SmokeLong Quarterly

Sati, your title, expands to much more than the given definition in your story. As this sentence says in your piece, “In a way, women prepare to burn all their lives,” your story illustrates the immolation of womanhood through more than just fire. Is that why you choose the single word “Sati” for the title?

I must admit, I struggle with titles. Often, my process begins with the story’s title, but by the time I’ve finished writing the story, the title no longer applies to it and needs to be changed. Other times, I finish writing a story and spend days searching for a title, only to be half-satisfied when I decide on one. This story, however, has always been titled Sati, from the very beginning of its conception to the very end of the editing process.

I vividly remember the first time I heard about the concept of Sati. A Hindi teacher told our class about it when we were in the sixth grade. I thought she was lying. The violence, the injustice of it, seemed impossible. If someone that’s reading this is coming across this concept for the first time, I want them to feel the same rawness that I felt as a child when they read that title. And once they’d understood the concept and for the ones that had already known of the concept, I’d wanted them to see what this burning symbolized, how it expanded beyond the practice itself, beyond the literal flame, as you said.

Love your formatting with the reverse numbering Visually and conceptually, it is both compelling and intriguing. Did you conceive your piece as a backward walk through your protagonist’s life? Would it matter if the paragraphs were rearranged?

The answer is a bit complicated! The first scene I’d conceptualized was the burning scene. However, I’d originally had a different scene as the last scene. The remaining scenes were originally supposed to be numbered the same way; however, the numbers were supposed to be completely shuffled. That is to say, there was a point where the paragraphs were completely rearranged.

I ended up deciding on a straightforward reverse-chronological order when I decided that this story wasn’t something to be deciphered, or to be pieced together. It was a truth, and I could not afford to filter it.

Another reason why I chose reverse chronological order is because as I continued working on the story, I began to weave in another theme, one of innocence and maturity and age. Of growing and girlhood, and womanhood. How, often, you can trace back abuse, systematic or not, from the beginning to the very end of some women’s lives.

The use of the generic “she” and “her” for your unnamed character is thought-provoking. To me, the umbrella words bring all of womanhood under them and speak for the gender, collectively. Did you consider writing this story using any other point of view?

Most of my stories, in their first draft, are written in the second-person point of view. Although there’s a lot of “you” being used in this story (it’s a habit, really), ultimately, I had to ground this story. Writing Sati did feel a bit like it wasn’t quite my story to tell, and yet it came to me, by virtue of being a woman. I wanted the reader to feel the same state of outpouring, this story that felt like an oil spill.

Each section, to me, reads like a flash, a happening in itself. Can you see yourself expanding any of these sections to a standalone flash?

I think that the most unfortunate part is, given the glimpse we see into the unnamed protagonist’s life, you could expand each part of her life with a thousand more hardships she’s suffered. The nature of a flash fiction piece is that there’s a lot of scope for expansion. I wanted the readers to feel like they’d been given a quick sweeping glance into the character’s life. That is all they get, a literal burning, white-hot flash to their eyes accustomed to dim comfort. That is what I wanted the story to feel like.

Your language is fantastic, vivid and emotive. I love your descriptions like “hand tourniquetted to anesthesia,” the “amputate herself into defiance,” and “Flower blooms into flower bleeds into garland melts into girl, into mother.” How important is language to create the atmosphere of tension, anger, frustration?

This question means a lot to me, truly. Mostly because, language is why I write. Or at the very least, why I write short or flash fiction. It is the singular thing that fuels me. My process goes something like this: I write lines that tell a story and this is a draining process. I don’t mean “draining” in a negative connotation; I simply mean that it requires fuel. Writing a good line, is the fuel that keeps me going. There is always a perfect word, a perfect phrase to describe exactly what one means. There is always a contradiction, a set of words so strangely placed together that fit together perfectly against each other. When I read or write, that is what I look for. I know that not every line can be like this, and that plot and themes and meaning is important. But language, that is the fuel: those lines that feel like they satisfy something inside you, that feel like they are meant just for you, almost like intimacy or affection.

Also, I do believe that atmosphere is one of the greatest strengths of flash fiction. You can condense your vocabulary so that when you step back and look at the story, its body has a color and has a sort of movement that, ideally, ties back into the story’s theme.