This month we talk with former associate editor of Flash Frontier and frequent flash writer Nod Ghosh and hear about historical fiction in two new books – plus excerpts!
Flash Frontier: Welcome, Nod! Both of these new books explore the terrain of historical fiction. The Two-Tailed Snake is set in North-east India at the time of the mid-twentieth century India-Pakistan Partition, while Throw a Seven takes place in the nineteenth-century settler landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand. What first took you to these periods – was if familial connections or historical reading or a combination of both, or something else entirely? What were the inspirations for writing books set in specific times for these characters?
Nod Ghosh: Kia ora, Flash Frontier. Thank you for inviting me to kōrero on my recently released titles.
Several books I’ve written since 2016 stem from prompts found on the Flash Nano event that runs each November. The US flash fiction writer Nancy Stohlman hosts an online group, where participants share writing and provide mutual support. Usually, I plan an era or theme to write about, but have little idea where the prompts will lead. I create a novella or novel from the pieces, which I start re-drafting in December.
The setting for The Two-Tailed Snake (Fairlight Books) is one my parents’ generation lived through. My whakapapa were involved in and affected by events around the Partition of India and Pakistan. I’m told the Quit India resolution was signed in my aunt’s father’s office in Sevagram. The carnage associated with rioting around Direct Action Day in 1946 forms part of our family folklore. I feel connected to events from that era through an imagined communal memory.
The disorder and displacement my family encountered informed my first book: The Crazed Wind (Truth Serum Press, 2018) – a fictionalised account of how trauma from that era contributed to intergenerational conflict. I interviewed family members and researched events for years before writing it. After The Crazed Wind, I still had unanswered questions. Therefore it wasn’t surprising those themes re-surfaced in 2021, when I wrote The Two-Tailed Snake. Partway through, I realised the protagonist’s year of birth lies exactly between my father and mother’s. That wasn’t intentional, but I like how the communal memory manifested that way.
Throw a Seven was released earlier this year by Reflex Press. I wrote it in 2020, again following Nancy’s prompts. The communal memory I imagined that year was not with my own tūpuna, but with some of Aotearoa’s earliest settlers from the Indian subcontinent. These people arrived in the mid-nineteenth century and inhabited dilapidated huts on what has become Shalamar Drive, the road where I live. Local folklore says we have a ghost on our street from that group. One of the threads for the novella-in-flash is the life I imagined for this character and his compatriots.
FF: And that brings us to the idea of travel: in these books, people are in flux. Change is central to their stories. When you are thinking about the world that your characters live in, is the space of uncertainty and unknowns a natural place to explore? What makes that kind of setting so rich for you as a writer?
NG: Writers draw from emotions and experiences they relate to. That state of flux is particularly strong in Throw a Seven, since it follows migrants from the Indian subcontinent whom I can identify with, as we are made from the same substance. The book also portrays those who came from the North of England. I empathise with their experience, because I moved to Aotearoa from West Yorkshire. While not made from the same nucleic acids, I have been steeped in the same substances (tea, beer and shitty weather) those characters have. I feel their challenges, the sense of loss, but also the wonder and excitement of new beginnings. Major life changes are usually accompanied by something positive, even if it is only to escape a tougher environment. Otherwise we would inhabit the status quo forever. Then who would want to write our stories?
In The Two-Tailed Snake, the protagonist is exiled to her aunt’s home after the inciting incident: her father’s disappearance. I hoped to emphasise a sense of upheaval the character experienced by removing her from the familiar.
FF: Both books follow the path of young protagonists: Joya in The Two-Tailed Snake Angelina in Throw a Seven. It’s not the first time you’ve engaged young characters and their journeys – literal and metaphorical. Can you tell us a bit about the challenges and joys of writing young characters – even as you are writing for adults?
NG: An older person writing from a youthful point of view has an easier task than a younger writer capturing an elderly perspective, although I have attempted both. I used to be young once. While I don’t share the experiences of youth in the 1850s, 1940s, or even the 2020s young people have common views to draw on. It probably helps that I’ve read a great deal of young adult fiction through having critiqued YA novels for prolific NZ author Eileen Merriman.
Having a young protagonist in The Two-Tailed Snake worked well for me, because the parameters around Partition are complex and nuanced. I’m a scientist by trade, not a historian, so despite intensive research, many complex issues were hard to grasp. As I read, I had to assess whether there was inherent bias in the source material, and how the perspective was shaped via the lens of the historian. In that way, I was like a young person from the era, discovering parts of the information rather than the whole, uncertain where the truth lay.
