Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I'm your host Clara Shirley Appel and my guest today is writer and Monterey peninsula resident Alka Joshi. Born in Rajasthan, India, Alka moved to the United States with her family when she was 9. Her mother, who had entered into an arranged marriage at 18, was always her champion. The Henna Artist, which follows a young woman forging her own path after fleeing an arranged marriage to an abusive older man, was Alka’s way of imagining a different kind of life for her mother. It is also the subject of our conversation today. Alka Joshi, welcome to Story Behind the Story!


Alka Joshi (AJ): Thank you very much! I'm happy to be here.


(CSA): We're happy to have you. So why don't you start by telling me about your mother; Who was she, and what was her life like?


(AJ): My mother was one of those extremely creative people. You could give her any material and she could make something beautiful out of it. And so, she was married at 18 when her father said to her, ‘Look, I have to take you out of college because you are getting a little long in the tooth.’ Eighteen was considered too old for a woman to not be married, and she was rapidly attaining spinsterhood. And he had five other daughters to marry, so he had to get the first one married first in order for the other ones to follow. My mother was married to my father, and my father is only a few years older, but Dad was finishing up his bachelor's in civil engineering and he was considered quite a good catch. He had come from a small village and done really well for himself, and always been promoted by his teachers to go from one place to another. And so, it was considered by astrological charts to be a very good marriage.


(CSA): Oh, how fascinating.


(AJ):  So my mother, of course, being raised in the 1950s my mother did everything that she's supposed to do. She gets married to the person that her parents have arranged for her, and that his family has arranged also. She immediately starts having children. She said that when she got married, she didn't quite understand how it was all supposed to work — pregnancy, and so on. So immediately when she got pregnant she was a little startled, and then after the first one, the second one, and the third one followed — I'm the second in line, and so I have an older brother and a younger brother. My mother had postpartum depression after each child, but it wasn't recognized back then and certainly still in India it's not widely talked about. I think she had a really hard time without really having anyone to talk to about it. 


My mother I think made the best of the situation that she was in, and when she was told by my dad that we would be going to America, she did her part. She got us all packed and ready to go, and we went from the desert state of Rajasthan, where temperatures were on as high as 110 / 115 degrees, to Iowa where my father was attending Iowa State University to get his doctorate. It just happened to be a really cold winter that year that just seemed to go on forever. We weren't prepared, and so my mom did the best she could — trying to keep us warm, accommodating us in a probably 600 square foot galvanized roof cottage that was really the graduate student housing, but had been World War II barracks before then. My mother had to learn how to ask for the right kind of spices and things like cilantro (which nobody seemed to recognize in the Midwest).


(CSA): Oh, wow.


(AJ): She had to learn how to drive for the first time, and she had to take us to swimming lessons, and these lessons, and school and whatnot. You know, she just rose to every occasion. I don't ever remember her complaining. She just did what she had to do. She learned to buy winter coats, to wear over her saris so she would be a little warmer, to put on two pairs of socks...


(CSA): It's a big difference between Iowa winters and Rajasthan summers!


(AJ): Yes. (both laugh) Yes. And at that time I think my father was earning $100 a month as a graduate student, and I think their rent at the graduate student housing was $38 a month. So she had to make the budget stretch for three growing children, and feed everybody and clothe everybody, and she learned how. Boy, she really learned how. She went from being a middle class housewife in India, to really struggling to feed and clothe us with a very limited income.


(CSA): She sounds like an incredible woman, and I'm interested too in your experience, because you were nine when you came to the United States. What was it like for you as a young immigrant, and how did it shape your relationship to India and Indian culture?
 
(AJ): When we first came, we were a little isolated at public school because we smelled like curry, and all the kids let us know that we smell bad. We didn't have the right clothes, you know, we still had kind of indian-ish clothes and not the cool jeans and t-shirts that the kids were wearing in school. The year was 1967. We also had… our accent was the queen's English and not the American English, so we had to learn how to start saying things like “skeh·jool” instead of “shed-yool,” and so we were made fun of a lot by the kids, as kids will do in school. We came home and we told my mom we're no longer going to eat Indian food — we want only to have American food. So Mom had to learn how to cook hamburgers and hot dogs and spaghetti- Os and things like that. We also wanted different clothes and so my mom, who didn't have enough in her budget to actually go out and buy us jeans, she made bell bottoms for us!


