You all know a favorite thing of mine is to introduce new authors and their debut novels. I'm so pleased that this author agreed to be interviewed because she's as eclectic as her new novel. Enjoy the interview and then I'm offering my personal copy of the novel US ONLY, details below.
Pia its all yours!
- ISBN-13: 9780778315971
- Publisher: Harlequin
- Publication date: 4/29/2014
- Pages: 288
Overview
IN THIS POIGNANT AND BREATHTAKING DEBUT, ONE MAN SEARCHES FOR MEANING IN THE WAKE OF INCOMPARABLE TRAGEDY…
Karom Seth should have been in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, and on the Indian shores in 2004, when the tsunami swept his entire family into the ocean. Whether it's a curse or a blessing, Karom can't be sure, but his absence from these disasters has left him with crushing guilt—and a belief that fate has singled him out for invincibility.
Giveaway Details
Prize includes one print copy
US ONLY
of Where Earth Meets Water
Please use Rafflecopter form below
Good Luck!
Prize includes one print copy
US ONLY
of Where Earth Meets Water
Please use Rafflecopter form below
Good Luck!
From the first morning that Karom awakes in Gita's grandmother's house, he can tell that their time in Delhi is going to be different from the rest of their trip. They arrive late at night from Agra, and as they drag their suitcases up to the second floor, Gita caresses the nameplate outside Ammama's apartment lightly, leaving a small wake in the dust with her fingers. "Huh," she says. "That's new." Kamini Pai, it reads. Before Karom has a chance to ask what she means, they are tumbling into the small flat, sandy from road silt and Indian rail travel, blinking under the fat fluorescent tube lights like a pair of bears emerging from a long winter's hibernation. After formal introductions and sleepy smiles, they fall into bed, Karom in the living room, Gita in her grandmother's room, surrendering to sleep miles away from any nettlesome insect buzzing or monotonous calls to prayer that echo through the compound. The night passes swiftly, gathering snatches of reality and combining them with fancy, translating and then siphoning them into their ears so that they dream vividly, solidly.
But then, in the early morning, in fact for each of the mornings for the six days they stay with Ammama in her small flat, a gong rings somewhere outside that sounds like a frying pan being hit with a metal spoon. Karom cautiously opens one eye to peer at his vintage Rolex, perched carefully on the chair he is using as a bedside table. Five forty-five. This is when Ammama pads into the sitting room, where Karom sleeps on the hard wooden pallet, his legs tangled in the threadbare sheets, his skin cool and clammy from nightly sweats. She presses a damp cloth on his forehead and he feigns sleep, unsure of how to react, rigidly aware of Gita asleep in the next room. She lowers herself onto the slate floor beside him with a towel under her knees. She swipes a line of vermilion across the hollow in her throat, directly in the center of her clavicle and, depending on how Karom is situated, mirrors the gesture on him. She closes her eyes, reopens them immediately to ensure that Karom is still sleeping, sucks in her breath and lets out a slew of Sanskrit. Karom yearns for the sweet, strong cold coffee that she places inches away from him-he can smell the chicory as the fan gathers the scent into the air-but is afraid that Ammama will see him awake and either make him participate in her ritual or scurry away in embarrassment.
He is touched that she has remembered his love for cold coffee, that it is a sacred thing in India. Back home in New York City, there is only iced coffee: simply ice dumped on top of coffee that becomes immediately diluted and insipid. Cold coffee is creamy, strong and pure. He waits until she finishes mumbling her indecipherable words, heaves herself to her feet and leaves the room. It is only once he hears the crescendo of the bucket being filled for her bath that he dares to reach for the drink, beads of sweat gathered around the base of the brass tumbler.
On their third day in Delhi, he tells Gita as they step out into the street and the blinding light of the premonsoon summer.
"She comes into my room in the mornings," he says. "With a tray of perfectly ripe bananas, a glass of cold coffee and a cold compress that she puts on my forehead. She kneels down next to my bed and mutters under her voice. It's hard to tell with the whirring of the fan, but I'm pretty sure she's praying."
