The best short stories sweep us into their emotional undertow, deftly transport us to other worlds, dig beneath the skin to reveal deeper truths. Give me the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, Grace Paley, Jamaica Kincaid, Lorrie Moore, Alice Walker, Alice Munro, to name just a few, a remote cabin, some food, a few good beers, and I could exist in perfect bliss for a very, very long time.
In just the past few years, a bumper crop of short story collections have hit the shelves including books by Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, Otessa Moshfegh, Akhil Sharma, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Desiree Cooper, among others, and our good-reading-fortune continues with the publication of Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s White Dancing Elephants (DZANC).
Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories reveal uncomfortable truths and then let the characters (and the reader) stew in them quite nicely, thank you. She fixes an unflinching gaze on the inner lives of her characters, oftentimes straddling two worlds: the Old Country and the new, our modern lives and the pull of tradition.
In anticipation of her debut collection, Chaya and I discuss what’s in the water at DZANC, the evolution of a few of her short stories, the pull of the Old Country, among other things writers think about.
CHRISTINE RICE: I’m a big fan of another DZANC author, Eugene Cross, and his collection Fires of Our Choosing. Both of your books are full of nuanced and beautifully-crafted short stories. What’s in the water over at DZANC?
CHAYA BHUVANESWAR: How wonderful to think of Eugene and other story writers DZANC has published, the most famous of whom are probably Charles Johnson and Robert Coover. I’m honored that my work was published in Narrative Magazine, as was Eugene’s, and I especially loved his story “Passengers” in Storyglossia. I think DZANC has had really strong editors and enough sustainability as a press (and as a press involved in many charitable endeavors, community service programs, magazines like The Collagist and Monkeybicycle, etc.) so that they can support writing they believe in without ever asking the writer to think about commercial considerations. For that I’m truly grateful. I felt allowed to breathe on the page, with these stories. I felt accepted as a writer and like the final result was much stronger for that acceptance (and has received more support because I was allowed to say what I wanted).
CR: How did you learn that your collection, White Dancing Elephants, was the winner of DZANC Books Short Story Collection Prize? How does it feel to have your first book published?
CB: Michelle Dotter, the publisher, called me and was so sweet and low-key in how she told me. It was really wonderful and memorable. And re: getting published – it’s wonderful but also scary as hell. I think it has gotten me “over” the residual fears about “What if so and so reads it?” I literally used to have “writer’s block” in the form of periods of dread and fear, contemplating the consequence of various people reading my work and knowing anything about my thoughts. I think what’s great about starting to get reviews, with over 500 Goodreads readers entering my Giveaway, etc. – what’s great about the bigness of it is that it creates a lot of anonymity. It’s like at Sewanee, where I actually knew very few people by name whom I was reading to and enjoyed it so much more because of that anonymity (even though the sight of Kai Carlson-Wee and Marilyn Nelson and Venita Blackburn and Shanti Sekaran actually listening to my words completely led me into an internal freak-out, though I did keep on reading.)
CR: Yeah, I would spiral into an internal freak-out too.
You used the last verse from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Punishment” as the book’s epigraph. Can you talk about how you settled on that verse?
CB: I’ve loved that poem for many many years, and for this collection, it was relevant because of how vividly Heaney sees the women, “your sisters”, participating in horrific violence against other women. That poem! The vividness and immediacy of its cruelty. That phrase about how people so distinctively punish “their own” – “connive in civilized outrage.” One of the Bog poems where Heaney contemplates the present in the past.
CR: “Neela, Bhopal, 1984″is a chilling account of a little girl’s life in a Bhopal shantytown and her murder at the hands of Union Carbide’s criminal negligence. Here’s the last sentence of that story:
All this was caused by someone important, an American, used to ordering some work to be finished somewhere else, the back of his head under a beam of light from a window that has been opened on a summer day, allowing the Houston air into the office for a few seconds, before his air conditioning starts going full blast.
This story humanizes the horrific event we’ve read about for so many years. Do you recall how the idea of telling this little girl’s story came to you?
