How did “Sparrow and the Parasol” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

The first iteration of this story was written during the delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was part of an online flash-fiction workshop run by Clarion West; this was the story I wrote for the fourth week while quarantining after traveling back to my hometown in Kerala, India. I remember that I was trying to challenge myself to write a chaotic, peopled world full of sensations that were in direct opposition to the sterile confines of my room. I wanted sensorial excess. I wrote the opening scene to be a mélange of strangeness, magic, fluids, meat, pain. Then I tried to thread that feeling of excess and insatiability into every scene.

For this story, I drew from cultural experiences like the sheer overstimulation of temple processions—the atmosphere of feverish worship, the physical crush of bodies, the ravaging transformation rituals that performers of art-forms like garudan thookam have to undergo. There is also a sort of ritual bargaining that is common in polytheistic households: we promise certain gods certain specific things if our wishes or desires are met. From there I thought about the commodification of worship itself, the endless consumer appetite for spiritual experiences.

For obvious reasons—i.e., the soul-sucking lockdown—the story did not work out the way I wanted it to that first time. I submitted a sub-par version of the story for critique, got some incredible feedback, but ultimately decided to trunk it because I couldn’t find an end befitting the beginning.

A couple of years after that first attempt, I revisited the story while at the actual six-week Clarion West workshop. Funnily enough, I did this right after escaping quarantine again, except this time my confinement was all the way across the world in Seattle. (Even now I associate this story with the smell of hand-sanitiser, which is hopefully the farthest thing a reader might get from it.)

Luckily, time, distance, and the brilliance of my fellow workshoppers made the story rather easy to fix. It just needed to be grosser, gorier and godlier.

What is your writing space like? What do you like to have around for optimal creativity?

I have ADHD, so my writing space is something to which I attach sacred value. I enjoy an extra-large desk, an ever-rising wall of notebooks, and an indulgently pink and clicky mechanical keyboard. I’ve been slowly populating my shelves with odd items that I collect on my travels. So far I’ve got a Czech grim-reaper marionette, a magenta Balinese cat, and a solar-powered Japanese bobblehead geisha. I went years without a dedicated writing space, resisting its allure to sit up hunched in my bed and write, but I’ve seen the light now.

Where are you in this story?

Hopefully slurping questionably legal soup with one of the Aunties and steering well clear of the gods.

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

Recently I’ve been reading some incredible South Asian SFF in both short form and novels. I finished Kuzhali Manickavel’s (brilliant, funny) Things We Found During the Autopsy, and immediately ran to pick up her latest collection. I’m still thinking about M.L. Krishnan’s Interstate Mohinis, and Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors. I have yet to find proper words to describe what these incredible works make me feel—mostly delighted shock at the possibilities they open up for me to think about how I want my own writing to evolve. I’m inspired by writing that defies the more oppressive of genre conventions; I love seeing characters from the margin who are tender, violent, irreverent, imperfect. I’ve started to define true inspiration as anything that battles my own paucity of imagination about what is “acceptable” in speculative fiction.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I’m working on a South Asian dark fantasy novel which has even more to say about worship as currency. I have a new novelette coming out soon with Strange Horizons that I’ve been describing as surreal, gacha body horror.