9.17 Your Next Meal Could Be A Time Machine ft. Lavanya Lakshminarayan

If you’ve ever wished for food to transport you to new places, this episode is for you!

In this episode, Tara sits down with Lavanya Lakshminarayan, international award-winning sci-fi author and game designer, to explore the world of Primus in Intergalactic Feast, a sequel to her Interstellar Megachef.

They dig into her two-book series, where food is not just sustenance, but culture, conflict, memory and resistance all at once. Lavanya talks about how it all started with a bowl of rasam made by her grandmother during a bout of dengue, and a question that wouldn't leave her alone: who decides which foods matter? 

Lavanya also dives into her elaborate process of building speculative worlds rooted in Indian food history, designing alien species and futuristic systems, and writing emotionally immersive sci-fi. From flowcharts that map out all the civilisations and systems to writing 120,000 words under an international deadline, she reveals her recipe for a bestseller that’s unmistakably Indian and universally loved. 

Press play and maybe sit with a bowl of your comfort food before you do, because you are in for a feast!

Books mentioned in this episode: 

1. Interstellar Megachef & Intergalactic Feast by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
2. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

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I think any scientist reading this book is going to have a good laugh. So, I need to start with this. Have you seen what's happening with virtual reality lately? I recently saw this video where people were literally traveling using VR and you're sitting in your house and your brain thinks you're somewhere else entirely, different country, different setting, different time and I just kept thinking there was a technology that would let me travel without leaving my house. I would never have to leave and that would be amazing but it just got me thinking about something else. What if you could not just see a place, feel it through food, through memory, through emotion and that's some of the ideas that are in the book that we're going to be talking about today, Intergalactic Feast by Lavanya Lakshminarayan. She is an international award-winning sci-fi author. She's one of India's top speculative fiction voices. She's also a game designer from Bangalore and she's built this absolutely wild and detailed universe called Primus. So, we're going to be talking about two of her books which are part of the same series, Interstellar Mega Chef and Intergalactic Feast and the protagonists of these two amazing speculative fiction novels are Saraswati who claims to be a refugee from earth and is trying to prove herself as a chef in a world that doesn't trust her and Serenity Koh who's a sharp, slightly intimidating, cool designer who is her collaborator and they create something called Feast which is an experience where food doesn't just taste good, it transports you into a memory or a feeling and obviously, you know, I really love that idea. So, Lavanya, it's really nice to have you here. For those of you who don't know, Lavanya was one of the people who were the first participants at the Bound Retreat in 2018 and we then collaborated on her first award-winning book and it's just been amazing to see how far you've come and all the accolades and all the creativity that you put into your work. Welcome. Well, thank you so much for having me, Tara and thank you for your many kind words about all of the books. I had a ton of fun writing both Interstellar Mega Chef and Intergalactic Feast and I'm really excited to be discussing them with you. So, tell me about the world of Primus, the world that we find these characters in. It's very interesting because you're not just telling a story, you've built an entire system and in this world, there are different species, there are rules like the nakshatra and they govern our city's function and everything feels like it has evolved based on scarcity, history and need. So, the world is very innovative and it's felt very designed. So, how did this world even come to you and tell our listeners a little bit more about this world? Okay, so there's stacks of notes with all my world building. This book is set, or these two books rather, are set about 2,000 years in the future and you're absolutely right. You know, humanity has had this history which is our future, the future that we're hurtling towards of scarcity, of resources running out, climate crisis. A lot of these things are here already, it's just that they get more extreme and humanity that survives each of these unfolding crises decides that the earth is not necessarily the only sustainable planet out there and by this point, of course, you know, they've done enough space research, there's sophisticated enough technology to permit them to look out into the stars, to dream of other worlds and so they travel to other worlds to try and find alternative ways of living than what society has traditionally always done on earth which is take its resources, use its resources, assert humankind as the most important species as opposed to, you know, living in harmony with nature as opposed to respecting our boundaries and our limits as just part of an ecosystem. So, humanity attempts to stop being so anthropocentric and tries to bring in this new era where they settle other planets, they don't colonize them, you know, they don't terraform them, all they do is travel to them and attempt to identify, you know, natural ecosystems on those planets and live in synchronicity with them without asserting themselves as a superior species and this is what happens when they get to Primus. So, Primus is this world, it's one of, it's the oldest settled planet, so the oldest new bastion of human civilization, if you will, after the earth. They've learned from the earth's mistakes, they live by very specific rules, one of them is to tread lightly, to take no more than you need to from the world around you, they're governed by the sense of nine virtues that every human being needs to embody in order to be a good human being, their society is incredibly, you know, equal opportunity for all, universal basic income, housing is provided, there's no sense of scarcity or unnecessary competition and this planet prides itself on having a