Between the Lines with Tashan Mehta

Fables, dreams and myths come together in Tashan Mehta’s masterful work of fantasy, Mad Sisters of Esi, sweeping across three landscapes, and featuring a museum of collective memory and a festival of madness. At its core, it asks: In the devastating chaos of this world, where all is in flux and the truth ever-changing, what will you choose to hold on to?

In conversation with HarperBroadcast, Mehta talks about writing and reading fantasy fiction, her literary influences from Calvino to Cortazar, and much more!

Read below:

Q. How did Mad Sisters of Esi originate and develop over time? Tell us about your journey(s) through the book.

TM: The idea for Mad Sisters of Esi first came to me on a plane in 2017: I saw a person wandering through cosmic chambers looking for a God Machine, until they encountered, for the first time, someone who looked like them. I wrote the first draft in about two months: short, 40,000 words, influenced by the colors and atmosphere of Blade Runner 2049.

Since then, it’s been draft after draft, trying to find the right shape for it. I discovered Wisa, the woman who created the God Machine, and wrote her back story. In doing so, I discovered Magali and the Museum of Collective Memory. Then I discovered Ojda, and Blajine, and thus realized the person in the chambers would leave to encounter Blajine. The chambers were placed in a tower, the tower turned into a whale.

The book branched into four interconnected novellas, each dealing with a different landscape, and while that structure felt freer than a novel’s traditional three-act structure, something wasn’t right. My imagination was broken: I could only think of Esi in these big, detailed genre sweeps, with different cities and fractions and political groups. It felt derived and, more importantly, not true to the heart of the novel. So I kept reworking. I was trying to become the right person to write this story.

I wrote the 22nd draft (and the fifth version) mid 2020. I thought, This is it. I sent it out to my closest friends, my trusted first readers; I was so proud. Their responses were the same: We love you, we love this, but we can’t understand what is going on.

So I took a break, despaired for a bit. Then in February 2021, I opened a blank document, and just wrote. First page to last. I had worked on the story for so long, it was sitting in me complete. Three months and 1,40,000 words later, I had a book.

This is the draft you know as Mad Sisters of Esi. There were edits after that, but they were edits, not rewrites: I sent it off to the second round of readers and tweaked accordingly, then my editor and I did a round once HarperCollins acquired it and I shaved 20,000 words off the manuscript (Part 1, The Whale of Babel, was original 11,000 words, now whittled down to 4,000. I’m always amazed at how I don’t miss those extra words).

Calvino has this great line in If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveler: “[There is a] privileged relationship with books that is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed.” It feels good to be a reader of Mad Sisters of Esi now, to see it as complete and as it was meant to be.

Q. In the opening pages of the book, you use three words to describe the worlds within the whale of babel: sprawling, tender and elastic. The same words apply to the worlds that you have created as well within the novel. Tell us about your experiences of this world-building. What were some challenges that you faced while creating the worlds in the novel?

TM: I think the biggest challenge was my failure of imagination. I kept seeing in this same camera view: fixed and at a distance, as if the novel was playing out on a stage. I kept world-building in a detailed, comprehensive manner: with maps and systems of politics, power, and operation. There’s nothing wrong with building a world in this way, but it wasn’t working for this book: it felt flat. The book didn’t care about systems of administration, and it was very annoyed that I couldn’t imagine beyond them.

Part of what helped me through was M. John Harrison’s essay on world building, where he describes it as an act of co-creation between reader and text, rather than a world that the author builds alone, from the ground up. The text cannot enshrine the author’s singular vision or meaning, he argues, because it is not possible to “replicate the world in some symbols, only imply it or allude to it”. In other words, the worlds are being created in the reader’s mind in real time, as and when they encounter terms that spark an associated image or impression of a world. Creating Mad Sisters of Esi in this way—through voice and language instead of maps—allowed me elasticity. It also allowed me scope, because no matter how many maps you draw, they can never be as vast as the sprawling archives of material (media, art, experiences) a reader can draw upon when imagining or interacting with your text.

