Karan Madhok - Author Interview
INTRODUCTION:
Karan Madhok is an Indian writer, editor, and journalist. He graduated from the MFA programme in Creative Writing at American University, where he won the Myra Sklarew Award for the best MFA Thesis (prose) in 2018.
Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay was published in October 2022 by the Aleph Book Company in India. His short story “Public Record” has also appeared in the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels: Dazzling Stories from the Country’s Finest New Writers (Aleph Book Company 2022), edited by David Davidar.
Karan’s creative work has been published in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. His journalism has been published for NBA, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, Scroll, The Caravan, FountainInk, and others. He is currently working on his first non-fiction book to be published by the Aleph Book Company.
Karan is the editor and co-founder of The Chakkar, an online journal of Indian arts and culture, with reviews and creative work around Indian music, film, literature, art, theatre, and more. He is also the founder and author of the Hoopistani blog on Indian basketball. When relaxing, he is usually busy eating butter chicken and rooting for the New York Knicks.
Karan’s website is at https://www.karanmadhok.com. He is also on Twitter (@KaranMadhok1) and Instagram (@karanmadhok).
QUESTIONS:
1. Please share with us some of your reading and writing background. Have you always been a writing and literary enthusiast?
Yes, I’ve been reading and writing for as long as I can remember! I used to keep extensive journals as a child, writing about everything that interested me: Sports, music, basketball, novels, comics, whatever. I wrote comic books and half-baked mystery novels—derivatives of James Bond in Indian settings.
I have much to credit to my father for becoming a voracious reader, who gifted me a number of books to read as a child. My grandfather was a poet, popular in our hometown, Varanasi, for his Urdu ghazals. Books were always around me, and what was a child to do to entertain himself in the days before personal computers and hand-held devices?
I wrote a number of novellas and short stories as a teenager, and they were all terrible. Still, I had a lot of fun creating fictional worlds. Even when I strayed down other tangents of journalism, I knew that nothing would make me happier than a life of creative writing!
2. Your debut novel, A Beautiful Decay, has just been released to glowing reviews. It has been named among the top-ten Indian fiction books of 2022 by GQ India and the Best of Fiction-2022 by Bound. Could you please tell us how it starts and the main trajectory it follows to get to its central messages.
A Beautiful Decay begins with the death of its protagonist and narrator, Vishnu, a 21-year-old Indian student in Washington D.C. The entire novel is told through Vishnu’s posthumous voice, which also gains omniscience upon death: he is freed from the bounds of time and space, and becomes conscious of every consciousness and every event that can exist in spacetime – past, present, and future, here, there, everywhere.
But Vishnu’s story is quite specific in time and place: he is killed in a racially-motivated attack at a sports bar in D.C. His consciousness flies across multiple events in his life – and events in the lives of the people closest to him – to understand the moments that led to his death. Through this perspective, the reader meets the parents that raised him, the sibling that left the family behind, the sibling that stayed, the college friends with whom he found close camaraderie and romance, and even the man who eventually killed him.
The novel is a meditation of how one can be a majority in one place, and a minority in other. Be the oppressor and the oppressed. Someone whose privileges bring him comfort in one land, and the same comforts bring him catastrophe in another.
3. Would you describe your book as an immigrant novel? In what ways?
More than an immigrant novel, I feel that A Beautiful Decay is a novel about ‘otherness’ or ‘foreignness’. The novel tackles issues not just of immigrants (or foreign students) in the United States, but about the larger human condition of ‘othering’ those whom we don’t fully understand. Vishnu is othered in the United States, but his own father ‘others’ those of a different religion/community back in India. So, while this novel does explore some typical issues faced by immigrants – and especially Indian immigrants – in the U.S., it also jumps across continents back to India, to explore the same issues under a different context.
4. The novel is set in India and the USA—in Varanasi and Washington D.C. What does the novel reveal about those places? In what ways are these settings essential to the evolution of the main character?
The primary function of these settings is to present the wide breadth of possibilities in the world, and how the same individual is able to experience all of these possibilities. Washington D.C. is the capital of the Unites States, the central seat of politics and power in the country that attracts aspirants from all over the world to discover these manufactured ideals of liberty, freedom, etc. Varanasi, meanwhile, is one of the oldest living cities in the world, a city often stuck in time, regularly confronting ancient customs in contemporary lifestyles. It’s also the city that many Hindu Indian aspire to die or be cremated in.
Varanasi carries with it this effluvium of the past, of something being left behind. D.C. has these idealistic aspirations to be a path forward for human civilization and democracy—all while confronting the politics of those who wish to block these progressive ideals. I felt that, to address the themes of cultural diversity and otherness in this novel, my characters had to confront these polarizing settings and find their own definitions of what it means to be alive in the world today.
5. One of your book reviewers compliments the novel’s “linguistic flair”? Could you please elaborate on this? Did you have to use a lot of the regional vernacular? How did you go about making sure this is understood by audiences outside India?
‘Flair’ is a relative term, so I feel that the first part of this question can only be answered from the perspective of the reviewer who found it in my work!
Yes, I did use a lot of regional vernacular – and to be specific, I used a lot of common words and turns of phrase spoken in the Hindustani vernacular (Hindi intermixed with Urdu) of the North Indian region where the narrator is from. English is not Vishnu’s mother tongue, so it made sense for me that his voice would only be authentic if it retained that flavour of home.
Regarding readers who may not understand Hindi/Hindustani, I feel that as long as I provide enough context in the English part of the text, the story will make sense. I haven’t yet met a reader who hasn’t understood every part of the novel completely—even if they don’t understand Hindi.