culture that is not bigoted, not discriminatory, incredibly open to the universe, except this is all the stuff that you see on the surface and that's where conflict sort of resides because this civilization is now the new center of human civilization and they take that job really, really seriously. Tell our listeners a little bit more about the Megashef competition that we find our two characters in, they've won the competition and that's where the second book starts, can you give a little context? Right, of course, so as part of this sort of central location at the heart of human culture, of new human culture, they have, of course, people on this planet have evolved new forms of art, new forms of poetry and of music, but they've also evolved or developed new forms of food and I go into how this was developed in a lot of detail in the first book, but the essentials are, there's no usage of cold ingredients, you know, rust or the essence of flavor of every single ingredient is sort of distilled, it's combined with a whole bunch of gels and jellies and terrines and so this new food is almost this molecular gastronomy inspired, very sort of minimalist food and it's never cooked over an open flame. Now, against this backdrop, as part of its way to promote its culture, to pride itself on its culture, every year a cooking reality show is hosted on this planet and it's called Interstellar Megashef and people from all over the galaxy are invited to participate in this planet and it's not restricted to humans alone and this is where Saraswati, who's one of the protagonists, finds herself very intentionally because she sees it as her way to escape her secret past on earth and establish herself in a new identity on Earth. So she participates in this cooking show and now, of course, Paris being what it is, you know, they are constantly claiming that it's equal opportunity for all, all forms of cuisine are welcome, except, of course, they're really not. So as an earthling, she goes on the show and she begins to cook and she makes a traditional earthling recipe, a meen polichathu, which is Tamil food inspired and when she makes it, she uses a whole bat-grown fish and this shocks and appalls the judges. She cooks over an open flame and it's horrifying to them because they just cannot believe that someone would have the audacity to show up on their cooking show on their planet and express a culture other than their own and this is really, again, part of the beginnings of a lot of tension and conflict in terms of food cultures and the clash between this food culture that's evolved on this planet and the food culture of and I wrote this sort of as a mirror to look at how our own cultures in present-day reality seem to clash all of the time, even when we don't necessarily intend for them to. I love how you brought food into it because food is culture and there's no greater way to show all of those conflicts that you're speaking about through the concept of food. So let's backtrack a little bit because, you know, how do these worlds even come up? What is the beginning point? What is the first idea and does the world come first or do these characters come first? What is your process? You know, it's different with every single book but specifically with these two books, there wasn't a single moment where the whole book popped into my head at one shot, you know. It kind of presented itself in stages. One part of it was, you know, I was recovering from dengue which is absolutely nasty and I completely lost my appetite and was feeling really, really tired and ill and my grandmother made me this bowl of rasam and rice and for the first time in weeks, I actually felt like eating it because I smelt that aroma of tamarind and spice and cilantro and in that moment while I was eating it, this thought struck me. Rasam is like this well-kept secret, right? I mean, we know about it here in India but outside of India, it's not something that's particularly present in the popular imagination. You know, you've got Indian food associated with say, chicken tikka masala and naan and all of those things, biryani but very seldom with rasam and this sort of took me down the rabbit hole thinking about why some foods gain popular imagination, who speaks for them, what power structures uphold them and I dove off the deep end into a tunnel food history looking at Indian foods, the origins of Indian food, looking at the origins of power dynamics that exist in food today, you know, the rise of earth cuisine as being the superior culinary form, the sort of relegation of foods from other cultures, then looking more into Indian history, sort of seeing the history of the rise of vegetarianism, sort of pushing to the margins foods that are not vegetarian, foods from other communities that are not upper caste Hindu, right? And so I was doing all of this research and while I was doing all of this research, this really strong image popped into my head of a young woman who wants to do something with food except she can't cook and her mother, her grandmother is this fabulous cook and she goes up to her and asks her to teach her about food and the grandmother subjects her to a blind taste test and that scene actually made it into the book that's Serenity Koh and her grandmother that actually happens. So while I was juggling all of this deep food history, there was this blip where this character popped into my head and I thought, okay, this is a really fun moment and as I was thinking about her, her personality kind of popped into my head all at one go where she's reckless, she's impulsive, she's rash, she's a bit arrogant, not the most considered person but well-meaning at heart and I thought, you know what, she could use a really good friend and this sort of more earnest, warmer, more grounded person who comes very much from the heart popped into my mind and that was Saraswati and the minute I had these three moving pieces I knew I had a book and as I started thinking about the book, it popped into my head that I actually had two books and that's when I started to sort of outline, to start building, I think, you know, what food cultures could look like in this world, what this world, this new future for humanity could be and why these characters mattered and why that story they were about to tell mattered and that's sort of how it all came together with this. That's