A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS
7.13 Books, 157 pages
Interview by Grace Singh Smith
Full disclosure: I met Namrata Poddar—writer, editor, UCLA professor of writing and literature—in a room filled with Vermont sunlight, at Bennington Writing Seminars. But what I should actually say here is that I met Joohi Mittal, a widow whose fortunes have fallen (“Poor Joohi, Mount Sinai duplex to Malava cubicle!” Mount Sinai. Need we know more?). Joohi appeared in Namrata’s story, “Silk Stole”, which we were “workshopping.” I don’t remember any of our comments, helpful or not; what I remember is a day in Joohi’s life unlike no other in her recent memory, where, thanks to an unexpected return from an investment, this mother of three—who works “three plus jobs”—allows herself a window into her lost life. She buys a designer silk stole, a drink at an Americanized café (Coffee Keen!), and—if only for the length of a facial massage, a Prada purse-wielding snooty fellow customer notwithstanding—Joohi feels “the lines on her forehead dissolve.” Ahhhhh. But then the story’s last two words disturb Joohi’s, and our, brief equilibrium. She “. . . sank deep.”
Several years after I wanted to clobber that Prada purse-wielding woman who checks out Joohi’s chipped toenail polish, “Silk Stole” appeared—has just appeared—as part of Namrata Poddar’s debut novel Border Less. Joohi appears, of course, but she is part of a large cast of border-crossing characters who are searching for a better life. Border Less traces the migratory journey of Dia Mittal, an airline call center agent in Mumbai, and as Dia journeys to the United States, the stories of other border crossers—travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, hospitality industry workers, Bollywood artists (junior and senior), hustling single mothers (like Joohi), academics, tourists in the Third World, refugees, and more—appear, not so much vignettes as threads in a vast web. And true to the complexities and struggles of immigrant life, the lines on these characters’ foreheads, if they do dissolve (figuratively speaking), only do so at a price.
Namrata and I talked over email about what inspired this many-voiced novel, her publication experience, how she navigates writing male characters (and tackles racism and classism), why she chose to end Border Less with a story written in the voice of the goddess Shakti, her advice for aspiring debut authors, and so much more. This interview has been lightly edited. You can read more about Namrata on her website.
—Grace Singh Smith, March 2022
GSS: Congratulations on this gorgeous symphony of a novel that challenges so many preconceived notions of form. When I first heard the title—Border Less—I was very intrigued. Why not, you know, Borderless? Then the novel’s epigraph, by Édouard Glissant, a stunning confirmation of the novel’s power and potential, answered my question, or at least I think so. Can you tell us a little more about the novel’s title (and the epigraph)—how it informs, inspires, and is also driven by the voices within it?
NP: On the title, it’s definitely the verb over the adjective. Meaning, it’s less “borderless” because we live in a world with a rising wave of nationalism in so many countries including the U.S. and India, increasingly under Trump erstwhile and Modi’s current leadership. To suggest that we literally inhabit a “global village” with no borders—even if it’s true somewhere within a digital universe composed of Facebook, Twitter, and the like—would be to suggest a political utopia, a reason I didn’t care to name the novel “borderless.” That said, most characters centered in the book have experienced geographical dislocation in one way or another, and are borderless to the degree that they do not claim allegiance to just one nation-state. Also, a spiritual interrogation and a yogic worldview punctuate Border Less along with its political exploration around the word “border.” Among several ideas, I see the novel offering a meditation on what it takes for women to let go of all the expectations and “ borders” placed on their being by society, families, parents, children, lovers, husbands, arty gatekeepers and more, and to tune into themselves and truly feel borderless.
The title as a verb—Border Less—also has multiple interpretations in the book. But if I’d to boil it down to a dominant one, Border Less alludes firstly to the novel’s closing chapter, an epilogue of sorts where the Hindu goddess of creation Shakti is calling out the Euro-American literary establishment and asking it to borderless forms of literary storytelling, especially the novel.
