The Indian American novelist’s How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder chronicles a preteen’s coming of age and her plot to kill her rapist uncle.
This is your first novel, and it comes 13 years after your debut story collection. What was your approach to writing
a novel?
There were periods when I didn’t think I had a novel in me. My office had all these storyboards on the wall, and it looked like I was planning a war. But once I figured out I wanted to tell it in a nontraditional way, I felt a lot of freedom. For example, I included quizzes like the ones in Seventeen magazine.
Georgie, your 12-year-old biracial narrator, is culturally isolated in 1980s Wyoming. What about her story reflects your experience as an Indian American?
My mother didn’t grow up in America, and I learned a lot from magazines like Seventeen. I started writing this novel with a lot of things I remember from growing up in Wyoming in the 1980s, like Halley’s Comet and watching the Challenger explode on TV. But then I had to create this fictional world. A lot of what Georgie does, like playing Light as a Feather and using a Ouija board, were things I did as a kid. But I’ve obviously never killed anyone, at least to my knowledge.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder blends a bildungsroman with thriller elements and the history of British colonialism. How did this all come together?
Whenever you go into any bookstore in India, there’s a huge Agatha Christie section. I love her books, and I wanted there to be little nods to her. So many British colonial writers have had a huge influence on Indians, like Enid Blyton and Georgette Heyer. Also, it’s a bit of a cliché for Indian writers, but Arundhati Roy. When I first read The God of Small Things, I remember thinking, “This is the way I want to write.” I loved her language, and the way she broke rules.
At one point, Georgie is asked to play a Native American in a skit because she’s Indian. What informed your portrayal of race in the novel?
A Passage to India was the first time I met a biracial character on the page. I was 28, and I read it during my MFA at the University of Houston. It was such a profound moment. Everything I read was “Indian-adjacent,” like A Little Princess—you know, those wise Indian figures. And the Little House on the Prairie books were important to me as a kid. But it’s hard to reckon with them now, given how problematic those books are. I wanted to include sections that are talking to a white audience as I’ve done in my own life.
Why was it important for you to tell this story?
Part of me wanted to push back on the notion that there’s no new ground to cover, that the immigrant experience has been talked about so much. Being a rural immigrant is a very different experience from being an immigrant in a city. I wanted to capture that isolation and what it meant for these girls. It’s liberating to be able to tell an immigrant story in a different way.