very fascinating that it started from food history and not actually the speculative part of it and the speculative part came later. Let's come to the characters. I really like Saraswati because her journey is emotionally very grounded and she arrives in this new world primus that you described as an outsider and I found it very fascinating. She says she's someone from earth and she immediately faces suspicion and hostility which I kind of understand why there would be suspicion against us earthlings and because there's this underlying belief that humans are destructive and unpredictable and incapable of harmony and the proof is in the pudding and you said that primus, you know, presents itself as a more evolved and passive society but it still has its own forms of exclusion and some of the times they wage war also using their words. So tell me a little bit more about Saraswati's character and how she navigates this new world coming from earth. I know she has a secret history and this new world, there's a new dynamic, there's a dynamic between earth and primus and she's sort of struggling to manage the two. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think to understand Saraswati, you've got to understand how these worlds are positioned. Primus, like you rightly said, is pacifist. It prides itself on being, you know, anti-empire, on being peaceful, on using words, being diplomatic except, you know, it's that that is not at every single level because in order to do that they have constantly positioned themselves as superior to their origin story and their origin story begins on earth. So when Saraswati lands up on primus, she comes from that origin story that they are desperately trying to forget, that they are desperately trying to leave behind and she is treated in their gaze as just a symbol of all of this, you know, rather destructive violent human history that they want no part of. They have established their own history, it's been going strong for thousands of years. Saraswati though is a character who is genuinely all heart. She is escaping a pretty torrent past back on earth and she keeps it a bit of a secret because she wants to hide her identity. She's a fantastic chef. On earth she ran her own restaurant and she sees using her skills as a chef as a way to break into this new state where she can establish herself, free herself of her past and really make her name for herself standing on her own two feet which is something she was not allowed to do on earth with no spoilers. It's part of the reason she leaves the earth. So she arrives with this head full of dreams and hopes and meets obstacle after obstacle after obstacle not because there is discrimination necessarily as at a systemic level. Primus is the kind of planet that says we welcome you with open arms whoever you are wherever you come from but the biases and the sort of stereotypes that it has fed its citizens with are always lurking underneath the surface and this is what Saraswati encounters. She's accompanied by her best friend in the whole world, a flying robot companion named Kili and he helps ground her I think. You know he's a source of lightness when things are getting dark for her. He inspires her, motivates her, helps her keep going no matter how big the obstacles that pop up in her path are and so they make this incredibly wholesome team I think. Now Saraswati despite the fact that she's hiding her identity is a genuinely nice person and this shows with the ease with which she starts to make friends on this new planet because you know not every person is necessarily a bad person right even if your first encounters of a new place are a bit hostile there are always good people and she sort of gravitates towards these good people and slowly starts building friendships and almost a found family on her journey navigating Primus despite all of its hostilities. I like the found family it was very interesting and because it was very hard actually to visualize it in a good way because they're not humans then there's the robot that you mentioned there's someone with fronds, they speak differently, they look differently. So can you tell me a little bit more about all these different species if you will that you've come up with and tell the listeners a little bit more about the kinds of people can I say people that you expect on Primus and who you might meet? Oh people is absolutely correct you know because they're all beings the operating belief that I was working off of was you know if I'm setting a book 2,000 years in the future presumably we might have discovered other life out there and I'm not saying this you know necessarily as a statement of fact I would like to imagine that there is companionship for humanity beyond our own planet right not just for humanity but for all beings on this planet so on Primus 2,000 years in the future there are of course human beings they're human beings from different planets as well who've moved to Primus because it really is at the heart of this new human civilization you've got people who are incredibly pro Primus and very protective of their culture you've got softer more mellow people as well on Primus there's a group of people who volunteer to walk through the wilderness because not all of the planet is settled it's not like the earth they've only chosen to build one mega city and the rest of it is wilderness so you've got these people called the wanderers who are humans and they walk through the wilderness to make sure everything is in its right place that everything is in harmony there's no unforeseen crisis about to strike the planet but then you've got non-human beings as well there's the enemon they're an ancient race I was inspired by chromatophores a lot you know octopi really and squid and how intelligent they are and so they come from this really really ancient people who were once warfaring but have now become incredibly peaceful and every time they communicate they've got fronds and tentacles and they change color to match their mood you will meet the benar they are similar but they're more blob like they in order to exist among human beings they need a mechanical frame built around them because their actual job is tunneling through space and building you know jump gates through space and for that they actually have incredibly dense incredibly powerful very small blob like bodies