Transcript for Bidaii ki Chicken Curry: a story by Keyan Bowes

Julia
Hello and welcome to the OMG Julia! Podcast. I'm your host Julia Rios and in this podcast we discuss creative lives and processes today I have special guest Keyan Bowes here to talk about her story that she wrote for my Worlds of Possibility project and actually the first thing we're going to have Keyan do is introduce herself and then we'll actually hear her read the story herself. So welcome, Keyan. Do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are?

Keyan
I'm Keyan Bowes. I'm a writer of speculative fiction generally. I would say equal parts fantasy and science fiction. I grew up in India. I still have ties to India and go back – except when there's covid – about once a year. This particular story really comes out of my experience.

Julia
I always let my subscribers and patrons have a chance to vote on what the next story I post is. For this particular time they voted to have a science fiction story, and so I chose this one out of my pile of stories. So this is a science fiction story and as Keyan has mentioned, it comes out of her experience being someone who is from India but also has lived other places and left, and I'm going to leave it at that for now and we'll just go straight into the story and then we'll come back in a few minutes after that has played and we'll have a little chat about the rest of the story.

Keyan
Bidaii ki Chicken Curry by Keyan Bowes, read by the author.

Chop the tomatoes.

Lots of activity around the space-port today. From my kitchen window, I see vehicles come and go, people like tiny dots moving among them in an intricate dance.

Chop the onions.

We're used to losing our daughters, back home in India. We get them married, hope they'll be safe and happy and cared-for. The wedding is as huge and wonderful as we can achieve with our savings, and our borrowing capacity, and the jewelry passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. They walk around the sacred fire, reciting vows. Then they leave, carried off to their new home, the home with a husband in it, and often more of his relatives. There's a lot of weeping at the bidaai, the ceremony of departure. Adjust, we tell our daughters. Learn to fit in. They belong elsewhere now.

The onions make my eyes water.

Chop the chicken.

That was how it was for my mother, Nani to my darling Sunaina. But I'd left all that behind when I left the land of my birth. My child grew up in a different world, a world where she'd pick her own spouse, make her own home, where she wouldn't be taken from me.

Arrange the spices.

She was bright-eyed and eager almost from birth. She was an explorer, a risk-taker, which to a mother is both joyous and terrifying.

Caramelize the onions as the layer of oil shimmers in the pan.

Preschool. Grade school. College. Her inquiring mind was drawn to the sciences. She worked summers at the hydroponic farm, growing foods we couldn't get otherwise. Then her eyes sought wider horizons and larger projects. More college, the Academy, and she joined the terraforming group.

Add the coriander powder, the cumin powder, the turmeric, the ginger and the garlic, and sauté until fragrant.

Some people blend the curry to make it smooth, but that's not how Sunaina likes it. Outside my kitchen window, a rocket takes off with a percussive roar, standing on a massive, sudden column of flame. It's the sacred fire of this new departure.

Turn up the flame, add the chicken, stir until it's a little brown. Add the tomatoes, let it go back to a boil, add water and salt.  Cover and simmer until the chicken is tender and the oil separates.

Tomorrow, there'll be another rocket, and Sunaina will be on it. Going back to Earth, a shattered Earth, to start rebuilding. But tonight, I'm making her favorite chicken curry.

Mix a little garam masala into a spoonful of the gravy, and stir it into the curry to finish it.

It's simple and tastes of the home we once had, where tomatoes and ginger and garlic weren't carefully bred in hydroponic farms on the surface of other planets. Perhaps someday her grand-daughter will grow a kitchen garden somewhere in India, when Sunaina and her team have terraformed the planet.

And there she is! My eyes are still watering from the damn onions. I wipe them on my scarf, and go open the door.

Julia
Ahhhh, that was so good! I love this story! Well, thank you so much for reading your story for us, Keyan. I wanted to also take this time to ask you a few questions about your creative process because that's one of the things that I usually do with people on on this podcast. So, starting with your general creative process, how long have you been writing?

Keyan
Honestly, I've been writing as long as I can remember. My earliest memory was of dictating a poem to my father because at that stage I could compose a poem but I could not actually write it down. I must have been about five years old. I've been writing for publication probably since I would say my early twenties with nonfiction, and then for fiction much more recently. Only after I retired from my day job.

Julia
So tell me about how you made this switch. Why did you change from from nonfiction to fiction and what was that transition like?