Lastly, the epigraph by the Nobel-nominated Afro-Caribbean writer and intellectual, Edouard Glissant, that opens the novel reinforces this circularity in the novel’s structure; it alludes to communities who have endured oppression and historic marginalization and how they have produced other forms of storytelling that subvert the assumptions of mainstream Western storytelling. Much of Glissant’s oeuvre explores forms of postcolonial storytelling and was a big influence on Border Less.
GSS: This novel defies the traditional form of the mainstream Western novel, with many voices and narratives. There is Dia Mittal, the airline call center agent in Mumbai, India, whom we meet in the first story Help me Help you and who eventually journeys to greater Los Angeles. Then there are all the stories that intersects with Dia’s—all border-crossing characters like Dia. Related to the first question, too—did you always know you would write a novel in this form? How did Dia appear to you as the fount of Border Less?
NP: I did not ever imagine I’d write a novel (even if I wanted to), let alone a polyphonic novel like Border Less. Maybe that’s because, for the longest time, I saw the novel, at least for my own writing aspirations that progressed over my U.S. years, via the American literary establishment and its market forces. Here, the novel follows the psychological drama of a few protagonists, is character-driven, and the plot often involves tracing a character arc on the page, a story movement from conflict to some sort of resolution in a way that won’t interrupt what John Gardner famously called the ”vivid and continuous dream” of an implied bourgeois reader’s experience. What I’m paraphrasing here are the assumptions of the modern realist novel and a decisive rise of the Anthropocene in storytelling, both of which, to me, have their origins in the West. Across much of the world and throughout history, storytelling hasn’t worked in this specific way.
As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer.
As a literary critic, I spent many years focusing on the realist novel as it manifests in 21st-century literature by writers of color; it’s a body of writing I still love. As a fiction writer though, this template of the novel did not inspire me at all—I don’t viscerally connect with its assumptions of continuity and wholeness, zooming into one or more main characters. To me, these arty assumptions come from white male history, assumptions that have been laid bare in works by several writers of color including Amitav Ghosh, Matthew Salesses, Gish Jen, and Edouard Glissant. As a brown woman with desert roots who grew up in a coastal, postcolonial India, who then migrated to the U.S., and who continues to live in a global patriarchy, my individual and communal history is marked by gaps, fissures, and ellipses. So it made more sense to me that my novel’s form reflects my own history over the history of my colonizer. All this critical reasoning, though, happened in the later stages of writing the book when I was thinking about form in serious ways.
As for Dia, she kept reappearing in my drafts over many years—an insistent voice of a lower-middle-class Mumbai girl, one who doesn’t come from the Bombay of writers like Salman Rushdie or Suketu Mehta, all Bombays I deeply love; one who crosses multiple borders between languages and cultures, like so many Mumbaikars have; one who insisted I put her story down on the page. That said, her voice rarely came to me as the dominant voice amid the multiple voices and stories I drafted toward the book; it came interspersed with other voices that spoke in my head. It’s this juxtaposition of voices that I’ve tried in many ways to capture within the book.
GSS: As someone who’s been slogging over a first novel for years, I find your journey and the novel’s publication inspiring. How long did it take you to write Border Less, how many drafts did you write, and how did the work evolve through the various iterations? For example, did you have a sense from the beginning that you’d split the novel up into the two sections on which these interconnected narratives hang, Roots and Routes?
NP: From its earliest drafts that I wrote while on a sabbatical from grad school to the time it was done with its final stage of line-edits in 2021, Border Less took seventeen years to write. I rework compulsively most things I write. Even a story or an essay of 5,000 words takes me, at the least, around twenty-five to thirty drafts. So you can imagine the various versions that must’ve happened over seventeen years with a manuscript of about 50,000 words.
Honestly, I didn’t feel inclined to keep a precise count as I feared the results would create a limiting belief in my head that would interfere with the process. That said, Border Less did evolve over many, many drafts, especially since I was revising not just its content and doing the developmental as well as line-edits at different moments, but also, thinking seriously through questions of form at each step.