(CSA): Oh wow!


(AJ): But, she went to the fabric store and bought the cheapest fabric that she could afford, and it turned out it was this super flowery fabric made out of this very dense cotton material, so it was kind of a little stiff. We all wore our bell bottoms to school the first day after she made them, but the kids then laughed at us because they were so wrong, you know? I mean it wasn't denim, it wasn't the right thing. So I think what my brothers and I really learned from those early years is that we just wanted to be American more than anything else. We just wanted to fit in, like a lot of immigrants. We want—


(CSA): Yeah, absolutely. I mean my dad refused to speak Yiddish with his mom.


(AJ): Exactly! That's exactly it. So we stop speaking Hindi at home. We only want to speak English. We only wanted to be around American kinds of things. We got into American music. My mother would have loved for us to take up an Indian instrument — She used to play tabla and sitar, and also maybe perform in some Indian plays, but we just had absolutely no interest in it whatsoever. 


You know Clara, in a weird sort of way when I started writing fiction at the age of 51, the first thing that occurred to me to write about was about some of these experiences, early experiences of our lives in America.


(CSA): So tell me about that. Like, how did writing this book, how did getting into writing fiction change the way that you thought about your heritage?


(AJ): As I started writing about some of these things, as an adult looking back on them, I can see how we were seduced into American culture, and how we really wanted to not stand out. I think my mother realized, at some point, that we were disavowing a culture that was so much in our DNA, and she would have loved for us to go back to that. And we did, in a way. We realized after a time that we still loved Indian food more than any other food, and we just you know craved Indian food whenever we had to go out to eat. As I started writing, I wanted to write about my mother's experience. I wanted to write about an imagined life for her if she hadn't had this arranged marriage. If she hadn't had to do everything that was culturally expected of her. And so I started imagining a life for her as an Indian woman, in India, doing something very different. Being able to escape that marriage. Being able to do something that would have used her creativity, would have used the smarts that she had to run her own business. In writing this novel, in talking to my mother, in talking to my father, I gained this new appreciation for my birth nation. I started to realize that all the things that I had wanted to ignore about my culture were really the things that made me special! The differences that I wanted to obliterate were actually the things that make me the most interesting! Which is that I am now a combination of two cultures. I am a combination of the American culture and the Indian culture that is so much a part of my upbringing. I think that I was able to imbue this novel with both of those kinds of elements. So I'm able to look at Indian culture from a very different perspective, from the perspective of a girl who might have been expected to grow up as a very traditional Indian girl, but then was not expected to do that once we arrived in America. Once we were here, my mother really wanted me to experience — because she knew how desperately I wanted to experience it — wanted me to experience being an American girl. At the age of 16 or 17 she took me to Merle Norman Cosmetics company which was a place that taught you how to wear makeup, because I didn't know how. I was so shy and I was so withdrawn and I so wanted to disappear in my own skin, that I think she just wanted to bring me out. She wanted me to stand out in a way that she felt was really going to be nurturing and healing for me. And then when we would go shopping, she would want me to try on halter tops! She would want me to try on the more American things that I so desperately wanted to become, but I I just wanted to blend in so much that I didn't want to wear anything that would make me stand out. I just wanted to, like I said before, just disappear into the fabric of America. I think that in writing this book, I'm able to bring out all the beauty of the Indian culture — the saris, the craft of henna, the beautiful jewelry that my mother used to wear — and also to bring out the kind of women that survive and thrive in that culture. I think at the end of the day, Clara, I think this book is really about women. Women in love marriages, women in arranged marriages. Women who want children, women who don't want children. Women who feel repressed, and women who feel that they can gain some control over their lives.


(CSA): Hmmm, I think that's great. As you were talking about your mother and the way that she was looking for ways to help you thrive and really be yourself instead of disappearing into the background, I was thinking to myself that sounds like a feminist.


(AJ): I think that my mother really was a feminist! She really felt that a woman could be anything, and she always told me that. She never pressured me to get married or to have children in lieu of having a career, in lieu of doing whatever I wanted to do. I think that she really was an original feminist, at a time when she was noticing the culture here in America was congregating toward a feminist culture. You know, 1967 — that was a seminal time for us to be here in the United States.