Keyan
I enjoy writing nonfiction, but I do it as a job. I mean one of my day jobs essentially involved writing economic forecasts. Making economic forecasts, writing them up, analyzing various economies... Another one involved doing something similar with companies, and while I enjoyed it, it was not something that I considered as a hobby. It was work. It was something I did professionally. Writing fiction has always been something that I do as a hobby, as something I enjoy doing at odd moments. So, yeah.

Julia
Okay, and have you always been drawn to Science fiction and fantasy specifically?

Keyan
Oh yes, totally. I think some of the earliest fiction I wrote was as a teenager and it was typically either science fiction or fantasy. I remember there was one about aliens next door, shape-shifting aliens next door. Another one, which I'm actually rewriting, is about time and that sort of goes into what time means and it's a fictional treatment of it.

Julia
Interesting! And this is something that you wrote when you were young and now you're starting to rewrite it?

Keyan
Yeah, it's kind of fun going back to my juvenile stories because while I write a lot differently now, there's a certain freshness to those pieces. There's the view of someone who's only recently stopped being a child and started thinking about the world and how to be in it. So I kind of enjoy that.

Julia
That's really Cool. So tell me about what your writing process is like. Do you tend to write multiple drafts? Do you tend to write one very clean draft? Do you do a lot of work in your head? Do you use outlines? What is a typical writing session like for you, and what does the story process from idea to finished story usually look like?

Keyan
My stories tend to start with an idea or even just a phrase or an image, and I do some work in my head, but not a lot; just enough to know that I can stop the story. And then I tell myself the story as I write it which means I'm a total complete pantser I do not know the end of the story until I get there. I have to say that I think it would be a lot more efficient if I outlined. In my nonfiction I used outlines all the time, and fairly detailed ones. I didn't necessarily adhere to them, but they provided a roadmap. But with my fiction, I find that if I do that it kind of kills it for me. It takes the fun out of it. It removes that element of telling myself a story. So I just write until I get to the end of the story and I go, "Aha. So that's what the story is supposed to be about!" and then I rewrite it and I do multiple drafts. None of my stories are ever finished, even stories that have been published. Sometimes when I resell them as a reprint and someone asks for more work on them, I'm more than happy to do it because again, it's telling myself something new about that story.

Julia
That's very cool. All right Let's talk a little bit about this specific story, which you sent me several stories in this round of consideration. This came in through my open call. For anyone who is listening and doesn't know what the Worlds of Possibility project is, in 2021 I started buying the right to publish stories on my website from other creators. Stories, artwork, poems... I've had a few different things. But in 2022 in April I did an open call specifically for stories, and I got 524 submissions of which I accepted 16. I think I had a second round consideration list that was something like 33 and then out of those I ended up accepting sixteen stories. So I got a lot of submissions and I also did not put a limit on how many times a person could submit. I said they could only submit one thing at a time but if they got a rejection, they were allowed to resubmit right away.

And I was also trying to read everything very fast, so people were usually not waiting more than a couple of days and like the only way that you would be waiting more than a couple of days is if you already made it to the second round. So then like you would get a notice saying I'm holding your story and then those people had to wait a few weeks to find out the final answer, but for a lot of people, they would get their responses really quickly and then a pretty significant number of people ended up sending me multiple submissions during the window.

And Keyan, you were one of those. I think you sent me a few different stories, and I thought it was so interesting the number of people that this happened with, because you aren't the only one whose work I already knew I liked. I've edited a different story by you before and I already knew that I liked your work. The question was whether or not the things that you were submitting were going to be the right fit for this particular project. I went through a few and I was like no not quite, not quite, and then you sent this one and I was like okay this is perfect. This is what I need.

Keyan
Oh, I'm so glad.

Julia
So I would love to hear a little bit from your perspective. How did you get the idea for this story, and what does it mean to you?

Keyan
This is a story that's a lot more meaningful than its short length would seem to suggest. The ceremony of bidaai comes at the end of an Indian wedding and it's when the girl leaves her childhood home – her parents' home – completely for the first time and becomes part of her husband's family. Traditionally, it's a bit of a leap in the dark because marriages were (and often are) arranged so she doesn't actually know either the man she's marrying or the family she's going into. Which is why it's so important for her to adjust. No matter who she is today, she has to become someone who's acceptable to them, and by the same token, though she never breaks her ties with her original family – she does see them, often several times a year – but she is not really part of that family anymore.

