Born in Hyderabad, India, Rishi Reddi writes about the Indian-American experience in the short stories of her first collection. Set primarily in the Boston area, the stories explore issues of culture clash within and beyond the Indian communities of the city, delving into the real life of characters that might otherwise be seen in one dimension.

Cara Seitchek: In “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy,” you are writing in a male point of view. How difficult was it to write from the point of view of a different sex and age?

Rishi Reddi: It wasn’t too difficult to write from a different point of view. In fact, sometimes I find it harder to write in a point of view that is closer to my own. If it’s too close, you find you can’t let your imagination soar as much.

CS: Justice Murthy’s pain at discovering that he ate beef is so real. Did the story have its origins in an incident from your own life?

RR: The idea for this story came from a small newspaper article – one of those six line stories on the side of the page. An Indian Hindu man had sued a fast food establishment because he had eaten French fries made with animal fats instead of vegetable oil. The judge threw the case out, but the man clearly was involved in the outcome and pursued this as far as he could. I first imagined my character as a young man in his 20s, but I changed it to someone more set in his ways and ornery.

CS: You capture the dislocation and disorientation of a new immigrant like Justice Murthy strongly. Is this drawn from your own experiences as you moved so frequently in your childhood?

RR: Experiences like these are par for the course for a new immigrant, but I think everyone, at some time, is looking for home. Everyone experiences this dislocation in some way at some time in your life – whether you’re in your twenties or an adult, sometimes you just don’t feel right about your current situation, so you go in search of home. All humans go through this experience of searching for home, and I think it’s a strong image that connects all the stories.

CS: In “Lakshmi and the Librarian,” you break one of those “rules” of writing – you shift points of view from Lakshmi to Mr. Filian’s. Was this deliberate or just how the story evolved as you wrote it?

RR: This was the first story I completed and when it was first workshopped in a writing class, the teacher noticed the point of view shift and said it was justified, and therefore not bound by this rule. I wanted to look at Lakshmi through the filter of the librarian’s eyes so we could see this woman as he did. So I learned if you are going to break the rules, you have to have a reason to do so.

CS: Also, in this story you use the present tense, while you use the past tense in the other stories. Why did you choose a different tense to tell this story?

RR: I didn’t use the present tense on purpose, but it did make the story more immediate. It was a way to get into the story as a writing exercise. Actually, I think you lose something when you don’t write in the past tense – you lose a sense of time passing and the freedom of working in the narrative voice. Past tense is a roomier voice than the present voice. I think the present tense is a little more hip and a bit flatter.

CS: How did the Bonsai tree come to be in the story? It seems like the perfect symbol for family tradition and endurance and other themes in the story.

RR: My husband and I were traveling in Montreal and went to a botanical garden, where we saw this whole collection of beautiful bonsais. And I wanted to put one in a story – there was just something about them that felt right to me. They seem fragile and small but they are just as hardy as any tree.

CS: My favorite phrase in the book is “talons of tradition”, which underlies your stories and describes so many of the situations that your characters find themselves in. Do you, yourself, feel these talons as well?

RR: That phrase was pull quote in The New Yorker and it never struck me until I saw it there. And then it made sense to me. Those talons of tradition really reverberate in Indian culture. There’s a real irony in that people travel abroad from India to give their children the best of everything, but they are attached to centuries of traditions. Indians in India don’t need to put the fences up against other cultures, so while they progress and develop, Indians abroad are more traditional and more tied to traditions from the 1950s. As a second generation Indian, what is Indian to my parents is the India of the 1960s and 1970s, which doesn’t relate to what Indians in India are thinking today.

CS: Some of your characters appear in more than one story. Did you deliberately connect the stories through these characters or did they just appear as you wrote?

RR: The characters re-appearing just happened on their own. I was working on “Karma” and going to “Bangles” and I realized I needed a snooty character. Since Prakash had already appeared, I just thought he needed to come over to the new story. And, when you think about it, how many Indian families could there be in Boston? Only so many, so it made sense that they would know each other. As I wrote more and more, some characters kept popping up.

