Excerpts:Q. Why don’t you tell us what ‘Kancchi’ is all about?A. ‘Kancchi’ is about a young girl who disappears at 16. Her name, or nickname, is Kancchi. It is also about her mother, who waits for her return. The story unfolds mostly between 1979 and 2005, with the early ’90s at its core. It follows two timelines: the past, tracing Kancchi’s life from birth to her disappearance, and the present, set over a single day in her mother’s life as she waits. The setting is a small village in the western hills of Nepal. Q. It’s almost as if you were trying to explore what is it about the position of women in contemporary Nepalese society that fascinates and frustrates you?A. That is true, of course, but I must admit it wasn’t a conscious decision. It wasn’t as if I had an agenda to say, “Let me write about women in Nepal.” But because I am a woman writing about women in Nepal, the book naturally began to reflect women’s issues. In the beginning, I did want to capture village life in Nepal—everything about it. And of course, that included women’s lives, their dreams, and their frustrations. But later, I realised I had to focus on the story: the little girl who disappears, and her mother who waits. As I did that, everything else seemed to fall into place.Q. When I read fiction by women, I find that inevitably their writing explores what it means to be a woman. I get the same sense with Kanchi. Was that also the case for you?A. Yeah, I think that’s correct. It’s not that we don’t try to explore women’s issues—we do. But sometimes we try too hard, and it gets in the way of the story. At some point you have to let go. Yes, we care about women’s issues, but let’s explore them through the story and the characters. If you’re writing realistic or literary fiction, you inevitably end up doing that. I don’t think we consciously set out to, but maybe it is conscious—because we’re women writing about women, it just happens.Q. A lot of writers tend to give solutions, but you seem more interested in presenting the situation. Was that a conscious choice?A. I think that might be the third-person narration that I chose or ended up choosing. I couldn’t tell you, as the reader, everything. I could only go so close to the character Ayas as the narrator, and that’s why I couldn’t just lay everything out on the page. I do wonder if that was also because of the prologue, where I show right away that Kanchi disappears, and then go back to show how she disappeared or what led to it. Because of that, I couldn’t really tell the reader everything, even though I knew it. So maybe that’s what caused it. Q. You weave in poetry and songs that add a different kind of narrative. How did you choose them, and what was your intent? Was it because it was part of village culture, or because you wanted your literature to show its place at the intersection of many traditions?A. I think it’s both. A, it’s part of village life and my life growing up. And B, as a young woman in the village who loved reading, she would naturally come across a lot of poetry and songs. In my novel, some songs she hears on the radio, but others she reads like poetry. Many of the songs in the novel are original—I wrote those lines myself. I also think the presence of so many songs and plays comes from Nepali culture, and from South Asian, especially Bollywood, traditions where songs appear in the middle of a story. Even while writing, after a strong scene, I sometimes felt like bursting into song and dance myself. So, I think that culture and tradition seeped into the novel. Q. How did you select the songs? Were they memories you brought in because they fit perfectly?A. It wasn’t easy to make them fit. Most of the songs are styled after popular folk songs I grew up hearing, so they definitely draw from that. But fitting them into the story took effort. I couldn’t just pick random lines and throw them in. I had to make sure they flowed naturally with the story.Q. So how much research did this novel take?A. It took a lot, mostly because I wasn’t born or raised in a village—though my mum was, and that’s why I wanted to write about it. I had to start from scratch with research. I did live in a village briefly, around age three, and although that’s not really the reason, it was one of the first places I remember, so I always felt close to it. Later we visited my mum’s village almost every year, until the civil war made it impossible—she was a policewoman, and I went to a police boarding school, so returning wasn’t an option. Still, I always felt fondly about the village and wanted to write about it, only to realise I knew almost nothing. After graduating from Stanford, I went back to research and finish the novel. Altogether, I spent about three months there over seven years—two uninterrupted months gave me plenty of material, and the rest I gathered by interviewing my mum, uncles, and aunts. They helped a lot.Q. What kind of material did you gather?A. So, while I was there, at first I would just observe my aunt, who let me stay with her. I took notes on little things—how