And it seemed to be something that was very sad and very tragic when I was growing up as as a child, and I still think that it's difficult for a young woman. And you know this is still happening in India today. Women have arranged marriages and they have traditional marriages and for many of them, that's what they want. But they do have to make a ah break with their their families.

And then I started thinking about it some more and I realized that, okay, in this framing it is something that's very sad, but actually there's another aspect to the bidaai, and that is that you grow up and you leave home. It's your parents giving you permission to be an adult. And I felt this as a child myself, when I was a teenager, when I left home. I remember turning to my father and saying you know this is it. I'm leaving. And he said yes, that's how it's supposed to be. So that's kind of what I wanted to capture in this story.

Julia
Yeah, this sort of bittersweet moment of leaving home. It's sweet because it's independent and it's moving on to the next stage of your life. But it's a little bit bitter because it's leaving behind everything that came before.

Keyan
Right, right. In this particular story, I mean Sunaina is a triumph. She's obviously a very competent young woman and obviously heading to a great future which any mother would be proud of, but then you also lose your daughter, you know? Who knows when Sunaina is going to be able to come back and visit?

Julia
Right. I think part of the interesting thing about this story is the thinking back to home being India and also knowing that the person who's narrating the story can't go back. They're probably not going back.

Keyan
Right. The subtext of the story is that Earth is shattered and is no longer habitable and that Sunaina and her team are going to change that.

Julia
So as someone who left one country for another, do you do you feel like your experience leaving influences the way that you write about someone else who's left?

Keyan
It may do. I had very strong roots in India, and I consider myself fortunate in that I'm in the position of being able to go back and visit whenever I can. If it wasn't for covid, I would be doing it more more frequently. There are people who don't have that option, people who are refugees, people who just don't have the finances to afford these visits home, people who no longer have a home where they were born. Or where where politically things have become so difficult that they daren't go anywhere near it. I can't help contrasting the experience of immigrants like myself, who have the option of staying in touch with our roots, and people who don't have that option.

Julia
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Why did you choose to tell this story through the act of cooking a meal?

Keyan
I think cooking and cuisines are often the last part of a culture to fall away. One of the first things that tends to go is the celebrations, because you can only celebrate things with other people. That's what most celebrations are about, so you can have little celebrations, but it's very different than celebrating in a country where everybody else is celebrating the same thing. For the second generation, language often goes because again if everybody around you is speaking a different language, you may be able to hang on to your mother tongue for a bit, but it becomes increasingly not part of your life. But I think cuisne tends to be some kind of an anchor. Even if you don't necessarily eat your your home country cuisine all the time, it still brings you a palette of flavors and memories.

Julia
Yeah, I think that rings true to me and it seems to me like food and the act of eating and the act of feeding other people is such a specific thing about any culture. You can tell a lot about a culture by the things that they eat, the ways that they serve them, and the traditions around that. Is this chicken curry something that you make yourself, or is this just something that you chose for a different reason?

Keyan
It's a pretty basic chicken curry, and yes, I do make that kind of a chicken curry. It's not the more complex version that someone who's really into being a home chef would make. It's a pretty standard kind of everyday chicken curry, and I chose something like that deliberately because the idea was that it's something that Sunaina associates with her childhood – with being a child at home – and it's a comfort food for her as she's leaving.

Julia
Yeah, so deliberately choosing sort of the everyday food rather than the special occasion food?

Keyan
That's right.

Julia
When you set out to write this, did you expect that you were going to write something that was very gripping and emotional, or did you think I want to write something about living in space and not know ahead of time that it was going to go to this emotional place?

Keyan
I expected it to be emotional because it started with the bidaai. Bidaai really just means farewell. You wouldn't use the term very casually. It's a departure. So I think the emotion was already contained in that idea. Setting it in space kind of happened during the story.

Julia
So you didn't know going in that you were going to set it in space?

Keyan
Right. When I found the the Rocket ships taking out taking off outside the kitchen window, I knew that space was involved, but it wasn't till I got more than halfway through the story that I realized where it was going.

Julia
That's really interesting. So one of the things that I look for in the Worlds of Possibility project is sort of the idea that all of the stories from it will end with a sort of sense of either hope or giving everyone who reads it a sense of in in some way contentedness or something like that, and so for me I think this is a really interesting case study because this story, in some ways it can be read as sad because Sunaina is leaving, but I think it's also very hopeful because she's gone back to to try to fix the the mess that we made of earth. And there's hope now for that future. So that to me was what made it hopeful but I wonder how it feels to you.

