I have always felt that distinctions between people from the same country fade when they come to a new place. What you have in common, as outsiders, is greater than what initially set you apart. What Yogan and Samar recognize in each other early on is a desire to better the conditions of the women they love, their families. They’re men in their twenties, just stepping into a new stage of life. They’re excited to talk about their wives, their dreams, their clothes! That is so much more interesting to them in that moment of meeting than where they’ve come from.
Yogan and Samar and their roommates arrive in Dubai with a limited sense of what awaits them, much of it gleaned from vloggers online. Their visions of their lives and their potential futures seem to draw more on what they’ve seen in Bollywood movies, which are a driving force in the story. Does Bollywood have that degree of influence?
Oh, yes! I am thinking particularly about the slate of films that came out in the late nineties and early two-thousands. The Bollywood dimension of this story took me by surprise, since I was never a film person and used to feel embarrassed by the big musical numbers, which were always about two people finally coming together in a large, familial display of affection and acceptance. I used to watch these movies with my parents, and something about their overly chaste rituals of romance felt even more suggestive to me than an onscreen kiss would have. I suppose I also didn’t want my parents to know how much I actually enjoyed watching these saccharine love stories! Which is to say that these films got into my bloodstream despite my resistance. In writing Yogan and Samar, who are both so earnest, I began to wonder how their lives would be different if, unlike me, they’d wholeheartedly embraced these films and their sentimentality, taking cues from the screen heroes to fuel their own courage and ambition and courtships. Where else do we learn what our lives could look like if not from movies (and books, of course)?
This is very rich territory for fiction. Did you consider writing a novel-length version of this story, or was it always intended as a short-form piece?
I think it was always going to be a story, though I definitely worried when it seemed to keep getting longer.
You have been working on your first novel. Does it relate in any way to “The Ice-Skater”? How challenging was it to make the leap from writing short fiction to a book-length narrative?
My novel, which I’ve just finished, unfolds over a few days in an apartment in Mumbai where two women—a college student and her childhood nanny—meet again after many years apart. The novel explores the strange, intimate relationship between them, a complicated kind of love; their bond is almost like that of a mother and daughter, but in a much more latent way. The book is divided into two parts, one told from the perspective of the student and one from the perspective of the former nanny. In order to make writing the novel seem less daunting to myself, I thought of it as two novellas side-by-side. Having the narrative take place within a limited time frame helped with that, too. After having written stories for so long, I’m still getting used to the roominess of a novel, how both characters and author have so much space in which to breathe. As I work on edits, I catch myself jumping through time the way I would in a story, in a single clause or with a line break, and then I realize that I can slow down, I can show the weather changing—such luxury! The substance of the novel is very different from “The Ice-Skater,” but I can see that it engages with similar ideas about immigration and what we might owe to those we’ve left behind in our home countries. ♦