she sifted through grains, what she did early in the morning, how she gathered grass, how she looked after the buffalo. That’s how it began. Later, once I had stayed there for at least two months, I became part of their story. I went to weddings and parties they organised and started befriending people. All those experiences, all those little things, somehow made their way into the story.Q. Did you face any language barriers while adjusting to the surroundings? And were the social rules or ways of engagement challenging to understand at first?A. It wasn’t easy. It took me a lot of drafts to make it seem like the scenes just wrote themselves. But yes, language was a problem. Normally, if I had to write dialogue, I would write it in Nepali first, longhand, then later translate it, and then go back again to edit and make sure it flowed well. The challenge was that not everything in Nepali can be easily translated, and even if you do, it can sound off in English. So, I had to find a way to carry the meaning from Nepali but also make it sound natural in English. It wasn’t easy at all.And as far as social rituals, I didn’t want to portray them as exotic. For example, customs around menstruation—if you’re a little girl in that part of the world, you go through them. The question was how to show them so they felt natural for her. The way to do that, I think, was to focus on her and how she experienced them. But of course, as a writer, my own perspectives on these rituals would try to creep in, and I had to edit those out. So yes, it was tough Q. The lyrics you did translate, but many other words you used casually within the text without feeling the need to translate. Instead, you opted for a glossary at the end. It created a very interesting mix in your writing. I don’t know whether it was an insistence, but that this was the easiest way to tell the story. And if it was going to be a combination of two languages, then so be it, isn’t it?A. Yeah, you’re correct. It was kind of an insistence—I didn’t want to translate every word, because that would take away from the flow of the story. But I also didn’t want the reader thinking, ‘What does this mean? Do I need to ask someone or look it up on Google Translate?’ I didn’t want them pulled out of the story. So I tried to make it so that even if you don’t know the exact meaning, you can guess from context, and your guess won’t be far off. That’s what I was going for with one or two words here and there. With songs, I had to translate because they were too long.I was also inspired by Junot Díaz’s ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. When I first read it, I loved how he used Spanish throughout—even though I didn’t understand a word, it worked. But of course, Spanish and English in the US have a different relationship from Nepali and English. So I couldn’t just write a whole paragraph in Nepali and expect readers to figure it out. The compromise was to make words clear enough through context, but also provide a glossary in case readers wanted to check if they guessed correctly.Q. What came through was how beautifully you created the character of Kanchhi. Showing her from childhood to 16, up to her disappearance, where everything seems to come together with all these different languages. At a certain point, it feels immaterial which language one is reading, because the experience itself takes over.A. Thank you, it really makes me feel the hard work paid off. As I said, it wasn’t easy—this is probably the ninth or tenth draft I’ve worked through. It took a long time to bring her character to life.Q. What did you end up dropping by the ninth or tenth draft?A. Oh, a lot. In the beginning, I actually started with the mother—trying to get her character right. That took a really long time, because it was hard for me to get into the mindset of a mother who had lost her daughter. Looking back, that was probably a rookie mistake—focusing on the present before really understanding what happened in the past. I also had many other characters that I eventually had to “murder,” as they say. It was only around 2018–2019, when I started working on Kanchhi herself, that things began to fall into place. Once I figured out the past, I could finally write the present with more clarity. But yes, it took many drafts to get there.Q. That’s interesting—Kanchi came much later. How did that happen?A. Yeah, it is interesting. Up until the seventh or eighth draft, I didn’t even know the book would be called Kanchhi. I was so focused on the mother—trying to get her right on the page—that I kept struggling to understand her and the village. A part of me thought Kanchhi would be easier to write, since she’s a little girl and I’ve been a little girl myself. Maybe that’s why I avoided her for so long. But from the beginning, I knew I didn’t really understand the mother or the village, so most of my energy went there. Perhaps I should have started with Kanchhi, but the process is really about blindly figuring things out and being patient enough to keep writing. Go to Source
