Diksha Basu
DIKSHA Basu’s The Windfall is one of the funniest novels I’ve read in recent times—and I read a lotta funny. But the humor doesn’t detract from some of the serious issues Basu touches on in her quest to capture the world of new money in New Delhi. The Windfall is about long-entrenched conservatism struggling against new social mores, and while the book is based in New Delhi, the themes are universal and very 2017. With a deceptively light touch and great warmth and affection, Basu has written an intelligent and incisive story about universal anxieties that plague us all. Especially me.
You started working on this in one of my classes at Columbia, if I remember correctly. But they were short stories, weren’t they? How did it end up becoming a novel?
It was a collection of short stories at first. That was sort of the expected model to work within during the MFA. And that makes sense: Workshopping short stories is more contained. Like many of my peers, my thesis was a collection of interconnected short stories, but in the two years after I finished my MFA, I converted that into a novel. And I’m glad I worked that way—I needed to write all the stories in order to understand, know, and love my characters as much as I now do, but the structure has changed completely. And I have to admit that I find novels much more satisfying than short stories. I appreciate the art of short stories, but at the end of the day I want to escape into the vastness of a novel.
Are there things about the writing or publishing process that have surprised you along the way?
It’s wonderful, but it’s lonely and it’s slow. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me—I know perfectly well that the bulk of the work is done alone at a computer, but it always surprises me how deeply isolating that can get, especially on days when it just isn’t working.
The Windfall deals with challenges specific to life in Delhi, but it stretches to encompass universal themes of economic striving and familial love. Did you set out to write a novel of place, or were you more concerned with the lives of your characters? How do you balance those two ends?
I grew up in part in New Delhi, and even though this is not my story thinly veiled, basing it there was an obvious
whose debut novel, The Windfall, was published in June by Crown.
choice for me. Delhi is a crucial character in my book. I like my fiction to be rooted in place, and Delhi is such a fascinating city, with its in-your-face explosion of wealth combined with shocking disparities of wealth. That being said, circumstances may be dictated by borders, but human characteristics are not. We live in an increasingly divided world in which we’re being taught to fear the outsider when so much of our experience is universal, and I wanted to explore that.
Your book tackles many serious subjects, often with a humorous or sidelong approach. How do you use humor to cut to the core of so many issues?
I hope I do it successfully. I like books that entertain first and do the rest— whatever the rest may be—second, and that’s what I set out to do. I also think we don’t laugh enough these days, and I don’t blame us; it’s a difficult time to laugh, but what else can we do? Crying gets boring.
In his blurb for the book, Karan Mahajan wrote that “the novel has a gentleness that belies its furious subject: money.” You majored in economics as an undergrad; did that background play any role in the way you examine class and wealth in the novel?
I focused on microeconomics in college, and I love the crispness of it. I hope I bring some of the efficiency of that subject to my prose, but I try not to consciously let my economics background influence my writing, regardless of the topic. I have a short attention span, and when people start speaking or writing as a means to express their own cleverness, I very quickly switch off and retreat into my own mind. And I would hate to do that to my reader.