"Get out," Gita says, hitting him playfully on the chest, smiling broadly. "What do you do?"
"Nothing," Karom says, stepping over an open sewage grate. "I pretend to sleep. What else am I supposed to do?"
Gita chuckles.
"It's not funny," he says. "She's so sweet, but the whole thing is incredibly awkward."
"It's only for three more days," Gita says. "Hang in there. She's a sweet old lady who's attached to her rituals. I'm sure she's only doing it out of love."
The perfectly ripe bananas don't escape Gita. She won't eat a banana with even a spot of brown on it, and Ammama presumes this condition extends to Karom. But it irks Gita that each day, the only bananas that remain on the breakfast table are either the ones from the day before, which Ammama will eventually turn into halwa, or those that are still green and will leave a film on Gita's tongue and a waxy taste in her mouth long after she's eaten one.
"You're not going to say anything to her?" Karom asks.
"What could I possibly say to her, Karom?" Gita responds. She is still thinking about the new nameplate outside the door. It's the first time during all her years of traveling to India that she has seen her grandmother's name proudly proclaiming her ownership of the apartment; previously it held her grandfather's name, a grandfather she's never met.
Karom knows there are some skeletons in Ammama's dusty closet, unopened for years. Gita has danced around the details of Ammama's past, but Karom understands that there is more to the old lady than even Gita is aware of. This became apparent when they originally discussed visiting India months before their trip.
"Visiting India," Gita had said at brunch in New York, "involves seeing my family. There's no way I could avoid it."
"And I'm thrilled about it," Karom had replied. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
"It's not that easy. Visiting together, like this, for the first time…" Gita struggled for words as her eyes flitted over Karom's plate. "You know how people think over there."
"Let them think," Karom said, spearing a large bite of stuffed French toast onto his fork and holding it out to Gita. He knew that she would take it without a fight, that it was a naughty departure from the egg-white omelet that sat in front of her. He knew it would keep her quiet while she chewed, giving him time to take control of the conversation. But it was she who managed to reveal a new side of her family.
Karom cut up another square of his French toast as Gita was chewing, layering it onto his fork into levels until he could no longer see the tines. He held it dangerously close to Gita's mouth, the cream cheese touching her lip. She looked at him and then the food, back and forth like a cross-eyed little girl.
"You're such a tease," she said, before taking the bread in one bite. "Ammama won't judge us, though. She's safe."
"Safe?"
"Life was hard in India over there back then," Gita proclaimed matter-of-factly, forking the remainder of his French toast onto her own plate, cutting and chewing between sentences.
"How do you mean?"
"Ammama is living proof of a marriage gone wrong. She's lived alone most of her adult life. She's what the rest of my family calls 'a freethinker.'"
En route to Ammama's house, they'd stopped at the Taj Mahal. Karom had wanted to spend the whole day at the mausoleum, watching the arc of the sun travel over the domed eggshell marble. He'd read a National Geographic article about how the sun changes the color of the marble depending on its angle throughout the day. The photos displayed the dome over twenty-four hours: pink, prenatal and shy in the dawn hours, citrine-yellow at midmorning, blinding white at high noon. It appeared as a completely different structure each moment, and Karom loved the unpredictability of it. The same ubiquitous structure that the world knew so intimately displayed so many different personalities. Had Shah Jahan meant to capture his beloved wife's multifaceted character? Her casual morning softness, her dour depression at having lost seven of her children, while constantly displaying the fierce, unfailing love she had for her husband? What made the Taj so emotional, changing over the course of the day depending on its mood? How had this feat been accomplished so many hundreds of years ago, when just the building of an edifice of this size had seemed impossible? Karom couldn't wait to watch its metamorphosis right before his very eyes.
But the train to Agra hadn't shown, and the Jaipur station from which they were departing had been overflowing with passengers, occupying all the benches or peering uselessly into the distance over the tracks. Karom watched Gita approach a tour guide who was playing games on his cell phone. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and spoke to him for a few minutes before she returned to Karom and told him about the strike.