that enable them to do this and so to sort of scale down the power and be able to navigate the human world they have these mechatronic frames there's tons more actually but these are the main ones you will encounter in detail I think while you're reading the book and how do you visualize these beings do you have drawings of them where do they exist in your head I definitely sketch them out I've got sketches of all of them I try and think of what would be significantly other from you know what we perceive to be intelligent life I think I try and sort of distance them physically from human scale human proportion a human understanding of you know a being you can have a conversation with and in our heads you know we're trained to think of I don't know our dogs and cats right potentially to acknowledge apes and monkeys because they're so similar in build to us but it's so limited our perception of what holds intelligence and so when I'm thinking of all of these other beings I'm really sort of pushing the envelope for example there's an entire an entire people who you'll meet very early in the first book they're called the kathritva and they're insect inspired because I think we perceive insects as you know either icky bugs or just these really tiny things that are inconsequential even though they hold up so much of our ecosystem so I thought you know what let me take that framework and throw it in space and create an entire people and a culture and a history with that so of course my jumping off point is rooted in I would say species that you find on it but then I try and push the envelope so for example the the enemon actually share a collective consciousness where all the memories can kind of pool the the benar have this the singing musical tradition which I think you'll only encounter in book two so while I'm developing what they look like and what they feel like I'm also trying to develop how they think and how they feel and how that differs from what we do as human beings that's a very interesting process and what I like about this book this is different from other speculative fiction books or different from space books it's obviously still very serious but it has a lightness to it because of this found family because of this community because there's a cooking competition not I wouldn't say maybe not a cooking competition but yeah it's like a master chef which is like an intergalactic master chef so it's a different kind of trope if you will which I have not seen before which combines food history culture the idea of all these worlds colliding and then of course there's central two central characters at the heart of the novel that the novels that sort of keep you going in the emotional journey is what keeps you going so tell me a little bit more about the food I know you said that you know you started with looking at food history tell me a little bit more about the in book one the cooking competition that these characters Saraswati and Serenity both find themselves in and then the intergalactic feast tell me about feast because I honestly loved feast and I really want to try one I really want to try one too I hope I hope a food expert out there actually chooses to build it that would be so much fun no thank you so much I think lightness was an inevitable part of this because when you're talking about food you're not you know there is an aspect of food which is incredibly political right it can be used divisively it can be used to discriminate but at the same time it brings people together and you experience joy sharing a meal with people and you know how joy is an act of resistance too so this all of this comes together and so you can't write about food being political without also writing about food being this genuinely wholesome expression of love and so when I was writing this book I was drawing on so much culinary inspiration from my own kitchen to begin with and I'm from Bangalore but I'm Tamil and I also have a lot of very close family in Hyderabad so I've always had a palate that belongs nowhere you know for all of the rasam and rice there's haleem and biryani for all the haleem and biryani there's I don't know right if your typical English breakfast because Bangalore has a serious colonial past much like you know of course the rest of the country as well but this was a very central cantonment area so having a palate that belongs to no specific culture opens me up to try different cultures and different types of food and all of this kind of flows into the book you'll find me and Polly you'll find katu dal and rice dosas and vadas they make an appearance and all of this is food that Saraswati is bringing to the table because she's from the earth and the part of the earth she's from even though I've called it a different name is loosely based on you know the Deccan plateau so southern the southern half of India but food on Primus is incredibly controlled it's minimal the flavors are subtle if everything on earth comes with spice that backs a sucker punch food on Primus is absolutely minimal and every single dish that's made on Primus is actually deeply significant it's all rooted in their history every ingredient holds a symbolic meaning so if you're building a dish and you're putting you know putting in ras from say cilantro the choice of cilantro holds a hidden meaning specific to their culture if you use peppercorns that holds a specific meaning if you decide to make it sweet why have you decided to make it sweet it's very codified and it's so it's almost as if when you're eating a dish on Primus you are actually eating a message from the maker a message steeped in history that reminds you of their culture and very very occasionally if a chef has really arrived on the planet they get to add a tiny touch of their own personality and so you know this is pretty much going in bold and chunky and cooking with intuition on earth clashing with cooking with absolute precision and act you know utmost significance attributed to every single ingredient and from this Saraswati and Serenity go ahead and build Feast. Now Feast is rooted in Brinian culture Serenity who starts developing it she is from Primus and so that's the food she's been exposed to except she can't cook so she desperately needs somebody to help her understand food and flavor and she happens to bump into Saraswati a few times and she decides