Indian author Mridula Koshy's first collection of short stories - If It Is Sweet - has recently been published in Australia by Brass Monkey Books who publish fiction from the Indian sub-continent that has not seen the light of day outside of India. Mridula guest blogs to tell us the story behind her new collection.

If It Is Sweet is my first book. The stories in the collection are pretty illustrative of the idea that most writers mine the same ground over and over. In this case, my obsession is with class and all of the stories in the collection are interested in the question of how people of upper and lower classes living together in the city of New Delhi negotiate the proximity in which the city places them. It is a large enough subject that it bears repeated mining. And at increasingly greater depths. The short story as a form lends itself to such mining – especially in the tangential connections one story makes with another and in the leaping off points within stories and from one story to another. I personally love the kind of free fall situations these leaps create and hence the addiction to reading and writing short fiction. I am personally not much interested in how the form can be manipulated to create more obvious connections – minor characters in one story popping up as central characters in another. Not because such a connection is too easy, which it sometimes is, but because in its clunkiness such connections dull the senses to the possibility of more nuanced connections.

If in one story I set out to see what relationship is possible between people of different classes only to run short with the working class characters serving the middle class character’s need for a foil to her grief (an old trope this) then I got to try again in another story – to simply reverse the roles and see how the characters would play out their grief. So the middle-class mother in ‘The Good Mother’ who grieves the death of her children with the help of working-class characters as a necessary audience for the scattering of their ashes becomes a working-class mother who grieves the death of her still-born twins in ‘Romancing the Koodawallah’. This time I dig harder: she proves not to need an audience. And in any case her middle-class employer proves unable to see her grief although he has a sense of something out there that he is almost privy to.

Another obsession of mine is structure and yet another language. And again, short stories allow me to fool with these questions. Some stories in the collection are fairly conventional, confining themselves to a few days in time, others like the story from which the collection takes its title, leaps through time as generations give way to generations. In this story I am particularly interested in exploring the idea of how the poor in Delhi see themselves generationally – I know our middle-class understanding of lineage and progeny is key to our sense of ourselves as substantial, would the same prove to be true for the working-class?

As for language I found myself wrestling with the need for a language that would clothe my characters in finery that was yet simple; language that takes its weight from literature but is not musty. Such a language was important to me because one way in which people render themselves real in their own and in the eyes of others is through their adoption of language that is not dismissive. ‘I am’ we say because there are words that make me, and fine and subtle ones at that.

English is a language that is remarkable in its ability to give voice to other tongues. My characters speak in other languages but I write what they speak in English. I wrestled with finding an English in which the other language is heard by both the reader in Australia who may not speak that other language and by the reader in India who does.

If It Is Sweet by Mridula Koshy is out now.