"I saw an STD booth over there," he said. "I'm going to call Lloyd. I'd forgotten that he's leaving for his bachelor party one of these days. I hope I can catch him." She watched him lope off toward the dusty shack set back from the railroad platform, where he opened a glass door and slid inside.
When he returned, the two of them sat on the platform, leaning their backs against one another for support, summoning the strength for the wait that loomed ahead. Karom unhooked his watch and reread the inscription on the underside of the face. It felt like a brand-new gift each time.
Together we learn there's nothing like time.
The strength he drew from this little mantra had made it possible to get through grueling days of struggling with the right word for a headline at the advertising agency where he worked, made it a little easier to stomach shelling out three figures for underwhelming plays and frustrating tiffs that he and Gita always managed to spark just before bedtime. The words rolled over in his mind and across his tongue when he needed something to concentrate on, while he was training for his first road race, and then a 10K, and then a full marathon. And during those moments, when he had to stop and check his patient pulse, when he could feel it bleating slowly but capably under the thin skin of his under-wrist, he repeated these words to himself.
Karom looked down at the platform beneath him, spackled red with paan spit. He traced one of the spatters with the toe of his sandal. Animals on safari, he thought. There's the elephant trunk, holding on to a hippo's tail, an alligator? No, a gecko, one of the household varieties that Gita screamed at until I chased it out of our tent in Jaisalmer.
Back home, in the subways of New York City, Karom liked to peer over the edge of the platform into the depths of the tunnels, waiting diligently for that crescent of light to appear reflected on the sheen of the tracks, holding until the headlights finally appeared and the silver cars careened into the station. At times, when the tunnel was long without any hidden curves, he could see the train's headlights a full station away. He could watch it amble down the stretch toward him, teasing him with its proximity. But most of the time, the delightful snatch of light wouldn't give itself away until the last minute, when it came peeking around the bend. Karom loved this dance with the train but simultaneously worried himself over how long it would take to appear. Most nights, when service was delayed or curtailed, he paced back and forth, his ears perking up at the faintest of rumblings, which sent him scurrying to perch his toes over the perimeter of yellow paint that warned passengers not to cross this line.
Once, the transit police who were loitering up and down the platform had approached him as he peered down the tunnel. "Sir," the officer had said. "I'm going to have to ask you to step away from the platform edge. It's for your own safety."
When they'd first taken the subway together years before, Karom's platform behavior had made Gita nervous.
"You stand so close to the edge," she'd said, tugging at his hand. "Please come back."
"It's just a game," Karom had said. "I lean over until I have to lean back."
"Well, I don't like it."
People lived in those tunnels, in the dank recesses, venturing out only to forage for food. Mole people, as he had heard them referred to, though he thought this term disrespectful and embarrassing. He couldn't imagine living that far underground, though he'd read that the tunnels spread so far below the surface of pavement that it was possible to venture seven or eight stories deep. He had joked to Gita that one day real estate would be at such a premium that well-appointed con-dos with marble countertops and bamboo floors would have no choice but to spread to the netherworld that lay beneath them. Doormen would stand at attention at the mouths of stairwells that meandered far below the sidewalk, and the former valuable measurement of natural light would be replaced by mold-repellant abilities.
"Just wait," Karom had said, "until the most sought-after apartments are those that are farther below the surface. Humans always need one-upmanship."
After two hours of waiting on the Jaipur station platform, Karom stood up suddenly. Gita turned the page of her guidebook and shifted her position without looking up. Karom walked gingerly over the bodies sprawled across the platform napping, through a group of children playing a hand-clapping game and knelt at the platform edge. He sat down, his legs dangling over. A group of men playing cards and puffing on strong clove-scented cigarettes eyed him from the shadows of a snack cart's canopy. Dust motes swirled in the early-afternoon sun and the slightest breeze lifted a piece of hair off Karom's forehead and swung it over his eye.
