Desires clash with society's expectations in Aruni Kashyap's new short fiction

Caption

Aruni Kashyap is the author of "The Way You Want to be Loved".

Credit: Peter Biello

In his new collection of short stories, Aruni Kashyap comes back time and time again to the tension between individual desires and society’s limits. Whether writing about an academic struggling against the cultural expectations of his peers, residents of his native Assam clashing with separatist insurgents, or young gay men expressing their love in India when such romance was outlawed, Kashyap writes with insight and compassion. The book is called The Way You Want to Be Loved. Recently, GPB's Peter Biello went to the University of Georgia in Athens, where Kashyap directs the creative writing program, to speak with him about his book. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Peter Biello: I wanted to ask you about academic life. Because you studied in Minnesota, as some of these characters do, I was wondering how much overlap there is between your experience and the experience of the characters in this book.

Aruni Kashyap: I think there's a lot of overlap, and even though I am actually from an academic family — my mother was a professor of Cotton College State University, which is one of the oldest universities in northeast India — I'm not at all new to academia. But at the same time, in a post-colonial country, actually languages also have different kinds of privileges, so being in English academia and Hindi academia or Assamese academia, Bengali academia, is very much different than each other. So when I actually entered academia, in the English academia, it has certain privilege of class and caste associated with it. So I was always an outsider in the academic space. These experiences actually enables me, this marginal position, enables me to actually point out to various blind spots that we liberals, we progressive people have.

Peter Biello: When you were studying in the United States in Minnesota, did you have a roommate like Mike? Mike appears in a couple of short stories in this book. He's — he's a white guy who's kind of insufferable. He's not as culturally sensitive as he could be, to put it mildly. And he made the characters in your stories really uncomfortable and in some ways wielded his power — perhaps without even knowing he was wielding his power, but doing it rather insensitively. Did you have a roommate like Mike or did you know someone like Mike?

Aruni Kashyap: I knew many people like Mike. Mike is obviously an amalgamation of many, many Mikes I knew as a student in Minnesota. I did have a roommate who was sort of strange and was not very sensitive towards the world, let's say. But I wanted Mike to be so much more exaggerated than the real Mike, because again, for dramatic effect. And I think that combining the many different characteristics of these Mike-like people enabled me to comment on how actually differences are perceived and accepted and negotiated in a society that is not comfortable with immigrants, not comfortable with difference. And I wanted to again write about someone like Mike who actually does a lot of these things without being completely — they don't have the self-awareness that they are actually saying these things that are offensive.

Peter Biello: I wanted to ask you about the political violence in these stories. There are some stories that depict just absolute brutality, and I was wondering how you went about writing about those things and what well of knowledge you were drawing on there.

Aruni Kashyap: A lot of these brutalities I grew up reading [about]. I actually didn't know they were unusual. I was born in 1984. The violent insurgency against Indian rule started in Assam in 1979. So by 1984, the insurgency was at its peak. As a result of that, I did not know a state or Assam that was without violence. The violence still continues. I like to tell this story because I realized how important this was much, much later. The story goes like this. Every day, my mother made it a habit to see me once and look at me for a few seconds before I hopped into the school bus. And I thought, you know, this is mother being mother. She actually loves her son so much. And she did that to both me and my brother. But much later, when I grew up, I asked her "Why you used to do that?" She said, "There was so much violence in Assam, that I was preparing myself if this was the last time I'm going to see you." And that changed everything for me because that means that every parent, every mother, every grandmother, every loved one lived like that, actually in Assam or in Kashmir or many other places where anti-India, independentist movements still are going on or have experienced those in the last few years.

Peter Biello: You write a few stories here about what it's like to be gay in India. I think there is a story where it is illegal and then a story when it's not illegal but it's a little bit scandalous to have a homosexual relationship. Can you talk a little about what it was like writing those stories?

Aruni Kashyap: You know, I lived in Delhi for the longest time. I had a very robust queer community. I was bothered by a lot of the stories that I was hearing and I wanted to write about how the person and the state and the individual is constantly in clash and writing about the anti-homosexuality laws, which is Article 377 that was, I think, scrapped in 2019 or 2018. I can't remember the date right now.

Peter Biello: I think it was 2018.

Aruni Kashyap: Yes, right. Thank you. September, I think it was. It was scrapped then. Until then, people were — that law was used to vilify [and] torture a lot of people I knew. A lot of the people had to suffer heartbreaking consequences, as you see in the story. The story actually, I wrote "The Way You Want to be Loved" is a gay romance story. The story, actually, I heard from a friend and it made me so angry. So I wanted to give it a different ending, because it was so heartbreaking for me to know that it's — just because two men were expressing love, and it was not obscene — they were holding hands — they had to go through that horrific experience. And it was just so common, and it is far more dangerous for trans people as well. So, that is the reason I wrote about it actually — was, in a way, for me to express my own outrage and sorrow and create a new — new ending for these two characters.