Tashan Mehta: On the Circular Nature of Time, Moving Toward Multiplicity, Multiple Drafts, and Her New Novel ‘Mad Sisters of Esi’
Tashan Mehta’s intriguingly titled Mad Sisters of Esi (DAW Books, 2025), was originally published in India by HarperCollins in early January 2023. It came to my attention, in no small part thanks to the gorgeous cover designed by Upamanyu Bhattacharyya, in late 2023, and I immediately ordered myself a copy. It would take me nearly a year to find myself in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, but that wait couldn’t be more worth it.
“Does anyone know what the shape of madness looks like?” asks a book unlike any other I’ve so far read. Amidst a festival of madness, a museum of collective memory, the whale of Babel, and a host of characters across time and space are questions with fluid answers. About cosmic madness and memories and magic, about time and truth and story, about the twisting, embracing, enduring threads of family and sisterhood, about what we keep, what slips through our fingers, and what remains against all odds.
This is a feverish dream, if not outright a fever dream, that starts with Myung and Laleh, the keepers of the whale of Babel. When Myung, restless to discover everything that lies beyond everything she’s ever known, flees the whale, she kickstarts an adventure that will lead her to the heart of the truth about the mythical, enigmatic Mad Sisters of Esi.
Tashan’s debut novel, The Liar’s Weave, was shortlisted for the Prabha Khaitan Woman's Voice Award. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Tashan about her sophomore novel Mad Sisters of Esi via email, about the nature of stories, fantastical worldbuilding, the pain and pleasure of creation, and more.
Anushree Nande: Sophomore novels are known to be notoriously taxing. You’ve mentioned elsewhere that Mad Sisters of Esi, which you spent many years and multiple iterations writing, is the book of your heart. Can you take us from how and where it all started, and where you ended up? How was it different from writing your debut novel?
Tashan Mehta: Sophomore novels are the worst—I actually trashed mine, and it’s lying in a folder on my laptop, never to see the light of day. Mad Sisters of Esi is the second novel I’ve published but the third I’ve written. When I wrote my debut novel, I was very concerned with permission. Was I allowed to do this? Would people believe it? Did it fall into accepted boundaries? Strangely, it made me more inclined to ignore the bits I thought needed more work or research. Because I was struggling every day to allow myself to write the book, I had less energy to throw into trusting my instincts. Mad Sisters was much easier in that way because I had decided, by that point, that permission wasn’t needed; no one cared enough to withhold it from me. I was free. And if I was free, then I could do whatever I wanted. Mad Sisters was also a very dramatic book in how it appeared. The first page wrote itself in my mind’s eye when I was on a plane back from Delhi (ironically, as I bemoaned my rubbish sophomore novel). It felt like being touched by a spirit. It was alive and it came in my hour of need, like a saviour. I assumed it meant the book would be easy to write. I was wrong, of course. It just kept dying on the page, so I kept having to change how I saw it, until we went from a 30,000-word novella following the aesthetic of Blade Runner 2049 to the 1,20,000-word surreal fantasy you’re reading now. That first page I wrote on the plane never made it past draft #3.
AN: You wrote, in the Bombay Literary Magazine newsletter, about how you had to become the writer and the person you needed to be to tell this story in the only form it was meant to be told. What did the process teach you about yourself, and how will those insights and shifted perception impact your future work? What was it like trusting the story to tell itself until you had grown into who you needed to be?
TM: Every time I think about the process that made Mad Sisters of Esi, I am intensely grateful. It was a weird time, but it gave me so many truths I hold dear. I learned, first and foremost, that I knew nothing about writing. Like, nothing. Zero. Zilch. I was a novice, and a bad one at that, and nothing was going to get done if I didn’t accept it. I then found out that being a novice was actually superb. It meant no one cared what you did, which meant you could do whatever you liked. I stopped looking at ‘good’ books and asking myself how they did it. Instead, I looked at the story, at the feeling that moved underneath the idea, and asked, “How do I capture that?” And then I asked myself, “How do I capture that in a way that interests me?” I cannot explain how empowering it is to chase your instincts, to listen to them, to write the book you want to read. Focusing on me as a reader meant I could rein in some of my stronger writerly desires. My main writerly desire is to do a complicated and stunning piece of language that either loses, stabs, or runs away from the reader. Losing, stabbing, and running away have their place, of course, but they must serve the book. This was one of the biggest transformations from my debut novel: I had this strong belief that the story of these sisters existed outside of me, beyond me, and my job wasn’t to invent it but capture it as powerfully as I could. It meant writing this book wasn’t about me or my writerly ambitions. It was about trying, within the limits of my talent, to create a home for the spirit of the book.