In an instant he had jumped down to the tracks. He glanced around, the walls of the platform looming up around him like a cave. He couldn't see the passengers from here, only sky and the great expanse of the tracks in the distance, far away, leading to Agra. Karom stood with both feet on one of the rails, the cool metal cutting through the inadequate rubber of his sandals and massaging the sore arches of his feet. He walked, holding his arms out balancing himself, pretending there was a book upon his head. On the seventeen-hour flight from New York to Bombay, Karom had watched a documentary on Philippe Petit, the daredevil tightrope walker who'd walked between the World Trade Towers and lived to tell the tale. Karom bent his feet to span across the track like Petit, a make-believe balancing pole in his hands as he walked forward.
From the first morning that Karom awakes in Gita's grandmother's house, he can tell that their time in Delhi is going to be different from the rest of their trip. They arrive late at night from Agra, and as they drag their suitcases up to the second floor, Gita caresses the nameplate outside Ammama's apartment lightly, leaving a small wake in the dust with her fingers. "Huh," she says. "That's new." Kamini Pai, it reads. Before Karom has a chance to ask what she means, they are tumbling into the small flat, sandy from road silt and Indian rail travel, blinking under the fat fluorescent tube lights like a pair of bears emerging from a long winter's hibernation. After formal introductions and sleepy smiles, they fall into bed, Karom in the living room, Gita in her grandmother's room, surrendering to sleep miles away from any nettlesome insect buzzing or monotonous calls to prayer that echo through the compound. The night passes swiftly, gathering snatches of reality and combining them with fancy, translating and then siphoning them into their ears so that they dream vividly, solidly.
But then, in the early morning, in fact for each of the mornings for the six days they stay with Ammama in her small flat, a gong rings somewhere outside that sounds like a frying pan being hit with a metal spoon. Karom cautiously opens one eye to peer at his vintage Rolex, perched carefully on the chair he is using as a bedside table. Five forty-five. This is when Ammama pads into the sitting room, where Karom sleeps on the hard wooden pallet, his legs tangled in the threadbare sheets, his skin cool and clammy from nightly sweats. She presses a damp cloth on his forehead and he feigns sleep, unsure of how to react, rigidly aware of Gita asleep in the next room. She lowers herself onto the slate floor beside him with a towel under her knees. She swipes a line of vermilion across the hollow in her throat, directly in the center of her clavicle and, depending on how Karom is situated, mirrors the gesture on him. She closes her eyes, reopens them immediately to ensure that Karom is still sleeping, sucks in her breath and lets out a slew of Sanskrit. Karom yearns for the sweet, strong cold coffee that she places inches away from him-he can smell the chicory as the fan gathers the scent into the air-but is afraid that Ammama will see him awake and either make him participate in her ritual or scurry away in embarrassment.
He is touched that she has remembered his love for cold coffee, that it is a sacred thing in India. Back home in New York City, there is only iced coffee: simply ice dumped on top of coffee that becomes immediately diluted and insipid. Cold coffee is creamy, strong and pure. He waits until she finishes mumbling her indecipherable words, heaves herself to her feet and leaves the room. It is only once he hears the crescendo of the bucket being filled for her bath that he dares to reach for the drink, beads of sweat gathered around the base of the brass tumbler.
On their third day in Delhi, he tells Gita as they step out into the street and the blinding light of the premonsoon summer.
"She comes into my room in the mornings," he says. "With a tray of perfectly ripe bananas, a glass of cold coffee and a cold compress that she puts on my forehead. She kneels down next to my bed and mutters under her voice. It's hard to tell with the whirring of the fan, but I'm pretty sure she's praying."
"Get out," Gita says, hitting him playfully on the chest, smiling broadly. "What do you do?"
"Nothing," Karom says, stepping over an open sewage grate. "I pretend to sleep. What else am I supposed to do?"
Gita chuckles.
"It's not funny," he says. "She's so sweet, but the whole thing is incredibly awkward."
"It's only for three more days," Gita says. "Hang in there. She's a sweet old lady who's attached to her rituals. I'm sure she's only doing it out of love."
The perfectly ripe bananas don't escape Gita. She won't eat a banana with even a spot of brown on it, and Ammama presumes this condition extends to Karom. But it irks Gita that each day, the only bananas that remain on the breakfast table are either the ones from the day before, which Ammama will eventually turn into halwa, or those that are still green and will leave a film on Gita's tongue and a waxy taste in her mouth long after she's eaten one.
