‘Longing and loneliness infuse my work’: Sanjana Thakur, 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner

Twenty-six-year-old Sanjana Thakur is the newest winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her story “Aishwarya Rai” was chosen by the jury from a pool of 7,359 entries. In her story, she imagines what “reverse adoption” might look like – that is, a child adopting a mother and therefore, also the nuances of familial bonds, dependence, and beauty and femininity.

A recent graduate of the MFA in Fiction programme at the University of Texas Austin’s New Writers Project, Thakur has always been interested in narratives centred around mothers and daughters. Though she has lived away from India for a little over ten years, her stories are often set in Mumbai or are about Indians in the US.

In a conversation with Scroll, the young writer talked about her growing up years, the ideas and origins of “Aishwarya Rai”, and why she finds the “constraints” of the short story productive.

I’m very interested in the theme of reverse adoption. Tell me a bit about it.
The idea started out pretty differently than how it is in the story now. I was looking at a Toys R Us store and thinking about a store called Moms R Us, where you could buy mothers off the shelf and pick her based on how she looks, her features and things like that. The idea evolved with time but that was the kernel.

It’s quite similar to adopting a child but I think in some ways, in my mind, also similar to a dog shelter. For instance, in the beginning, a mother is returned to the shelter because she has had too many placements and none of them has worked out – like a dog in a shelter, she might also end up being euthanised.

When did you write the story? Were you required to write it as part of your coursework?
Everything I wrote during my time at the programme was for my workshops and I wrote this story in my second year for a fiction workshop. It has changed since then, of course. I took it to the workshop, got feedback notes, and revised it several times until it turned into the story that is now.

It wasn’t a specific assignment. Our workshops are very open and free. You’re allowed to write whatever you want and you bring it to class and your peers help you help you make it better. So I did write it for class but it wasn’t based on a prompt. It was just what I needed to write then. I write a lot of stories about mothers and daughters. At that moment in the programme, I was a little bit frustrated with the feeling of what if I can never write about anything except mothers and daughters and why am I only writing about this? I thought why not write a story where I can put in as many mothers as possible? Maybe by doing that, I’ll be able to finally write something else after.

I think now I’ve become more comfortable with the idea. I’m happy to keep writing about it as long as I and other people find it interesting, and am able to write about it in new ways.

Aishwarya Rai is also a character in your story. Why did you pick her instead of any other Bollywood actor?
That’s a good question. I think a lot of the reasons I picked her would work for basically all Bollywood actresses. Aishwarya Rai stands in as a reference for an ideal woman and an ideal mother. I wanted that texture in the story – to have someone who is the pinnacle of womanhood, to the point that she can tell other women, Here are the products you can use to look like me.

It also conveys that Avni’s issues with her mother do not exist in a vacuum – they’re informed by societal expectations of beauty, mothers, daughters, and women in general. I think I could have picked any Bollywood actor but my mind went to Aishwarya Rai because even by Bollywood standards she’s so beautiful and perfect.

You said you have lived outside of India for nearly ten years but you chose to write about Mumbai. What does the long-distance relationship with India, and Mumbai particularly, look like for you?
I haven’t really lived in India as an adult. I lived there till I was 14 or 15 and then my family moved to Dubai for a few years. After that, I moved to the US for undergraduate studies and after graduating, I moved home [Mumbai] for one year because of COVID. I moved again to the US for my master’s. So as an adult, I’ve only lived in Mumbai for a year during the lockdown. I was at home, yes, but I wasn’t really in the city.

The most time I get to spend in the city is when I come home during the summer break and winter break. I try to come back twice a year, so I think for me, the way that I feel about Mumbai is that it’s very much my home and I miss it when I’m not there.

I wasn’t able to come back this summer and I cannot even tell you how much I miss the rain and the mangoes. I can’t believe I missed the mango season! I miss the city and wait to go back and when I do, I’m always a little bit taken aback by the fact that it’s different and not exactly what I imagined, because, of course, the city changes in between my visits. It goes through different iterations of itself. I change too.

I constantly long to be in Mumbai and even when I’m in the city, I still long for what I had imagined it was. Many of my stories are set in Mumbai and the feelings of longing and loneliness infuse a lot of my work. Some stories are set in the US with Indian characters and those are more explicit explorations of this homesickness.

What were you reading and writing as a child? Were you always interested in literature?
I grew up very lucky. When I was little, my mother would read to me a lot. I also read a lot on my own. I was known in my family for always having a book at family functions and finding a corner to sit and read. At school, my teachers would say, “Oh, she’s great. She does her work well, but she reads under the table when I’m teaching.”

I have also been writing since childhood and it has shifted and grown immensely. But I always loved it, and I was very lucky that my parents were very supportive of my writing and for the most part, my reading, though they would get annoyed by that sometimes. My grandfather loves to read and write as well. My parents love to read and I grew up in a house where reading was encouraged. Though neither of them writes, my parents have been enthusiastic about my work. They probably believe more in me than I believe in myself. I feel very lucky and grateful for that because this is not a typical career path and they’ve had moments where they wonder if this is the way to be financially stable.

