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Voice as Driving Force: Maya Somogyi interviews Sanchari Sur

Your story’s speaker’s “crisis of faith” converges with many pivotal moments of change in her life: becoming a religious minority in Dubai, leaving her hometown, going through puberty, and struggling to find a community. I’m really interested in how the speaker’s coming-of-age informs her internal struggle with Hinduism and vice versa. How do the themes of immigration and growing up affect the speaker’s struggle with religion?

First of all, thank you for these thoughtful questions! The “faith” here is not just religious faith but also faith in your way of being in the world, the position you occupy, figuring out how and where you fit in. In this case, many aspects of the narrator are in crisis; moving away from her birth city, almost-invisibilizing of her religious faith, and of course, going through adolescence and every challenge that comes with bodily changes.

For context, any Indian, or South Asian, in the United Arab Emirates was an expat (at least until 2021 when the rules changed). My story then is not about immigration, but about being an expat who is coming of age in a liminal space like Dubai. All my characters—the protagonist, Hamza, Fati, Pri—exist in their expat-outsider status while also traversing teenage life, negotiating their physical and metaphorical exiles. Adding other struggles to that mix, such as having undiagnosed ADHD as an invisible disability, makes the protagonist feel even more alienated. This is why the protagonist seeks community, even an imagined one, where she can get it.

As the story continues, we find out more about Hamza as well as our protagonist alongside him. The two seem to foil each other, with Hamza finding himself in the Qur’an and the speaker searching for a community with the church, both trying to locate themselves and their beliefs from the speaker’s perspective. What inspired you to tie them together in this way?

I didn’t conceptualize Hamza as the protagonist’s foil, as they are complementary in nature. The protagonist sees Hamza as kin. She is not obsessed with the “why” of his jump unlike others, but rather the “what-ness” of the jump; that is, what he experienced when he fell, the affect of his jump. The reasons for jumping become immaterial.

The protagonist and Hamza are both on the same journey to feel whole in some way, whether through religious community or an imagined kin-ness with a boy the protagonist has not met. This whole-ness is elusive and ephemeral, much like the last image of the story. In an exilic Dubai, this is the most that can be hoped for.

Her family’s personal history with the 1947 Partition situates the speaker almost as an inheritor of their departure, the next in a line of diaspora from their ancestral homes. She also carries her family’s expectations, maintaining a Tuesday ritual with a brass pot gifted by her grandfather. Though she often defies them, what role does family play in your story?

The family as an institution is an invisible but familiar anchor that exists for all of my characters, complete with its baggage of cultural expectations and the weight of history. For the protagonist, she wants to come of age on her own terms. Hence, the church. Hence, the secrets she confesses during church summer camp, free in the knowledge that it won’t reach the ears of her parents. It’s a constant negotiation that is true for teenagers, which rules to break and which rules to break safely.

Much of our knowledge about the speaker hinges on what we find out about her as the story progresses, such as her past connection to Hamza. As I read, I found myself drawn further into the narrative’s revelations and the speaker’s mysterious life. How do you draw your readers in like this, with carefully constructed revelations? What inspires you as you plot your stories?

I am inspired by a line, an image, or the voice of my narrator that won’t go away. Even though this story is a part of a larger project, it began with the image of a barred balcony; an anecdote I heard as a teenager. Still, there were a lot of false starts because I was intellectualizing the process instead of letting my instinct take over. For fiction, and sometimes nonfiction, I have found the best thing I can do is to let go and get into this instinctual space, a spiritual space, where I let my subconscious take over. Then whatever comes onto the page is far more vulnerable, far more unexpected, but in a good way.

When I am writing fiction, I try to never let plot dictate my narratives. I don’t even know how a story is going to end until I am halfway through writing it. It’s only at the midway point that the story reveals its shape. Voice, as the driving force, shapes my narratives through the writing process.

Are there any authors or pieces of work in particular you take inspiration from for your own writing? Also, what are you reading right now? Is there anything you would like to recommend?

I find myself returning to short stories by Brandon Taylor, Curtis Sittenfeld, Emma Cline, Mariana Enríquez, Lauren Groff, Kathleen Collins, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, to name a few. On the home front, I turn to Casey Plett (both collections), Jess Taylor’s Just Pervs, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife, anything by Billy-Ray Belcourt and most recently, Shashi Bhat’s Death by a Thousand Cuts.

For narrative techniques and affect, I often turn to film. For the project that “Crisis of Faith” belongs to, my mood board includes movies that capture the fleeting or the wistful longing for the fleeting, whether it’s a temporary love, connecting with a stranger, shared belly laughs, lazy summer days, or our short-lived youth; Sandhya Suri’s The Field (2018), Bas Devos’s Here (2023), Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2022), Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale (1996), Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Angamaly Diaries (2017), and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024).

Currently, apart from re-reading critical theorists like Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, etc. for my dissertation revisions—theory that spills over into my creative work—I find myself falling deeply into Teju Cole’s Tremor for its philosophical meanderings, and Chris Knapp’s States of Emergency for organically syncretizing the political and the intimate.

 

 

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