Angelina is the protagonist for several stories in Throw a Seven, and appears as a secondary character in others. Her journey begins when she is a young woman in 1853, and continues over a quarter of a century. Her impulsiveness, needs and wants change as she matures, but I aimed to keep her faults and motivating features constant.
FF: Both books are about landscape and the place these people find themselves, but also about encounters between people. We come to moments of surprise or revelation, moments that bring fear or worry, moments that suggest the greater connection between people. Joya and Angelina are at the centre of each story, but there is moving energy all around them, jostling and sometimes noisy. So we wonder: which comes first, place or character?
NG: I enjoy building characters. I become those people and inhabit their worlds. As The Two-Tailed Snake and Throw a Seven are both historical fiction those invented people live somewhere I can’t experience, so I have to imagine the scents, sights and sounds they’d encounter, and what the colour of their sunlight light was. Thus place and character are intrinsically linked.
For Throw a Seven, which is set in Aotearoa, I thank the editor in the acknowledgements for accepting a story that features twice as many characters as chapters, (without counting the horse and dog). The landscape is a character in its own right, as the reader encounters many different people against this backdrop.
For The Two-Tailed Snake, set in India, location is important, but the emphasis is on the protagonist’s worries, interactions with other characters or the absence of them. That said, Joya’s experience of taste, smell, sound and uncertainty about her environment are described in depth to help establish her position.
FF: There are patterns and suggestive pairings in both novellas. Throw a Seven begins:
Left or Right.
Weak or strong.
Black or white.
Right or wrong.
In The Two-Tailed Snake, we come to this set of questions: Is he a snake, or a statue? Or is he two snakes? Or a man? Or a snake? Or a man-snake? Which suggests the idea of a dichotomy but in both books we see that the choices are never that clear. There is underlying tension everywhere. Does a complex story such as Joya’s or Angelina’s begin with a simple idea? Choosing one place for another, or one action for another, and subsequent choices that follow, many unforeseen?
NG: The dualisms and contrasts appear because I enjoy playing with words. I love creating sound patterns. I completed a song-writing course years before enrolling on a creative writing programme. I appreciate rhythm, repetition, assonance and similar devices, and pay attention to how sentences scan.
However, these techniques must relate to the characters’ driving forces. With Angelina in Throw a Seven, there is the suggestion of impulsiveness, a willingness to submit to extrinsic forces such as casting a die. It’s about how she responds to choices offered.
The words chosen for the narrating snake in The Two-Tailed Snake reinforce his voice, his cunning and deceptiveness. The uncertainty about the two-tailed snake he speaks of needs to be maintained until the reveal at the end of the book, and so the reader is presented with opposing possibilities.
And yes, in a way these simple choices do perhaps act as a prelude for the complexities that follow.
FF: Let’s talk about form. The Two-Tailed Snake is a novella written in third person, while Throw a Seven is a novella-in-flash, with the pieces written in first person from different character experiences and views. How did each of these approaches inform the outcome of the books? Did you end up making choices yourself as you had to weave story and form together for each one?
NG: Because Throw a Seven features many characters moving in and out of each other’s lives, a closer approach using first-person narration helped make the transition between story-tellers clearer. Plus, some of the characters’ voices are established by using vernacular, particularly those from Yorkshire, necessitating the use of the first person.
The sentence construction for some dialogue in The Two-Tailed Snake mimics Bengali language the characters would use, even though the reader experiences it in English. For example, Lohith the factory manager asks Joya ‘You know where is this?’ meaning ‘Do you know where this is?’ Using such inversions for all the narration would be cumbersome, hence it is only used to ‘flavour’ dialogue. The specific features of protagonist Joya’s voice are more subtle.
The narrating snake’s voice is the only deviation to first person in The Two-Tailed Snake. He needs to speak this way, because of the authorial intrusion, where he appears to address the reader (‘you’/’yourself’) directly.
FF: What was the biggest challenge in writing each of these books?
NG: For The Two-Tailed Snake, it was the ending. The story has a particular sort of conclusion I find difficult to create plausibly. I had almost completed the first draft before I knew the book needed that type of ending. I was still uncertain how to pull it off. Feedback I’ve received suggests that this is right conclusion for Joya.
With Throw a Seven, I thought I’d written the Māori perspective accurately, having consulted various texts and gleaned information from the local museum. However, it wasn’t until author Iona Winter provided a sensitivity reading that I realised how off the mark I was.
FF: Finally, the theme of home. Both books are about a searching, a longing. Can you share a bit about this idea of home in the context of someone who was born in another place but makes Aotearoa New Zealand your home, and whose family is also around the globe? How does your own experience of home influence or suggest new questions for you, as you dig into character, history and story?
