Megha Majumdar

Thank you so much, Kate.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much.

I was very interested in seeing how people might move forward with big dreams and move forward with their spirits intact in a time when the society around them makes this really dangerous turn toward right-wing nationalism.

We are in...

An Indian place with fictional aspects.

Specifically, we're in the slum in that city where the main character, whose name is Jeevan, she is witness to this attack on a train.

She sees this train burning.

In some ways, I have drawn very heavily from the city that I grew up in, which is a big city called Kolkata, used to be called Calcutta.

But I think anybody who is familiar with Kolkata or India will understand very quickly that though a lot of the places and textures are drawn from that city, there are many aspects of this place that are imagined as well.

Jeevan is a young woman who has grown up seeing her parents

struggle to get every basic facility and basic comfort.

She has seen them struggle to make a living, struggle to get a secure water supply.

She has fought hard to earn a place at a school.

So she has grown up absorbing the lesson that for some people, and that includes people like her, she lives in a system that does not recognize her and that does not see her

That's a great question.

Lovely is a character who is part of the Hydra community, which is a very specific Indian social category character.

at the intersection of gender and religion and class.

And in many ways, she is very much at the margins of society.

She is marginalized in these complex ways.