Atticus Lish in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, May 30, 2021. Credit: Ryan Hermens

I have recommended Atticus Lish’s first novel to more people than any other book. Beautiful without being sentimental, brutal without being cruel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) is a love story between Zou Lei, an undocumented half-Uighur, half–Han Chinese woman, and Brad Skinner, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD. “He gets it,” I told fellow New Yorkers: the Jackson Heights bars; the Flushing food stalls; the long walks through outer Queens, past housing projects and storefront mosques and cash-and-carries, all the way to the gas stations and football fields of Long Island. Everyone I pestered into reading the novel was bowled over, from jaded graduate students and sore-eyed copy editors to my mother and my grappling coach. Read More

Photo: Sushant Sehgal.

I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive. But what lingered in my mind was a detail from the work he had submitted to the class, the closing chapter of a bildungsroman, now published as Silent Winds, Dry Seas. The protagonist, Vishnu Bhushan, takes enormous pride in his delicate hands. A scholarship student from the island of Mauritius, off the coast of East Africa, he refuses a work-study job washing dishes in a Yale dining hall. Manual labor is abhorrent to him. At first, I found his fastidiousness comical. Then I realized that Vishnu dreads working with his hands because he fears it will bind him metaphorically to the servitude of his Indian ancestors on Mauritian sugar estates. “Sugarcane hell” is how one of Vishnu’s cousins, still tied to the land, describes the backbreaking labor of cutting woody stalks of cane.

Busjeet’s literary debut at the age of seventy-one is surprising. After leaving Mauritius to study in the U.S., he settled in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., and worked for the private-sector arm of the World Bank, where he focused on developing economies. Far from the corridors of power, his fictional alter ego, Vishnu, grows up in the conflicted world of midcentury Mauritius, part of a rambunctious, feuding clan rising out of poverty into small jobs. Descended from indentured laborers, they live in scruffy neighborhoods among the Creole descendants of enslaved people, escape into drink and the comfort of Hindu rituals, pinning their hopes on their children winning scholarships to study abroad.

Unfortunately, little fiction has been produced in English about Indian communities rooted in indenture, though V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant early novels of Trinidad stand out. The British devised this shadow form of slavery immediately after abolishing the African slave trade in 1833, in order to continue reaping profits from their plantations all over the world. More than a million dispossessed Indian villagers were shipped out to far-flung sugar colonies. Overwork and physical abuse crippled the lives of these men and women. Nearly half a million indentured workers landed in Mauritius, laboring for French Mauritian and British planters whose greed transformed the island into the world’s biggest sugar factory for a time. Busjeet’s novel offers a rare view of the society that evolved from this brutish system.

In May and June, Busjeet and I spoke by phone and exchanged emails about what it takes to reconstruct a faraway childhood, laugh off old pain, and reckon with the dark legacy of colonialism.

INTERVIEWER

You turned to writing after a long career in development banking. Did you ever think about becoming a writer early on?

BUSJEET

In Mauritius, writing was the last thing you’d think of doing. I went to what is considered the best high school there, Royal College, but I don’t recall anyone talking about embracing writing as a career. My father was literate—he knew Shakespeare—but my mother was basically illiterate. She had only two years of primary school. Then, in her old age, she started learning to read and write Hindi. The orientation was making a living, you know? If you were Franco-Mauritian, the world of business was yours. The Hindus, Muslims, and Creoles went into the liberal professions—doctor, engineer, lawyer. Writing was a kind of luxury. Most people I knew didn’t read for pleasure. They read for exams, and once exams were over, they didn’t read. The top writer in Mauritius at the time was a guy called Malcolm de Chazal. He was regarded as a madman. Read More

Photo: Paige Lewis. Courtesy of Graywolf Press.

Enthusiasm is at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s literary endeavor. Since the publication of his 2017 debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, a hyperspeed, ultrasensory journey through addiction, recovery, and spirituality, he’s become one of the best-known poets in America, and that’s saying something in this moment when poetry is suddenly, somehow, cool. But before that, Akbar was already a tremendous presence—a prototypical online influencer, sharing pictures of pages from other poets’ books with his many followers, spreading the gospel far and wide. Calling a Wolf a Wolf was a phenomenon, reaching thousands of readers, many of whom discovered and fell in love with poetry through their feeds. Though Akbar has since left social media, he remains an advocate through his work as poetry editor of The Nation. When I spoke to him over Zoom, he was at an artists’ residency at Civitella, in Italy, and despite the distance and shaky internet connection, we gabbed about the life-or-death practice of poetry like the pair of gleeful nerds we are.

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