(CSA): Yeah, definitely!


(AJ): The sexual revolution was going on, women were burning bras, women were claiming their identities, women were saying ‘I can be anything I want to be! I don't have to be this you know mousy housewife at home! I can be anything I want to be.’


(CSA): Well, and I think that's a fascinating thing about the book because one of the things that really piqued my interest in it is the way that topics like abortion and unplanned pregnancy are just part of the world building,  at a very different time in a very different place. So I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. What were the attitudes around abortion during that period in India, and how are they different among people who occupied different positions in society?


(AJ): Well at that time, abortion was not approved of. Abortion might have meant that you had premarital sex, and to this day premarital sex is frowned upon in India. Now that doesn't mean that the young women of today are not engaging in it, and the young men and women of today are sexually more experienced and explore it more, but back in 1955 it wasn't something that anyone talked about. The ways to abortion were illegal and often dangerous, just as they were in this country. I think women who wanted to have an abortion were not sure exactly how to go about doing it, and so you looked for some woman who was a friend of some woman who was a friend of another woman who was a friend of another woman and finally you came to…


(CSA): Mmm, the whisper network.


(AJ): Yes, the whisper network, exactly. Today the attitude is very different. At some point in the '70s in India, abortion became legal, and so today what you have is a lot of people who want to abort, but are doing it and are doing it legally, but are doing it because they want to have a son instead of a daughter. Female infanticide is a real problem in India. I read last year in the Times of India that the government is now penalizing doctors who are telling the woman in their care that she's going to have a boy or a girl. He cannot, he or she cannot reveal the gender of the child because that is leading to too much female infanticide. So abortions are mainly being done because a couple does not want to have a baby girl. Baby girls, in many parts of India, are still considered a liability as opposed to an asset. A boy is an asset because once you arrange his marriage, you, as the parents of a baby boy, will be getting money, a dowry. And you'll be getting, in today's day and age, the wealthy couples are also giving cars, houses — all kinds of amazing things in a dowry. But, having a baby girl means that the parents are going to have to pay to get her married, and that just becomes too much of a liability for a lot of poorer families. India is still largely in agrarian society, even though since the year 2008 all around the world more migration has happened from the rural areas to the urban areas, as people — as young people in particular — look for jobs in cities. India still largely rural, and as those rural people migrate to cities, they carry with them the traditional values that they grew up with, and the traditional values still say that a woman's life is worth less than a man's.


(CSA): Well, so,  let's talk about that a little bit in the context of the book because one of the things that sort of stuck out to me is there are moments when Lakshmi seems like she's trapped between two worlds. Between sort of a past and a present or future in India, and in her own sort of imagining; so she has this really strong sense of herself and a deep desire for independence in her own life, but she also has a great deal of shame over things that, well some of the kinds of things that we're talking about. Where does that come from for her?


(AJ): I think it's as you said: she is trapped between two different worlds. There is the world that she came from, that is in her DNA so strongly. A world where a woman's life is not worth as much as a man's, where she has no control over whom she marries, where she lives, what she does for a living, and the world that she wants to live in, which is a world independent of and free of all those restrictions. She wants to determine for her own life all the decisions that she feels she'd like to make for herself: whom to be with in her life, and what to do, and can she make her own money so that she can make her own decisions about how to spend that money? Can she buy a property? Can she have a house that no one can evict her from? She is caught between two worlds, and it's very difficult (as we all know as women) to let go of how we were raised, versus how we would like to conduct our lives for the rest of our journey here on earth. 
(CSA): Yeah, and I think one of the big places where you see that tension is when her sister comes back into her life, her younger sister. Because she has so much that she wants to teach her and share with her, but as she does it, she's also got all this fear in her about: is her sister, who doesn't know how to survive yet, going to put her at risk? I just wondered if you could talk about that tension, and especially around the sort of instinct (that I think kind of relates to some of what you're saying in your own life), the instinct that Lakshmi has toward assimilation, versus the sort of cost of it to her and her sister psychically.


