Ratika Kapur's new novel is The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for your new novel and for Mrs. Sharma?--Marshal Zeringue
A: Like most ideas for novels, this one had clearly been germinating in my head for a while, nourished by the occasional sighting of a face on a metro station platform, at a traffic signal, or at a mall.
Perhaps the fact that my world is adjacent but disjoint from the world of those women who live in Mrs. Sharma's world engendered a curiosity--a yearning almost--to reach out and try and enter that world.
Q: The story is told from Mrs. Sharma’s point of view. Would you describe her as a reliable or unreliable narrator?
A: We are all, in a sense, unreliable narrators of our lives, aren't we? We hide things from each other and from ourselves. I think the notion of the reliable narrator is really just a fantastical notion, like a unicorn or the Yeti; it resembles things that exist in the world but...[read on]