Conversations Between Friends: Nina Michiko Tam and Vaishnavi Patel
Vaishnavi Patel and I met in our first year of law school—well before she’d published her New York Times-bestselling debut, Kaikeyi. By the time that book came out, we were fast friends, drawn together by our passion for civil rights law and our love of writing. Last year, Vaishnavi published her second novel, Goddess of the River, and guided me through the process of writing, querying, and selling my debut.
Three years out of law school, our friendship remains one of the great joys of my life. It was a pleasure to speak to Vaishnavi following publication of her third book, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion, a literary novel exploring an alternate version of the 1960s where India was never liberated from the British. Like Vaishnavi’s previous novels, Ten Incarnations is marked by compelling storytelling, deep research, and an unwavering belief in the power of literature. We had a blast discussing her craft in this interview and hope you enjoy it as well.
—Nina Michiko Tam
Nina Michiko Tam: I obviously got to read your previous two novels, Kaikeyi and Goddess of the River, which are both retellings of ancient Hindu texts. Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is your first novel that isn’t a retelling. What was it like to write that?
Vaishnavi Patel: It was a lot of fun. In some ways, it was much harder to not have the exact world and context and building blocks ready to go. When you’re retelling this ancient epic that people have told for three thousand years, you’ve got every interpretation at your fingertips. You’ve got all the characters, and all the supporting characters, and what the world is supposed to be like and what the themes are. When you’re writing from scratch, you’re on your own. But it was really fun once I got into it, because I actually had control over my characters and where they could go. If I needed to remove a character or add a character in at a certain critical point, or if I needed to change the end point, I wasn’t forced into a corner by the original text. So I had a lot more creative freedom to shape the story.
I did also add mythical elements to the stories. So Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is loosely based around the ten incarnations of the god Vishnu. His avatars loosely mirror evolution. It starts out with a fish, and then a turtle, a boar, and an animal-human hybrid. You go up the rank to achieve enlightenment, and finally, there’s a tenth incarnation. So it naturally mirrors the evolution of a character, if you’re starting from a young age, and how they themselves learn and grow. It was a nice way to tie in mythology.
NMT: You didn’t have to work off a text for this book, but you did do a ton of research, right? You have this huge bibliography in the back, which tracks with how you were in law school. You bring that energy to your fiction writing too.
VP: You can take law out of the girl, but you can’t take the girl out of the lawyer, or maybe in reverse, I don’t know. I really like to do my research and to honor what came before me. I think especially when you’re writing about myths, or when you’re writing about the independence movement, you’re writing about things that are really, really important to people’s lives. For me, you know I had family members who participated in the Indian Independence movement. I’m only here because people fought for India’s independence, and I don’t want to misrepresent what they did or their history.
But I’m writing an alternate history, so some things are different. To me, what that means is, in order to change the history, I have to understand it. I’m not just willy-nilly picking stuff that sounds cool, I’m making deliberate changes that are still in line with the history of colonialism and British tactics and historical methods of oppression. I needed to really understand the nitty-gritty details as much as possible, even if it never comes through explicitly. It’s in the back of my mind in everything I’m writing about the world. I’m very deeply committed to citing my sources, which is probably a little bit law-influenced.
NMT: Reading this book, I could see a lot of your work in civil rights law coming through. You’ve said that this is the book of your heart. What does that mean for you?
VP: Backing up, this is Vaishnavi Patel lore. I always thought that I was going to be the first lawyer in my family. But I was talking to my grandma right around the time I entered law school, and I was joking to her that the family was finally getting a lawyer. We were FaceTiming, and she looked strange. She goes, “Actually, you don’t know this, but my Baba, my dad, was a lawyer.”
It turns out that he got a law degree, and he wanted to practice. But he was also a freedom fighter, so he was leading strikes. The British ran him out of town, so he never got to practice, and they basically blacklisted him. He never got to be a lawyer, and he just kept fighting for freedom. He was later thrown in jail. He got tuberculosis, and eventually died of that. So he never got to be a real lawyer, but that was his dream.
It really has touched me in terms of thinking about, What is my role as a lawyer? What sacrifices did so many other people make for me to be sitting here talking about this? That’s where the idea for the story came, from the sacrifices of the freedom movement. I don’t think that my great-grandfather necessarily thought of it as this massive sacrifice he made. That seed is what grew into Ten Incarnations. I love all my books, and I care about them all, but this one is closest to me in terms of what matters.
NMT: That’s such a moving story.
VP: I knew that he was a freedom fighter. My family hates the British. We grew up hearing that the British were the bad guys in every story, beginning when I was five years old. We knew that he was a freedom fighter, but I actually think it was harder to talk about how he was a lawyer or wanted to be a lawyer, because that was a dream he didn’t get to have.
NMT: I assume your family has read this book. What was their reaction to your depiction of a history that they know intimately?