CB: I actually completely owe the editor of Narrative Northeast, the very talented editor and poet, Pamela Hughes, who people can read about at the Huff Post. Pamela was the one who liked something I’d written that got accepted elsewhere and asked me to submit something else. I quickly wrote this – not sure where it came from, but I had been thinking about Bhopal and environmental destruction and I think they were doing an environmentally themed issue. I initially wrote it from the POV of a neelagai, a gazelle-like animal and one of the many animals devastated, damaged, killed outright by the chemical leak during the Bhopal disaster. The animal POV was female and Pamela was the one who suggested I write from the perspective of a child. This then opened things up for me to think about the child’s siblings, the impact of the disaster on poorly-housed child laborers and other people with no way to seek shelter from the leak and sleeping on the road or outside buildings, as so many people in India live every day. Pamela worked intricately with me to edit the story. I am so grateful to her and all the editors who helped the stories appear in earlier forms in various literary magazines and helped me bring a collection together.
CR: For me, “Jagatishwaran” was layered so beautifully and very much about the push and pull of things – of family, of desire, of coming and going. One of the periphery characters in the story, a sister, travels between the Old Country and the new. I’m curious about this push/pull in your life: do you have family in the Old Country, and if so, how have your travel experiences shaped you as a writer? If not, did your parents or grandparents travel back?
CB: We definitely did have this experience and there are features of it in fiction by, for example, Jhumpa Lahiri, and while newer generation writers have criticized this content, calling it “curry fiction,” I do have to admit that it has always been comforting to me to see this narrative represented and now part of the mainstream. All these things my parents did I registered as interesting and weird but “just the way we were.” Buying plastic bags of almonds to take back to my grandparents’ house. Bringing other things like denim jeans and sneakers in the 1980s before India really underwent globalization and the opening of its economy, and these items were really valuable and scarce. Then bringing things back. Saris and Indian clothing of all kinds. Cooking items. Spices. Placing these specially “brought” and set-aside items at the center of the world they made. Eating off plates that weren’t objectively better than anything they could find here but eating with the belief that using plates from home actually made food taste better. And the phone calls, the back and forth, the differences in time zone, the differences in technology. I don’t know that immigrants now would go through any of these things, because, again, of globalization, Skype, the Internet, MTV, Star TV, Bollywood’s expanded range and expanded representation of Western lifestyles with increasing degrees of explicit sex and Western wealth. But for my parents it was going through a passage between centuries. Also, because they moved from village life to briefer years in cities, then to the West. I’m sure all that seeped into the story. Even at its center was the relationship between father and son, between a family and an artist with an illness.
CR: I admire how you push the short story form – structure in particular. In “The Bang Bang,” for example, you shift between first and third. That’s one of the things I love about these short stories…they keep you off-balance (on many different levels.) They challenge the reader and the form. Can you talk about how you go about letting the story ‘speak’ to you, about how you let it hit the page, about how taking risks pay off on the page?
CB: Your wonderful question makes me remember a great interview with Edward P. Jones that I read once, that I practically memorized and reminded myself of for years afterward. He talked about how he held the entirety of his novel in his head for years, developing it there, before writing it down. If things go well, that’s what happens in my writing of a story. I know it before I write it down. Not always exactly that way, in that sometimes I’ll know a few sentences, write those down first, then not be able to come back to the story for weeks or even months (in one case, years!) and then write the whole middle and end in one go, coming back to it. I feel like I have to know what is driving me to write anything along these lines and then write it. Then in revision I start playing with stuff, telling the story from a different POV or excruciatingly rearranging it in a million ways. But more often just listening to it on the word by word, sentence by sentence level and trying to see if it sounds “right,” which makes no sense when I really think about it, so I try not to think about it and just kind of do it. Like – you know what.
CR: In a few of these stories, a male character trades in his first wife for a younger/healthier/fill-in-the-blank version. Why does that act, that trade-in take your attention?