At the top of your mind, can you tell us about writers who have had a big impact on you and your writing?
I read a lot of post-colonial literature by women of colour. Right now I can think about Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parts which is a stunning example of really beautiful speculative fiction. Then there’s Avin Doshi’s novel Burnt Sugar which I love. It’s so, so gorgeous and I love reading about mothers and daughters. I revisit that book often. I first read Arundhati Roy when I was in high school and I remember being completely blown away and that feeling has not faded. Danielle Evans’s short story collections Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Collections are brilliant.

There’s a book called Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark that I fell in love with. I was assigned a story from that collection in my first semester of college and it was the strangest collection I’d ever read, and also one of the most beautiful. I still feel that way. I never quite understood it but I’m blown away by how beautiful it is.

Recently I’ve been on a K Ming Chang kick and I read Gods of Want, Bestiary, and Organ Meats. She’s a phenomenal writer and her books are an intensely incredible combination of beauty and grossness. That’s amazing to me. I read Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in college and remember being amazed by how quietly beautiful it is and how smoothly she interweaves the different narratives of all the characters.

That’s a great reading list. And what are your writing hacks? Do you sometimes want to just shut yourself from the world or throw away your phone?
That would be a good move. I don’t have the self-control for it so I don’t do that! I have found that I’m a very deadline-motivated writer, which worked great for me while I was in the MFA. Now that I’m no longer in college, I’m trying to figure out a way to structure my writing practice outside of the programme. I usually tend to pull a couple of all-nighters before my deadline and camp out in my living room. I have three drinks next to me – tea, coffee, and water – and I type away furiously. I’m very lucky to live with four amazing roommates and they will usually remind me to eat. It’s very frenzied, but part of my MFA process was also me accepting that this is my process.

I used to feel bad and I thought I should be able to write every day. You know, like how it’s commonly advised to writers. I felt bad that it didn’t work for me and I couldn’t do it but during the MFA, I met all kinds of writers and learnt about different writing habits. Elizabeth McCracken, my advisor and an author, was always really supportive and wonderful to me and encouraged me to just lean into my method. However, she’s asked me not to stay up all night and maybe try and go to bed at a reasonable hour!

Who are your first readers?
Because my process over the last three years in the MFA has been so last minute, I didn’t usually have time to ask anyone to read it before I turned it into my workshop. I’m okay with that because the workshop is meant to make rough work better. My first readers are usually my peers who incidentally also read the first draft. On the rare occasions that I write something and have time after, I’ll ask some of my roommates to read my work. They’re not creative writing majors but they’re very smart, wonderful people and their perspective is really valuable.

Now that I’m done with the MFA, I hope some of my peers will still read my works in progress.

I find it interesting that you work on a story one or two days before you have to submit it, but is the idea planted in your head much before? Do you work on it in your head first?
I think it varies. In this story, for example, “Aishwarya Rai”, the idea had been in my head for a little while. I had been thinking about the Toys R Us/Moms R Us stores but I’d never actually tried to write it. I have a scraps document on my laptop which is a long list of not necessarily ideas but also phrases I would like to use at some point.

So when I have a deadline approaching and I don’t have something in mind, I’ll go through the document and see if something jumps out at me and try to find a setting that’s interesting. I wanted to write a story set in a dentist’s office and another set in the Four Bungalows Fish Market [in Mumbai] so I picked the setting first and then built the rest of the story. I pick and try out different scraps of ideas to see if one of them wants to turn into something at that moment.

Are you working on a book of stories or a novel right now?
I wrote a thesis for my MFA which is also a collection of short stories. I am in the process now of finishing up final revisions on that after my thesis defence and I am hoping that I can start querying agents soon. I would love to get the book out into the world. There are 15 stories in the collection and most of them are about mothers and daughters. All of them are about Indian people. In different ways, they talk about bodies, sexuality, coming of age, and family relationships. It’s a mix of realist and speculative stories. I’m feeling lucky that “Aishwarya Rai” is already available to read and I can see people’s responses to it.

I wanted to write this book and I feel very proud and happy with the work I’ve done over the last three years. I would love for other people to be able to read it too.

It seems like you enjoy the short story form more than that of the novel or a novella.
I’ve not written longer forms of fiction. I’ve tried loosely while I was in the MFA. And when I say I’ve tried, I mean thought about it really hard and tried to come up with an idea. That’s something I used to feel frustrated with in my first year of the MFA. I used to wonder why I didn’t have a novel idea that could sustain itself over many pages.

My advisor who is very smart, very wise, and very wonderful would tell me, that a novel is not something you can force. If you have an idea for it, and it wants to exist, then it will make its way out of you. But if you try to force it, you’re just going to write a bad novel. I’ve taken that to heart and given myself the grace of not pressuring myself on that front. I’ve never really tried to write a novel but in the future, I would love to if an idea comes.

The other part is that I really love the short story form. It is also a lot of what I read. It’s so much fun to be able to tell a whole narrative in a limited amount of space. The idea of constraints is really productive for me – whatever that means – and it means different things in short stories, poetry etc but a novel, in my mind, is so open and free that it leaves me not knowing how to go about it. As long as short stories feel fun to me, I’ll keep writing them and then maybe in the future, at some point, a novel will emerge.