"You're not going to say anything to her?" Karom asks.
"What could I possibly say to her, Karom?" Gita responds. She is still thinking about the new nameplate outside the door. It's the first time during all her years of traveling to India that she has seen her grandmother's name proudly proclaiming her ownership of the apartment; previously it held her grandfather's name, a grandfather she's never met.
Karom knows there are some skeletons in Ammama's dusty closet, unopened for years. Gita has danced around the details of Ammama's past, but Karom understands that there is more to the old lady than even Gita is aware of. This became apparent when they originally discussed visiting India months before their trip.
"Visiting India," Gita had said at brunch in New York, "involves seeing my family. There's no way I could avoid it."
"And I'm thrilled about it," Karom had replied. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
"It's not that easy. Visiting together, like this, for the first time…" Gita struggled for words as her eyes flitted over Karom's plate. "You know how people think over there."
"Let them think," Karom said, spearing a large bite of stuffed French toast onto his fork and holding it out to Gita. He knew that she would take it without a fight, that it was a naughty departure from the egg-white omelet that sat in front of her. He knew it would keep her quiet while she chewed, giving him time to take control of the conversation. But it was she who managed to reveal a new side of her family.
Karom cut up another square of his French toast as Gita was chewing, layering it onto his fork into levels until he could no longer see the tines. He held it dangerously close to Gita's mouth, the cream cheese touching her lip. She looked at him and then the food, back and forth like a cross-eyed little girl.
"You're such a tease," she said, before taking the bread in one bite. "Ammama won't judge us, though. She's safe."
"Safe?"
"Life was hard in India over there back then," Gita proclaimed matter-of-factly, forking the remainder of his French toast onto her own plate, cutting and chewing between sentences.
"How do you mean?"
"Ammama is living proof of a marriage gone wrong. She's lived alone most of her adult life. She's what the rest of my family calls 'a freethinker.'"
En route to Ammama's house, they'd stopped at the Taj Mahal. Karom had wanted to spend the whole day at the mausoleum, watching the arc of the sun travel over the domed eggshell marble. He'd read a National Geographic article about how the sun changes the color of the marble depending on its angle throughout the day. The photos displayed the dome over twenty-four hours: pink, prenatal and shy in the dawn hours, citrine-yellow at midmorning, blinding white at high noon. It appeared as a completely different structure each moment, and Karom loved the unpredictability of it. The same ubiquitous structure that the world knew so intimately displayed so many different personalities. Had Shah Jahan meant to capture his beloved wife's multifaceted character? Her casual morning softness, her dour depression at having lost seven of her children, while constantly displaying the fierce, unfailing love she had for her husband? What made the Taj so emotional, changing over the course of the day depending on its mood? How had this feat been accomplished so many hundreds of years ago, when just the building of an edifice of this size had seemed impossible? Karom couldn't wait to watch its metamorphosis right before his very eyes.
But the train to Agra hadn't shown, and the Jaipur station from which they were departing had been overflowing with passengers, occupying all the benches or peering uselessly into the distance over the tracks. Karom watched Gita approach a tour guide who was playing games on his cell phone. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and spoke to him for a few minutes before she returned to Karom and told him about the strike.
"I saw an STD booth over there," he said. "I'm going to call Lloyd. I'd forgotten that he's leaving for his bachelor party one of these days. I hope I can catch him." She watched him lope off toward the dusty shack set back from the railroad platform, where he opened a glass door and slid inside.
When he returned, the two of them sat on the platform, leaning their backs against one another for support, summoning the strength for the wait that loomed ahead. Karom unhooked his watch and reread the inscription on the underside of the face. It felt like a brand-new gift each time.
Together we learn there's nothing like time.
The strength he drew from this little mantra had made it possible to get through grueling days of struggling with the right word for a headline at the advertising agency where he worked, made it a little easier to stomach shelling out three figures for underwhelming plays and frustrating tiffs that he and Gita always managed to spark just before bedtime. The words rolled over in his mind and across his tongue when he needed something to concentrate on, while he was training for his first road race, and then a 10K, and then a full marathon. And during those moments, when he had to stop and check his patient pulse, when he could feel it bleating slowly but capably under the thin skin of his under-wrist, he repeated these words to himself.
