Oindrila Mukherjee is a highly accomplished writer, associate professor of English at Grand Valley State University where she teaches creative writing. She holds a Ph.D in Literature and Creative Writing, and has studied at 4 impressive universities. Mukherjee grew up in Kolkata, India, and resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This past January, Mukherjee released her debut novel, The Dream Builders. The novel follows Maneka Roy, a professor at a midwestern college who leaves America and goes back home to India to grieve her mother and take care of her widowed father. The new city in which Maneka’s father lives is experiencing major economic growth and the city is anxiously awaiting the opening of a Trump Tower. Maneka realizes how Americanized and unrecognizable this part of India has become.
Then a tragedy takes place and Maneka realizes the fragility of life in a place that seems to value profit over people. This story is told through 10 amazing voices of people in the community, exploring classism, systems that divide us, and the Americanization of India. This novel encourages the value of humanity in a time where materialism and capitalism are treated with the utmost importance.
When did you discover your passion for writing? How has that passion evolved over the course of your writing career?
I didn’t really have a lot of consistent friendships. If I went to people’s homes, I took a book with me, or I would go and see if they had any books that I could read. So, it was always reading, reading, reading, starting with children’s literature. I never really thought I would be a writer because that didn’t seem to be one of the professions that were available [to me]. I did enjoy writing in elementary school, middle school, and high school in English class. I was writing essays, and I knew I liked to write, but I don’t think I was a storyteller. Writing is one thing and writing fiction, I have learned even recently, is a very different thing. You can enjoy using words and writing, but you could not be a good storyteller, or the other way around. Some people have this gift for things like rock contour – I wasn’t one of those people.
So, when did I actually think I could be a writer? I think it was in the late 90s when I was an undergrad, because Indian writers really started to win a lot of international acclaim. Arundhati Roy, who some of you may have heard of, she wrote this novel called “The God of Small Things,” which won the Booker Prize in 1997. It was the year that I left India for the first time to go study in England, and it suddenly seemed everyone was talking about her. A couple of years after that, Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer, and that was like this time when Indian authors were becoming celebrities. I kind of thought that, ‘oh, I love words, I want to write.” So I kind of toyed with the idea of writing, but it had not really been crystallized.
I do have to say though, that at the time I really wanted to be a celebrity writer, not just a writer, you know, and that’s a problem. *laughs* It took me a long time to actually publish a book because I was doing it for the wrong reasons back then. I just wanted to be published; I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be interviewed everywhere, and I wanted all the trappings of literary theme. I wasn’t really focused on the actual story that I was going to tell. I don’t even know if I had a story. So yeah, I can’t really point to a specific time, but I just love books. I actually did want to be the author of a book that people would read, you know, lonely people would read and connect with and things like that. I had that beautiful poetic vision, but then there was also the other one, which was that I wanted to be a celebrity. Everybody will know me, and recognize me, which I had to kind of give up on that, to actually publish a book.
How do you go about developing your characters? Do real people inspire them, or do you create them around the role you want them to play in your book?
Both, I think. I definitely do get inspired by things that happen in real life to people. For instance, if I hear something that happened to someone that feels to me like it could be a novel, this could be a story, or it’s really moving, then I will use it to make my own story. And I’ve shameless stolen things from people. But the situation that they’re in has to move me. It has to be something where I’m like, “what would I do if that happened to me?” Or, “that is such a conundrum, that’s such a dilemma. What must they have gone through in this moment?”
So, for me, writing is very much about human psychology and human behavior. It’s very much about people’s motivations and how they feel and how they react to things. And that is something that you learn from real life, right, from observing people, talking to people, and watching them. So that definitely plays a big part, but then I have to make up stuff, because that’s why you’re writing fiction and not memoir, and you have the freedom to exaggerate and embellish. I kind of really enjoyed doing that. To a point where, you know, people ask me or assume that Maneka is me, or that the book is autobiographical to a creative extent. Or they ask me things like, “oh, did this really happened?” And I don’t even know anymore. Like, no, I made up 90% of it, but little parts of it are, of course, stolen.