CB: It stems back to a horrible day in medical school where my partner (who is still my partner) announced casually that he had just seen a younger version of me in a coffee shop and she had flirted with him. I was livid. But, also, at that moment, excited and determined. Because how cool are older women who connive effectively to keep their partners from straying? How cool are older men, like the ones in Andrea Lee’s wonderful collection (that I loved and that made me fall a little bit hard for Gary Shteyngart because he is a WHITE GUY who understood how GOOD Andrea Levy is on race, class, gender, all of it). She writes these older men who are savvy, amused, and somehow manage to ensnare younger women who tell themselves they “know” all the men’s tricks, yet still enjoy the seduction. I actually really like the “game” of having to be a Scheherzade who’s always on the verge of being “killed” or “thrown over” for a new one, the next day’s bride, a fresh version. I love the fairy tale dimension of being the one who triumphs by her wit.
CR: Many of these characters struggle with the overwhelming pressure of success, of not failing, of living up to and being beholden to the sacrifices made by their parents and grandparents on their behalf (Orange Popsicles and A Shaker Chair). Can you talk about why success and failure are recurring topics in your stories?
CB: I personally struggle so much with these concepts. There was a narrative I had of my life up until about my mid-twenties — that only choices where success was “guaranteed” were acceptable. I went to an Ivy undergrad, excelled, was a Rhodes scholar, worked out for nearly 2 hours every day, could definitely kick ass. But I was so fragile and scared of emotional vulnerability of any kind. I would have all these imaginary romantic attachments, come up against the expectation of having an arranged marriage, look into that reality, get scared, repeat. I was even more imaginary about these “entanglements” than the heroine of “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before,” if that is possible. It literally took me years (and starting a family) to better understand how this narrative of success and failure actually kept me from being a writer, my heart’s desire. I’d submitted a story to The New Yorker and thought: If I get this published, I’ll pursue writing, and if not, I have to do something else. I gave myself only that single opportunity. The story got published years later, not in The New Yorker, but by then I had sort of steeled myself to do something else “with my life.”
But, of course, I kept returning to writing. It was as painful as an affair one can’t and won’t (and eventually realizes, one SHOULDN’T) break off in favor of “doing the right thing” (whatever that was, the problem being that I didn’t even know). I appreciated though how much medicine welcomed me as a world, as a set of incredibly instructive and illuminating relationships during the training, where I learned so much about people, period, from interacting with my classmates and teachers. In some ways medicine was a kind of ‘repetition compulsion’ for me, where again and again, I could form the intense, sort of ‘familial’ relationships that I’d struggled with within my own family, which had been so affected by illness among several family members and how much everyone had to work and contribute to those family members recovery from illness. Medicine was incredibly empowering as a means to help others and finally and conclusively just get past a narrative of “success and failure” that had made me so fragile and incapable of taking risks. I think everyone blessed enough to become a doctor is truly transformed by it and I hope, I tell myself anyway, that my attention and care of my patients is so informed by my own belief and gratitude toward medicine as a human project. As an endeavor that is about so much more than “success and failure” – because at a very fundamental level – NO HUMAN BEING IS EVER ‘A FAILURE.’ There is no “failure.” No one is less. Every single person is worthwhile.
CR: “A Shaker Chair” shook me to the core. That last line, the twist. I just had to say that.
CB: Thank you so much! I wrote the very beginning of that right after I had my first child, and didn’t come back to it and finish it until years later. I made a point of finishing it while in a state of dread, because someone who sexually harassed many women, someone in medicine (thank God nobody I have seen for the past several years!) was kind of mentally and emotionally “looking over my shoulder” as I wrote about that struggling therapist, Sylvia. I felt that he was judging me, that harasser guy, as I wrote the earliest drafts of that story. I want to say a special thank you to Mary Logue, a wonderful writer herself and a friend, who advocated for that story, who felt it was a really strong story. She helped me feel less ashamed for my ability to imagine Sylvia. I did feel deeply ashamed of that ability – until enough writer friends reminded me that the ability to imagine is human. “Imagination dead imagine” as one of the greats said. I should say too that in his own way the harasser should be thanked. I wrote about him in a poem up now at IthacaLit, the same issue that actually has poetry by one of my idols, Natalie Diaz, in it — so amazing! (My poem, by the way, is <“http://ithacalit.com/chaya-“>HERE – it also placed in the Hunger Mountain poetry contest judged by Sherman Bitsui, another idol.