Karom looked down at the platform beneath him, spackled red with paan spit. He traced one of the spatters with the toe of his sandal. Animals on safari, he thought. There's the elephant trunk, holding on to a hippo's tail, an alligator? No, a gecko, one of the household varieties that Gita screamed at until I chased it out of our tent in Jaisalmer.
Back home, in the subways of New York City, Karom liked to peer over the edge of the platform into the depths of the tunnels, waiting diligently for that crescent of light to appear reflected on the sheen of the tracks, holding until the headlights finally appeared and the silver cars careened into the station. At times, when the tunnel was long without any hidden curves, he could see the train's headlights a full station away. He could watch it amble down the stretch toward him, teasing him with its proximity. But most of the time, the delightful snatch of light wouldn't give itself away until the last minute, when it came peeking around the bend. Karom loved this dance with the train but simultaneously worried himself over how long it would take to appear. Most nights, when service was delayed or curtailed, he paced back and forth, his ears perking up at the faintest of rumblings, which sent him scurrying to perch his toes over the perimeter of yellow paint that warned passengers not to cross this line.
Once, the transit police who were loitering up and down the platform had approached him as he peered down the tunnel. "Sir," the officer had said. "I'm going to have to ask you to step away from the platform edge. It's for your own safety."
When they'd first taken the subway together years before, Karom's platform behavior had made Gita nervous.
"You stand so close to the edge," she'd said, tugging at his hand. "Please come back."
"It's just a game," Karom had said. "I lean over until I have to lean back."
"Well, I don't like it."
People lived in those tunnels, in the dank recesses, venturing out only to forage for food. Mole people, as he had heard them referred to, though he thought this term disrespectful and embarrassing. He couldn't imagine living that far underground, though he'd read that the tunnels spread so far below the surface of pavement that it was possible to venture seven or eight stories deep. He had joked to Gita that one day real estate would be at such a premium that well-appointed con-dos with marble countertops and bamboo floors would have no choice but to spread to the netherworld that lay beneath them. Doormen would stand at attention at the mouths of stairwells that meandered far below the sidewalk, and the former valuable measurement of natural light would be replaced by mold-repellant abilities.
"Just wait," Karom had said, "until the most sought-after apartments are those that are farther below the surface. Humans always need one-upmanship."
After two hours of waiting on the Jaipur station platform, Karom stood up suddenly. Gita turned the page of her guidebook and shifted her position without looking up. Karom walked gingerly over the bodies sprawled across the platform napping, through a group of children playing a hand-clapping game and knelt at the platform edge. He sat down, his legs dangling over. A group of men playing cards and puffing on strong clove-scented cigarettes eyed him from the shadows of a snack cart's canopy. Dust motes swirled in the early-afternoon sun and the slightest breeze lifted a piece of hair off Karom's forehead and swung it over his eye.
In an instant he had jumped down to the tracks. He glanced around, the walls of the platform looming up around him like a cave. He couldn't see the passengers from here, only sky and the great expanse of the tracks in the distance, far away, leading to Agra. Karom stood with both feet on one of the rails, the cool metal cutting through the inadequate rubber of his sandals and massaging the sore arches of his feet. He walked, holding his arms out balancing himself, pretending there was a book upon his head. On the seventeen-hour flight from New York to Bombay, Karom had watched a documentary on Philippe Petit, the daredevil tightrope walker who'd walked between the World Trade Towers and lived to tell the tale. Karom bent his feet to span across the track like Petit, a make-believe balancing pole in his hands as he walked forward.
Pia, hi! Welcome to The Reading Frenzy. Your debut novel looks amazing and the premise is so intriguing. Tell my readers a bit about it.