There are 10 characters. The beginning one is the Indian immigrant in the U.S who is a creative writing professor, non-fiction, in a midwestern college town, and people assume that’s me. They’re like, “oh, you’re Maneka, and Maneka’s the protagonist!” Honestly, they’re all me. *laughs* All 10 of them. There are five men, there are five women. They’re from very different social backgrounds and economic backgrounds. One is a really wealthy, glamorous woman. The other is her chauffeur. There’s [also] Maneka’s aging dad, and then there’s this rebellious left-wing photographer. There’s the dad’s living mate who comes from a village. I have very little in common with some of these characters in terms of lifestyle, but they’re all at some point seeing the world through my eyes. After all, I created them, right? I put words in their mouth that I would have thought of at some point in time, and they’re all kind of extensions of me.
I have characters that nobody would guess has anything to do with me saying things that I’ve thought, you know? So it’s really interesting for me to hear people zoom in on one person, because the autobiographical details are so similar. And I’m like, you know what’s interesting? I did create all of them. *laughs* Especially because nobody is an antagonist in the book. If you think something of someone, you immediately go to their chapter and discover that it they’re totally different from what you’d expect, because all the chapters are from different points of view. So, when you’re inhabiting a character’s point of view, you have to empathize with them deeply to be able to do that – to be able to make the reader empathize with them. And I don’t know if you can empathize without putting a little bit of yourself in them, right? So yeah, they are all inspired by real life characters, or at least situations, I would say.
What was the process like from writing from the perspective of 10 different characters? Was it like a madhouse? Did you have post-it notes everywhere? What really helped you focus on each individual?
Yeah, it was a madhouse. *laughs* I don’t do post-it’s. The person who had a studio next to mine invited me to her room and I went there and her entire wall was being held with post-it notes, and there were more on the floor. And I was like, “this looks, it looks crazy.” But to me, it felt like the height of organization. I was like, “how are you so organized because I would lose those post-it’s by the next morning.” I just write things down on the notes on my phone, or like multiple files on my computer, and then I never know which one is which. I don’t think I ever go back and look at those files. I have so many files on my computer under “The Dream Builders” or Hiraeth. Actually, [that] was the original name of the novel. I don’t even know what those documents are. I’ve never gone back and revisited them. And if I do, I sometimes look at my phone, and I’m like, “what is this list?” I just cannot remember when I wrote it there. So my notes to myself are mostly useless; I just have to remember things.
The madhouse is that, first of all, “who am I gonna even devote a chapter to, right?” There was a little kid who had a chapter – I took it out later because it wasn’t really working in the story. There was an American character in the American town where Maneka teaches who had a chapter and I took it out because it was ruining the momentum. So, there were more characters than there are now in who have their own chapter. But I feel like, actually, once I decided who was going to have a chapter, it really helped me structure and organize my thoughts. It really felt like compartments, you know? This is Maneka’s, this is Ramona’s, this is Jessica’s, and it really felt more easy to organize like having shelves where you can put things rather than just put them anywhere you want in the room.
The first drafts were…the first draft was really bad. And I know I thought Jessica’s chapter was the weakest chapter in my book, it was so bad, nothing was happening. It was just a mess. And by the end of it, I thought it was the strongest chapter in the book. That meant though, that a different chapter had now become the weakest chapter, and I had to work that out. So, yeah, you know, the first draft, I was just like, “no one’s gonna ever read this, I will never be able to finish this. This is a terrible book, like what is the point, you know?” But I think gradually, as you keep revising, it start[s] making more and more sense. That’s why I was telling the student who came up to talk to me today, just write your draft. Because if you don’t write the first draft, you don’t even know what you’re doing. Just somehow get to the end, even if it is just: he did this, and then she did this, and then he said that. Don’t worry about the prose. Don’t worry about whether it’s working, just try to get the story down. Then you can take a step back and look at your draft, and you can figure out what you want to do next, you know?
But yeah, it was a madhouse. But I honestly feel like if it had just been one character, it would have been even more chaotic for me, if that makes any sense. It’s like putting everything into one big shelf, you know?
How have you experienced “Americanization” in India? When did you first notice? Is your personal experience reflected in your book?
That’s a great question and I actually have an answer to this because this is kind of something that I’ve really been thinking about for years! I think that’s why it was so important for me to write it. I was telling people this morning that when I was growing up it was like post-Colonial India, former British colony, all the books we read in school and college were British books. We didn’t have cable TV when I was a kid; we had some pretty shows on TV though.
