Short stories are undervalued, but I do see this book living somewhere in the middle between a novel and a short story collection. I think I was able to take the best from both worlds. Really, it is the subject matter that decides the structure of the boo

I grew up in a predominantly South Asian neighbourhood, so I was very conscious about how history overlapped and intersected. The massacre of Sikhs in Delhi happened in 1984 while the massacre of Tamils in Colombo happened in 1983. Sometimes, we see history as isolated events contained within borders. In writing, I hope to explore the messiness of history and identity. Along with the various histories of my friends and classmates, the civil war in Sri Lanka was formative to my identity as a Tamil.

I’d love to hear a brief history of Half Gods. Were the stories written over the course of many years? You have said you had somehow forgotten about the manuscript, and that when you rediscovered it, you had the sensation you had written it for your future self. Would you tell me why it felt that way?

The stories were written over the course of many years. They are nonlinear and jump across time and countries. I think the short story form allowed me the flexibility to make those larger geographic and temporal jumps, but like a novel, the stories have accumulative power and have larger narrative arcs. It felt like I wrote to my future self because I wrote about things I had not yet experienced like losing a parent. Re-reading the book after experiencing that loss felt comforting in ways I had not anticipated.

Half Gods was a play in one of its earliest iterations. Why did you choose that format and then rework it as a short story collection? What did you find the stories both gained and/or lost in that process?

There’s an immediacy to playwrighting and a very visceral collaboration between the audience and the actors on stage. I liked the conceptual idea of the stories as a play, especially the idea of having characters in the full regalia of gods as they gave long monologues. That would be quite a different story.

Reading is also a very intimate experience between the reader and the text. The quiet space of a page allowed me more room to worldbuild and to take more drastic jumps when it came to scenery and time periods. I can move from the eve of independence in Nuwara Eliya to the shoreline in the United States with just the turn of a page.

In what ways does the Mahabharata find its way into your book? When did you first encounter the epic and why did you become interested in referencing it in your own fiction?

The two main brothers are named