“Don’t do it!” Ms. Suneja laughed as we asked her to give advice to people aspiring to become writers. She put back her dark — almost black — hair, her eyes looked down and she continued speaking. “Yes, I know it is funny because I am teaching writing. However, I have recently been very disillusioned with what writing as a career is.”

Shilpi Suneja is a fiction writer from India. She got an MA in English from New York University and MFA from Boston University. In her writing, she emphasizes the themes of the perception of gender and justice, talks about “little people” and those abandoned from society. Today she navigated us in the journey deep into India, where she spent her childhood, told us about her family, shared with us the process behind the creation of her story “Outside the Body” and discussed the power of fiction and the way novels can represent history. “History in a European concept is just a list of wars, a list of dates, and of those who won the war. As a fiction writer it’s your responsibility to write about something other than war and people who won it.”

When the clocks showed almost eight in the evening, we ran to the computers and started a zoom meeting. The connection faltered and fixed on the image of her room, white-colored, very bright with big windows and pinkish curtains and with an unusual plant right in the left corner. When the video unfroze, Ms. Suneja’s face appeared and she welcomed us with a shiny smile. Born in India, she spent only the first fifteen years of her life there but the memories she carries about her hometown, the house where she and her mother were born are an inspiration for her fiction stories. “Those first initial memories from the first five years of your life never leave you. They are the bedrock of your memory,” her eyes looked away as if she was somewhere deep down in her memories. “In that sense, India is a name but for me very specifically my birth town, and the one-mile area that I could explore, that I could walk around, my school are the very specific places I always go back to and generate fiction from there in my memories.” 

Ms. Suneja is currently working on the novel about the Indian Partition that took place in 1947 when India became independent. “This novel mostly has to do with the splitting of Punjab which used to be one cohesive state. That state was split into India and Pakistan,” she explained to us. When the discussion flowed towards her identity as a Punjabi, she said that for her the identity is “a loaded word, it’s like a basket where you can put anything you want. My identity as a Punjabi has been very contested in the sense that I have never learned the language. My parents made the decision that they were not going to teach Punjabi to their kids. Just because there is this loss right now I feel motivated to explore that aspect of my identity because I feel that I’ve lost it.” She is writing her novel based on the memories of her grandfather, who witnessed the Indian Partition but passed away when Ms. Suneja was two years old. She knows her grandfather and his life from the stories her mother told about him and the way he died. “Even though I didn’t really meet my grandfather I carry the memory of him and all of these little things that he owned like an old type of stamp that’s made of brass but it has his signature on it. I still carry that with me in my bag. It goes everywhere where I go.”

Ms. Suneja leaned forward and discussed the power of the novel and the way it could represent history. She emphasized the details that historians and historical books do not focus on. “All those details that historians don’t wish to focus on such as the everyday life, who made bread, the day the soldiers came into the town, what are the things you carried across the border are essential. What about all the little people? Little people who don’t matter. Let’s zoom in on one of those people and see what exactly did they feel, what did they lose, what were the thoughts inside their heads or what are the things that they saw with their eyes. That is not going to be found in a history book but it ought to be found in novels.” She leaned back and a minute of silence appeared between us. After a moment, we went deep into our discussion, talking about how fiction and storytelling appeared as a genre from ancient times and what a powerful tool it is because “there is no other form, not anthropology, not biography, not articles or scientific writing can accomplish what a novelist or poet can accomplish.” As she raises her eyebrows and gestures with her hands, Ms. Suneja continues, “A novel is a perfect blend of plot, character, and language. It is something magical”. 

When questioned, “The story “Outside the Body” is full of very specific details, was it a first-person experience?” she took a deep breath, “Growing up we would see these people who were called the eunuchs. It is all about what kind of a name or a noun do you give to people whose experiences are just so outside everything that is considered normative. A eunuch is a word that you use but they can be called a transgender or just men in women’s bodies or vice versa or they are androgynous. Their spectrum of experience and physical appearance is so broad and yet one word to describe them is not sufficient. They were a significant part of my childhood. On the one hand, they were completely outside the realm of society because they didn’t look like us. Their parents abandoned them because they didn’t look normal.” In expressing this idea, Ms. Suneja’s energy and intensity peak. Her eyes open wider than before. She explained the link between the form of the Indian God Shiva that was “androgynous body where one side of his body is male and the other side of his body is female” and these eunuchs. She told how “no wedding or no birth is complete unless these people come and bless the newlyweds or the child” but they are still outside of society and sometimes have no shelter to live or no food to eat. For a second she closed her eyes and looked down and concluded “...I just wanted to pay homage to these people who want to change the way we think about gender.” “Outside the Body” has spent almost eleven years on Ms. Suneja’s computer since it was written. “I started it when I was a student at BU. At that time the story looked very different from what you see now. Then I put it away for many years. Maybe only two years ago I looked at it again. I had a very fresh idea and I rewrote it completely. Then I put it away again,” as she was reminiscing her sonant laugh filled the whole space, “Every time when you come back to the story you notice something else. It could be as specific as changing a single word or just completely re-imagining it. The more time you spend on the story the more radical change you can make to a story.”

Coming back to the advice for aspiring writers, Ms. Suneja noted that it is important not to give up on a day job for a career as a writer. If writing fiction is something you are passionate about, it is better to “make time for it, find communities, find writers to aspire to, and writers who will read your work and give you feedback and who will also support you on your journey. Find people to hang out with on a Sunday afternoon, have tea or wine, and read the stories of each other. Then you should be reading like a crazy person. Reading and finding people who might support you is very essential. So yes, do it carefully and never give up your day job.”