Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction, and serves as interviews editor for Kweli, where she curates a series titled “Race, Power and Storytelling.” Her work has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, Transition, Poets & Writers, The Best Asian Short Stories 2019, Electric Literature, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. Her debut fiction manuscript, Ladies Special, Homebound, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s 2018 Meriwether First Book Prize and is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars, and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. An excerpt from her story “Help Me Help You” can be found here. It appears in the July/Aug 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Help Me Help You”?
As a writer who switched homes often and across continents, I’m drawn to the idea of place and its representation in stories (among other things). This is especially true for my hometown Mumbai, the city where I was raised, where I’ve spent the longest chunk of my life so far. Stories on Mumbai by white storytellers (tourism, literature, Hollywood) often portray the city through a predictable set of tropes: slums, Hindu-Muslim tension, mainstream Bollywood, the city’s underworld, and a key marker of Mumbai’s modernization, call centers serving the “First World.” When it comes to urban Indian settings, two Hollywood stories were big turn-offs for me: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (by the Oscar-winning director of Shakespeare in Love), where Judi Dench, a retired English woman living in India, at one moment “civilizes” call center agents to become more approachable while serving their western clients. Another was the NBC show Outsourced that I couldn’t watch beyond an episode or two, as it portrays Indians in call centers through the usual clichés, including the use of a contrived accent perceived to be homogenously Indian by westerners. They turned me off as they completely erase the darker realities of an international division of labor where a “Third World” serves the First. Instead, we have call centers in the same world as one of the indirect focus of American presidential debates where non-Americans are seen to be “stealing” American jobs.
The original impetus in writing “Help Me Help You” was to respond to this white gaze on urban India. It was also to tap into the power of storytelling to humanize the virtual migrant on the other end of the phone, one who “serves” Americans on a daily basis.
There’s something so satisfying about the moment Soma breaks protocol and tells Vicky off. How did you break the tension you’d built over the course of the scene?
When Soma talks back to her racist client knowing she’ll lose her job in doing so and risk her family’s survival, the moment to show this in the story felt right. What took me a while was to trust that intuition. As a brown writer trying to publish in the American market, my stories are often mediated by a white editorial vision so trusting myself with my work’s organic development was a bigger challenge here.
Her relationship with her father is such an important part of the story. Are there other stories about caretaking you’d especially recommend to your readers?
I agree. I do think Soma’s relationship to her father drives a good deal of the story.
Frankly, by the time I revised and submitted my story to the Kenyon Review, I’d completed my first year as a mother. I was in the middle of a radical life transition, personally and professionally, and was trying to understand my relationship to maternal caregiving that is hopelessly romanticized in our global culture. Most of my reading these days is about the physical and emotional labor of caregiving as a brown mother, although I imagine most caregivers relate to this experience at some level. Books on caregiving I’m currently reading and enjoying are by Black writers: Imani Perry’s A Letter to My Sons and Nefertiti Austin’s Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I switched to creative writing after a long academic tenure in literary criticism. When I started out, it was hard for me to write without constantly deconstructing my stories, a professional habit. Even now, I tend to be hyper-aware of the flaws in my stories. It’s taken me years to shut up the critic as I begin writing from a place of intuition, even if the critical training is very useful in the later stages of a story’s completion. Writers evolve with each piece they write, and I’m no exception to the rule. Over the years, though, I have learned to trust my voice, to trust the twists and turns in my own path as a writer, to trust what I want to write about instead of what I feel I should be writing about. I’ve also developed a more intimate relationship with the English language—it isn’t my native tongue but I claim it as my first language.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m working on personal essays about early stages of motherhood that I foresee as a future book.
I’m also curating a fashion blog on Instagram these days called Style Gully (@stylegully). It deals with my usual obsession around questions of identity, representation and social justice, only this time via stories of clothing on a fun, informal platform.