Border Less first started as standalone scenes and vignettes, many of which evolved into stories that often connected organically to become a collection of interconnected stories. This collection then morphed into a novel, yet a novel that draws inspiration from a BIPOC legacy of novels and storytelling at large over a white legacy of the novel.
GSS: I love how you use slang, of the sort you’d heard on the streets of Mumbai and also Hindi terms/words—“bhunkuss,” “jaan,” plus the names of Bollywood songs—without explaining, or even giving hints, as to their meaning in English. What kind of considerations go into that—do you worry about uninitiated readers stumbling over it?
…when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing.
NP: One of my biggest motivations in writing Border Less was to see more Anglophone fiction in both my homes—India and the U.S.—reflect the English my people and I speak. After all, every Anglophone writer reflects the world they come from in the way they use language—whether it be Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros or Raymond Carver.
And yet, when white writers write in a Caucasian English that’s specific to say, working-class London or middle-class California or New York suburbs, they don’t pause on the page to translate for a brown Anglophone reader like me the communal idioms or slang they import into their use of English. When using hybrid English in my novel—one inspired from both South Asia (especially Mumbai), and a South Asian diaspora in the West—I allowed myself the same freedom most writers I love wield within their writing. In fact, this non-explanation of one’s world and an opacity with language is the only way I’ve ever encountered and consumed “literary” writing. I felt no desire to play a literary pioneer here and pursue the goal of full linguistic transparency as if that were possible.
GSS: In Firang, the narrator’s husband’s friends, a slightly cringe-inducing group (IMHO), call her Firang, foreigner because she spent her childhood in Mauritius before moving to India, France, and Northern California for school, then finally to Orange County where she settles down with her husband, Vish. Firang is a very loaded term. The narrator’s journey across borders aligns with yours—or at least the places where you’ve lived. How much of your own immigrant experience informed Border Less?
NP: Firang is certainly a loaded term, although like with any word or concept, it gains and shifts meaning with context, something I hope cultural insiders will recognize within Border Less, too.
I believe Noor, the narrator in Firang, and I have overlapping life journeys to the extent that we have both lived in India and France, but I haven’t lived in Northern California and Noor hasn’t lived in the East Coast cities of India and North America as I have. Where our life journeys overlap is in the fact that we have both crossed borders and lived in more than one place. Although that’s the case with most characters in Border Less.
Migration or the constant navigation between countries, continents, languages and cultures, impacts my life in crucial ways. If it seeps into all of my work—fiction, nonfiction, translation, teaching, and editorial work—that is because it’s a huge part of who I am. It’s a topic that can never not interest me, on the page or otherwise.
GSS: Brothers at Happy Hour has unlikable men complaining about the women in their lives (it doesn’t exactly end on a complimentary note for these bros). There’s this character, TJ, who’s finally settled down at the age of thirty-four with a distant cousin, after a month of “rumored dating,” causing everyone to be “surprised yet relieved he wasn’t gay.” (That yet, though.). TJ is the first brother—“brothers”, since they aren’t related, after all—we hear from in this story. He launches into a bitter complaint about his “super Type-A wife.” I found myself feeling mildly sorry for TJ, in spite of myself. How hard—or how easy—it is for you to write sympathetic—and, conversely, unsympathetic male characters?
Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story.
NP: I agree. With all the moments you share from the novel above, TJ comes across as a fairly unlikeable character. That said, there are other moments within the novel where TJ is also relatable to readers, or I hope, especially when it comes to his loyalty for his friends, or the inside jokes they share as Indian American “brothers.”
