By Selma Carvalho
Set in Goa around the time of Liberation, Mrinalini Harchandrai’s novel Rescuing a River Breeze (Bloomsbury, 2023) makes the longlist for the prestigious Asian Prize for Fiction 2023. She shares this honour with other worthies such as V. V. Ganeshananthan for Brotherless Nights, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 and the Carol Shield’s Prize for fiction, R. F. Kuang for Yellow Face which made the NYT bestseller list, and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ for Spell of Good Things, who was long-listed for the Booker prize. A review of Rescuing a River Breeze can be read here. In conversation with Selma Carvalho, Harchandrai discusses the implications of being longlisted for the prize.
What is your immediate reaction to being longlisted in the prestigious Asian Prize for Fiction 2023?
When the news was first shared with me, it felt surreal. This isn’t a national award, but an international one, featuring authors whose works are awarded and featured on bestseller lists, which is humbling. I think somewhere I nursed the feeling that the story’s readers would only be found within the locality it is set in. So it is lovely to know that Rescuing a River Breeze has the potential to reverberate across borders and cultures in this way, and its characters are forging connections with mind and heart. Previously, the book was longlisted for the prestigious McKitterick Prize, so this feels like double validation. It is a privilege and I am exceedingly thankful to the judges of the prize for selecting this book for the longlist.
Often there is a tendency in the mainstream publishing world to dismiss Goa-centric writing as niche writing which will not appeal to wider audiences. What was your publishing journey like writing a Goa-centric book?
To be honest, this is one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story. Goa and its diaspora have such a rich tradition of storytelling but somehow they aren’t reaching the bookshelves outside of the state. Goa is regarded in India as a party place for drugs, beaches and casinos. Which is completely at odds with my memories of and reverence for its nature and communities from the summers I spent there in my early years with my family. Once considered a jewel in the Portuguese empire, with Panjim as its administrative seat in Estado da India, it is largely ignored or relegated to certain tropes in storytelling. So, I thought it would be interesting terrain to illuminate in fiction. However, I did get my first reality bite when I sent in an early manuscript to an agent, who rejected it for being too niche. Since then, as I mentioned earlier, this experience still makes me feel it would mostly appeal to readers closer to its shore. However, there are examples of books that are hyperlocal and yet find resonance with readers across countries. Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, that landed up on the New York Times bestseller list is a wonderful recent example. The main storyline is set in rural Kerala and is replete with Malayalam phrases, but even Oprah, someone unfamiliar with that landscape and its colloquialisms, selected it for her book club, calling it ‘a soulful mystical experience from the first sentence to the very last.’ So I suppose if a story is narrated well enough, and can pull apart the stereotypes and get you into the pulse of the characters, why wouldn’t it be interesting to anyone with a beating heart? Luckily, the agent who signed on Rescuing a River Breeze saw the value of a lesser-told story and connected with the writing enough to choose to represent it as soon as he read it. At its heart, it is a story about friendship, loss, love, existentialism, territoriality, and even the fleeting but heady sensations joy brings—the things that make us human—attempted with detail in the hope to summon characters to rise off the page and allow us to commiserate with them. Sure, it may be a story set in a distinctive place and time, but I’m hoping that the universality of the human condition is where readers will ultimately connect with it.
This prize brings much visibility to the author but also increases audiences for literature deemed regional. Do you hope the Prize will highlight Goa-centric literature?
Yes, it would be a wonderful effect if that could be the case. Goa has such a unique and layered history of identity, migrancy and traditions of the arts in the subcontinent that there’s certainly hope more readers will be curious for Goa-centric literature.
There is a lot of specificity in your book, both in terms of locations, history and people, how did you prepare for writing a book which dwells on Goa’s historical past?
This story was inspired by my mother’s childhood experiences in 1961 Goa. So quite a fair bit of the details of life then have been reaped or borrowed from family stories itself. I myself spent my childhood summers visiting my grandmother’s home in Goa, so perhaps some facility with the tongue and an understanding of mindset nuances seeped into me over the years. Also, since the annexation of Goa from Portugal to India is a big part of the plot, I spent a fair amount of time with history books to brush up on the geopolitics and geo-identities of the era that would lead up to the defining and life-altering one-day war.
You have your literary beginnings in poetry and this is your first novel, did you find yourself having to overcome any creative mind-blocks?
When a poem apparates in my mind, I usually try to work it out on the page to figure it out and craft it as I go. However, I did have to rigorously first bring logic and architecture to the story in Rescuing A River Breeze, before allowing myself the luxury of diving into its prose. A big part of writing this novel was character inhabitation, which I learned can be better on some days than others. However, more than mind-blocks, there were several occasions where the organic turns the story took in its writing and even rewriting, would take me by surprise.
What are your future projects?
I’ve co-edited an anthology of world poetry in translation with Priya Sarukkai Chabria which should be out later this year with a university press. I’m also toying on a collection of poems, as well the development of a novel.
Rescuing a River Breeze can be purchased here.
Mrinalini Harchandrai’s poetry has been longlisted for the erbacce-prize 2022, was a finalist for the Quarterly West Poetry Prize 2021 and Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize 2019, and received an Honourable Mention for the Cid Pearlman Performance Project 2021. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018 and shortlisted for Columbia Journal Spring 2020 Contest. Her novel, Rescuing A River Breeze (Bloomsbury, 2023) longlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2021 and The Asian Prize for Fiction 2023. The Dragon’s Heart, an anthology of world poetry in translation she co-edited is forthcoming with Jadavpur University Press. She is former Deputy Editor at Poetry at Sangam.
Selma Carvalho is the editor at JRLJ, her latest book is Notes on a Marriage (Speaking Tiger)
The banner image of a house in Goa is by Ashutosh Gupta and downloaded from Unspash.com