NG: I suppose this goes back to the fact that writers draw from emotions and experiences they relate to. As a migrant whose parents were migrants from somewhere else, I know it’s inevitable that the idea of changing home would be on my radar.
What makes home? Is it the people? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. Or is it the flora, fauna or the way the sun shines? Is it what we eat? The language?
Here’s a story that may not answer the question, but shows different perspectives on the issue.
My parents longed for their homeland, India, with palpable nostalgia during the decades they lived in the UK. Their intention had been to raise their family in England and then return home. So home didn’t shift for them . . . until they attempted going back. India had changed. They tried to re-integrate, moving between the two countries. In the end, both died in the UK.
I moved to Aotearoa in 2002, and decided I didn’t want to be away from ‘home’ as my parents had. So I made New Zealand home. I knew I’d conditioned myself successfully after my first visit back to the UK in 2003. After a complicated day involving being evicted from Kingston Railway Station and significant amounts of vodka, I passed a travel agency. Their window display showed images of the Southern Alps of New Zealand and the Dux de Lux Pub at the (pre-earthquake) Arts Centre in Ōtautahi Christchurch. I longed to return home.
So I have settled in my home.
I know the pain of missing home. I’ve seen it in my parents. Perhaps it is that imagined communal memory that warned me against it. I didn’t want the pain for myself, but it doesn’t mean I can’t give that sense of longing to my characters.
Writers can be cruel bastards.
Excerpted contents
From Snakes, I
The Two-Tailed Snake
Snakes come in many forms, yah! I’ve heard it said we are good company when we perform our duty without scheming and conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
I’ve heard that you perceive us as good or evil according to your needs. Ah, the hubris of humanity!
There are kraits and green tree vipers, whose venom will become beneficial in time. The gods know we serpents will be valuable one day, our defence used to create antivenoms and other gifts to mankind. Those with a love of ophiology and studying reptiles in general will nurture us, especially where there is a profit to be made. You may call me cynical, but I am only an observer, a scaly one with bead-like eyes who has glimpsed the future.
And what of anguine prophets? There are as many stories told about us serpents as the ones we tell ourselves.
A snake-god, Ananta-Shesha, circles the world. All-seeing. All-knowing. Ananta hears prophecies about white serpents who cross the ocean, who are vanquished in battle and return to salt water, defeated. Ananta hears it all.
And what of sanguine prophesiers, who sit at firesides passing tales to their children and children’s children, frightening them by foretelling their misfortunes? I have heard so much said by those who know so little.
There is a legend whispered among the initiated, but perhaps not whispered often enough, or loudly enough. It is said that if one slaughters a snake, death will follow. Make a snake angry, insult us, or show disrespect, and a curse will lead to sickness and calamity. We may not act immediately, but bad fortune will find you. Eventually.
There are benevolent snake-deities within the sub-pantheon. Those who support the weight of the planets with their multitudinous heads humbly accept offerings of eggs and milk from worshippers. The Supreme Being, the trinity of higher gods, the trimurti of Lord Vishnu, Lord Brahma and Lord Shiva will bless those such as Ananta, whose yawn may cause the earth to shiver.
There is Vasuki, who dwells on Lord Shiva’s neck, who stirs his tail in the oceans and whips up an ambrosia of immortality.
There is Manasadevi, the queen of snakes. She is also the god of poison. Her eyes are as black as the queen of Ishkapon or Chiraton. But are they truly as black as spades or clubs? Or is there a glint of diamond in them that reveals her true heart?
And there is Kaliya, feared by many, who lurks in the black waters of the river, and is known for terrorising infant gods.
We are not all divine, but many snakes hold the power of divination. I could tell you how the earth will end. We reside in the last of the four ages of the epoch, but all is not as it appears in the scriptures. If only you knew how to read the Puranas accurately, yah!
There are many of us. Innocent snakes. Corrupt snakes. Dead snakes. Comical snakes. There are snakes that reproduce without coitus. Try that if you can. It’s been done, I’m told.
We are not all literal. Some are divine energy, coiled tight as a spring, waiting to be awoken so your consciousness may be raised.
We shed our skins and are reborn, for which we are revered and envied.
And we are abused.
There are fakirs who coax defanged snakes to dance. Some sew our mouths together into narrow slits so only the tongue protrudes. Such cruelty! Such depravity! We dance in and out of wicker baskets, the thin wail of a pungi reed pipe creating the illusion of mesmerisation. In reality, we have been subdued by means of intoxicating herbs. At least it takes some of the pain away. Ahhhh!