Thank you! Where Earth Meets Water tells the story of Karom, a man who is struggling with his own form of survivor guilt. He has coincidentally but narrowly avoided tragedies in which he loses friends and loved ones, and the idea that he might be marked for invincibility is one that begins to haunt him. His grief extends to his best friend Lloyd and to his girlfriend Gita, who are each trying to find their role in his journey. In India, Gita introduces Karom to her grandmother, Kamini, a woman who is struggling with demons of her own. It’s a story about survival and love, of loss and catharsis.
Where did the idea
for the novel come?
I’m sure we have all wondered about luck and the idea of being in the right place at the right time. My experience really hit close to home. I was temping in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center over the summer of 2001; my last day was three days before 9/11 happened. The tragedy certainly rocked every American in some way, but what I remember so strongly from that time were the stories that people passed around: of the family member who had a meeting in one of the towers that morning but he overslept, or another woman who missed her train and was late to work, or the job interview that frustratingly got canceled, which of course, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. These stories set my mind wandering. A few years later, when the disastrous tsunami of 2004 decimated parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India, I was standing on the shores of the Bay of Bengal overlooking what I thought were rather serene waters. Had I really missed something this powerful again, due to pure luck and the fact that my family had decided to stick to West Bengal for our vacation this year, rather than travel down the coast?
The conflation of these two events had sparked
some subconscious thought within me, urging me to consider and construct the
ideals of a character who was just that lucky. I didn’t sit down to write the
short story that ultimately became the first chapter of Where Earth Meets Water
until a few years later.
In my sixth grade classroom, our teacher had
posted a John Donne quote above the blackboard: “No man is an island.” I never
understood its true meaning until I became a writer, and appreciated that one
person’s actions can have lasting effects on the people around him or her. It’s
why I’m so drawn to storylines that have converging characters; Jennifer Egan’s
A Visit From the Goon Squad was particularly inspiring as I thought about how
one person’s decisions can affect another’s. This true belief in overlapping
characters, plots and scenarios urged me to build up the stories of the other
significant characters in the story: those of Gita, Lloyd and Kamini.
Pia you won the Barnard College Young Women’s
Writing Award at age 12, tell us how you managed this seeing as you have to be
18 to enter.
In junior high school, I was enrolled in an
after school girls writing workshop. It was a small group – only 7 or 8 of us –
and it was led by a dynamic young woman named Katherine, who believed in
empowering girls through the written word. We met once a week to do writing exercises
that were creative and cathartic, sharing our work and receiving criticism; my
very first writing workshop. Katharine really liked one of the essays I had
written about the first time I realized the difference between boys and girls
(spoiler: when I snuck into the boys bathroom in grade school), and sought my
permission to submit it to a contest. To be honest, I’m not sure how she finagled
the age parameters, but I do remember faces of confusion and shock when I
ascended the podium to read my essay at Barnard College during the award ceremony.
Even if she cut some corners, Katharine was a great mentor, and was one of the
first people to help me believe in my talent.
Taking from the last
question you knew at 12 what you wanted to be when you grew up. When did you
know? Was there a specific catalyst that told you writing would be your future?
I’m not sure I ever knew that I wanted to be a
writer when I grew up. As a child, I was constantly telling and creating
stories. I was the district champion of the Storytelling Contest in grade
school and junior high. I wrote my first “novel” at age 12, on my grandfather’s
old typewriter that he gifted me when he saw how much I loved to write – it was
about a young girl with a special talent for swimming (strangely familiar to
the plotline of National Velvet, one of my favorite books at the time). I was
also very involved in theater, both acting and directing plays in high school,
another form of storytelling. But for a long time, there was a part of me that
was more practical than honest with myself. I’d never regarded writing as a
full time profession, one that could actually support you. It was only during
the time I spent writing Where Earth Meets Water during my free time as a
copywriter that I considered that this could really be something.
Pia you grew up in
New York but you spent some time in the UK also.
What took you there?
What took you there?
I spent my junior year abroad at the London
School of Economics. Even though I’d chosen it, my home school (Mount Holyoke
College) wasn’t the right fit for me. As soon as I arrived in this thriving
metropolis, I knew I had to stay. I studied incredibly hard that first year so
that I would get the grades I needed to finish my college years at the LSE with
a degree in Government. I had some wonderful experiences there – I interned
with a Member of Parliament and got to know some of the issues that his
constituency faced. I also did a stint at the weekend desk of the Associated
Press.
