The Bandit Queens author Parini Shroff: ‘I’m far more interested in flailing and failing humans’

“Nathan and Malti differ on so many fronts: age, gender, race, upbringing, language, culture. I wanted to thrust two disparate people in a pressure cooker and make them actually talk to each other. I knew from the onset that they would hide behind their differences, but also that these were misdirects to avoid the work of actually interfacing with someone who doesn’t agree with you, and then realising that that disagreement does not automatically make them a villain,” Shroff, 41, says.

Family, in the novel, is a slippery thing, a constant tussle between the ones we choose and the one we inherit. Can the two ever truly come together? Shroff’s answer runs through Kavya, the daughter and wife who orbits between her mother Malti and her husband Nathan, smoothing over a friction neither of them will name. Shroff calls her the embodiment of the “eldest daughter maintaining the peace,” and it is Kavya’s removal from the equation that sets the novel in motion.

Without her to mediate, Shroff explains, “Nathan and Malti must reckon with each other. The only thing binding them are their ties to Kavya, and even those are fraying.” What follows is less a reconciliation than a reckoning: two people realising “they never really knew each other — or bothered to.”

Kavya, Shroff says, is “a load-bearing corner I yanked out so the entire artifice above could wobble and fall” — leaving her mother and husband to have the “messy” conversations that never would have happened otherwise.

That interest in mess — in characters who are undignified, contradictory, still figuring themselves out — runs through Shroff’s fiction more broadly, and she is candid about wanting to push back against tidier depictions of South Asian women in particular.

“People are complicated, but for so long South Asians, women especially, are portrayed as long-suffering saints. I’m far more interested in flailing and failing humans and I hope readers are, too. We won’t all see ourselves in saints, but we can certainly identify and empathise with a character who tries and just can’t seem to get it right,” she says.

It’s a seriousness she consistently smuggles in through comedy. Shroff resists the idea that humour undercuts weight. “I was re-reading The Crucible (by Arthur Miller) this month and I didn’t recall it having funny lines, but it does! Humour can act as a counterweight to heavier topics and admit some breathing room, but it’s also an effective way to educate and entertain simultaneously, which is what I want my fiction to accomplish,” she says.

That instinct for argument and nuance, it turns out, is not confined to the page. Shroff is also a practising attorney, and says her two working lives feed off one another rather than compete. I’ve been writing fiction in some form or another since I was seven, and it was my interest in writing and character nuance that made law feasible,” she says, “They’ve both informed how my brain operates, for better or worse.”

Unlike her debut novel, Some People came together unusually quickly. “I have never written as fast as I wrote Some People, and I will likely never write that fast again. But I learned there is, for me, no one way to write a novel. Even the novel I’m working on now has been a different experience than its predecessors. The only thing the manuscripts all have in common is that I must commit my butt to my seat and show up. I always have to show up,” Shroff says.

And once a book is finished, does she ever have to tell her characters that they’re done, or do they keep talking to her regardless? “I’ve learned my characters are in the driver’s seat and I’m just along for the ride. They’re pushy, loud and demanding and, more often than not, I defer to them. Resisting only delays the project and process; they generally tend to get their way,” says Shroff.