Q. As a writer of fantasy fiction, how often do you encounter the question of allegory in your work? And why do you think we often try to find parallels and superimpose meanings from the real world on a fictional/fantastical one?

TM: I think its human to search for yourself and your reality in a text. We read to expand our minds, yes, but we also read to understand how to live—we’re looking for reflections that help us see ourselves better.

What I love about fables and the fantastical is that they are not just mirrors; they are magic mirrors. They show you yourself, yes, but they show you yourself in a wider reality, in a conception of “real” and “true” that takes into account the unknown and the intangible, all the quiet things you feel at the level of your body and see when you dream. They step beyond your conscious mind. I’ve quoted Cortazar before, but it’s too perfect not to quote again: the fantastic and the real are not distinct, but simply dimensions of each other:

“…the fantastic never seemed like the fantastic but rather like one of many possibilities or existences that reality can present to us when, for some immediate or indirect reason, we manage to open ourselves up to the unexpected. That’s probably where fantastic literature comes from; in any case, that’s where my stories come from. It’s not escapism; it’s a contribution to living more deeply in this reality.”

Q. The novel straddles multiple timelines and spaces with eloquent prose, creating a tapestry of rich lives. What was it like to play with the idea of spatiotemporality in concepts like ‘double sight’, for example, in the novel?

TM: I loved it. One of the joys of this novel, and what helped create the sense of wildness I was seeking, was playing with concepts we usually hold as scared and immovable—but playing with them in a flippant, easy manner, as if time always stretches and space always shifts and we just haven’t been paying attention.

This sort of stretching does interesting things to human nature. There’s a line in the novel about this: “Time is the scale against which we measure our lives.” What happens when that scale is fluid and slippery? What does it say about our measurements and about ourselves? What happens when time and space can’t be relied upon?

What I love even more is that in our universe, the one we live in, time does stretch (as Einstein proved) and space probably does always shift, and everything is so much wilder than we allow ourselves to see on a day-to-day basis. It was a joy to acknowledge that wildness and put it front and center so I could watch my characters (and hopefully, readers) grapple with it.

Q. One of the most fascinating elements/spaces within the novel is the Museum of Collective Memory. Tell us about your relationship as a writer and thinker with memories, and how that influenced the creation of this wondrous (yet dangerous) space in the novel.

TM: Oh, there were so many paths that led to the Museum of Collective Memory. One of them was the collective: I wanted to write a South Asian novel that wasn’t South Asian in its visual markers but instead captured the feeling of being South Asian. For me, that centered on the collective. How does a collective form? How does it stay and carry itself forward? I always reach for my Parsiness in times like this, in how that identity has morphed but remained. Collective memory is key to its survival: the rituals, the remembering, the roots to which we return.

The second, interestingly enough, was our collective imagination. I kept thinking of how novels like Wolf Hall work, where they paint a whole scene in three to four words. The answer was our collective imagination: we could fill in the blanks in Mantel’s world because we’d consumed so much media and stories that focused on the same time period: we were fat archives of the Tudor era, filled with all the films and books and TV shows. Collective imagination got me thinking about collective experience, and of course, that circled back to collective memory.

The third was archives, specifically the archives of the self. How do we order the memory of ourselves? How do we create coherence out of the disparate versions we’ve been? And how much of our memory includes the input (and thus memories) of others?

The result was a museum of song and sound that I wish could visit.

Q. There’s an extraordinary, extravagant quality to fairy tales. One of the foremost high-fantasy writers JRR Tolkien also viewed them as highly imaginative hyperspaces with endless possibilities for life and magic. Esi is also composed of various strands of collective memory, folklores and myths. How did you mine such a deep, expansive inner life of the worlds in Mad Sisters of Esi? And who were some of your literary inspirations in this process?