that this is the person she wants to work with so while they're building it together what is Feast? Feast is effectively a colorless flavorless food and it is packed with tiny tiny code that can only be read by these nano particles that you ingest it capitalizes on a whole simulation program that Serenity actually builds and designs where you can have simulated experience being directly into your brain because you have a subscription to these nanoparticles which you routinely ingest right so Feast capitalizes on this and when you eat this absolutely colorless flavorless food which is packed with nutrition but not much else it can knock you into an alternative world run an entire simulation of flavor of smell of sight it runs memories on loop like you're looking at looking at home videos it shows you exotic new destinations so it really taps into your biology everything your hormones are doing every memory you've had and sort of surfaces them so it is this incredibly powerful piece of food technology and they manage to build it together. Sounds really really cool and fantastic so why are the people some people on Primus wary of it and critical of it? Well you know so Primus is this kind of planet where they're fixated upon tradition like I was saying you know every single food has significance there's a precision to making it how it's presented is incredibly critical so the correct colors the correct marbles of colors on every single plate are really essential so I think they're kind of obsessive about the process about the organic process of making food which is a bit rich coming from them considering they don't use whole ingredients considering they criticize Saraswati so heavily for using the organic process of cooking over an open fire right but still they take themselves incredibly seriously and their concerns are not entirely unfounded I think part of it is a loss of the process of what they consider cooking it's sort of they view it as almost a trivialization of a thousand-year-old craft which is a fair argument if you know your job is the perfection or the pursuit of perfecting a thousand-year-old craft they view it as something possibly dangerous because it taps into so many personal deep evocative memories so they sit in opposition to it because it threatens every single thing they know and if there's one thing about primians it's that they absolutely do not like change and they do not adapt well to it so you have this character that's coming in and bringing a lot of change tell me a little bit more about the other character because we spoke Saraswati she has a secret past very interesting kind of fraught history back on earth that she's also trying to escape and she's trying to sort of you know not let it come out on this planet and then Serenity Ko and they kind of have a crush on each other and the book also you know talks a little bit about that so tell me a little bit more about Serenity Ko and the kind of dynamic that you were trying to show between Saraswati and her. Serenity Ko is impulsive she's reckless she's absolutely no filter and she is genuinely really good at what she does this kind of gives her a little bit of a chip on her shoulder she's very young she's in her late 20s she's already tremendously successful she was pretty prodigious as a kid so she's skipped through a lot of growing up experiences that she would have otherwise had you know internships and all of that instead of that right after university she's plunged straight into the deep end of this incredibly demanding job as a designer of these simulations and she's amazing at them so she's sort of not the most roundedly developed person because she's always been I would say faster than she needed to be grown up faster than she needed to never really socialized as much as she could have because like I said she's no filter she speaks her mind she's incredibly bright so that childhood precociousness has kind of led to a slightly more isolated adulthood but she is again you know beneath all of these layers that make her seem often obnoxious and a bit inconsiderate she's genuinely all heart again she wants she wants to be a good person she wants to do the right thing except she can't always articulate that and she's got a completely you know runaway personality runaway mouth she's one of those people who jumps and thinks about jumping later and so consequences are always hitting her very hard in the face and no more so than when she runs into Saraswati who holds her own who's a much calmer presence in general even though she is going through her own personal journey that's heavy at times when she's around Serenity Ko Serenity Ko actually gets under her skin and Saraswati gives it back and that's a rare dynamic for Serenity Ko to encounter in somebody close to her own age usually it's her grandmother or her older brother trying to tell her to you know calm down and giving her advice and here there's Saraswati kind of being this balancing presence to all of this just impetuous I want it now I'm doing it my way kind of behavior and that forces her to go to sort of start taking a step back a very small step back but she starts to I think then start questioning why she is the way she is and who she actually wants to be and that's a huge part of her journey to come into her own and there's so much science in this book and obviously you know you've chosen speculative fiction as the thing that you want to sink your teeth into and I know that you're a game designer so how much did you experience as a game designer influence the way you build these worlds and you know do you have a science background as well because we spoke about nanoparticles and all of these things which are sort of completely over my head but how much research do you have to do to sort of build these things in you know it's funny I ran away from science the moment I finished high school I mean I did it in my 11th and 12th and I was just I'm out because I just did not enjoy it how dry it was how theoretical it was and the way it was taught but then you know as I've gotten a bit older I've started seeing science not as this process of systems that they make you learn so that you can get through entrance exams but more as a pursuit of curiosity if you will and as I started to sit with that thought I realized that I'm actually a genuinely very curious person so I'm always