Pia, I love your website it’s so clean and
uncluttered. Did you design it? How “connected” are you with social media?
Thank you! But I
can’t take much credit for it. I looked at some websites of writers that I really
like, and what they all had in common was a simplicity that made it easy to
navigate and from which to glean information. My brother-in-law, Nikhil Mitter
designed my website, and we shared that desire for something elegant and accessible.
I use both Facebook
and Twitter, which I try to update at least twice a week. And our blog, Two
Admirable Pleasures, connects me with readers and foodies.
Pia, does the advanced editorial praise for
your debut novel make you nervous or happy or both?
For such a long
time, Where Earth Meets Water was being written within a vacuum; I was only
sharing it with a few people in order to receive feedback and comments. So just
the idea that other people are now interacting with my story and have opinions
about it is intriguing to me. The reviews that have come out so far make me
really excited about how the book might ultimately be received. But I know that
praise rarely comes unbalanced without criticism as well, so I have prepared
myself for the inevitable. In fact, I received my first less-than-stellar
review on Goodreads the other day. Everyone has opinions, and I can’t expect
them all to be the same.
What do you enjoy reading?
I’m a literary fiction gal through and through, but I also really enjoy memoirs and narrative nonfiction. Like my novel, I particularly enjoy stories about interconnected lives. I love reading about the intricacies, details and quirks that bring characters to life. And sometimes, beautiful language without a necessarily engaging plotline is enough to keep me hooked. I could go on for pages about my favorite writers and books, but here is a sampling: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, the novels of Vendela Vida, and I recently got into the Rabbit series by John Updike. I’m obsessed with his ability to manipulate language. There’s no formula, but any book that gets under my skin and makes me think about my own writing instantly becomes a favorite. As soon I finished Ann Patchett’s collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, I reached for my laptop and began to work on an essay of my own. Now that’s a true testament to inspiration.
What are you working on now?
I am currently in
Tallinn, Estonia, conducting on-the-ground research in anticipation of my
second novel. Without giving away too much, the story is about two families who
meet through an exchange program and become inextricably involved in one
another’s lives. While I’ve learned a lot about a new culture and country, I’m
also learning a lot more about myself, about the disciplines and rigors of
writing a second novel.
Pia, thank you for taking time to chat with us
about your novel. Good Luck with the new novel! Will there be any
events/signings for fans to meet you in person?
Absolutely – please join me at Words Bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey on Saturday, May 10 at 5pm or at the Barnes & Noble Tribeca in New York City on Wednesday, May 14 at 6pm.
I’ll also be at the
Printer’s Row Literary Festival in Chicago during the first weekend in June.
I’d also love to join book clubs that are reading Where Earth Meets Water, in
person if it’s possible, or via Skype.
MEET THE AUTHOR:Pia Padukone was born, raised and continues to live in New York City. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School and the London School of Economics, Pia has worked as a copywriter in healthcare advertising. In their spare time, Pia and her husband write Two Admirable Pleasures, a blog that combines their shared passions for books and the culinary dishes that are inspired by them. Pia debuts with Where Earth Meets Water and is working on her second novel.
I love to discover a new author and anticipate all of the great reading ahead! This sounds like a great book. Thanks for the giveaway and best wishes to you and Pus!
ReplyDeleteConnie thanks for your comment. I love debut authors, it's like a blank page :)
DeleteMy gosh, what an interview! Talk about fate, talent and such an interesting story. All the best Pia in this new beginning! I wish you much success and I'll be following you on FB and Twitter. I'm headed to your beautiful website! And thanks for the chance to win your debuting novel! Deb, you always find great authors! ♥
ReplyDeleteThanks Lorelei. I can't wait to read the novel then give it away :)
Deletedeb
Thank you so much for sharing the except the book sounds really great!
ReplyDeleteThank you Lily :)
Deleteif I liked the book enough to read more from the author
ReplyDeleteGood luck BN
Delete