(AJ): Exactly. I think the reason that I created the sister character is so that we could see the juxtaposition of what Lakshmi wants to attain and what she wants to leave behind, and how much pressure there is from a member of her own family to not do that. Her sister wants children, her sister wants a traditional life, her sister wants to be a wife and a mother and all of those things that Lakshmi doesn't want to be. And so when we have two opposing points of view, two opposing goals of the central characters in the book, then we have that tension. 


(CSA): That's where you get the drama


(AJ): Yes! It creates the drama, it creates the reason that we keep reading books! We want to not only figure out things about our own lives through books, but we want to know how characters in a book deal with the various tensions in their lives and how they resolve them, and set up a game plan, maybe, for how we might handle something like that.


(CSA): Yeah.


(AD BREAK)


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is a writer and Bay area resident, Alka Joshi, whose debut novel The Henna Artist tells the story of a young woman struggling to find her purpose in post-independence India.


You spent 10 years working on this book before you got the offer of publication…


(AJ): (she laughs) Yes.


(CSA): … and I'm curious both how the book changed over that time from the early days until now, and also, how did you hold on to hope and faith in your work for that long?


(AJ): I would love to tell you that each of those 10 years was marvelous, and that I never lost hope, but the truth and the reality is that I often lost hope during those years. When I first started writing the novel, Mom was alive and I was taking her back and forth to India to spend a month at a time there. I got to talk to her a lot about her girlhood. We actually visited her old school, and she lived in both Agra and Jaipur, and so we visited both of those places. The novel and the characters were very much alive for me during that time, and I got to read portions of Lakshmi, the central character’s life, who is based after my mother — I got to read portions of that to Mom, and she said, ‘Honey this is so good! Please keep going.’ Two and a half years into my journey with the book My mom died.


(CSA): Wow, that must have been hard.


(AJ): It was really hard, and I could not touch the book for 2 years. I just couldn't do anything with the book. I was so bereft. Losing your mother is a really big thing, especially when you are… she has loved you so much, and she has made you such a strong woman in your own right. (She gets choked up.) Sorry.
 
(CSA): It's okay.


(AJ): And so I missed her a lot, and for two years I couldn't go back to the novel. And then my mentor asked me where I was with it, and so I started to go back to it. My agent said, ‘you know Alka, I have seen the new draft of the novel now, and what you're doing with it is you've got the older sister and the younger sister. You've got Lakshmi in one chapter, and then the alternating chapters you've got her younger sister, Radha. Now these two women have to be in a book as strong as each other in order to carry a novel. If you are going to alternate their points of view in subsequent chapters, you need to make a decision here: You are either going to lose one character, and make Lakshmi, who is the strongest character, make her the protagonist of the novel. Or you are going to raise Radha’s profile and make her as strong. You need to make that decision.’ Oh my gosh, that just really rankled, because I thought I have spent all these years building these characters, and now I have to lose one character? Or I have to you know make her totally different? In the end, I worked on this for another year and a half, and I ended up getting rid of the chapters with Radha which meant I cut about 150 to 180 pages out of the novel. I had to put the scenes that Radha experienced through Lakshmi's eyes in Lakshmi’s part of the book. So Lakshmi became the only voice in the novel, a first person voice, and I had to find ways for her to experience what Radha is going through, through her own life. So that was hard. It was very difficult, and if you're a writer you know that it's really hard to get rid of the chapters and the pages that you have worked so hard on! It's like, ‘oh, those are my babies! I'm letting go of my babies!’ But I did that, and then I sent it back to my agent and my agent said, ‘Okay, well now I think I taken you with my advice as far as I can take you. I would like you to get a book editor.’ So I hired a book editor. The book editor sent me 12 pages of revisions! And I was like, ‘Oh. No!’ I said to my husband, ‘I can't do this. I can't keep doing this, because I feel like I put my heart and soul in this book and now I'm being told I've got to change these 5,000 things!’ My husband is also a writer; It really helps so much to have another writer in the family because he understands totally where I'm at. He said, ‘why don't you just step away for a while? Just step away from it. Do other things” — you know, I'm already working full-time running an ad agency on my own, and so it's not like I didn't have enough to do — so he said, ‘Just step away from the writing.’ So I did, and then some 6 months later, I'm able to go back to it. I'm reading through what I've written and I go, ‘Oh, I love this world! I love these characters! I want to go back to it!’ And I think that's how you keep going, is when you go back and read what you've written, first of all you think, ‘I wrote this?!’ because it feels like you're reading somebody else's book!  And you're thinking, ‘Wow, I like these characters!’ It's like you're rediscovering your characters all over again when you take a hiatus from writing. And then when you go back to it, it's like, ‘ …oh my god, okay I can do this, I can make some of those changes. Let me look at those changes again and see if they were as monumental as I thought they were.’ And you know when you go back and look at them, it's like, ‘oh, okay, I can do this. This is a little one, this is a little one… okay this is a major one, but you know what, I totally get now what this editor is trying to get me to do!’