The Americanization came through pop music like Madonna and Michael Jackson you know and Hollywood movies that were not even released at the same time. Something really radical happened in 1992 when I was just when I was in high school. Basically what happened is India’s economy changed; they liberalized the market which means they opened up the economy to foreign investors. Suddenly, we had Nike and we had Coke and we had all these American brands. Before that, we didn’t.
Suddenly, people went overseas, [like] that uncle and aunt who lived in America, would come back with cans of Pepsi. Everything was beginning to enter the Indian market- we had cable TV 24/7 suddenly starting in like 1992. So you had MTV and CNN and we had these two TV shows beamed every single weeknight at primetime. Eight o’clock was the Bold and the Beautiful. Eight-thirty was Santa Barbara. We didn’t think those were daytime soaps because they were big primetime for us. That was our glimpse [into America]. People knew about America. We had watched a lot of movies and stuff, but this was like an Americanization that hadn’t been there before. It was beamed into our homes, CNN, all of the cultural stuff.
I think that’s when globalization started because of the economy, right when you had all these foreign brands coming in and the economy changing. It really culturally marked a big shift in our lives when we were like teens. I mean, we suddenly went from British and Indian stuff to completely more American stuff. Kids now celebrate Halloween which was not the case when I was growing up because it’s totally imported from America. It’s it’s become really all-pervasive, you know?This was really fascinating to me… what does is it do to our culture in a country of like, a half billion people, where most people still live in villages and small towns, have arranged marriages, and are very traditional and patriarchal? Those are not the people you will ever see here [in America], in your visiting writers students, because you have to speak English and go to urban schools and stuff to come here to grad school and write in English and so on. If you go to India you and go to a big city,[you will see] our culture is very different, you know, and that’s huge. By the way, just urban population is like five times what America’s population is. So you will think this is all of India and it’s not, so when those things start to collide, that’s the thing that was interesting to me. Everyone is watching The Bold and the Beautiful, but their chauffeur does not speak any English and is not. He doesn’t have cable TV, he’s watching something totally different. That kind of contrast between different classes and different sections is [what] you don’t see here [in America]. The reason is that most people speak the same language or at least know some English [here]. Even if they don’t speak, if that’s not their primary language, then there are maybe two others that they might be speaking. We [in India] have 25 States and each state has its own official language. The differences and the diversity, which is good but also really bad in this case, because it’s some class difference. It’s a hierarchy what was really fascinating to me… The rich become richer, the middle class has a lot more money than they used to, and the working class has a lot less. The divide between the haves and the have-nots has just grown.
What advice do you have for young authors trying to get published? Is there anything you wish you would have done differently in your own publishing journey?
That’s a great question, I would have written more and read more. And I personally would have not wasted so much time doing things that were not related to my dreams or my goal. But that’s just me. I mean, some people would say, “you had a fun life, you’ve had an interesting life,” but I feel like I went off course a lot of times. My advice would be just read a lot, and stay immersed in that world of publishing where you know what’s being published. You know, you’re all editing a wonderful literary magazine, if you can read other literary magazines, both for undergrads, but also the ones that are not just for undergrads, see what’s being published, or just read the news, like, what’s winning the awards, you know? Just being part of being aware of what is happening in the world of literary, creative arts, and publishing is the first step. Read as much as you can in the genre that you love, but also in other genres. This alone can take you an entire lifetime, because this is a lot. And especially because nobody’s doing it full time. You have to go to school, you have your classes, you have your homework. So how much time can you devote to just, you know, keeping up with what’s happening, but I feel like I didn’t do that.
I came to this country in my 20s, and I had never taken a creative writing class because we didn’t have any creative writing courses. And I had not heard of any of the literary journals in America. I didn’t know what an MFA program was. I had never heard of AWP which is our annual [writer’s] conference. I was completely unaware of all these things. When I came here for my MFA, I didn’t know even in my first two years of my MFA. It takes time to get caught up. I don’t even know when I started actually figuring that out. I don’t think I was reading a lot of literary journals, even like 15 years ago. And what happens with that is here I am trying to get published in a world where I don’t know what’s been published? Do you know what I mean? And I mean, that’s like a shortcut. That’s what I mean by saying I wanted to be a celebrity writer. I didn’t want to be a good writer. I didn’t even know what it meant to be a good writer, you know?
