Night Heron, hot off the press, appears on the Archive Books table at Printed Matter’s NYABF April 2024!

​     Night Heron is my debut novel. An artwork edition, co-designed with Simone Ellero who is based in Berlin, was launched in Berlin in April 2022. Each copy of this artwork edition is hand bound by Simone Ellero and features artworks by Eli Cortiñas and Sara Matta. Archive Books of Berlin will publish the paperback of this novel in 2024.
      Steeped in the living of rupture, the strength and fragmentation of memory, and the layering of life and art-making, Night Heron weaves together two parallel stories of women artists.  Twenty-first century Bengali-American artist, Pakhi, floats through the world on a non-quest that takes her to New York City, Berlin, and Bujumbura; nineteenth century Bengali writer, Mrinalini, lives in a joint family home in a declining Lucknow, persistently finding time and space to write. At the heart of the novel is Pakhi’s choice to leave her son, an uneasy decision that is mirrored in Mrinalini’s ambivalence regarding her own education and what doors are opened and possibly closed for herself and her children as a result of it. 
      I chose to make an artwork edition so that regardless of whether the stories inside are read, the book as object expresses the spirit of the novel—rupture, memory, and layering—in visual and tactile ways. The inclusion of artworks and use of spray paint are particularly apt given that the two main characters meet through Mrinalini’s notebooks, which Pakhi finds at a market in Kolkata and begins to read and paint over as she faces the deceptive promises of independence, finding more in common with Mrinalini than she had expected. 

Variations
         Variations was the first public working title of this novel. This title came from the structure of the novel.
          When I started this novel, I wanted to write about a woman’s development into an artist. My first protagonist was someone like me, but not me. As I wrote the first chapter, over many months, I realized that my first protagonist, like me, had genealogies that could not simply be spoken as memories and stories. This led to my second protagonist, whose story forms a lower layer of what I saw as a necessary palimpsest. So I wrote my novel alternating one story and the other.
         I gave my “beta-readers,” from the United States, Germany, and India, the full manuscript in the alternating-chapter form. Their feedback led me to think more deeply about how to convey variation in a sequenced expression. I talked to a Western classical pianist friend, Erica Poole, who told me about a recital in which the pianist played a Rachmaninov Etude after Julia Wolfe’s “Earring.” These specific pieces, with this specific sequencing, were key to helping me sense, and think about, the non-linear coherence of sequential variation in my novel.
         So, if you have my manuscript (or book!) I encourage you to listen to the two pieces below as a prelude to the novel.

Prelude
1.    Earring, by Julia Wolfe, played by Thalia Myers
2.    Etude Tableau in A Minor, Opus 39, No. 2, by Sergei Rachmaninov, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy
Erica Poole introduced Meenakshi Chakraverti to these pieces and this sequencing. Ms. Poole heard Conrad Tao play these pieces in this astoundingly brilliant order at the Aspen Music Festival in 2014.

​What beta-readers said about Night Heron/Variations
      Your novel captures the essence of LONGING - on one hand, the need to feel and be part of the security of “home”; on the other hand, the longing to develop oneself into a fuller person, even if that means breaking with everything that people around you expect of you. That second part is the true driver of the novel for me - I love the ways your two central characters in the parallel stories are searching, longing, exploring, reaching … trying to find themselves while being burdened and constrained by the expectations of those closest to them.  
            -- Rahul Roy, Chicago

      Carefully structured, beautifully paced, with vivid characters and thought-provoking juxtapositions between the two stories.
            -- Isabella Furth, San Diego

      I have just emerged from the last part of your enchanting first novel. I fell completely under a spell as the characters evolved and demanded my full attention. You have created a world for the reader. Thank you, dear friend!
            -- Nancy Cannon-O’Connell, San Diego

      For me, this book is about a woman and her art. Art consumes. As a male artist, you’re allowed to take leave from life. Your art is considered big enough to take leave from life. As a female artist, your art is never seen to be absorbing enough. I am intrigued by the conversation that Mrinalini constantly has with herself about the legitimacy of leaving life for her art. She leaves yet doesn’t leave.
            -- Lopa Banerjee, New York

      Your novel conveys the struggles and dilemmas of women artists.
            -- Anchita Ghatak, Kolkata

      It is splendid.... The narrative of Variations is straightforward and realistic. It presents the interwoven stories of two Indian women in very different life circumstances, more than 130 years apart. The two stories have many parallel elements: each woman pushes against social constraints; each deals with the difficulties of marriage; each has creative, artistic urges that need space to develop and be expressed…. The language throughout is clean and beautiful, and the dialogue crisp and authentic. Formally, the novel’s structure is complicated, offering connections and opportunities for insight that can reward rereading. The convergences and divergences create a cool dramatic "space" in which the two stories interlace. For me as a reader, the dual stories flow seamlessly. And there are so many wonderful moments!
             -- Walter Wright, Worcester

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