(CSA): Yeah, yeah, yeah.


(AJ): And one thing I've noticed Clara, is that when people ask me to look at their manuscripts now, and I say okay, I am performing the role of an editor but a very loosey goosey one because I'm just giving you very honest feedback. And they don't want to change anything! And I realize that one of the best things you learn from staying with a book over a long period of time is you learn that that book is a group effort. It is not all of you; it is an effort that is made better by editors, by agents, by your publisher. You have to be open to making those changes that they're asking you to make, or even deciding which changes you want to make, but you have to be open to the idea that everybody is going to help you.


(CSA): It's like getting over your ego a little bit.


(AJ): Yeah! And you have to be grateful that there are people who believe in your work enough to say, ‘I love these characters, I love this book, I'm going to help you make it better.’ That is an amazing thing, and you have to go, ‘oh my god, there are people that are willing to help me make this better, and they believe in me and they believe in the book!’ That is an amazing thing to to learn over the course of 10 years.


(CSA): Well let's hear a little bit from the book now. Why don't you just set it up for us and tell us what you're going to read.


(AJ): I'm going to read from the beginning chapters of the book, and what we're doing here is following Lakshmi as she has entered the home of her wealthiest client, Parvati, who is also one of her benefactors, whose husband has also been one of Lakshmi's biggest benefactors. She has entered the home, and she is about to work on the henna of her client. She is seated on a divan with her client, and here she is thinking.


(She reads)  "Before I came to Jaipur, my ladies relied on women of the Shudra caste to henna their hands and feet. But the low-caste women painted what their mothers had before them: simple dots, dashes, triangles. Just enough to earn their mea­ger income. My patterns were more intricate; they told stories of the women I served. My henna paste was finer and silkier than the mixture the Shudra women used. I took care to rub a lemon and sugar lotion into my ladies’ skin before applying the henna so the imprint would last for weeks. The darker the henna, the more a woman was loved by her husband—or so my clients believed—and my rich, cinnamon designs never disappointed. Over time, my clients had come to believe that my henna could bring wayward husbands back to their beds or coax a baby from their wombs. Because of this, I could name a price ten times higher than the Shudra women. And receive it.