There are so many things you could do or need to do. One thing that I would find helpful if I were talking to my younger self is, like, set aside time whenever you can if not to write at least to read, and to be aware of what is being published. What are people writing? What are the conversations going on? What are people talking about in the world of literature, in the world of poetry, in the world of nonfiction. What are the controversies? Who are the writers? I just think that helps you, it’s also inspiring. It’s inspiring to hear from other people, and to know what’s going on.
And then just read, you know? Whenever I had writer’s block, I felt like reading was the one thing that would get me back on track. The moment I would start reading something, believe me. Sometimes I would read one page, and I would be like, “oh, I want to write again.” One page, that’s all it took. It was just going back to words. If they were pretty words, or if they were fun, interesting words, or something cool about it, t just made me want to write again, so just think reading. Even if you spend five years just reading and you don’t write that much, it’s totally not a waste of time. And I don’t think you can write without reading a lot. It just wouldn’t be very good. *laughs* I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I mean, I haven’t read much this year. I’ll just give you an example. My book came out in January, and I just haven’t had the time. I was on book tour, and I’ve been traveling. And, of course, I read, but I have a lot of grading. I have a lot of students. I read their work. And then I read the work of people – someone who’s interviewing me or my conversation partner, but that’s kind of like homework. And even though their work is wonderful, that’s all I’m reading. That’s like, not a lot really, right. I just haven’t had time to read a lot. People do ask me all the time, “when are you starting your next book?” I just need a month to start reading again, to get caught up on things before I can get in that mode and that groove. So without reading, I mean, you literally are kind of lost. You don’t know where you are in the world of literature.
What do you want readers to take away from The Dream Builders?
One of the things is that you never know what someone else is going through. So we see people behaving in a certain way, or being standoffish or saying something that seems insensitive. And I just feel like, I’m really, really fascinated by what that person is really like, and what their life is really like. And so one thing would be just to have empathy, and to not judge people without trying to find out what they’re actually going through over their lives. Like that also kind of seems obvious, right? That answer also seems kind of obvious. We see that all the time, right. But I feel like that was one of the things I was actively trying to do in the book. And that’s why you have the different characters, you see them in one way. And then you get inside their head, and you see the world in a totally different way. And my goal was to have people feel for every character, no matter how obnoxious, or how flawed, or just how, I mean, I’m not uninteresting, they might seem at first. So that’s one [takeaway] like empathy.
Also, I wrote this book during the pandemic. And when there was a lot of isolation, in my own life and in everyone else’s. And in some ways, everyone in this city is far away from home. Nobody grew up rich. They’ve all come there for different reasons for work, or family or whatever. And Maneka has traveled much farther. But I feel like this is also about thinking about where is home? Where do you belong? Because none of them belong there. But then again, some people by the end are like, Oh, I don’t know, this is my home. And they’re, like, feeling for the city. So I feel like the sense of belonging is where do we really belong? Where is home? Do we have a home? It’s not an answer. It’s just a question that I think that sometimes resonates with people; you don’t have to be an immigrant. You know, the pandemic, during the pandemic, I felt like a lot of people were experiencing things that immigrants typically experience, like the fact that you couldn’t go home that you couldn’t go see your parents that you couldn’t go see your families, that you were so far away that you were stuck. I remember somebody complaining on Facebook about how long it took to get through customs. You know, because there was this Europe travel ban, and it was lifted, and everybody was coming back. And people were like, Oh, do you know how long it took me in the line to get through customs? And I’m like, Uh huh. Yep. It always took me about two hours without a pandemic, so welcome to my world. And within India too, there were people who were from Bombay and Delhi and when their father passed away, they couldn’t go [be with family, say goodbye]. And I know so many of these things happen to immigrants, even without a pandemic. And it was interesting, because it was such a leveler, right, like [it didn’t matter if you were] rich or poor, like, nobody could get into the hospitals or, you know, it was like so many things that people hadn’t experienced before. In a way it showed the problems in our society, and how the divisions but it also was a big leveler, it was like we’re all kind of in the same boat here; that it doesn’t matter where you are. And I just feel like that’s why there are so many characters from different backgrounds and even though they are Indian, their situations are universal. So I think that’s another takeaway, to think about human beings across different backgrounds, no matter what their passport is, or whatever…we’re all kind of the same.
About the authors of this post: this interview was a collaboration between the Winter 2023 staff of 30 North.
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