The Way You Want to Be Loved
About
At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.
In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.
At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.
Author
Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease: Stories and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. Recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His translations have been nominated for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation 2023 and VOW Book Awards 2024. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel called Noikhon Etia Duroit and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Email: aruni.kashyap@uga.edu
Praise
‘These powerful stories shorten the distance between South Asia and America, which are, refreshingly, not positioned as opposite pulls but as companion landscapes where dream, desire, and defiance thrive. With a cast of characters who are emotionally intelligent yet still flawed, imperfect, yet still endearing, Aruni Kashyap eschews the predictable narratives and brings us unique takes on leaving home, loving family, and longing for passion. Daring and surprising, The Way You Want to Be Loved is the must-read of our times.’
–Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night
‘Indian literature is extremely diverse, spreading over multiple vernaculars and dialects, each with vibrant histories. Indian writing in English also represents an old body of work that long precedes the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Despite this dynamic literary landscape, literature from India’s Northeast—a self-sufficient region with a mélange of languages, cultures, and peoples—has remained relatively obscure to the wider world until recently. In the last two or so decades, a number of outstanding writers and translators of fiction in English have emerged from this region, dispelling its obscure position and challenging the way Indian literature is read globally. One prominent name associated with this dynamic wave of storytelling is Aruni Kashyap.’
–Split Lip Magazine
‘This masterful collection mixes Chekovian realism with Borgesian magic to create a new and vital literary voice for our times. With wit, intelligence, and humor, Kashyap’s stories grapple with the tangled predicament of anyone who has ever felt themselves an outsider: in a new country, in the labyrinth of academia, or within one’s own family. These stories range the world from the mountains of the Himalayas to the cold plains of the American Midwest, and I would happily follow Kashyap’s writing anywhere.’
–Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design
"A book of ferocious inquiry and vast heart, delightful formal play and intellectual agility, The Way You Want to Be Loved asks how we can bear to live with the distances that make and unmake us."
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
‘One of India’s rising literary voices.’
—The Florida Review
‘An impassioned reflection on displacement, dispersal, and life in the diaspora.’
—Wasafiri Magazine
‘A new voice in the burgeoning oeuvre of anglophone fiction from northeast India. Kashyap’s collection of short stories continues the exploration of the impact of political violence on everyday life in the northeast Indian state of Assam that characterized The House, while simultaneously charting new territory.’
—World Literature Today
‘In The Way You Want to Be Loved, Kashyap precisely embarks on a journey to undo the single-story surrounding his homeland. He makes no effort to play safe by catering to the mainland’s expectations from a writer coming from India’s Northeast. With the first story itself Kashyap plunges headlong into murky waters without losing sight of his goal—to narrate the tales of displaced individuals desperately negotiating home.’
—HuffPost
‘The stories in Aruni Kashyap’s The Way You Want to Be Loved share a discussion about the struggles of finding community and acceptance, whether as a result of sexuality, relocation, or misunderstandings based on perceived cultural awareness. . . . Despite the dark themes, most of Kashyap’s stories have a dry sense of humor and occasionally make the reader laugh out loud.’
—Rain Taxi Review (Minneapolis)
‘A collection of poignant, finely crafted stories set against the backdrop of violence that has long racked north-eastern India.’
—Amitav Ghosh, via Twitter
‘One marvels at Kashyap’s technical prowess, the deft chess moves on the storyboard—the flow of the story intact at all times. . . . The Way You Want to Be Loved is an acerbic, unusual, transgressive and frequently funny collection that I’m sure will be talked about for years to come. It’s also dark as f***, so carry a flashlight.’
—Open
‘And every once in a while, Kashyap’s conversational, no-frills prose yields startling imagery: a woman seeing a bloodied face printed in a newspaper and imagining that the blood has seeped into the red lentils that were wrapped in the paper; another woman swimming compulsively and noisily across a pond because she doesn’t want to hear the sounds of her son making love with another man in his hut. At such moments, these stories strike a fine balance between being stark depictions of real lives and being as fable-like as the tale of the oppressed leaf-girl Tejimola.’
—Scroll.in
‘In their very existence, Kashyap’s stories are defiant, challenging the mainstream intelligentsia’s authority: Why must the voice of the subaltern fit the narratives constructed by those that are not? The Way You Want to Be Loved is a book we did not know we needed, and for precisely that reason, a book that must be read.’
—The Hindu Business Line
‘To open author Aruni Kashyap’s book The Way You Want to Be Loved is to find your way into a wonderland of long short stories. . . . Watch out for this voice from a lesser-known corner of our country.
