Content Warning—miscarriage I see my anesthesiologist at the movies and it surprises me in the way that seeing someone outside the setting you know them does. There is a prick of recognition and then my mind scrambles to…
4. It is prom night. A group of us are out to eat at The Urban Hive, on the rooftop. Couples sit in pairs around a table forged of meteorite. Smoky black, with a network of tiny bubble cells,…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
Couch You could call the color of the upholstery rust, but it was rust chasing a pattern. Blanket Harshly fibered, it was never quite white. Arrangement She couldn’t arrange herself after what they’d done to her. Then It started…
By Patrick Thomas Henry • Wherever I write, I stow props: photographs and notebooks, found objects, mementoes of life away from the page. Despite my effort to shake off the strictures of my own workshop experiences, I still believe…
They were calling it Glitch Tuesday. “A woman menaced by a jackhammer,” said the radio. “It’s all hitting the fan today,” Philip said. He bit into a slice of toast. Julia had woken to the sound of a car…
1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
000 Generalities In 1999, I worked two jobs and had just gotten out of the hospital. A few afternoons a week and on Saturdays I shelved books at a small branch of the public library, as I had been…
The day you killed your mother, you wished your father dead. A whole life of could-bes glittered in your mind. A beauty parlour for your mother, reams of thread and pots of sticky wax. A lunchbox business, stacks of…
It’s a strange thing to come back to a story years after writing it. It becomes an encounter with the past. I wrote “Daughter” in 2015–2016 and took it to my first workshop. For me, the story marks a time when I began thinking about craft consciously and actively. In the workshop, we read something written in second-person POV. I’m sure I had encountered this narrative choice before, but it struck me particularly then. I admired its power and intimacy, how it grabbed you by the throat, refused to let go. It started my fascination with second person, and I changed the narrative perspective of “Daughter” from third to second. I have since read stories that perfectly execute the style to amplify thematic concerns, for example “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” by Rebecca Roanhorse and “Homecoming Is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” by Isabel J. Kim.
Revisiting “Daughter” for publication made me self-conscious. I have moved on in many ways in the how, who, and what I write. The writing seems overwrought, burdened with emotion, overly stylised at times. But some aspects feel raw and true: the intrusive thoughts, the desperate wishes and bargains we make with the world. Some aspects I recognise instinctively but realise might not be enough for readers: the fraught relationship with the father, the difficulty in capturing the day-to-day things which pile up to create a lifetime of hurt.
I discovered something of a voice through this story. My writing tends to differ story to story depending on the vibe and genre I’m going for, but it is consistently English mixed with Nepali. There are some words I have always only known in Nepali and some which don’t have an adequate English counterpart. Age eight onwards, I grew up in the West, with only the media available here. Everything I wrote—fan fiction or original—was imitations of that. Around the time I wrote “Daughter,” I was becoming aware of the need to actively resist the ‘default’ of white characters and white settings.
I had—and still have—ambivalence toward the gender roles in the story, even if they show a reality. I am conscious of the danger of perpetuating stereotypes about South Asian cultures, about women’s lives in ‘underdeveloped’ countries. I am cautious too of characterising a place, pinning it down for a Western gaze to categorise and consume. There is an intentional vagueness to the setting (the city, the capital, the border, the foreigners). I started off with an arid desert but, as I wrote, the ‘known’ filtered in—as it always does in my work—a confluence of the real and fictional that I find productive. In the stretch of months during which I worked on “Daughter,” there were devastating earthquakes in Nepal, as well as conflict on the Nepal-India border. The story doesn’t attempt to capture those, but the real-world events did soak into its fabric.
I like to think of “Daughter” as a timestamp of myself as a growing writer. It helps me accept it as it is and let it out into the world.
ISHA KARKI lives in London. Her short fiction won the Dinesh Allirajah Prize in 2021 and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize and Mslexia Short Story Competition in 2020. She is a graduate of Clarion West and currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. @IshaKarki11
