Your novella “The Ice-Skater” tells the story of two Indian laborers who travel to Dubai for work and become friends. You include a wealth of detail about the life of a migrant worker in Dubai. What inspired you to write the story, and how did you go about researching it?

I lived in Dubai as a child and took ice-skating lessons there. I was so terrible at it that the instructor actually recommended to my mother that I give it up. I’d repressed this, naturally, until I went skating again as an adult in late 2022. I was still terrible, but my then partner was an excellent skater, and I loved watching him zip around the rink. Around the same time, the FIFA World Cup was being held in Qatar. I began to see stories in the news about the many laborers who’d died in the Gulf while working on infrastructure projects ramping up to the World Cup. The causes of death spanned from heatstroke to suicide. From there, I began to imagine two lives, two men—one who spent his time in the cold and the other in the heat. For research, I watched investigative documentaries and videos on YouTube that had been uploaded by men who lived in worker accommodations. I read whatever I could find about illegal recruitment fees and the other labor-related binds that migrant workers often find themselves in. I also went skating a few more times, with a friend who very kindly held my hand as we made our rounds. I often write stories in a burst, all at once, but this story came slowly, line by line.

The two men meet different fates, not so much thanks to luck but because one man has a greater awareness of the risks of the job and knows what to ask in advance. The narrative addresses the idea of predestination and, in a way, debunks it. Was that part of your plan for it from the beginning?

I can see where the next paragraph will go only when I’m standing on the precipice of it. So, no, I didn’t have much of a plan when I started, though I was drawn to the image of an inexperienced skater holding on to the side barrier of a rink and watching, mesmerized, as an experienced skater speeds across the ice. I was writing toward that scene, which, now that I’m thinking about it, might itself have the motif of two different fates: mobility and stasis, confidence and shame. I had also been reading Anne Carson’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies at the time. There is a line from “Herakles” that still haunts me: “In an instant, luck changes. / In an instant, children die.” I say this to point out all the ingredients on the counter.

Though the men are both manual laborers, they come from different circumstances. Yogan is from outside Lucknow, in northern India, and has a more provincial background; Samar, who is more worldly, is from Mumbai, to the south. Do those distinctions hold or become irrelevant once they reach Dubai?

I have always felt that distinctions between people from the same country fade when they come to a new place. What you have in common, as outsiders, is greater than what initially set you apart. What Yogan and Samar recognize in each other early on is a desire to better the conditions of the women they love, their families. They’re men in their twenties, just stepping into a new stage of life. They’re excited to talk about their wives, their dreams, their clothes! That is so much more interesting to them in that moment of meeting than where they’ve come from.

Yogan and Samar and their roommates arrive in Dubai with a limited sense of what awaits them, much of it gleaned from vloggers online. Their visions of their lives and their potential futures seem to draw more on what they’ve seen in Bollywood movies, which are a driving force in the story. Does Bollywood have that degree of influence?

Oh, yes! I am thinking particularly about the slate of films that came out in the late nineties and early two-thousands. The Bollywood dimension of this story took me by surprise, since I was never a film person and used to feel embarrassed by the big musical numbers, which were always about two people finally coming together in a large, familial display of affection and acceptance. I used to watch these movies with my parents, and something about their overly chaste rituals of romance felt even more suggestive to me than an onscreen kiss would have. I suppose I also didn’t want my parents to know how much I actually enjoyed watching these saccharine love stories! Which is to say that these films got into my bloodstream despite my resistance. In writing Yogan and Samar, who are both so earnest, I began to wonder how their lives would be different if, unlike me, they’d wholeheartedly embraced these films and their sentimentality, taking cues from the screen heroes to fuel their own courage and ambition and courtships. Where else do we learn what our lives could look like if not from movies (and books, of course)?

This is very rich territory for fiction. Did you consider writing a novel-length version of this story, or was it always intended as a short-form piece?

I think it was always going to be a story, though I definitely worried when it seemed to keep getting longer.

You have been working on your first novel. Does it relate in any way to “The Ice-Skater”? How challenging was it to make the leap from writing short fiction to a book-length narrative?

My novel, which I’ve just finished, unfolds over a few days in an apartment in Mumbai where two women—a college student and her childhood nanny—meet again after many years apart. The novel explores the strange, intimate relationship between them, a complicated kind of love; their bond is almost like that of a mother and daughter, but in a much more latent way. The book is divided into two parts, one told from the perspective of the student and one from the perspective of the former nanny. In order to make writing the novel seem less daunting to myself, I thought of it as two novellas side-by-side. Having the narrative take place within a limited time frame helped with that, too. After having written stories for so long, I’m still getting used to the roominess of a novel, how both characters and author have so much space in which to breathe. As I work on edits, I catch myself jumping through time the way I would in a story, in a single clause or with a line break, and then I realize that I can slow down, I can show the weather changing—such luxury! The substance of the novel is very different from “The Ice-Skater,” but I can see that it engages with similar ideas about immigration and what we might owe to those we’ve left behind in our home countries. ♦