Deepa Rajagopalan on creating space at the centre.

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This piece is in partnership with PEN Canada.

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Words carry weight because of the way you use them; how you place them in a sentence, how you pick one over the other, how you refuse to explain them. It gives everything away. It reveals you, the speaker. And when you have access to only one language – a language that fundamentally doesn’t recognise you, that doesn’t have words for what you are trying to say – you must have the courage to bend it like clay.

My parents met in college in Kerala, where they were studying to become medical imaging technologists, and soon after they graduated they got married and found jobs in Saudi Arabia. I was born and spent most of my childhood there. We lived in a small desert town that no one had heard of and where my parents worked at the main hospital. They quickly learned how to be quiet and blend in, like lizards in the desert.

I went to the only international school that happened to teach an Indian curriculum. There were kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. My Grade Two class spoke nine different languages at home – none of them Arabic – so it helped that the official language of the school was English. I had a teacher who taught me how to fall in love with the English language. She taught me to pay attention to the words. I came home every afternoon with new ones on my tongue and tried them out in sentences. My parents, bewildered, bought dictionary after dictionary to satiate my curiosity. Ours was a small school, and most of our classrooms were in a portable trailer. We had a library that doubled as the computer room. I read every book in there at least twice. Wherever I went – in our close-knit Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Sri-Lankan-Filipino community – I found books to read, and people would lend them to me, no questions asked. The book I read the most was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The novel is set in Cornwall, England. There was nothing I had in common with the characters in this book, and yet I felt at home reading it. It was a source of comfort. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t see myself in that story, or any other story I had read until then.

When I was eight, I tried to write a novel. All the characters in the novel had light skin and blue eyes. I didn’t have the imagination then to understand that I had subconsciously accepted that I was not at the centre – that I was, in my own life, at the edge, or even invisible, and was fine with it. I wrote essays and stories for my school magazine, but I wasn’t in any of them and, until years later, I didn’t think anything of it.

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I moved to a boarding school in Kerala when I was thirteen, and a few years after, I got my hands on this book everyone kept talking about which had won the Booker Prize in 1997. The author – this curly-haired beautiful woman – was all over the news because people outside India said that she was brilliant. She also kept getting into legal trouble in India for the words that she used. That book was The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I had never read anything so beautiful before, and yet I was enraged by it. This book, unlike anything I had read until then, was about my people. The characters looked and sounded like us – my parents, my friends, their parents, extended family. Their concerns, their humour, their hope and hopelessness were familiar. I felt exposed, like the safety of being at the fringes had disappeared. There was nowhere to hide in three-hundred-something pages. Surely, that couldn’t be safe, right? Literature was no longer something I read from the sidelines. I was inside it. I put it away, and read Rebecca again, looking for comfort. But it didn’t feel the same anymore.

Following the publication of The God of Small Things, an English historian told Arundhati Roy during a radio show in London that the very fact that she writes in English is a tribute to British Imperialism. He meant it as high praise, because he had loved her work. But the thing is, if you read The God of Small Things, even though it was written in English, it feels like it wasn’t. It feels like it was written in a version of Malayalam, or in something more than language. Something that captured the essence of a people so effectively that the language becomes irrelevant. The English historian probably felt the way I felt when I read Rebecca – in awe of something you cannot see yourself in – but unlike me, he was not comfortable or familiar with that feeling. It only makes sense that he felt compelled to give the credit for the brilliance of Roy to British Imperialism.

Roy does not explain things that require explaining to the average English reader. She writes about Ayemenam like it is the centre of the world, like its people are the only people who matter. When she uses words that are specific to the place, to the people, she doesn’t explain them or apologise for them or put them in italics. She leaves them out there in the open, for everyone to judge and question and not understand. One reviewer of The God of Small Things on Goodreads gave it a scathing one-star review and said that it was just meaningless gibberish. They were so enraged at being forced to read about a community that didn’t include them, and instead of trying to understand it, they declared their hate for it. Roy is not ashamed of not being understood. She stands there, right at the centre, with a delicious, humble confidence, and says what she has to say. She uses the English language to decentralise itself. I think this is what Toni Morrison meant when she said ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’

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My great-grandmother lived with us for a couple of years during my late teens. She had, by then, started to succumb to old age. Her bladder had lost control, she needed support to walk, and she couldn’t hear very well. My mother had her move in with us to give her whatever dignity we could, but people treated her as something worthless. During that time, I found out that she had been a writer in her youth. A writer! I had known her all my life, and no one had ever mentioned this before. She wrote in Malayalam, which meant that, for me, her work was not accessible. I asked her to teach me the language. I could speak the language fluently, but the written word was foreign to me. The 56 letters of the alphabet – 15 vowels and 42 consonants – tortured me. The loops and circles and curves, and the subtle differences in sounds they caused remained unapproachable. Every day, I read with her for half an hour – loudly, so that she could hear. She was patient with the many mistakes I made. I got better – I could soon read billboards and destination signs on buses and, with difficulty, newspaper headlines. She died not long after, standing, holding onto a dresser. My mother said that she died peacefully, knowing that she had done something worthy in the last days of her life.

I lost the language soon after that.

I wonder what kind of a writer my great-grandmother was. I wonder if she wrote as if she, her people, our people, were at the centre of it. I wonder if she had written all the things she wanted to, without inhibition.

When I first started writing seriously, I had already been in North America for almost a decade. Unlike my parents in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t need to camouflage myself to be safe. But I was, at first, apologetic for taking up space on the page, as if what I was writing about was too much, too little, too heavy, too silly, too trivial, too everything. But I was consumed by the desire to say exactly what I wanted to say. I turned to fiction, where I felt I could write from the centre of my life. What if I could give words to this strange, unmoored sense of belonging – of belonging nowhere and also anywhere? What if I could give the reader what they didn’t know they wanted?

On the page, unlike in the real world – or, worse, on social media – there is space for the nuances of who I really am. On the page, I feel safe to first present the box I was placed in, and then to shatter it, to be anywhere but in the box.

After my short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, came out, I got to travel to many literary festivals and talk about the book. I had dreamed of this for years. At many of those festivals, I had the indelible joy of people coming up to me to express how much they had loved my book. Some of them would go on to tell me about the one time they went to India in the 1970s or 1980s and educate me about a city or a practice or a custom they had encountered. They meant well, of course. They simply couldn’t see themselves in my stories and had to find a way to forge a connection. And instead of getting offended, I thought, maybe I got this right. Maybe I managed to create something good and specific – that I made someone who didn’t find themselves in it not only keep reading but come up to me and try to claim a part of it. Surely that should mean something?

A reader who read a story in the book about a group of young South Indian girls learning Carnatic music at a Hindu temple in California asked me why there were no white people in the story. She seemed bewildered, offended even. I said it was because it was my story, and I wanted to place these scrawny little brown girls smack at the centre, as if no one else mattered. I said that I did it, because I wanted to do it. I said that I learned it from Arundhati Roy. I only said one of those things out loud, but I am a writer, and here, on the page, I have more courage.

Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize, and an Apple Books Best Books of the Year 2024. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, and the Notre Dame Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

Photo credit: Ema Suvajac