What was it like trusting the story? Awful. I’m doing it again for the new book, and I remember now just how difficult it is. It requires patience, and this strange knife-edge balance between acceptance and frustration, between reaching—arm outstretched, fingers straining, you silently screaming—and sitting still on a sofa. I continue to be terrible at it. But it helps that I did Mad Sisters. That I trust myself enough to throw away everything I’ve worked on and pivot, on something as flimsy as “this is boring.” It helps to think of the story as beyond me and to push myself to do it justice, to find its voice and perspective. There’s still frustration and struggle and anger at the limits of what I can do, at my failure to execute, but there is also trust, ease, and a belief that I will find my way to it, somehow. I also remind myself that each book is a different person, asking a different question, wanting its story told in a way that’s true to its spirit. Achieving this takes time, and it’s never the time you think it will take.
AN: One of the most striking elements of the book is its worldbuilding, which is immersive and yet often enigmatic, magical and visceral, yet fluid. Just like the non-linear narrative. How did you approach the worldbuilding (are you a plotter, a pantser or somewhere in between), and did it change, if at all, through the different iterations? How did you decide what the best version of the narrative structure was going to be?
TM: I am going to answer the last question first, because it also answers the first question: I decided on the best version of the narrative structure by simply doing every possible combination I could. The one you’re reading is the only one that worked. It always surprises me how much of writing is order. You tell a reader a piece of information too soon or too late and it doesn’t land. Readers have written to me about the strange structure of Mad Sisters, and asked why I didn’t choose a linear narrative. The truth is, I tried. A linear narrative died on the page. You put “Esi” first and it doesn’t bloom, because you haven’t waited for it. Put “Whale of Babel” last and it’s too slow, too challenging a world after Esi. Put “Ojda” first, and there are too many mysteries to unpack too soon. The narrative structure of the book is the closest I could get to its spirit, to the circular nature of time, families, and longing, to metamorphoses and the crumbling of what we tell ourselves. It’s the best way to make you live it. Which sort of answers your first question: how did I worldbuild? By basically doing every possible combination I could. I like how M. John Harrison describes worldbuilding—as co-creation between reader and writer, rather than a fixed, concrete set of rules. To me, society always seems to be chaos masquerading as order, and the fluidity of co-creation mimics the real world more closely than traditional worldbuilding. It also let me lean into the generative possibility of language, which Calvino is a master at (and does beautifully in Invisible Cities). So, panster—all the way. I did plan once, though! After more than twenty drafts of Mad Sisters, I sat and broke down what I had into beat points in a Word document, to help me find the final shape. It was incredibly useful, although I changed almost everything as I wrote.
AN: Whether between Magali and Wisa, or Myung and Laleh—there is so much tender focus on the engulfing, all-encompassing experience that is sisterhood. Was this always a narrative focus or did it come in later? Who was the first character to appear when you began?
TM: The very first character that appeared to me was Laleh and the mention of their creator, Great Wisa (both names were different then). Once I built out Wisa’s backstory, it became the story, and the book evolved from there. But no, sisterhood wasn’t the core at all. Family was, and identity, and belonging, but they were my preoccupations leaking into the novel, themes I could only see out of the corner of my eye. My notes for the book were basically: “What is this about?”, “Where is this going?”, “Why won’t this make sense?”, “What are we saying?”. It took me many drafts to find the anchor line (it’s about two sisters searching for where they belong), but once I had it, it helped clarify what the story was reaching for.
AN: Whether the whale song or the sounds and songs of the Museum of Collective Memory, why is “song the answer”?
TM: Oh, because I am terrible at song. I can’t hear beats, I am always off rhythm, I am tone deaf and cannot capture a note correctly (or even hear where I’m going wrong). Which means music and sound has always fascinated me. I found my partner around the same time as I began writing this book, and he loves (and works closely) with sound. He spoke about song from the perspective of an artist: how it carries feeling, how it moves past language’s inadequacies, how it works with our bodies and with space. That love found its way into the book. Mad Sisters is all about that which is beyond us, and song is beyond me.
AN: There is a lot of emphasis on fairytales, folktales, the oral tradition of storytelling, the nature of stories in Mad Sisters. Can you elaborate on that inspiration/fascination that’s evident in the book?
TM: Part of my preoccupation with folktales is that I was trying to write what I would want to read, and fairytales, folktales, sea explorers and quests were my favorite stories when I was young. There is such inherent wonder in explorer narratives, because it hinges on discovery, on greeting the strange with curiosity. It’s the same with fairytales: your wonder isn’t meant to be packed up and subsumed into “believability.” Your wonder is the point. I also read part of Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong when researching this novel, and I was blown away by his theory that writing was a form of technology that limited the multiplicity of stories. Before writing, stories were passed down orally and then expected to be changed from one teller to the other. Consistency and believability weren’t vital. Instead, it was more important to speak to a deeper, hidden truth inherent in the current circumstances that the story was being born into—even if that meant changing the story when you told it. Based on the circumstances and the truth, the story changed. It was meant to change. It was meant to speak to its time, not stay the same. It spoke so clearly to the multiplicity I was chasing in the book (see answer #8) that it became an essential feature.