Even Parvati credited her younger son’s birth to my henna skills. She had been my first client in Jaipur. When she con­ceived, I saw the pages of my appointment book fill up with the ladies of her acquaintance—the elite of Jaipur.
Now, as the henna on her hands was drying and I began drawing on her feet, Parvati bent forward to observe until our heads were almost touching, her breath sweet with the scent of betel nut. Her warm sigh grazed my cheek. “You tell me you’ve never been outside India, but I’ve only seen this fig leaf in Istanbul.”
My breath caught and, for an instant, the old fear came over me. On Parvati’s feet, I had drawn the leaves of the Turkish fig tree—so different from its Rajasthani cousin, the banyan, the miserly fruit of which was fit only for birds. On her soles, intended for a husband’s eyes alone, I was painting a large fig, plump and sensual, split in half.
I smiled as I met her eyes and pressed her shoulder back, gently, onto the cushions of the divan. Arching a brow, I said, “Is that what your husband will notice? That the figs are Turkish?”
I pulled a mirror from my satchel, and held it to the arch of her right foot so she could see the tiny wasp I’d painted next to the fig. “Your husband surely knows that every fig requires a special wasp to fertilize the flower deep inside.”
Her brows rose in surprise. Her lips, stained a deep plum, parted. She laughed, a lusty roar that shook the divan. Par­vati was a handsome woman with shapely eyes and a generous mouth, the top lip plumper than the bottom. Her jewel-colored saris, like the fuchsia silk she wore today, brightened her complexion.
She wiped the corners of her eyes with the end of her sari. “Shabash, Lakshmi!” she said. “Always on the days you’ve done my henna, Samir can’t stay away from my bed.” Her voice carried the hint of an afternoon spent on cool cotton sheets, her husband’s thighs warm against hers.” 
(CSA): Reading The Henna Artist, I found myself returning over and over again to the setting, because it's so rich. As you talk about in that opening segment, this book is set in India not long after the country achieved independence from British rule. What's the importance of that setting to you and what drew you to it?
(AJ): The independence that Lakshmi wants to achieve I think mirrors the independence that India is now trying to achieve. Independence of a country, as you know, is a very complicated procedure. And while there's a lot of excitement about building new roads and libraries and schools, and all these fantastic buildings and infrastructure, there is also a loss of identity of sorts. And the same thing is happening to Lakshmi. She has lost one set of identities — which was being a wife and being a daughter-in-law and living in a small village — she's lost that identity, and is trying to put on this new cloak of, ‘I am a city girl. I run my own business now. I am privy to all of these private conversations that I have with these elite women, and I have to protect myself and my past from these people because exposure would mean that I'm going to lose everything.’ So I think that I wanted to mirror what's happening in Lakshmi's life with what's happening in India. 
The lushness of Indian life is something that I actually did come to claim back when I claimed my Indian heritage again. Going back to Jaipur with my mother, in the early years of writing this story, I once again was immersed in the sounds and scents and the feeling of India. You cannot get away from sensory overload when you go to India, and you cannot get away from sensory overload when you read this novel because it is so much a part of what being in India is all about! There are these lime green saris juxtaposed against this elephant walking down the street, and the dustiness of the soil on the road. And then there's going to be a peacock, all of a sudden, flying through the air, and there is so much going on in India in any part of India at any one time, and I wanted to capture that feeling — not only the exuberance of independence, but the exuberance of India and the exuberance of Lakshmi's life as it is unfolding before us.
(CSA): I love that! I mean there's so much… there's so many different pieces to it, too. It's such a complicated social scene, and socioeconomic scene, I mean — more than just the actual social life. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how the caste system plays into this novel, because Lakshmi is of course born high caste, she's born Brahmin, but she isn't considered a peer by the women she's serving as a henna artist. Why is that?
(AJ): In her her time in the 1950s, the women who performed henna on hands and feet were considered unclean because touching the feet of anyone is a low caste activity, which is why Lakshmi says that it's only the Shudra women who used to do this henna work. Because Lakshmi is doing it, and she's a Brahmin, she is being invited into these homes and allowed to sit on the same divan as these women, instead of sitting on the floor and doing the henna. She's also allowed into their lives in a way that a lower caste woman would not be allowed. I wanted to read this particular scene because she is very aware, as are all Indians, of the caste they are born into, of the castes they are intermingling with, of how they are supposed to eat or conduct themselves or greet people from one caste to another. There is so much that goes on in a very subtle way in India about this social structure. 
(CSA): There's a lot of shoulds.