reading about about everything honestly I'll read about any practically anything I can get my hands on and part of that is a whole lot of research into into various sciences so you know whether it's what we're doing in outer space whether it's you know the future of computers because all of the you know the nanoparticles and all of that are being tested well not the version I wrote but there is there are versions of quantum computers being tested right so I'm always reading this stuff and it fascinates me so then but I'm not an expert I'm not a technically grounded expert I think any scientist reading this book is going to have a good laugh but what I am is a very systematic thinker and I think that's where my game design brain kind of kicks in because I read about all of this really cool stuff that we're discovering that we're developing and building and while I can't get super technical and I don't want to anyway because I'm writing fiction not a science textbook right or a white paper once I've done all of this reading my game design brain starts to think in terms of rule sets and systems so then it says oh wouldn't it be cool if there were tiny you know nanopoles you could ingest that actually computerized code that can then sync with your cells and read your cells and I go down the rabbit hole and then I draw a bunch of flowcharts this sounds crazy but I really do I'll draw a bunch of flowcharts exploring how the process works practically none of it will make it to the book but this is also that I understand how it works and then I can pick and choose what I'm telling a reader to believe in and how much information they need for it to make sense but at the back of my mind in my notes I carefully plan every single system so everything in this book from how they cook the premium way of cooking that is without using fire the technology they use to extract this rust or essence all of that is a system that I have mapped out there are rules the way these simulation work all of these simulations work again mapped out with rules the way the civilization works their economy like I said there's universal basic income all of that rule set systems flowcharts and I actually have a ton of fun doing this oh I love to peek behind the covers and look at a few of those flowcharts and systems that you design because it takes a special kind of brain I think to sort of firstly come up with all of this I always think this of sci-fi and speculative fiction writers because it's right brain and left brain in a way and then translate it into prose that evokes emotion and that you know makes you hold on to the story and that's also palatable because you don't want to get too technical with the story because you lose the reader because the readers are not may not be science nerds absolutely and we've touched upon something that was so essential to this book the prose itself because you're writing about food you can't write about it in an analytical kind of very bare bones minimalist way food is so rich so evocative even the simplest dish evokes all of your senses touch smell sometimes you know the sound of a pressure cooker the sound of a tadka popping all of this is part of a food experience so finding the right words and being able to create the lushness of that experience while for any reader you know reading it and for myself while writing it that was actually one of the biggest challenges and one of the most fun parts of writing this book and you've been living with this world for a long time now I think you've been working on it for six years seven years six years so yeah how do you sort of like have the stamina to stick with it keep it going or is it just so immersive that you know you're always thinking about it you're always sort of working on it oh it's a little bit of both you're right it's been probably yes six years I started thinking about the book in 2020 and it's taken me a while because there were so many moving parts to it now when you're doing research and when you're chasing the idea as a blue sky bigger idea everything is exciting and there's constant momentum because you're you know you're thinking oh I could do this this way I could write a food culture like this and you haven't figured out any of the specifics yet so you don't know the limits that are going to come back later to bite you when you're drafting so it's all very exciting at first and then you start outlining which is again exciting because there's so much possibility you're playing with multiple parts every story has a billion possible endings right so you're chasing all these different pathways but then you start to write and each of these books is about 120,000 odd words long and you're starting at word zero and you know again in the beginning it's exciting it's scary because you're trying to find the right voice you're trying to think you know is this character and there are multiple character perspectives in this two main characters and two secondary characters and you're trying to figure out how each of these people would speak how they would voice themselves they're talking to you in the back of your head you know articulating themselves so it's incredibly fun but then as you start putting the words down properly you realize how far away you are from any sense of an ending and then it's just a discipline that has to kick in where you have to make yourself show up at least in my case I will show up I might not write but I will come and sit at my desk and tinker for at least an hour and if I'm not writing anything that's fair I can walk away but the important thing is showing up and trying 10 minutes 15 minutes at a time so it's a mix of both things the the other thing is that these books were written under a deadline because they were already signed to my publisher in the UK and that is its own unique kind of pressure it's a good thing because it's a time limit but it's a bad thing because you're constantly looking at the calendar and thinking oh gosh I've got only you know six months left I have to write 60,000 words and then I have to edit it before I send it in so that it's a clean draft and it's a lot of pressure and I think there were moments through that whole process where a switch in my brain went off I completely disconnected from external reality I was at my desk you know living on things like sandwiches and coffee right like