VP: The book is dedicated to the freedom fighters, because it’s not just about the Indian Independence movement. This book was inspired by colonization, and independence movements around the world; there are still freedom movements happening today, so it’s not dedicated just to my great-grandfather. But in the acknowledgement, I specifically talk about him and his sacrifices. My grandma called me, and she was crying, which is not something I’ve ever seen. She was just so amazed that he was memorialized in this book. There were thousands of freedom fighters, right? The movement couldn’t have existed without thousands of foot soldiers. But many freedom fighters’ stories and sacrifices aren’t remembered in the same way as Gandhi and Nehru and all the people at the top. My grandma was really touched.
She was still really upset about some of the things that I did at the end of the book. She was pretty upset at some of the narrative choices on who makes it and who doesn’t. My mom really liked it, although she had a lot of comments like, “This wasn’t how electricity worked in 1960.”
NMT: They’re fact checking you.
VP: Yeah, they were fact checking me a little bit, but they loved it. They are very excited about it, and very proud and supportive of my writing. It’s funny. This book shocked them more than the myth retellings, because they expected what would happen in those. In Ten Incarnations, my family was like, How could you be so cruel and sadistic?
NMT: In retellings, we know what will happen to Rama in the Ramayana. In Ten Incarnations, it’s completely your fault.
VP: I’m getting blamed for my choices.
NMT: Well, that’s a good sign. It shows you had an impact on your readers.
VP: I got very invested in the characters. I hope that people will get invested in the characters. I like to think that I write hopeful books. They’re not necessarily happy books. But there’s enough misery and pessimism in the real world that I want my books to be hopeful. I do think that my definition of what is a hopeful, uplifting ending doesn’t necessarily match everybody’s definition of a hopeful and uplifting ending.
NMT: But that’s what history is like. One of the threads in Ten Incarnations is freedom movements and how those movements sometimes get things wrong. We’ve both worked, or are working, in civil rights law. You know, you get things wrong. It’s imperfect.
VP: I mean, I look back at things from a few years ago, and I think, Oh, I was wrong. Or, Oh, that was probably a mistake. Do you feel that way? I think that the best you can do is to do the work and understand that you’re not going to get it right all the time.
NMT: Sometimes I hear people say, “I want my writing to change the world.” I think when you are using the law to change the world, you can also end up doing a lot of damage. Literature doesn’t change the world in that immediate way, but it can have a more lasting power in the sense that you give readers room to explore and to think and to decide.
VP: I agree. When you’re writing a book, at the end of the day, the product that goes out into the world is yours. You have editors and friends giving you feedback, and you don’t do it alone, but at the end of the day, you have control over every word in your book. With the law, you can make your arguments, but the judge is writing the opinion, and sometimes that judge needs to get the agreement of other judges. So the law involves a much more communal process, which is part of the reason why the law also has a much broader impact. Writing is a much more precise instrument.
NMT: Turning back to your books, there’s always a really strong feminist perspective. There’s a really strong focus on justice. It’s cool that you get to explore those themes in your writing.
VP: You explore important social themes in your writing too. It’s not necessarily as close to what you work on in law, but you’re talking about alienation, isolation, religious fundamentalism, all sorts of very important social issues.
NMT: Both of us are really big advocates for our communities. You write for the South Asian community, for the Indian community, and I write for my community. It’s very cool to get to portray that in our art. You said that in the beginning of this book you dedicated it to the freedom fighters. Who do you imagine reading Ten Incarnations of Rebellion? Who is your ideal reader?
VP: Originally, I wrote it for my sister or for my friends. I keep in mind people I know, because if I think about the whole wide world, it’s too many voices.
I do think that there is value in this book for basically anybody who has a commitment to justice—to think about challenging their worldview or challenging what they think is the right way of fighting. This book is about British colonialism, which has mostly ended at this point, but other colonialist regimes continue to exist in our world. I will take a very American focus here: We basically still have colonies in America that pay taxes and are made to obey American law without having full political representation or a say in their government. And we, as Americans—even as people who consider themselves justice-oriented or progressive Americans—often forget that this is something that our country has done and is doing. It’s easy to think about colonialism as something in the past, but many of the tools of colonialism are being used today.
This book is about an isolated city that is getting limited information or propaganda, which we see happening today. Their access to seditious or contradictory texts is limited; we literally see book bans happening across the country today. They are heavily surveilled; that one’s a gimme. Their ability to gather and organize is watched and monitored, and if it gets to be too much, the police take them in. If you think about it for even a moment, all of these factors are still present in the world. So I want the text to trouble a wide group of people.
NINA MICHIKO TAM was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Tastes Like Seeing God, her debut novel, is forthcoming from Pamela Dorman Books/Penguin Random House. She has received support from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Plympton. A graduate of Yale Law School, by day she works as a civil rights attorney in Houston, Texas. Find her on Instagram @ninamichikotam.
VAISHNAVI PATEL is the New York Times bestselling author of Kaikeyi and Goddess of the River. She is a lawyer specializing in civil rights litigation, including issues of gender and racial justice. Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is her third novel. Find her on Instagram @vaishnawrites.
