‘This novel is informed by technological utopianism’

On her book that charts the journey of a Dalit boy from rural Andhra Pradesh to a pre-internet United States, where he wields technology to reinvent himself

Ronnie Kuriakose

How did the idea for the novel take shape?

The initial idea came from my dad. In January 2009, we were travelling together, and he was teasing me about writing only short stories and not a novel. I said, “Okay, dad, give me an idea for a novel, then” — and he did. The idea he gave me was to write about a Dalit family living in a South Indian coconut grove like the one where he grew up. At the time, I’d just taken a leave of absence from a tech reporting job at The Wall Street Journal, where I’d been writing about people like Larry Ellison of Oracle and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. I found these men and their companies and the socioeconomic systems in which they operated really fascinating. So I had this idea to start with a child growing up in a coconut grove like my dad’s, in the 1950s, but then have my character, King Rao, move to the US and start a tech company in the 1970s.

How have your years working as a journalist covering technology defined your writing? From your vantage point, is it already too late to navigate technology away from a dystopian future?

It has been through my work as a journalist that I’ve learned how technology works — and also how the tech industry, and business in general, work. Through fiction, I’ve been able to explore a possible future direction. But I don’t have any more of a crystal ball than anyone else regarding where we’re actually headed.

Though you began writing the book 13 years ago, the optimism of Obama’s America is replaced by the caginess of the post-trump years and the many controversies that ensued in the late 2010s involving tech companies. Is that an outcome of the novel taking this long to write?

I think of the novel as deeply informed by the technological utopianism that defined the early Obama years. It was largely during Obama’s time that the power and wealth of tech companies grew so much. Obama himself has more recently spoken about this quite thoughtfully and eloquently; he seems as alarmed as anyone about what has happened.

It was a lot of fun. I’m a journalist partly because I love absorbing new information and telling people about it. Putting these passages in the novel that contain information dumps allowed me to sneakily exercise that muscle in my fiction as well.