Giller Prize Special 2024: The Chat with Deepa Rajagopalan

By Trevor Corkum · July 24, 2024 · Tagged The Chat, short stories, debut

Deepa Rajagopalan's critically acclaimed debut collection of short fiction, Peacocks of Instagram (House of Anansi Press), is a finalist for this year's Giller Prize. Souvankham Thammavongsa praises the book as “the debut of a major new writer." The collection explores ideas of home and belonging, agency and power.

The Miramichi Reader says, "Rajagopalan shares her wit and appreciation for the beauty around us with warmth, even when talking about the real drama and tragedy perfusing these stories of displacement, class difference, and privilege."

Deepa Rajagopalan won the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, Event, and Arc Poetry Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived in many cities across India, the US, and Canada.

Peacocks of Instagram is your debut collection of short fiction. Congrats! How are you feeling about having your first book out in the world?

It has been two months since my book came out, and it’s been such an expansive experience. It truly feels like a gift. Touring with my book, reading from it, signing copies—it’s been a dream.

My favourite part has been readers reaching out to me—both friends and folks I’ve never met—telling me what they loved about the book, giving me updates after reading each chapter, and sending me snippets of sentences that moved them, shattered them, gave them hope. Sometimes I think, what more could a writer ask for? Sales, I suppose, so I hope people are buying the book!

The title story is such a complex and powerful tale about belonging, identity, and diaspora, told through the perspective of a coffee shop employee who sells peacock accessories on the internet. Tell us more about writing this story, and how the seed for the story was born?

As a human in the world, I am constantly disconcerted by the news. At the time, I was reading about the farmers' protests in India, and how people in Toronto were taking to the streets, and I thought I wanted to write about it in ways that are not direct and provide a perspective that we rarely get to see in the media. Tell it slant, I suppose. I wanted to write about how the suffering of the farmers has repercussions outside of the Indian subcontinent. And I had this vision of this quirky, enterprising main character who comes across as ordinary, but who has lived a difficult, albeit full, life. She works at a coffee shop, but her life is centred around her business of selling peacock accessories on Instagram. Her husband is a peafowl researcher, also somewhat of an unconventional, strange character. I tried to use these elements to create a story that questions ideas of belonging and safety.

The collection includes a great endorsement from Giller Prize-winning author Souvankham Thammavongsa, who calls the release of your book “the debut of a major new writer.” What does it mean to receive this kind of praise at this point in your writing career?

When Souvankham Thammavongsa gives you that kind of praise, it becomes a duty to live up to that. I think about the incredible luck to be seen by her in this way. When someone like her doesn’t curb your ambition, but is ambitious for you, it truly is a talisman, something to hold on to on bad days. I think about the incredible generosity it takes and hope to pay it forward some day in such a meaningful way.

Is there a particular story in the collection that you feel most connected to personally?

I think the stories where the character Devi appears ("Maths Club" and "Driving Lessons") are probably the ones that I connect to most personally because I did go to boarding school and move to California in my early twenties. Some of these stories are of course inspired by real life, but the characters in my stories are more interesting and audacious that I am. They do the things that I think about after the fact—little acts of spunk, revenge, rashness. It’s almost as if I live vicariously through my stories.

If you could spend a day with a character from one of your stories, who would it be? What would you do together and what would you learn from one another?

I would love to spend a day with Rahel from the story "Rahel." Writing that story and creating that character who is so unapologetic about who she is, who understands that dignity is an inside business, was the most fun I had in this collection.

We would meet at her house near Trinity Bellwoods for tea, and she would tell me about all the pieces of art that she collected and the ceramics she made. We would then take a ferry to the Toronto Islands, which was where she took Freddie, and she would tell me about her first impression of Freddie. She’d show me how it’s possible to be a woman in this world who likes herself.

Excerpt from Peacocks of Instagram

"The Many Homes of Kanmani"

The first three bodies I saw at the hospital weren’t my mother. When I finally found her, bile snaked its way up my throat, choking me. It looked like they had put my mother’s clothes and her worn gold chain on a monster. Eyes swollen shut, lips like balloons, face a blueish grey. I want to remember her face the way I saw it that morning on our way to swimming lessons, her smile that revealed the gap between her front teeth and her eyes that told whole stories.

But always, that bloated creature comes to mind.

That was six years ago, when I was eight. My mother had signed me up at the swim school at the other end of the city, forty minutes away, because the pool was nicer. My mother never learned how to swim, so this was a big deal for her. While the other parents were on their phones, my mother would watch me through the big glass window. If I glanced her way, I would see her looking at me, clapping.

In the bathroom that morning, she did my hair. Using a thin comb, she drew a line from my nose up my forehead and over my head—chasing symmetry—parting my thick hair in two equal halves all the way to the back of my neck. She brushed each side until you could run your fingers through it without getting stuck. She braided both sections and twisted them into two tight buns using Love-in-Tokyos, which were these elastics she got from India, each bun bound by two glossy blue beads. She moved her head from side to side, squinting, to make sure the buns were equidistant from each other. These things were important to her.

In the car, we played the word game. You have to say a word starting with the last letter of the previous word. Whoever says the most words wins. We started playing this game so that my mother could improve her vocabulary—in English, that is. Sometimes, we gave ourselves constraints—we could only use nouns or names of animals, things like that. That day, it was toilet words. I started us off with fart, then toot, then turd, then dump, then poop, then pee, and so on. I was on a roll, and I had to pause just to get all the giggles out.

There is a spot on the highway where the road dips. My mother and I used to pretend it was a roller coaster and scream with glee when we drove over it.

English escaped my mother, always running away, running in circles. She had a degree in Tamil literature, and speaking Tamil is like making honey. In the ten years my mother was in the United States, no one would give her a job because they couldn’t understand what she was saying. But my mother was full of meaning, and the people she came across became full of knowing for having met her. She could get to the point quickly because she knew only a few words. But that wasn’t the kind of language people who were hiring were looking for.