6. Tell us how this book came about. Was there a special inspiration that gave impetus to starting the novel? Are there any special lifetime memories that influenced your writing?
The main framework of the novel is, of course, from my own lived experience: I was a student from Varanasi in India, living in Washington D.C. in the USA, at a time when right wing populism had become the main political narrative in both countries. I am of the majority community from India, but was a minority here in the U.S.; for me, it made no sense that any community felt right to oppress another—in a different part of the same world, the oppressors become the oppressed.
Just a month after Trump was sworn in as President, a young Indian immigrant—Srinivas Kuchibhotla—was murdered in a hate crime at a bar in Kansas. Obviously, racism is as old as America itself, but Kuchibhotla’s death was a sudden reminder of the politics of hate getting rapidly out of control, where anyone that looked different, sounded different, had a different faith, whatever, was suddenly a threat.
It was Kuchibhotla’s death that eventually inspired the opening scene of A Beautiful Decay, as Vishnu is murdered at a bar in a similar fashion. That opening scene eventually developed into a larger narrative, where I wanted to focus not on the politics of Vishnu’s death alone, but the circumstances of his life back in India, to focus on the complications of identity that he faces in different parts of the world.
7. The structure of A Beautiful Decay is unique: it starts at the main character’s moment of death, when his spirit races through his past, present and future. Was this already the structure when you started working on the novel? Or did you go through some iterations? What were the main considerations in rejecting other forms in favor of the final one? Did you outline the novel or develop it as you wrote?
I never second-guessed myself about the novel’s opening: Vishnu’s death in D.C., and the quick shift to Varanasi for his cremation. To me, it was important to lay bare some components straight away: the story’s stakes (a hate crime), it’s complications (Vishnu’s relationship with his father), it’s cultural contradictions between India and the USA, and the unique narrative voice.
But beyond that, yes, there was a lot of restructuring. Most of the story is outlined around the overarching narratives of other main characters, and how they intersect or interact with Vishnu. So, there are parts loosely dedicated to Vishnu himself, to his father, his friend Jess, his brother Rishi, his friend Hamid, his mother, and his killer, Mark.
Since Vishnu’s posthumous narration is beyond our mortal understandings of linear time, I wanted to allow his narrative voice to jump across time, too. Thus, the novel has more of a recursive structure, where each timeline returns to the time of Vishnu’s death, over and over again. This is where time—as we know it—has stopped for him forever.
8. Please describe your path to publication in India. Are there any major differences compared to the publishing process in the US?
I finished the first draft of A Beautiful Decay in 2018, and through my agent, tried initially to get it published in the U.S. But I think that the story was received as ‘too foreign’ initially for U.S. publishers: both in terms of content but also in storytelling style which is more ‘Indian’ in its maximalist feel. Ultimately, through my U.S. agent and other contacts in the literary world, I was able to meet Kanishka Gupta, my agent in India, who believed strongly in the book’s potential. So, instead of it being an American story from an Indian perspective, it was framed as an Indian story that also explores American perspectives. In my opinion, A Beautiful Decay can a bit of both—depending on the reader.
And fingers crossed: I’m still hoping for an international publishing deal that will bring the book to readers in the U.S., too!
9. What is your writing process? When and how do you find time to write, given that you juggle creative, journalistic, and sports writing? What challenges and opportunities have come your way as a freelance writer?
Freelancing requires one to set up a lot of artificial structures for oneself. Since I juggle a bunch of different projects, I’ll usually divide my working day into different work ‘sessions’: Morning for editorial work on The Chakkar; afternoons for administrative work and research for my writing projects; and evenings for creative writing itself.
The freelance life is ideal for someone like me, because I have to travel quite a bit for work, and I prefer keeping my schedule flexible to take care for my personal life and to take care of my daughter. The challenge, of course, is that freelancing offers no certainties of a steady income, of future opportunities, of any added benefits that come with a full-time profession.
10. Who would you say are your much admired, if not favorite authors and novels? Would you say they were inspirational or perhaps influential in your own writing? In what ways?
I admire so many literary greats. Albert Camus, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fyodor Dostoevsky. More than influencing my writing directly, I tend to be inspired purely by the ambition of these authors: in different ways, they had these grand philosophical visions, which they communicated through the vessel of spellbinding fiction. It’s the approach I strive to have in my work, too: a story must always mean something greater than the story itself—but, ultimately, it has to be a great story in its own right!
11. What are you working on now? Or are you often working on several projects simultaneously?
My main obsession these days is my second book—which is a work of nonfiction. The book is about Cannabis in India, a personal travelogue exploring the cultural, political, legal, medical, and personal aspects of this famous/infamous substance. I spent much of the past year traveling around India exploring various hotspots of ganja cultivation, researching its history, interviewing activists, farmers, users, and so much more. It’s been an enlightening experience.
12. Would you share some friendly words of advice for those who are presently in AU’s MFA programme, particularly those of us who are just starting?
Don’t be a prisoner of ‘genre’ too soon! Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, fantasy, memoir, young adult, literary, whatever… The wonderful thing about the MFA programme was that it offered me the option to experiment and get to know myself as a writer. Even your thesis choice doesn’t have to define you long-term. I feel that every passionate writer can contain multitudes (apart from fiction, I dabble in journalism, sports-writing, personal nonfiction, and some poetry, too). Follow the path that inspires you the most, but stay curious about the other paths as well!
Written by: Fernando Manibog
Cover photo: Accessed from https://www.karanmadhok.com/