AN: What draws you towards the stories that you write? And is there anything you’d like readers to take away from them?
TM: I’m still piecing this answer together. I did an interview with Helter Skelter magazine where Nirica, the interviewer, pointed out that my endings are both hopeful and sad. I had never seen it like that; to me, Mad Sisters is a positively joyful ending. But I loved the insight, and it’s not one I could have reached on my own. So I will say that I continue to be interested in relational ties and how we navigate them, in power, and in how systems and individuals cocreate each other. But that’s as far as I’ve got. As for what I’d like readers to take away from my books, it depends on the book. In The Liar’s Weave, it’s that all power hides within it a type of powerlessness. In Mad Sisters of Esi, I want them to look at the sheer cosmic madness of the universe around us––too much for us to comprehend––and to notice the fragile, tender ties we’ve built to keep us sane. Then I want them to appreciate both the ties and the cosmic madness. But mostly I’d love readers to ignore me completely, and meet the books on their own terms. Once the book is published, I’m irrelevant, except to help readers prepare for the book and the type of conversation they’re about to have.
AN: In the book, you’ve made an interesting link between madness and magic, that is seeing clearly (maybe too clearly) at the dark swirly abyss that is the cosmos and its infinite wonders and terrors). What can be wrong with knowing? Can you explain how you thought about and developed this theme?
TM: This was an organic product of the novel: I suspect the book always wanted to go there and it kept urging me towards it. How I started on the journey is, in retrospect, very odd. I remember being frustrated with the usual writing advice. Show don’t tell. What does your character want versus what does your character need? Are you writing a three-act structure or a five-act structure? It all seemed to operate on fundamental assumptions of what the world should be like, and I found that ridiculous. The world was eleven billion things before nine a.m. and all of them were contradictory. Similarly, I found myself exhausted with my single camera, stuck-view imagination: a point of view that watched the story unfold from one viewpoint and then tried to tell it as objectively and as close to reality as possible. It was silly. What was reality? Or objectivity? Why was I assuming that what I could see was more “real,” “rooted” and “true” than what I couldn’t? Plus, character! What did my character want versus need? I didn’t know. They didn’t know. No one really knows! You’re not one person; you’re a thousand people gathered through time, all your past selves and your future selves and your present selves. And you’re not even an individual; you’re an individual navigating a porous, fluid boundary between you and the community you come from, the history of the environment you live in, and the land that feeds you. All of this was pushing me towards multiplicity, particularly multiplicity versus singularity and how they nestled within each other. From there, it was a short leap to the multiplicity of the universe around us, and how we try and order that multiplicity through neural pathways/shortcuts and language (without it, we’d collapse under the sheer plethora of information). Being able to see the multiplicity in the singularity felt like a power. It was the ability to touch the sublime, and let it both awe and humble you.
AN: What sort of research and reading did you undertake throughout the drafting process or before it?
TM: I can’t remember most of it, to be honest—that’s the problem with taking so long to do a book and not knowing quite where you’re going. But the few key texts that shaped my approach that I can still remember: Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjonerud, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn, M. John Harrison’s essays on worldbuilding, and Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter J. Ong.
AN: Writing can be as brutal as it’s beautiful. How do you keep yourself hopeful and motivated? What do you hold on to when everything is fluid and ephemeral?
TM: Ah, what a beautiful question. Writing has been my best friend. I’ve walked away from it, yelled at it, promised to never see it again, and made a multi-step plan to abandon it (I don’t treat my human best friends like this, I promise). It, in turn, has not been easy to love or live with (“brutal” is correct). But it is an anchor in my life, an invitation to live more deeply, and to sit with the questions I ask in the course of living so that I may search for the answers. More preciously, it helps me find the words for that which is invisible and intangible. In so doing, it helps me give those words to others. That last bit is a gift to me. Language isn’t just to communicate; it can carve out reality. It brings forth that which lives in the shadows and now may be examined by the light of day. And when you look at something, it gives you the power to greet it and form a relationship with it. Also, I love writing. Love gets you through most things.
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Tashan Mehta is a novelist whose interest lies in form and the fantastical. Her second novel, Mad Sisters of Esi, won the 2024 AutHer Award for Best Novel as well as the 2024 Subjective Chaos Kind of Award for Best Fantasy, and was on the 2023 Locus Recommended Reading List. Her first novel, The Liar’s Weave, was shortlisted for the Prabha Kaitan’s Woman’s Voice Award. She has been part of the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency (India) and was British Council Writer-in-Residence at Anglia Ruskin University (UK). She can be found at tashanmehta.com.