Like other male or female characters in the book, I see TJ as an ambivalent character—he embodies the good and the bad, and I hope this makes him more than a one-dimensional character. Of course, the feminist in me may rationally believe that it’s hard to create sympathetic male characters, but as fiction writers, we don’t write with a political label attached to our pen. We write by learning to listen and letting our characters guide us moment by moment into the next step of a story. TJ to me was as hard or as easy as writing other male or female characters within the book, whether it is Dia the protagonist, or perhaps the most likable of all male characters in Border Less, Jeetendra, a motel owner in Southern California, the narrator of the chapter, “Victorious”.
GSS: Another question from Firang. “Every cliché on India I’d heard from white folks in the west, my new brown family in the West was recycling, joke after joke on the motherland’s lack of civilization, the poverty, the population, the heat. . .” I found it easy—too easy—to identify with the narrator’s irritation, and it is evocative of the layered racism often invisible from the outside (that is, most people are aware—or such is my hope—of colonial and post-colonial attitudes of Westerners towards Indians but then there’s the racism, discrimination, and classism within the nation itself, part of my experience growing up in rural northeast India.). I note, too, where the call center supervisor in Help me Help you makes a jab at the way “interns from Ahmedabad” pronounce certain English words. Did you intentionally create these moments, these nods to the often invisible reality of inter-Indian racism and classism, or did the story produce these moments “organically”?
NP: I didn’t intentionally create these moments. They showed up organically because like you, I’m quite aware of racism, classism, and casteism within our South Asian communities—in the subcontinent or its diaspora worldwide. In the later stages of writing the book, though, when I did wear a critic’s hat, these moments stood out to me as a key highlight. After that, I did my best to hone these moments, as a storyteller, for the reader.
GSS: Kundalini, the closing story, is a brilliant, fierce takedown of patriarchy in all its avatars, from religious to literary, and it is written in the second person! By the goddess Shakti, no less, she who “[owns] that ancient game of Form and Illusion”. I think it is important for readers of Border Less to know why you chose to end Border Less with her voice. Please tell us more.
NP: Glad you enjoyed the ending. Although to be honest, I didn’t always choose to end my novel with Shakti’s voice. When I think of storytelling in rational or conventional terms, ending the novel of Dia’s journey and her eventually finding “home” made sense to me. And yet the last chapter came to me almost as is, that is, Shakti, speaking directly to some of the big figures of South Asian history and mythology, not to mention the Western literary establishment and other characters in Border Less. When I was transcribing the voice I heard, I loved what I had on the page, except that I didn’t know what to do with the epistolary short fiction I’d downloaded, as if from ether. I put it away in my digital folder for “extras” yet Shakti’s voice kept insisting that I put her back into my novel and also that I give her the last word.
This led me to think of the manuscript I had in deeper ways, to think through the questions of form, and a postcolonial legacy of storytelling including hybrid novels that I was already familiar with, thanks to my life in and involvement with teaching and literary criticism. And surely, in the structural revisions of the manuscript, ending the narrative with a secondary character who repeatedly comes up in the book as a leitmotif made sense, especially since Border Less is less about character-driven fiction, and way more about community-driven fiction. “Kundalini,” especially in its performance of the great cosmic dance of destruction and creation, the Tandava, heralds a new world order; it echoes the epigraph by Glissant that opens the novel by reaffirming an alternative world with other forms of storytelling that come from communities who have endured historic oppression and marginalization. It thus also reinforces a circularity over linearity of “plot”; it echoes the circular movements of the Rajasthani dance ghoomar that punctuate the novel; it creates a frame that encases Dia’s story as well as her community’s, and frames are crucial to Rajasthani art forms from my ancestral home in India, from our performing arts to haveli architecture with its specific forms of windows or the jharokha.
In short, ending with “Kundalini” made so much more sense than with Dia’s journey that appears in the novel as its penultimate chapter.
GSS: You are an author, an editor, a professor of literature and creative writing at UCLA, and last, but not the least, a mother. Who have been your greatest influences, people who have anchored you?