—The New Indian Express
‘When an author writes from a restive part of India—say, Kashmir or, in the present case, Assam—readers often expect him to focus on questions of violence or identity. This can unwittingly infringe on the author’s right to express himself freely, and relegate his own experiences to a secondary position. In The Way You Want to Be Loved, Aruni Kashyap not only addresses this issue but also challenges it through remarkable short stories, while exploring the ideas of linguistic and ethnic stereotypes and sexuality.’
—The Telegraph
‘In a cool, dispassionate tone that mines intimate, sometimes incidental situations, Kashyap’s stories are quietly affecting, often sparkling with valuable insight. . . . Kashyap explores love and sex, desire and myth, violence and conflict, at an easy, page-turning pace. It reminded me very much of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s unforgettable collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, which drew out quietly devastating moments in the lives of Nigerian men and women, many of them living away from their homeland in America, caught in an unending abyss between two disparate worlds.’
—The Asian Age
‘The stories that make up Aruni Kashyap’s unflinching new collection, The Way You Want to Be Loved, roam between the turbulent villages of Assam and the frigid placidity of the American Midwest, and explore the complexities of identity and isolation, violence and resilience amidst diverse backdrops. In these wide-ranging stories, folklore and sorcery are interlaced with spikey meditations on race and belonging. The connective tissue is found in the centering of characters who intentionally and unintentionally don’t fit the norm, who push against the urge to generalise—and the urge to dismiss.’
—Helter Skelter
‘There is this sense of “translation” throughout Kashyap’s [short]-story collection. Every character is an outsider to the world around them: a homosexual man in his village in Assam, an Assamese in New Delhi, an Assamese in America, an inter-racial couple in the home of a conservative American family, and so on. The stories present characters that exist without that perfect jigsaw fit, of a world where we are always left with a sense of unfinished, of new questions to answer even after the story is long finished.’
—The Chakkar: An Indian Arts Review
‘An intense page-turner.’
—MensXP
‘The award-winning US-based Assamese writer has delivered a collection of immersive short stories, which address themes including repression, fundamentalism, and the violation of human rights. The book also asks important questions about environment and territorial sovereignty, along with giving urgent insights into an often silenced and marginalized culture.’
—Eastern Eye UK
‘Tales of insurgency and violence, of myth and history, of sexuality and demography, of diasporic and local frontiers make his [Kashyap’s] new collection of ten short stories simply an enthralling experience.’
—Split Lip magazine
‘Through the short stories in The Way You Want to Be Loved, Kashyap points to a binding element in the midst of our differing perceptions of home. It is, as he seems to say, the necessity to be more tolerant and accepting, to lend an ear, to be kind, and to empathise, whether with yourself, your family, friends or even a stranger. He points to how our different perceptions of home need not threaten our identity—there is no need to resort to violence to assert and establish our identity over anyone else’s. For Kashyap, all our different homes can be brought together to form a happy society through kindness and acceptance. And it is through this that the wandering person finds a home in a heart.’
—The Curious Reader
Interview with Aruni Kashyap
1. On the occasion of your book’s publication in its first American edition, I wondered if you could situate the work for readers in the US who may not know a lot about Indian geography. Can you tell me about Assam?
Well, Assam is in the northeastern part of India, a cluster of about eight extremely heterogeneous and multilingual states, with many indigenous and migrant communities living together—sometimes peacefully and often not. People worldwide understand Assam through two images: one of them is very prominent, Assam Tea. It is a brand that is known around the world, especially among caffeine supporters. A large chunk of the world's tea used to be and continues to be produced in Assam. This is, of course, due to colonialism by the British, who went there and established plantations.
But some parts of the world also know Assam because of the armed insurgency against Indian rule that started in 1979. Assam burst into an armed insurgency, demanding to secede. Like other lesser-known insurgencies in the world, this conflict between the Indian state and the rebels, along with the stories of people who suffered, went largely unreported. During this period, more than thirty thousand people were killed on both sides; many more were injured, handicapped, and killed extrajudicially by the Indian army. Hence, it is not incidental that most of my work focuses on the tension between the state and the individual, the legacy of state violence, and tries to record, archive, and memorialize this recent history.
2. Your book includes characters who cross boundaries at various scales, within India, from India to the United States, and within the US. How do you see yourself participating within, or complicating, conventions in the literature of immigration?
