DEEPA RAJAGOPALAN won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her work has appeared in
literary magazines such as Room, The Malahat Review, EVENT, and Arc Poetry. She has an MFA
in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she
has lived in many cities across Saudi Arabia, India, the US, and Canada. Her debut collection of
short fiction, Peacocks of Instagram, is forthcoming from House of Anansi in Spring 2024.
Deepa is now working on her first novel. Find her at @derajagopalan (Twitter), @deerajagopalan (Instagram), and at deeparajagopalan.com.

Senuri Wasalathanthri: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, Deepa. Recently, your
poem, “Gifts From Across the Arabian Sea,” appeared in EVENT 52/1. In 2021, you won the
2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award for your short story “Peacocks of Instagram.” That story will also appear in your short story collection forthcoming from House of Anansi in 2024. Congratulations on these achievements! Can you tell me about the themes you explored in your short stories?

Deepa Rajagopalan: Thank you, Senuri. When I was working on the collection, the themes weren’t that apparent. I followed my curiosities and created characters who are familiar on the outside but unpredictable or even extraordinary when you get to know them. The way you encounter people in real life. I was consumed by characters who lived at the fringes of what is considered “acceptable” or “normal.” And I think a short story collection gives you the luxury to do that. I thought, what if a hotel housekeeper who is wronged terribly decided to seek revenge, but quietly? What if an ordinary coffee shop employee with a harrowing past takes control of her life by doing something she enjoys, like selling peacock accessories on the internet? What does justice look like for a child who loses her parents due to a climate change related tragedy?

I think stories are always trying to answer some questions. The intent of the story is not to come to a resolution, but to lay down all the questions out in the open for the writer and the reader to ponder. By the time I was done with the collection, I realized it was addressing similar themes. How do people exercise agency when they are powerless? What does agency look like while navigating love, loss, and injustice? How does one hold beauty in a brutal landscape?

SW: Creating memorable characters is an art form in itself. Could you tell me about the character that was most challenging for you to create and what inspired you to create that character?

DR: A lot of female characters are written such that their central purpose in life is to get chosen by a romantic partner. I wanted to create characters who refuse that expectation, because of their lived experience. There’s a story in my collection called “Rahel,” in which the main character’s central motivation is to come into her own personhood. On the surface, it is a story about her affair with a man who is less than admirable, but I like to think of it as a love story with herself. Very rarely do we get to see women, especially women in their thirties and forties, who are allowed to be as flawed as their male counterparts, and to unapologetically centre themselves. It was hard to write Rahel because it is hard to imagine such an existence for a woman. To Rahel, she is the main character in her life. How many of us women think of ourselves as the main characters in our lives?

SW: I understand that the short stories featured in “Peacocks of Instagram” are inspired by the unique, rich cultures of the Indian and South Asian communities. How did you effectively capture these communities through your stories, ensuring readers from any nationality or background can understand and relate to them? Were there any specific techniques or approaches you employed to bridge cultural gaps and create a universal connection with your readers?

DR: I grew up in the Middle East and South Asia, reading books by Western authors like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte and Mark Twain and Jane Austen and Anton Chekov, and I didn’t organically relate to the culture or the communities in their books. I didn’t understand many references and had to look them up. But isn’t that the magnificence of reading fiction? You are allowed a window into a world you would not have been able to imagine yourself. These books were compelling to me because they were able to get into some essential truths about being human. My stories are set in South Asian communities because that has been my life experience, but at their centre, my hope is for the reader to feel seen. This is why I love fiction. It makes you feel less lonely.

There are technical ways in which you can introduce something from a different culture with little exposition. You describe it before you name it. You tell it in a way that doesn’t diminish the intelligence of the reader. I think the most effective stories are the ones that don’t explain themselves. You can centre a reader in a different world by immersing them in the world, amidst its characters. The first paragraph of one of my favourite books, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy does exactly this. It starts off with the setting.