TM: I’ve mentioned my tiredness with the form of the traditional novel before, but it really is the root of so many things in Mad Sisters of Esi. Even craft felt limiting—What does your character want versus what do they need, what are their obstacles, what’s your three-act or five-act structure, what is the set-up and climax? I couldn’t bring myself to care. I didn’t know how to define “good” anymore (it is a ridiculously subjective term) but I knew I wanted to create something alive.

The key to that was introducing what I call “different ways of seeing”. Every form—a fairytale, a fable, a myth, a realist account, a dream, a travelogue—has its own particular ontological stance. It sees in a particular way, which is another way of saying it notices different things about the same scene and elevates different elements. Putting those different forms together in the novel, having them speak and argue with each other, brought me closer to the twin essences of the novel: the collective and the wild.

I love the definition “highly imaginative hyperspaces with endless possibilities for life and magic” because that’s exactly what I felt when I read the fantastical, especially when I was younger—that large, boundary-expanding feeling you get when you don’t only admire a story but it also becomes a part of you. That’s what it means to create something alive, I think; it lives in your reader.

TM: Italo Calvino was a huge influence, particularly Invisible Cities and his non-fiction book on craft, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I read an early draft of Helen Marshall’s The Mirabilist (out with a new name in 2025) that first opened my eyes to how a fantastical novel could be structured and what boundaries we can push (I remember thinking, oh, we can do that? That’s allowed?). It coupled with Jeanette Winterson’s comment that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit was shaped like a spiral, which was my first hint as to what Mad Sisters of Esi could become. And of course, all the fables and fairytales I read when I was younger, borrowed from the British Council Library and which I believed were my unique, secret finds. I don’t remember the names of novels, but their stories and wonder still lives in me.

Q. How would you respond to critics and/or readers who perceive fantasy fiction with a certain disdain (for the lack of a better word)? What are some biases about the reception of the genre that you wish did not exist?

TM: The first is more practical, which I hope that critics know but readers might not: what gets defined as fantasy or literary is mostly marketing. Cloud Atlas is an excellent fantasy novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant example of future science fiction, One Hundred Years of Solitude belongs happily in speculative fiction, but all of these have been marketed to you as literary. There are rivulets of history, expectations, and buying patterns that define what label a book gets—it’s quite beautiful when you look at how a book is shaped, but to a large extent, it’s meaningless. I know a lot of novels marketed as fantasy that have far better prose and depth of emotion that literary novels, and I know a lot of literary novels that have a lot more imagination and scope than many fantasy novels.

In short, it’s all largely made up.

The second is for readers, for those who believe they don’t have the imagination to grapple with new worlds or those who think fables and myth or anything imaginary belong to a childhood they’ve left behind—it’s okay to reach for joy. To ask for wonder and awe in what you read, to access again that sense of possibility you felt when the world was as yet undiscovered. To be childlike is not to be childish; it is simply to accept that within each of us is a ghost child puppeteering the strings of our adult decisions, that our truest moments are our youngest hurts, and that picking up a book with a cosmic whale on it doesn’t make you less mature, only more accepting that the world is broader, vaster, wilder than a narrow definition of maturity allows.

There’s a line I read once in a gorgeous column that I always keep near me: “We must risk delight.”

Q. Finally, as the book is a brilliant meditation on madness in its many forms, I thoroughly enjoyed how it is correlated to love, loss, loneliness and separation through multiple narratives and interpersonal relationships. What are your thoughts on the nexus between madness and love-loss-loneliness-separation?

TM: Madness in this novel is very much a synonym for wildness and plurality. It denotes the vastness of possibility, of an expansion of reality that exists outside of conscious thought and is not always understood by our intellect. To me, the essence of the novel is this plurality: the “more” we can’t always put our finger on, and that we often have to look away from in order to survive.

But what happens when you do look that plurality in the eye? How do you survive then? I found love to be the easiest answer. It is the glue that bonds us to other people, and a collective is how we kept from being swallowed by the cosmic—by anchoring our flimsy bodies to a bigger whole. Loss, loneliness, separation—they are all consequences of when that bond dissolves or is ripped from us, when we have the grapple with the vastness on our own.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast