Author TV

Here's an interview from the Hyderabad Literary Festival in which I talk maybe a little too extensively about Not Only the Things That Have Happened. You can find it, along with many other interesting interviews on Author TV.in.

Favourite interviews so far

A good interview is sometimes better than a good essay because there are two minds at work in the interview. I've given dozens. Here are a few of my favourites.

February, 2013 with Janice Pariat at The Fuschia Tree. We discuss, time, bicycles and weightlessness. 

February, 2013, with Anupama Raju in The Hindu. "I want to be fair to the reader."

February, 2013, my first live chat, on IBN. Many questions, quickly. (Did I mention I type with two fingers only?)

Janurary, 2013, in Malayalam on Asianet. (Video.)


December, 2012, on Back Page , Oregon Public Broadcasting. (Video.)

July, 2012, Platform Magazine. On Not Only The Things That Have Happened.

May, 2012, with Deepanjana Pal, from interview that ran in Elle, India.

April, 2012, radio interview on Australia's 'Yes She Can’, a multicultural women’s radio program broadcasting on Canberra’s Multicultural Service (CMS) 91.1 FM. You can hear the show here.

August, 2009, "Mridula Koshy is a sleepy, sleepless optimist (and author of the much buzzed book 'If it is Sweet')"-- interview on Aspi's Drift.

May, 2009, with Aditi Machado, on Blotting Paper.

Kerala Calling

It's interesting to see how language operates: as I strain toward the Malayalam I don't possess, the English I do possess falls apart, helpless to transform itself into Malayalam. My hands take over, frantic that I should make sense.

Back Page with Jody Seay

I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago on Back Page, a local public television show. I went in nervous as heck, but Jody was a pro and we did it in one take! For those who were paying attention on Facebook to my Ferragamo lust, I am indeed wearing one of my $10 finds. You can see the interview on-line, here:




And you can read a recent interview with Businessworld here.

Not Only the Things That Have Happened

Here's a bit about the new book that ran in Platform Magazine a month or two back. Since the interview, the release date of the book has changed from September to October/Novemeber.

As you can see, Blogger makes the text of the interview difficult to read, so the original is below. Here is a link to it at the Siyahi website, which displays it more clearly. I have to show you this picture which was taken a couple years back by my son Akshay. He was ten then. The picture of me with the bicycle in the post below this one is also one he took, but more recently. Lately when people ask for an author picture I send them Akshay's work. It's nice to have an in house portraitist. 

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1. Give us a little background about yourself and when did your romance with writing begin?

I’ve never had a romance with writing and certainly it has never romanced me. I wish, I wish, but wishes don’t transform magically into romantic suitors and they never get down on bended knees and there never is a sparkling novel inside the satin lined box they never hold open. It is another matter that I have had many such romances with reading.

2. If you had to write a blurb on Not Only the Things That Have Happened, how would you write it?

A woman relinquishes her four year old son to tourists passing through town; losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Some forty years on the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life, the son’s struggle is for the story that will allow him to live. Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a novel about the stories that break us and make us and then remake us.

3. What inspired the novel and what made you structure it in two parts?

The novel takes place over a thirty six hour period and does what I like to do with time in my writing, which is to make the point that the present is always given to us, but the past and the future is of our making. This makes for a complex structure as characters travel back and forth from the present to the past and into the future. However I am not a complete masochist and not at all inclined to inflict pain so I keep it simple, locating the stories as far apart as the lives of the two main characters. The mother lives in Kerala and her story takes up Part One of the novel; the son lives in the United States and his story is Part Two of the novel. No, they never meet, neither in life nor in my novel. There is however space in the novel for the reader to decide if there is somewhere else where lost souls meet.

4. When is it out and what next?

Not Only the Things That Have Happened is forthcoming from Harper Collins India in September of this year. My next book is a young adult novel, the story of twelve year old Noor who learns to ride a bicycle, learns what is lost and gained when dreams become real, and learns her kabbadiwallh father merits the pride she has always felt for him. I am also working on another collection of short stories.

Interview in HT

The best stories are those that are born of the lives of the working class people on the streets, says former professional trade union worker-turned short story writer Mridula Koshy.

The 40-year-old writer's maiden anthology of short stories, If It is Sweet, was released in the Capital on Wednesday.

Published by one of the youngest publishing houses in the country, the Westland/Tranquebar Press, the book "travels through the streets of Delhi picking on odd lives and the disavowed dramas that play themselves out on the stretch of the crowded BRT and in the adjoining residential neighbourhoods like Defence Colony, M-Block Market (of Greater Kailash I), Chirag Delhi flyover and Humayun's Tomb", the writer says.

The prolific writer has been contributing short stories to Penguin Books-India anthologies, American and European publications like Wasafiri, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review and Existere.

Koshy, who was born and raised in Delhi till the age of 15, migrated to the US in the 1980s. After graduating from Occidental College on the outskirts Los Angeles, where US President Barack Obama studied, Koshy became a full-time trade union activist and a community organiser, while holding several small-time jobs like waitress, backstage dresser and silver ware polisher. She returned to Delhi four years ago and took to full-time writing.

Her career as a trade union worker has a lot to with the stories - they are full of the sweat and grime of the city. The narration is punctuated with slogan-like graffiti, italicised excerpts and distortions of words to convey the regional identity of the characters.

"Somehow when I started writing about India, I felt I had to begin with Delhi. The issues that the city threw up were serious and complex. I worked in the US as a trade union organiser, talking to workers in the public sector units, healthcare and those in jobs that were not represented by other unions.

"It was largely because my mother worked as a nurse in the US for some time and I realised that the US was a very complicated society. It is divided along racial and class lines. The city of Los Angeles, where I lived, saw quite a bit of upheaval in the mid-eighties. I found some of it in Delhi," Koshy told IANS.

She was thrown into a society of immigrants - simmering with complications and anxieties, the culture of welfare doles and freeloaders.

"I had to come up with an analysis to convince myself why I was a second class citizen in the US. I brought my intelligence to use in the working class society to understand the gender forces at play and the whole migrants' issue.

"So, after college I joined this radical trade union Local 11 HERE, which came to my campus seeking volunteers. I was arrested for the first time while working for Local 11. Then I joined the United Farm Workers and finally the Service Employees' International Union in Portland, where I worked for six years, organising workers as a pro," she said.

Koshy's stories are a reflection of the proletariat in her. Today is the Day, a cross between a novella and a short story divided into seven sub-heads, tells the tale of Suraj, a domestic help who is tired of working in a big household.

He resents the class-divide and the trappings of sophistication in his employer's home which force him to hit back in a bizarre way.

The Good Mother, a tragic and rather gruesome take on single motherhood, is the story of a woman's pilgrimage to immerse the ashes of her dead sons. She picks up a younger lover on the way from Rishikesh to Delhi and ends up tipping the brass urn containing the ashes of her sons out of the the window sill in a Defence Colony rent-in, which she shares with her foreign lover, instead of in the holy waters of the Ganga.

Koshy's next project: a novel set in Kerala and the US.

From here.