anything that's basic that's low effort kind of walking through the world in this daze which it sounds very like I guess glamorous and all of that but it's actually just incredibly disconcerting because the minute I'd step out of those phases I think oh my goodness a month has gone by and it's been a long time since I met my friends for a drink you know and so you know it's this it's a very inconsistent process especially with something that takes years to write. It sounds incredibly difficult to do and especially under the you know ticking time bomb of a deadline but I like the fact that you know it's very interesting your books have gone international you've won awards there in the UK you have a international agent as well but they're very Indian in flavor and it's very rare to see speculative fiction and I think you probably would have spoken about it in other interviews also but as readers we're not very used to Indian speculative fiction we kind of when we walk into a bookstore we would read sort of you know best or maybe UK, US spec fic for the canon or the famous ones so is the according to you because you're published both in India and in the UK is the Indian speculative fiction reading market changing? I think so you know you're absolutely right I think because the canon of speculative fiction is held so firmly by the west and for the longest time has reflected anglophone writing out of the UK and the US that is very much front and center you know most people as teenagers wherever they are in the world if they've read spec fic they've read Cholkin and they've read Asimov right and that's core canon right there but there has been so much work from all over the world being written especially in the last 20 to 30 years and that certainly includes Indian writers writing spec fic, Indian diaspora writers writing spec fic as well and the reason it exists is because there are readers for it you know and they're not there are definitely Indian readers for it there are also non-Indian readers who want to explore a new way of seeing the world because you're right when I write there is a distinctly Indian flavor to it. I will liberally pepper my work with words and phrases from Indian languages right in the same way Cholkin goes and builds Elvish as a language right but I've got access because of the number of Indian languages I speak I've got access to the school vocabulary I'm writing in English but I can pick and choose what I throw in there similarly in these books there's foods in my first novel it's set in a futuristic Bangalore and I think writing from the context of the space where you locate yourself is inevitable for every writer it's not necessarily writing what you know in that very traditional sense of this is the sum of my life experiences and this is all I can express but it is sort of acknowledging where you're rooted where you're positioned and I think there are so many people who across India who find themselves positioned in a similar space right who've grown up post MTV I generally consider the post 90s generation to be a much more globally exposed one not just to global western ideas but to global ideas of Indianness as well if that makes sense because we're not just you know the story about the small town or the village while that has its place there's so much more to India there's rapid urbanization there's climate crisis there's layers of discrimination in urban centers and rural centers all of this and India changes every 500 meters right when you take a walk and I think there are enough Indians who are aware of this who aren't viewing themselves through what the west has told us we are right we've asserted sort of a new identity that is global but Indian too and that's where I find my work fits in and that's where I find all the work that Indian writers in India and outside of India who are writing speculative fiction that's where their work fits into I think that's very well articulated that especially sort of like recent generations there is a more of an awareness of the premium nature of what India can provide to the world and then therefore there's more acceptance of those products services content all of that which we're seeing now happen more and more Indian brands and Indian movies and all of those things take the global stage so I want to find out a little more about your origin story so what led you to speculative fiction were you always sort of a writer or sort of writing this happen to you one day? I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was eight so I I have this memory in my mind and I know I was eight because you know that first composition they make you write in school which is myself I kind of ended it saying I wanted to be an author when I grew up and I can trace why that was when I was a kid I was constantly surrounded by stories and storytellers my parents would read to me incessantly and I would demand that they read to me I would pester aunts uncles grandparents any adult looking person to tell me stories and I was the sort of storied consuming machine and I think there was a point where I realized that they made me feel connected to something beyond myself they made me think about the world differently and when I realized how powerful that was for me very young I decided I wanted to make other people feel that way too and so I was constantly wandering around with notebooks in school you know I'd be I wasn't truly a full-on backbencher because that's you know teachers kind of see you when you're sitting right at the back so I'd hide in the middle and be paying attention in class but also scribbling away in notebooks and I'd be building these short story worlds these fantasy worlds sitting over my summer vacation reading like a maniac and then writing like a maniac just because I could and because I enjoyed the process so much so I knew I always wanted to do this and I was never sure how to actually do it and pull it off so when I finished university I went and worked as a game designer and I think that really gave me a lot more context on the structure of creating something from a bare bones idea to you know its eventual conclusion as something that's finished and polished and well articulated it kind of helped me figure out how to set goals you know set the standard I wanted to write to how to know when I'd reach that space and then let go so you've