40:26.22
Keyan
Um, I think exactly that. There's the hope that Sunaina and her team can terraform Earth, which is kind of ironic. But yes that Earth can be restored to functionality, and of all planets, this is the planet to which the the terran blueprint should apply most perfectly. So I think there is definitely a sense of hope there. On the personal level, I think the the pride that the mother has in Sunaina, the pride and the love and the joy, I think all of those things are positives in that story.

Julia
Yeah, because the the mother is really thinking like oh it's sad that my daughter is leaving but I'm also so proud of her for what she is doing.

Keyan
Right.

Julia
Yeah I think that's lovely. So if you get into a place where you're kind of like blocked, if you have a little bit of a rut, are there tricks that you use to get your creative juices flowing again?

Keyan
I find that having an audience makes a difference to me, so I'm a member of a couple of critique groups, and there's a forum called Codex for new professional writers. They sometimes have competitions and I have never in the past taken part in those, but now I'm giving it a shot and I'm finding it's rather interesting because it means that somebody's going to be reading your work soon after it's completed, and I find that motivating. But yeah, mostly if I'm blocked I just wait it out.  I know that soon or later a story idea is going to arrive and demand to be written, so that works for me.

Julia
Excellent. Okay, so where can people find you (online or otherwise), and also your work? And is there anything specifically that you recommend people check out if they're unfamiliar with your work and this is the first thing that they've heard?

Keyan
The easiest place to find me is on my website. It's http://keyanbowes.com and there's a publications tab there. Two of my favorite stories that are available online, one in fact, is the one that you edited, Julia, and I'll come back to this thought in a minute. That's called "Light and Death on the Indian Battle Station" and then another one is called "Octonet" and that's available on Escape Pod. So it's available both as a podcast and as text.

So what I wanted to say about being edited by you was that it was a great experience, and you were talking of lots of people sending you multiple stories to this call. A lot of it is because of you, Julia. I don't think if it was an unknown editor they would have gotten the same response. But I was going, "Oh yeah, Julia. I'd love another chance to be edited by Julia."

Julia
Haha. And then with this story I basically was just like oh no, it's perfect.

Keyan
Hahaha.

Julia
It depends for me from story to story, depending on what it is and where it's going. "Light and d=Death on the Indian Battle Station" was a much longer storie. There was sort of more more room to dig into it and make sure that everything was clear and consistent. And I think that's what I'm usually looking for, is to make sure that the story is is telling itself as effectively as possible. But in this case, you had it already so finely honed that I mostly didn't change anything.

48:17.69
Keyan
Yeah, this one this one was very short.

48:34.67
juliarios
Tight and doing what it wanted to do with the space. So that's always what we love to see in Flash I think that.

48:42.77
Keyan
Running.

48:44.74
juliarios
Doing that. There's an art form to doing very short that is different than writing at other lengths and it's sort of in some ways closer to the way that I think of writing poetry because you sort of can capture the whole thing.

48:58.32
Keyan
Um, yes.

49:04.37
juliarios
In your mind in one fluid motion and then you're you're sort of trying to figure out. Okay, ah does this does this line Do. What? it's supposed to do and I think if you think about that when you're actually. Writing or editing your draft then by the time it gets to me. It's probably already been worked.

Keyan
I find that when I'm writing at very short lengths, when I'm writing flash, it needs a lot of precision. Every word has to have a reason to be there, and so the way I would edit it is different than the way I would edit, sa, a 4,000 word. Story.

Julia
I feel the same way, personally, if I'm talking about my own writing, and I think that in this case the conceit that you have where every every moment of the story is sort of punctuated by part of the recipe is a very clear structure and makes it flow very smoothly and also makes it clear what you're doing from the beginning. So. There's not a lot of room to move structural pieces around.

Keyan
Basically the whole story is told in the space of time that Sunaina's mother's cooking this chicken curry.

Julia
Right, and it's not... chicken curry, a basic chicken curry doesn't take very long to cook.

Keyan
Right.

Julia
It's meant to be everyday food, and everyday food is meant to come together quickly enough that you can get dinner on the table. It's not the kind of thing that you spend all day cooking for a very special holiday.

Keyan
Right.

Julia
Thank you so much for talking to me, and for reading your story out loud, and for writing the story and sending it to me because I loved having the chance to read it and then get to put it out there and share it with other people. Everyone should go and check out all of Keyan's other stories.

Keyan
Thank you.

Julia
All right, thank you for listening and I'll catch you next time.