I have complex, ambivalent thoughts about Indian Writing in English but it hasn’t stopped me from loving this body of work. I have long admired the work of amazing and brilliant South Asian American writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma, Rakesh Satyal, Shyam Selvadurai, and many more. After coming to the US, I wanted to see myself in this space. I wanted to see and read about fictional works where my experience would be reflected. I wanted to read about the experiences of people who shared my language history and culture in South Asian Anglophone fiction. Thankfully, the groundwork was done not only by Lahiri, Sharma, Satyal, and Selvaduari but also by writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy. For many reasons, the work of Lahiri, Satyal, and Selvadurai was significant and empowering for me; their work, in many ways, provided me with the literary permission to write my truth.
Lahiri’s fiction about Bengali immigrants was something I connected deeply with not only because of the numerous similarities between Bengalis and Assamese but also because of a shared sensibility—a sensibility, primarily literary, that was strengthened by my reading of Bengali writers in Bengali language since my childhood. For queer people, it is so important to see their experience reflected in fiction, in culture, and Selvaduari and Satyal’s work permitted me to write my own and tell that young college-going Aruni that “you are not alone.” So, it was a classic case of writing what I wanted to read. But at the same time, as a literature student, I was aware that my work, if it is good or published, would contribute to this beautiful body of work and further add nuance to this conversation.
3. In several of your stories, I had the interesting sensation of being thrust into political situations where there was a sense of urgency but also a trust in the reader to sort things out, rather than having power dynamics explained in detail. Can you talk about whether and how you see politics as an element in your fiction?
Politics is an inseparable part of socially responsible fiction. Commercial fiction writers may not include it because they don’t want to lose a reader or polarize their reader base. They want to be read by everybody, but fiction critically commenting on society's vagaries through tragedy and humor can’t avoid politics.
This is such an important question because I get this wherever I go in the States to read or speak. It is a unique aspect of the American literary establishment to think of politics as something separate from fiction writing, and many writers, even when I was in grad school ten years ago, shy away from politics. I think this is the result of systematic covert campaigns that started during the Cold War period when the American government entered the creative writing classrooms and propped up work that was belletristic and shamed everything that was decidedly political.
This has had far-reaching consequences in American literature. Insularity is one of the common accusations against American letters, the lack of translations being the second. The lack of diversity, both racial and aesthetic, is another. Publishers fear political work and are ashamed of work that takes a strong political stance. I have faced rejections from editors for being “too political,” but the same editors don’t have an answer when you ask them how political one can be. I hope American readers, editors, and agents aggressively look beyond America, especially in the Global South, where most of the world lives; they will see that even commercial fiction takes a political stance.
The politics in my fiction is as important as setting and character. Politics is a character in my work, and it is simply because it is what is. If I am telling stories about the fragility of democracy, about the impermeant state, racism, and state violence, I doubt I can avoid the political ramifications in people’s lives.
4. Snow comes up in moving ways at a couple of points in the book. It made me wonder: When did you first see snow?
In Minnesota, where I went to grad school, and trust me, it killed all the romanticism I had attached to snowfalls. It looks amazing when you see it in a Mira Nair movie, but not when you experience it. I have lived in Georgia for the last six years, and I don’t miss one bit of the snow. Minnesota killed all my romance for snow, and anyone who has lived in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, or Wisconsin would agree with me!
5. Also food! Was it a deliberate decision to write (evocatively, I should say) about food and eating across many of the collection’s stories?
Food and the preparation and sharing of food are such an integral part of community-oriented societies! I missed that when I came to the US because I had never had dinner or breakfast alone before. At home, we all cooked together. In my village, people cook large meals together, spend hours chattering, and sharing jokes and memories, and that happens often. I suppose it is impossible in highly urbanized or supremely individualistic societies. Hence, it was genuinely subconscious. I never realized it until people, especially my western readers, started pointing it out. For us, it is so ordinary—I mean the presence of food and elaborate meals. At the same time, what we cook is intentional and replete with cultural beliefs often based on science, understanding of gut behavior—knowledge that our ancestors have passed down across generations. One of the reasons I started watching police procedurals was because when I was attending grad school, it killed me to eat alone, so I started watching something while eating.
6. I know you’re an advocate for work that often fails to generate the awareness (at least among readers in the US) that it deserves. What’s a book you value that may not be familiar to many people reading this interview?
There are so many! I even once made a list of such books for Electric Literature, recommending my favorite Indian fiction. I would say The Moth of Eaten Howdah of a Tusker by Indira Goswami is a brilliant and powerful novel that needs to be widely read. I am also a big fan of Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an indigenous writer from Arunachal Pradesh who writes in Assamese language. My favorite is his novel called Sanam, about polyandry among the Monpa tribe.