(AJ): There’s so many shoulds. And it's not really spoken about, but it's still very prevalent. Last year when I was in India, I asked these young women, “Does caste matter to you when you get married?” and they said, ‘Oh no, absolutely not.’ You know, the middle classes, the educated women, they all say, ‘no, caste does not matter to me at all.’ Then I ask them, “Is your marriage going to be arranged for you or are you going to arrange your own marriage?” And by and large, most of them are going to tell me, and did tell me, that their marriages will be arranged for them by their parents. Because they’re busy studying, they don't have time to arrange their own marriages. But then I say, “So, will your parents be looking outside of your caste?” And they… there's a moment of quiet, and then they have to admit, no — they're going to look in my caste. So caste is determining whom people are marrying and what community they're marrying into.
(AD BREAK)
(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is writer and Bay area resident, Alka Joshi, whose debut novel, The Henna Artist tells the story of a young woman struggling to find her purpose in post-independence India. How is life from middle class young women in India today compared with the elite daughters of Lakshmi's clients?
(AJ): The young women of today are able to say to their parents, ‘I don't want to get married until I'm 27, until I finish my BA, until I finish my masters. I only want to have one child.’ They are able to say, ‘I think I'm really in love with this guy in college and I'd like to marry him, and I don't want you to arrange my marriage,’ or they're able to say, ‘I do want you to arrange my marriage because I'm very busy working and studying.’ Now, even given that latitude, there is still a hard stop on the restrictions that they live under, which is that 30 is the new 18 now. So where, in my mother's generation, 18 was considered a spinster who wasn't married, now, if a woman is not married by 30, the family panics. For a man it's 35. There there’s an artificial cut off now of ‘you must get married by a certain time.’ so marriage is a major factor of life. You must get married. Another is you must have children. So within six to seven years of marriage, you are expected to at least produce one child, and of course if the child is a boy, so much the better. But, I did talk to some women who don't want to have children. Rather than saying to their parents or to their in-laws, ‘we're not going to have children,’ first they want to get the in-laws used to the idea of them not having children. They want them to sort of… they want to ease them into this transition. So it is still very much expected that a young married couple is going to have children. I ran into a few women who said, ‘I'm not going to get married. I have no plans to get married.’ And there are 70 million out of the 1.4 billion population in India who do not want… who are still single for whatever reason, and don't have children. So I think that that number is growing. I think that the attitudes with premarital sex, because they're shifting, I think that we are going to see more women who say, ‘I either don't want to get married by the time I'm 30,’ or ‘I don't want to get married but I want to have a child,’ or ‘I don't want to get married or have children, or live out my life the way my parents want me to,’ so I think those attitudes are shifting.
Now, when I was last in India, I met with an adoption advocate. She is very much an advocate for adopting the many children that live in orphanages in India today, as opposed to a woman who is having a brand new child, right? She says that she had a client come in, an unmarried woman who wanted to adopt the baby that she was going to have, and Aloma Lobo is the name of the advocate, and she told me that she could tell that this woman actually didn't want to give up her child.
(CSA): Sort of like Radha.
(AJ): Yeah! And so she just kept having conversations with her. Instead of planning, filling out the paperwork for the final adoption. And so she kept having these conversations with her. Finally, the baby's here and the woman says, ‘I don't want to give my baby up for adoption. I love this baby.’ And so Aloma says, ‘Well that's great then! We are going to introduce this baby into society!’ The woman is terrified. She is a PhD student; She is going to be earning good money when she gets her degree, but for right now she is saddled with a small child, baby that she doesn't know how she's going to introduce to society. Aloma says, ‘We're going to have a big party. We're going to invite all of your friends and relatives, and you are going to say this is my baby and this is the name of my baby. And then when people say “Are you married?” you just say, “Have another sandwich! This is my baby, have another sandwich!”’ Aloma is one of those people who is not only advocating for adoption in India, but she's also making it okay for women who decide that they want to keep those babies without marriage—
(CSA): Helping reduce the stigma.
(AJ): Yes! Helping reduce that stigma. 
(CSA): I like that a lot. One more thing I kind of wanted to talk to you about because one thing in the book did take me off guard, and that's Lakshmi's empathy for Hari her abusive ex-husband. Her willingness to see the good in him, if not exactly to forgive him… I don't know that I would be capable of that level of empathy for someone who hurt me so much. I honestly wasn't sure how I felt about it, so I just thought I'd ask you what were you wanting to do with that, and why infuse Lakshmi with that kind of empathy for her abuser?
(AJ): Ok. So in the beginning, I wanted Lakshmi to sort of say goodbye to this past but not necessarily to forgive him.