There are snakes that curl into a ball and disappear when they hear the thwack of a policeman’s lathi, only to follow the gullible man and lure him later with intoxicating offers. And though snakes divine or simple may admonish these deviants until they slither away guilt-ridden and forlorn, they will always return if there is a chance of a few coins to be gained.
We know there are good and bad among us, and those like me, who are indifferent.
There is one among us, a snake with two tails, who is a man, is a serpent, no, a man really – perhaps a bit of both. Listen closely to this tale. And in parallel, you will hear another story.
Perhaps it is two tales in one.
From Angelina’s Story 1853
Throw a Seven
Left or Right.
Weak or strong.
Black or white.
Right or wrong.
Life is full of choices.
Dilemmas.
Dualisms.
Want more? A theological or spiritual view that there are only two fundamental concepts that are opposed to each other in every way.
Things come in pairs.
My parents? Two diametrically opposed beings.
My father worked in Bengal for the ICS. That’s the Indian Civil Service for those who don’t know.
My mother washed his shirts. Perhaps that is where my affinity for people who clean other people’s garments stems from?
My name is Angelina.
People say I’m quiet, but there’s plenty going on inside my pretty head. Most people don’t know it, because I won’t show it. Oh, Luqmaan knows. My Lucky Man sees what’s what
whenever it’s his turn to share my bed. The dhobi is one of many I might know as in the Bible, but there aren’t many who know what’s happening in my head. In that way, the laundryman is unique.
I like my men clean and my liquor strong. Perhaps I was born corrupt. But my daddy loved me. He fed me a diet of books and philosophy. How do you think I came to know about the pre-Islamic Persian works of Zoroaster? He taught me how to drink whisky without a grimace, how to smoke a cigar with a smile.
My mother may have been a washerwoman, but she was a smart one. She told me stories from the Mahabharata every night as I drifted to sleep in the thick heat of Rajarhat. She taught me about dhárma, karma and pramana. She taught me how to mend a sock. She taught me to spit in the faces of those who disrespected my mixed heritage. Only do it quietly, my child.
It was from her I learned to say yes, sir, while imagining pushing a lighted dhoop kathi up the backside of anyone who thought they were better than me. All good lessons for a smart woman destined for a life of servitude, more useful than philosophy for certain. Philosophy doesn’t feed an empty stomach.
How did my fortune change so?
Sophistication and philosophy won’t get you far when your daddy dies, leaving nothing but gambling debts. Mother pined and expired within a month. I have no brothers or sisters. There’s only me.
The zamindar threw me out of what I’d believed was our house. I came away with the clothes on my back and only one thing of my father’s. None of his books, his pocket watch, of his big ideas. Only a die, carved from bone, with concentric circles as dots. It was a thing of beauty.
I use it to plan my life.
What happens to a woman destined for greatness, who becomes a servant, reduced to drudgery seven days a week? She is to marry the laundryman and live in heaven on earth of course, in a new land, our Nouvelle-Zéalande.
We have a plan, Luqmaan and I. We will become landowners, zamindars. But we have to wait. No one can know yet. That’s how the die rolls. It’s the law of the dice, for us to follow or die. We’ll follow the Nobab to this new land, all innocence and subservience. We will ‘fall in love’ at the right time and marry. We will gain their trust, and − I’ll do what the die tells me. That’s all anyone needs to know. Can’t give my secrets away.
We’ll have all we want in good time. Oh, but I miss my luxuries. I still indulge in small pleasures courtesy of my ill-gotten gains. I’ve bought a gown — blue sateen. But I will wear
plain cottons for now.
I am one of two chhi-chhi girls who will sail to a land where status and social standing have been redefined. We just need a helping hand to help us get there.
What is my next move?
I cast the die and throw a seven.
Nod Ghosh graduated from the Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2014, and has had work published internationally and locally, with short fiction placed in competitions including the NZ National Flash Fiction Day and Bath Flash Fiction Awards. Nod’s books include The Crazed Wind (2018), Filthy Sucre (2020), Toy Train (2021) and Love, Lemons and Illicit Sex (2023) from Truth Serum Press, and Throw a Seven (2023) from Reflex Press and The Two-Tailed Snake (2023) from Fairlight Books. A forthcoming publication from Everytime Press, How to Bake a Book, is an instruction manual on creative writing. Nod has judged competitions and provided critique for writers including Eileen Merriman, whose work has been published by Penguin Random House. Further details: http://www.nodghosh.com/