3 Questions with Rashmitha Muniandi
Rashmitha Muniandi is a writer and journalist from Bangalore, India. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is the recipient of the 2023-24 Poets & Writers and REAL Fellowships. She writes fiction on race, postcolonial India, and deities. Her work “Mother to Mother," which is featured in our current print issue, was also a 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner.
Associate Editor Noa Padawer-Blattm talks with Rashmitha Muniandi about her work in Issue 75, out now!!
The address of “you” in your piece “Mother to Mother” seems central to how this story unfolds. At points, this address shifts – between ma and pa. What about this craft element (the address of “you”) seemed right to you when you were telling “Mother to Mother?” What does this craft element offer to you as the writer?
At some point, while writing this story, the address of "you" became inevitable. I realized I couldn't tell this story any other way. I wanted this story to function interchangeably as a letter. I often write letters to my characters, particularly to difficult ones who keep changing their locks on me. As a writer, this address offers me a rare intimacy with my characters that is only possible within letters. In this story, the characters began to animate within the pages before I could address them. So, I began calling out to them in hindsight. "You" was how I could address them, how I could call them back onto the page.
I’m thinking about the role of numbers, conceptions of eternity, and the recollection of memory in this piece. How did you conceptualize time and memory when writing and drafting “Mother to Mother?”
I thought about numbers a lot while writing this story because my central character, the mother, is a mathematics teacher. In this story, there is a constant push-and-pull between numbered time and its distortion by memory. They both complicate each other. Memory operates on a tangent against the years and ages and numbers mentioned in the story. Whenever I attempted a little math to plot the story, memory resisted my attempts. So I let memory blot all my graphs and seep outward. Then there was the fact that I wrote this during the pandemic. Time was distorted as it was. Numbers lost their value. Only memory seemed to take my side.
Is there anything else about “Mother to Mother” that you’d like to share, about content or process, that we wouldn’t know at first glance?
I am intrigued by the passdown of stories across time. Although fictional, many portions of the story were difficult to write. At the time of writing this, I was mourning a loved one during the pandemic. I may have borrowed this story from my mother. She may have borrowed it from her own mother. “Mother to Mother” is then also the story of daughter to daughter. As the teller of this story, I am unimportant. It is a passdown, after all. I keep wondering: whose story is this to tell? The mother's or the daughter's? Perhaps they must sit down and decide that among themselves, then let me know.