(CSA): hmm 
(AJ): But then I had an editor who said, my editor at the publishing house, she said, ‘You know, we need to see Hari as more than a one-dimensional character. Nobody is all bad and nobody is all good, and that is what makes a character interesting. People are imperfect and that's what we want out of our literary characters. She said, ‘Is there any way that you could turn Hari into a character who is more empathetic?’ Initially I was like, no, I don't want to do that. I hate him, and I hate him on behalf of Lakshmi, and I want Lakshmi to hate him. But you know then I thought, okay let me think about this. And I thought, yes. I think that in order to leave all of that past behind, Lakshmi does need to forgive him. I think in order to leave any part of our past behind, we can shut the door, but the bad feelings about that past will never go away unless we forgive. Unless we let go in a really fundamental way. And that's what I finally found Lakshmi could do if we also saw a side of Hari that we hadn't seen before. Suddenly we see a side of him that allows us to forgive him as readers. At the same time, we also see that Lakshmi's contributed to the ruination of that marriage. So lakshmi's own actions have led us to the point where we can see that in order to forgive Hari, she also has to forgive herself. And so she does. And I think we all have to forgive ourselves in order to forgive others also.
(CSA): So it's… yeah, I like that. It's more about how she's going to get through this and how she's going to move on past that point in her life. 
(AJ): Yeah. I think editors are so wise. They're so wise. They gently push you in directions that I think help you grow not only as a writer, but it really helps you grow as a person. I feel that I have grown so much as a person just writing this book and making the changes that have been asked of me.
(CSA): So I think, before we stop talking about the book, I'd love to hear your final take on this. What did it mean to you to write this? What does it mean to you that it's coming into the world?
(AJ): First of all, my mother gave me an incredible gift and it was a gift of freedom and a gift of independence, and I wanted to give her that gift back. My book is a way of giving my mother that gift. I dedicate to her. I also wanted Lakshmi to be my mother, so I want Lakshmi to live that life that I wish my mother could have lived; But of course if she had lived that life, then I wouldn't be here and you know… so that wouldn't be… that wouldn't serve anybody for right now. But I also want people to take away from this that there are all kinds of female desires in this world. That women have complex needs, and that we are a mass of contradictions, as I think every woman in this novel is. We have the capacity to survive and thrive even with all of those contradictions. We also have the capacity to change
(CSA): Right.
(AJ): I think that in my life I have changed so much over the years, and I think I've changed during the 10 years that I've been writing this novel, and I know that my mother changed a lot in her lifetime as well. When she saw the opportunity to raise a daughter with as much freedom as she saw the American girls around her had, she's snatched it. She took it and she ran with it, and I loved that about her, and I love that about Lakshmi.
(CSA): So what's next for you? 
(AJ): Well… so I started writing another novel after this one, and it was based on the life of a real female painter who was half Hungarian and half Indian. I started to write that novel, but there were characters from this novel, The Henna Artist, that kept coming back to me. And so I said, okay. I set the first novel aside, and I started working on a sequel to The Henna Artist, taking place about 12 years later. I wrote the pages and I have a writing group that I meet with, and so my agent found out… I think I posted something on Instagram about working on a sequel, and she said, ‘Hey, I hear you're working on a sequel. Why not send the first 10 pages and a synopsis to your editor at the publishing house?’ So I said, ‘okay.’ I sent off that to my agent, my editor at Harper Collins, and within a matter of days my agent said, ‘We have an offer!’ and I said, ‘We have an offer on the sequel?! But the first one isn't even out yet! The Henna Artist isn't due to be released until March the 3rd!’ And she said, ‘Well, it's there, so let's look at it!’ So we did, and Harper Collins bought the sequel, and then I wrote a first draft. I had already finished some parts of it, and so I ended up holing up at my dad's house. He was great — he brought me lots of chai and he brought me Dal. He’s a really good cook, and so he had stored up all of this stuff in his freezer that he made for me. Then we had these wonderful chats over dinner, and I would go back to my bedroom and I would just start writing, writing, writing, and I wrote six or eight hours a day, and I finished the first draft, and now it's in my editor's hands
(CSA): That's great! So we have more to look forward to in this world!
(AJ): Yeah, Yeah. And I loved coming back to these characters. I just feel like I know them, you know? I just feel like they're real in my life, in my head, and so it was really fun to be back with all of them again, and seeing what they're doing now 12 years after the fact.
(CSA): Well, I look forward to reading it, and Alka Joshi thank you for joining me today!
(AJ): Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity! I have loved having a chat with you!
(CSA): To learn more about Alka or to order a copy of her book visit TheHennaArtist.com.