been a bit of a journey but the inclination was always there what do you expect? You know I think it was a summer holiday I remember it it's like a vision clear as day in my head I'm at my grandparent's place it's in Hyderabad it's the summer holidays there's this low slant of the sun this building radiating heat which is what you get in Hyderabad and I'm sitting on my grandmother's rocking chair and I've got a copy of The Hobbit in my hands and I read that book practically in a single sitting through you know the baking heat of Hyderabad summer's day end to end and I was just so floored by the power of that story by the characters in it by the sense of adventure by the mirrors to what you know small acts can bring about because of course hot on its heels I read The Lord of the Rings how small people can make such a huge difference there are just so many things in Tolkien and that's the first thing I remember reading that perspective that just jumped out at me and grabbed me and said this is the most incredible experience of your life and I was 11 so you know I hadn't lived much life but at the time that summer's day that summer holiday reading Tolkien that was it to me. Yeah books can do that to you I still I mean the visceral reaction we have as children when we read books I don't think it's replicable as adults I remember all of those books I mean so many sort of like milestone books that one reads and it's just mind-blowing honestly. There's no feeling that compared you know you're so willing I think when you're a child to let your disbelief be suspended and to let somebody just take you on a journey and there's a beautiful innocence to it. Absolutely so are you a full-time author now that you've sort of like you know got so much critical acclaim and success? Yes I am but I'm always also keeping an eye out on what's going on in games I consult on different gaming projects I don't work in games full-time at the moment because that's a high pressure industry writing novels and deadline is extremely high pressure so for now yes I enjoy it I like being able to be immersed in it but I also have a really soft spot for gaming and for video games so you know if ever something really exciting pops up there I might just go back and forth between the two. Yeah they're not always one thing but no that's fantastic that you know because I can when you describe your process I was thinking of there's no way that you could be doing both. Absolutely not. So what are you working on next because I know that now there was a two book series right this and now so are you leaving the world of Primus and are you going to be entering a new world or are you staying in Primus and telling a different story? Well I have ideas for stories that could be told on Primus but I'm going to take a bit of a break from it just to think fresh thoughts I think because I feel like when I do come back to this world it'll I'll be able to write newer characters who hold their own and I'm just relative to Saras and Serenity Comb so right now I'm tinkering with honestly a notebook full of ideas because like you said it took me six years to write these two books but at the same time the idea generation machine in your head never switches off right so there are all of these really fun novel ideas that I've been jotting down at a really high level and not pursuing kind of telling myself to pace myself because there's no point working on multiple projects at the same time at least not for me I think given how intense the process of writing these books was adding something else to it would have just been chaos so I'm exploring I'm going to say at least half a dozen ideas with seriousness and I think I'm very close to figuring out what the next big one is going to be and on the side I'm writing a couple of short stories that are due to be published I think sometime next year you know how long publishing is so writing this year to be published next year but it's so joyful you know the whole creative process because it makes you have always have wonder and it encourages curiosity but then you bring a process into that creativity and bring that project to fruition I think that's what we sort of discussed today so no I think it was very fascinating so that brings me to the last round which is a rapid-fire round where you can just answer in one word or one sentence oh no pressure yeah when you go to dealing with pressure so okay one feast experience that you would create for yourself oh okay I would um it's going to sound silly those cheap orange lollies I would absolutely want that because that takes me right back to my childhood and my granddad would walk me home from school from the school bus and he would always buy me those cheap orange lollies every single day so I want to have that connection that moment I love that one dish that instantly takes you back in time my mother's filter coffee I just have a lifetime of memories associated with it so I can go back in time but still be present and it's all there one word for primus controlled one character from your books that you would want to meet serenity coke sci-fi or comfort read sci-fi are you so did you say serendipitous do you identify yourself more with saraswati because when I was reading I felt that you would identify more with her I think so I think I'm a bit more restrained like I said serendipitous no filter just sheer impulse um and I think it would be incredible fun to hang out with her because she would kind of be unhinged and untethered and that would help me lighten up just a little bit I would never be able to match her but I wouldn't be as restrained and reserved as I usually am awesome thank you so much it was such a fun conversation and I feel like I've traveled to your world without leaving my chair oh thank you so much yeah and to any listeners out there here's something I want to ask you if you could relive one memory through food what would it be tell me in the comments I'd love to know and if you know someone who would love this mix of sci-fi food imagination send this episode to them thank you thank you hope you enjoyed this episode of books and beyond with bound this podcast is created by bound a company that helps you grow through stories find us at bound india on all social media platforms tune in every wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from india and south asia