Hellooo!

Last month I loved the constantly amazing and surprising Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta - fantasy, time travel, ghosts and multiple universes merged with a tale of sisters and families learning to understand one another. It made a huge impression on me and I was delighted to have the chance to ask Tashan a few questions on the novel.

How do you like to booktempt Mad Sisters of Esi?

I like to call it a sprawling, madcap, very strange novel about two sisters on a quest across three universes, with a museum of collective memory, a festival of madness, and a very lovable bat.

I rarely ask where ideas come from but for this book…how did these sisters and the whale of Babel evolve?

I honestly wish I knew. The book started out as a page – I was on a flight back from Delhi, suffering from writer’s block about the book I was under contract to write, when a page of this novel arrived, fully written, in my mind’s eye. It was about two people wandering a tower of babel, looking for a god machine.

Nothing of that page survives in the final draft of MAD SISTERS OF ESI – not even the characters or the concept, I think, although the tower of babel became the whale of babel over time. But that page did give me the first draft of the book, which introduced me to Wisa (at that time, the creator of the so-called God Machine). Once I met her, it was about listening to her story and writing it over and over until I got it right.

This novel has its own internal consistency despite how out there it can get. How did you find the balance between the two? How liberating was it to push the boundaries of ‘reality’?

Oh, I absolutely love pushing the boundaries of reality, both in imagination and in voice. I am drawn to books that can be liquid in their prose, and that teach the reader different ways of looking simply because of how they approach language. 

The internal consistency was hard to get right, though. How far can you push a reader while still keeping them anchored to the book and pulling them along an emotional journey? I don’t think I struck a balance until I wrote many, many drafts – but there came a point where the book had been written so many times, the story was living inside me. Once that happened, I was able to pour it out on the page without thinking about the elements of the narrative; instead, I focused only on the reader’s journey across the book, i.e. how the story would build in their mind paragraph by paragraph.

Did you know all the history of the world and characters upfront or did this evolve with the writing?

It evolved with the writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer who can create a plan, but I’m awful at it; I have a lot of fun creating the plan and then the book I write is lifeless. I like M. John Harrison’s method of worldbuilding, which Helen Marshall introduced me to: you let the story and place reveal itself to you through the prose, and you pay very close attention to the linguistic clues your subconscious is giving you. 

I like it for two reasons. One, it co-opts voice and style instinctively into the world-building process, which means you never have a book where the story and the voice are distinct or at odds – they feed into each other, they are the same thing. Two, no matter how many maps you draw or trade routes you plan out for your imaginary world, there is a richness of material and imagination your reader will bring to the text that you cannot match. It’s one mind (yours) against many (your readers). It feels more freeing to give them the same linguistic clues and have their mind build the worlds they want to live in.

Helen and I had a great discussion about this, actually (she’s so brilliant) because we realized at some point that there is still a large amount of building outside the text that a writer must do, even if they don’t know they’re doing it. For example, I wrote a lot for MAD SISTERS OF ESI that never made it into the book; I kept thinking it would make it into the book, which is why I wrote it, but now it’s just pages and pages of notes. I guess that’s traditional world-building in a way, albeit by accident.

How is the Indian SF scene? Is there anyone you think we should also be reading?

It’s thriving! There’s such incredible work coming out of this side of the world, with people pushing boundaries and what the shape of a novel (or novella) can look like. Three fantastic books got published this year alone. Samit Basu wrote The Jinn-bot of Shantiport, which I honestly think is his best book: it picks apart how both society and human nature are constructed with acute and acerbic wisdom, but also with so much humour and lightness; I’m amazed at how effortless the combination is. Indrapramit Das released a novella, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. It has all the trademarks of an Indrapramit Das work: astonishing prose, this gentle melting of the line between the real and imaginary into a dreamscape you can lose yourself in. What I loved about this one is how delicately he captures emotions that are often impossible to hold: that tender ache of first love, of belonging, of wanting and of learning to let go. Lastly, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Ten-Percent Thief came out this year, which was published in India in 2020 as Analog/Virtual. It’s a brilliant mosaic novel that gives us a vision of the future while holding close all the complexities of the present.

(Special shout-out to Vajra Chandrasekera who is not Indian but still from this part of the world, and whose The Saint of Bright Doors is making waves everywhere.)

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I have a short story coming out on January 15th in the anthology, Solarpunk Creatures, by World Weaver Press. I loved writing it but it’s also the last short story I’m going to do for a while; I’ve realized it’s not my form. And I’m working away at the new novel, which was set at the edge of Florence two months ago, and is now located in Bombay – I call it my “Bombay Grimm’s Fairytale”. Don’t ask me what it will become three months from now. You can find out more about what I’m doing at tashanmehta.com, or find me on Instagram (tashanmehta).

If there was one book, not your own that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?

I’m going to skid past the first that occurred to me (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel) because the literary world will have already told everyone to read it, and arrive at my darling, dear book: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It’s just a gorgeous, brilliant example of the novel of tenderness; it cracks your rib cage open with the force of your feeling; it deserves so much love, so much, and a lot of people I know won’t pick it up because it has “Goblin” in the title (*screams silently*). So if you’re reading this, please – pick it up. It undid me, and it undid me stealthily, which is the best kind of undoing.