NP: My biggest influences as life anchors or as a working mother are my mother and my sister, who’ve always had to work very hard to earn a living and yet have been very present for their families, especially their children. Other big inspirations on the road are a whole community of mother-writers who also raise children, produce books, hold day jobs and are active literary citizens. Watching multitasking working women who’re no suckers to patriarchy or systemic oppression at multiple levels lead their day-to-day lives and simply be themselves in all their light anchors me on the road. This list of peers and role models in my life is very long, although my mentors, Dr. Francoise Lionnet and Dr. Shu-mei Shih at UCLA, and Jill McCorkle and Angie Cruz from my time at Bennington Writing Seminars first come to mind, as do peers like Camille Dungy, Tiphanie Yanique, Bich Minh Nguyen, Sonora Jha, Pooja Makhijani, Anajli Enjeti, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Kaitlyn Greenidge, among others. Another huge life anchor of mine is a close circle of friends, working mothers of color, who keep life very real for me, and who uplift me when I trip, and it’s my hope that I do the same for them—shout out in particular here to SoCal writer-sisters Shilpa Agrawal and Aline Ohanesian, and academic sister from Mumbai, Dr. Urmila Patil.
My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.
GSS: And lastly, what has been the publication journey like, for Border Less? What were some obstacles that you had to reckon with? Do share any advice you might have for others who, like you, are laboring over work that challenges the literary status quo.
NP: As with most BIWOC—more so, those not born and raised in the U.S. and those who don’t strictly center the U.S. in their work—I had a hard time shopping for my manuscript within an American literary industry known to be eighty-five percent white at all levels of executive decision making. And while I talk openly, teach, and write about these structural inequities in American publishing in most of my recent nonfiction and editorial work, I reckoned early enough with the fact that my manuscript was unlikely to get a pass by the Big Five. Firstly, because I didn’t have an agent until I already signed the contract for my novel, and secondly, because of all the “rules” Border Less resists when it comes to “literary storytelling,” and because the novel’s last chapter in calling out the literary establishment is fairly incendiary.
After a point, I shopped my manuscript mainly with small and indie presses known to take an interest in BIPOC voices. Here, too, while the manuscript was a contender for three literary awards for first books from Feminist Press, Black Lawrence Press, and C&R Press, it didn’t garner enough interest toward an actual publication. I’m someone who doesn’t believe in giving rejection too much energy so at some point, I just stopped tracking the numbers—but I did submit and receive rejections continuously, until one day, Leland Cheuk, an Asian American author, the founder and publisher of 7.13 Books, reached out to me with an offer for publication.
My two cents, then, for aspiring debut authors trying to finish and shop their manuscript in the American market: Learn as much as you can about the publishing landscape. Put out your work as much as you can to discover who is truly your reader. Know also what you seek first—a paycheck from your book sales or a book that deeply reflects you. For minority writers, these two goals in the current literary landscape can often be incompatible.
Beyond the completion and circulation of a book, get clear on what you want from your writing path. Then start looking for ways to make that happen. Walking the road as a “minority” writer who takes her work seriously is already a pretty demanding path, no matter what choices you make, unless you come from generational wealth or financial privilege. Every choice on the road to publication is a tradeoff, but once you know what you truly want, paying the cost toward your choices will come easier, I think, as will contentment and hopefully, joy.
Namrata Poddar writes fiction and nonfiction, serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, and teaches literature and writing at UCLA. Her work has appeared in several publications including Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, and The Best Asian Short Stories. Her debut novel, Border Less, was released in March 2022 from 7.13 Books, and was a finalist for Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether Prize. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. Find her on Twitter, @poddar_namrata, and on Instagram, @writerpoddar. Author Photo Credit: Elena Bessi
Grace Singh Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Arrowsmith Press, Santa Monica Review, Cleaver, Aster(ix), The Texas Review, Home (Heady Mix), and elsewhere. Her story “Oshini” was selected for the 2018 Best of the Net anthology, and her story “The Promotion” was cited as notable in The Best American Short Stories 2016. She is Santa Monica College’s spokesperson and is the blog editor at AGNI.