“May in Ayemenen is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid.”

And then, it goes on to describe the river and the dustgreen trees. There’s a line about dissolute bluebottles humming in the fruity air. Then something like:

“The bluebottles stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.”

It is one of the most stunning first paragraphs I’ve read. It works because of its specificity. It doesn’t try to generalize so as to not alienate a reader from a different part of the world. Instead, it centres itself, as if this is the only story in the world. Later, in the book, there’s a scene where the child, one of the twins, says something hurtful to her mother. And the mother goes on to say something like:

“Do you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you a little less.”

Those words just shattered me. It will make any reader remember a time from their childhood when they felt unloved or unlovable.

I have a story in my collection called “Singing for the Gods,” set in a Hindu temple in California. If not for the names of places, you wouldn’t know the story was set in North America because of the specific South Indian cultural references. But it centres a group of young girls who don’t fit in, who feel ridiculed for who they are, who are so used to being othered that they lean into it. This experience is universal, and I think if you can be true to that, you can connect with readers from any background.

SW: As an immigrant, how did you first start to dip your toes into the literary industry in Canada? What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome in doing so?

DR: I moved to Canada on a cold February day with no idea how my life was going to turn out. By then, moving was something I was used to. Before I was born, my parents left everything they knew in India and moved to a small desert town in Saudi Arabia to build a new life. I shuttled between Saudi Arabia and India during my early childhood, and then moved to a boarding school in India when I was twelve. That experience was mostly traumatic, but it gave me a sense of autonomy that I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. My parents never held me back, they nurtured my independence. Growing up, I wrote a lot for school magazines, the kids’ section in the local paper, letters to anyone who would give me their mailing address. I was the kid who wrote letters to her teachers during summer breaks giving them life updates. I was very good at math—I loved the surety of numbers. It gave me a sense of control. I ended up studying engineering in university, which I did not enjoy but led to a tech job that I very much enjoyed.

For many years, I was working, quite happily, in my tech job with no connections to the literary world, when I realized I wanted to get back to writing. By then I had already been in Canada for almost ten years. I signed up for an intro to creative writing class at the University of Toronto, and that could have been nothing, but it became the catalyst for me to take writing seriously and professionally. My instructor in that class, Danila Botha, was exactly the right teacher I needed at the time. She became that initial guide to the literary world, urging me to submit to magazines and putting that seed in me to do an MFA. I ended up taking many more courses at the University of Toronto and completing the certificate program in creative writing. I applied to the creative writing MFA program at the University of Guelph and I got in, which really helped me hone my craft and surround myself with people from the industry. During the MFA, I was lucky enough to get Souvankham Thammavongsa as my mentor for a summer mentorship, and later as my thesis advisor. That was a life-changing experience, to be able to immerse myself in a project under the guidance of someone like Souvankham, who was so invested in my work. She never tried to curb my ambition. On the contrary, she was ambitious for me.

In 2021, I won the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices award, and that opened up doors for me that would have been difficult to open otherwise. Once I finished my collection, I started sending it out to agents. I got a lot of positive feedback but also a lot of rejection. It is still challenging for a racialized person in the West to get published, especially when you are trying to subvert stereotypical narratives. There is a tendency when it comes to publishing racialized authors that there is room only for a few of us. I think this is changing but there is a long way to go. The more stories there are out there, there is more understanding of these stories and the nuances that individualize them.

SW: Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me, Deepa. To close things off, what advice would you give to aspiring immigrant writers in Canada who are looking to publish their work?

DR: I think everyone has their own journey, and I hope, as an industry, we can come to a point where we don’t have to separate immigrant writers from all the other writers. I would say this to aspiring writers who feel like their voice is not valued: lean into your uniqueness. Don’t starve your sentences of yourself. Read a lot, write a lot, send out your work a lot, and don’t let anyone tell you to curb your ambition.

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Senuri Wasalathanthri lives in Vancouver, BC.