CS: Does the order of the stories in the book reflect a specific order, whether chronological or the order in which you wrote them, or something totally different?

RR: My editor chose “Justice Shiva Ram Murthy” to start the book because the story has such a unique voice. We worked together on the order of the other stories. I felt that “Lakshmi and the Librarian” should go first because you meet a lot of characters in that story and the other stories are offshoots. We wanted “Devadasi” to go last but it was sort of sad, so we made it second to last, and then ended with “Lord Krishna” to provide some form of satisfaction. Of all the stories, I think “Bangles” is my favorite story.

CS: Do Lata and Luke, characters in the “Validity of Love” get back together? Some of the plot line in “Lakshmi and the Librarian” seems to suggest that they do.

RR: I hope they do. One of my friends feel like they don’t, but I think their relationship is more than a simple boy-girl relationship. I’d like to write about Lata as an older woman sometime and see what happens to her.

CS: In “Bangles,” Arundhati feels disconnected from her family and must eventually rely on the kindness of strangers. Was there a particular story or incident that inspired this story?

RR: This story came out of seeing a woman on the subway in Boston. She was an elderly Indian woman wearing a sari and her hair in a bun, and I thought it was great that she was out on her own, but there was something sad and lonely about her. Widows in the Indian culture are shoved aside and are no longer part of everyday life, and it’s quite sad.

CS: In the back of the book, you have listed several books that inspired you. Is there one book that perhaps has influenced you the most? Or is there one you thought about after this list was printed?

RR: You just don’t know what stays with you when you read something, but that awareness of literature stays with you. I do read the Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want to Write, at least once a year. But lately I’ve been reading Edward P. Jones’ The Known World because it goes back in history and takes up a different dialect with great confidence. I’m writing a book set in the 1910s and 1920s, focusing on the first immigrants to this county and I find I lack confidence when writing back in time. I’ve also been reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which looks at the Indian Diaspora in the United States.

CS: Is there a particular character that you feel closest to? Or that you feel you might write about again?

RR: I really like Justice Murthy because he is so ornery. I also like Shankar in “Karma” and Lata, but I liked them all in some way – you have to if you are writing about them.

CS: Many characters are doctors or in medical school. Did you deliberately choose this profession for your characters because your father is a physician, or was this more of an unconscious choice?

RR: It was a very conscious choice – the group of Indian immigrants who came to the US in the 1960s and 1970s, all came to be doctors and engineers. In fact, I read some statistic that about one sixth of all physicians in the US are Indian.

CS: While most of your stories take place in Massachusetts, the last one, “Lord Krishna,” takes place in Kansas. Since you have lived in so many places, why did you choose Kansas to set this story in when you have so many other settings to draw from?

RR: It was more natural for the religious conflict in “Lord Krishna” to take place in a smaller town than Boston. It’s a fairly common experience for immigrants. I moved to Kansas when I was in high school, and I know that it is a hard place to move to. It all came together when I was writing the story to put my characters in that place.

CS: Indian dance and dance lessons were a thread that ran through many of your stories. Do you still take lessons in Bharata Natyam (one of the oldest forms of Indian dance)?

RR: I don’t dance – I looked into it when I was in my 20s and as a child, I enjoyed it. In college, I met people who had danced their whole lives, and there was a sense of loss that if I had lived somewhere else, then I might have been able to take dance lessons. I love Indian dancing as each one tells a story and they are very didactic.

Rishi Reddi has been an enforcement attorney for the state and federal environmental protection agencies, as well as a lawyer for the Massachusetts Secretary of Environment. Her short stories have appeared in The Harvard Review, Louisville Review, and Prairie Schooner, and her English translation of Telugu short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review. Her work has been featured in Best American Short Stories 2005 and received an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2004. Reddi was the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She serves on the board of directors of South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (www.saalt.org).