CR: Together, the stories present a potent cocktail of sexuality, violence, gender, race, culture. There is also this sense of belonging, of characters chipping out a bit of America, to claim it and in turn to have it claim them. I found that my first-generation family was very much beholden to this notion of ‘fitting in’ but also of keeping certain traditions. I love the way you express that tension so clearly on the page…again…just had to say that.
CB: Thank you so much Chris! I keep thinking back to when I was in high school, and an Indian family’s house was burned down by the KKK in Staten Island. Staten Island!! Do people remember the Dot Busters, a group of young white men who targeted Indians and even murdered an Indian man? Through all that, which is I think recapitulated in some of the hatred and violence of Charlottesville, the forces of hate that propelled the victory of 45, etc. – through all of it were these little Indian girls holding up signs and chanting, saying, “We are here, we are here, we are here to stay.” That is how I feel. That is what I say when I see images of hate. In a strange way it has been comforting, I think, for my friends of color and me to remember how much racism is embedded in American history. It didn’t stop us from getting as far as we already have. Even during the Clinton years, there was so much blatant racism. It just wasn’t Southern fried back them, y’ know?
CR: I can’t forget to mention your sense of humor and comedic timing and the way you masterfully use time. In “Talinda,” for example, the situations and dialogue is at once really funny and so incredibly sad. Can you talk about that age-old mixture of comedy and tragedy? How you translate it to the page? How it veers the stories away from any sense of sentimentality?
CB: This is something easier to talk about in relation to work that I read and reread by others, that I actively learn from. Everyone should read “Tarantula”, by Thom Gunn. SO GOOD. And so incredibly funny. Gary Shteyngart (even if it weren’t the case that “He already had me at Andrea Lee”) really makes me howl with laughter. Everyone should see his book trailer for “Little Failure” where he wears a fluffy pink bathrobe.
I enjoy funny stories and movies. It is no accident that my ‘anniversary’ movie with my partner is the movie we saw on our first date. “Happiness” by Todd Solondz. “It’s not me. It’s you. It’s just you.” I think at some basic level there’s no choice but to turn to humor in the face of very bleak suffering and I am so grateful we have humor as a leavening spice.
CR: “Orange Popsicles” is a brutal study about many issues, one of which is the sense of entitlement white people feel over the bodies of people of color. This is one of those stories where – in a flash – things go horribly wrong and I wanted to reach in and turn back time. I wanted another ending for Jayanti, for all of us.
I’m curious about readers’ reactions to this story or to your other stories…is it what you might expect or something different? (I get a lot of comments from men about how ‘dark’ my book is…and I’m just curious about your experience writing such powerfully truthful stories.)
CB: I so appreciate this question. Honestly, I’ve not gotten that (yet) from any male readers. I’m looking forward to that though. “The darkness.” I have worried about it and my agent was brilliant in emphasizing, “there are people who want to read dark things.” I would say though that there isn’t any character who doesn’t also find light. Everyone comes to some point where they can at least see some light. I believe that is as necessary as exposing the darkness. To have light. To know that we deserve the light. I believe that fiercely, I really do. The light just shouldn’t mean people have to accept any lies. I want light without sweetness, if that makes sense, if ‘sweetness’ is just a code word for “sugarcoat” and “dishonesty.” I believe light can be brutal, in the best way.
Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a physician and writer with work in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. Her debut collection White Dancing Elephants will be released on Oct 9 2018, by Dzanc Books and is available for pre-order now at amazon.com as well as indie booksellers. She has received a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Sewanee Writers Conference scholarship and Henfield award for her writing. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events.