Q&A with Keshni and Mari

Q.  What was the inspiration behind the book? 

KK: Tina is from a very specific world – a tight-knit ethnic community and family and also a very particular sort of school environment.  So yes, the book is inspired by the environment I grew up in.  Tina is an outsider in both these worlds, just like I always felt I was.  This ‘outsiderness’ may explain why I’ve been drawn to questions that are internal in nature.  I think the same goes for Mari – and you can see that in her paintings.  How do you live an authentic life?  How do you figure out who you are in a complicated, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society?  I was a pretty shy and anxious teenager and I spent a lot of time alone – eating lunch alone, etc., not unlike Tina.  I think that’s why existentialism appealed to me.  It encourages you to find an anchor within yourself.

MA: I have always been in love with Indian culture and art and this was a project that I was really inspired and excited about; a mix of India and US.  I’m Japanese from Japan.  But, I’ve also lived in the U.S. for many years.  So I understood the multi-cultural aspect of it. Also, in my paintings, I look a lot at self-exploration, so in that way, I understood the existential questions.

Q.  Why don’t you deal more directly with Tina’s Indian heritage?

KK: I just wanted to write Tina’s story, really, and be very true to who I felt she was.  I didn’t think she was directly interested in her cultural heritage.  Not at fifteen at least.  She was more interested in boys and friends. She was interested in her identity only by default.   To that point, I think we’re in a transition period in America where demographics and power are shifting.  The America I grew up in was less familiar with weird names and different races. So, there was an early nineties identity-claiming that people of color in America who are now in their thirties and forties went through.  Tina’s a different generation. They think about race slightly differently.  I talked to teenagers while I was writing this book, particularly non-white girls who went to expensive schools.  It was interesting…they are a little different, and yet kind of the same.

Also, to be honest, I wasn’t interested in writing an Indian ‘longing for the homeland’ sort of story, the kind that we see in a lot of Indian diasporic writing.  Of course, those are interesting stories, but I grew up in a much more brittle, international, secular, non-traditional family who thinks about things like longing and homeland in ways that I haven’t quite seen yet in the majority of diaspo