SmokeLong Quarterly

I love your title. It’s almost a painting in itself. I also love how the word “three” carries a deeper meaning, an inheritance shared by three generations of women. Do you think there will be a fourth painter, or will someone eventually break the cycle of family history?

I think I would like there to be a fourth painter, but I would like her to paint something different. The woman narrating the story is the third generation, and she has already experienced what the women before her could not talk about openly. She knows what it means to be in a failed marriage and not know how to tell your family about it. She also knows how easily toxic marriages can become normal when there is no space for honest conversations, especially in India.

So I imagine that when the fourth generation comes along, she will try to create that safe space for her daughter (or even for her son). A space where they can talk about relationships without shame, where divorce is not stigmatized, and where leaving a toxic relationship is not something to be afraid of.

I also hope the story speaks to women who recognize something of themselves in the narrator. Maybe they can take what they have experienced and create a different kind of environment for the upcoming generations. In that sense, perhaps the fourth painter can still be part of the inheritance, but she does not have to inherit the silence.

The parrot is such a powerful motif. Through it, I can feel how much the narrator longs to hear her grandmother’s truth. How did you decide to use the parrot as a symbol of silence, or maybe even silencing? Or does the parrot signal a different kind of communication?

The story is set against the backdrop of a Mithila wedding, and I wanted the Kohbar room to feel rooted in that world. Kohbar paintings are made around weddings, and they often have motifs from nature: trees, plants, flowers, animals and birds. So, a parrot felt quite natural within that setting.

But there is also a more personal reason. When I was a child, my grandmother had a parrot. It lived in a cage, and she would feed it things like chickpeas and chilies. It could even say a few words in Hindi. I remember wondering whether my grandmother ever actually talked to the parrot. It was just my wonderment, I never saw her do it.

So, when I was writing this story, the parrot became connected to my grandmother. I think that is partly why it stayed. It wasn’t something I consciously decided would represent silence. It acquired that meaning as I was writing the story. Perhaps the fact that the parrot could speak, while there were so many things the women in the family could not say, made that connection stronger.

There’s only one sentence about the sun, and yet, it adds an undercurrent of tension to the whole story. I also love the word choice “occupies.” How do you create such depth for your sentences?

I don’t think I consciously try to make every sentence carry a deeper meaning. For me, it usually begins with the image itself. I try to pay attention to what is physically present in a scene and then choose the words that feel right for that particular object or moment.

In this story, the sun “occupies” the corner because I wanted it to feel almost like another presence in the room. It is just a painted sun, but the word makes it feel slightly more alive, as though it has claimed its place there and has been watching everything happen.

I think I also tend to leave some things unsaid. I like sentences that give the reader a little room to make their own connections. Sometimes a detail can do more work than an explanation can.

I admire the poetic, quietly confident pace of your story. Is this something that comes to you naturally, or do you have to consciously resist the urge of flooding the reader with big emotions (asking for myself ☺)?

I think I have to resist it a little. When a story deals with something emotionally heavy, there is always a temptation to explain exactly how a character feels, or to make the emotion bigger on the page. But I usually find that the quieter moments stay with me longer.

With this story, I wanted the narrator’s emotions to exist underneath ordinary things: her mother repairing a painting, a train passing somewhere in the distance, a family member changing the subject. I didn’t want every painful moment to announce itself as painful.

I think that is also how people often experience difficult things in real life. You can be carrying something enormous and still have someone ask you to hold a torch while they fix a parrot on the wall. That contrast felt important to me.

You describe the act of painting with beautiful, vivid details. Are you a painter as well?

I’m not a professional painter, and I’ve never really tried wall painting. I do sometimes paint, but that’s only when we make rangoli at home. We use a lot of flowers, leaves, plants and traditional motifs in our designs.

In that sense, there is something familiar about the visual language of Kohbar painting to me. The main difference, of course, is that a Kohbar is painted on a wall, while a rangoli is made on the floor. I think that familiarity with those traditional designs probably helped me imagine the room and its paintings, even though I am not a painter myself.