My latest book is The One Who Swam With The Fishes.

"A mesmerizing account of the well-known story of Matsyagandha ... and her transformation from fisherman’s daughter to Satyavati, Santanu’s royal consort and the Mother/Progenitor of the Kuru clan." - Hindustan Times

"Themes of fate, morality and power overlay a subtle and essential feminism to make this lyrical book a must-read. If this is Madhavan’s first book in the Girls from the Mahabharata series, there is much to look forward to in the months to come." - Open Magazine

"A gleeful dollop of Blytonian magic ... Reddy Madhavan is also able to tackle some fairly sensitive subjects such as identity, the love of and karmic ties with parents, adoption, the first sexual encounter, loneliness, and my favourite, feminist rage." - Scroll

26 April 2023

The Internet Personified: Several observations and an event

Dearest daffodils,

It’s out! The book I wrote during the pandemic and then worked on for a few years after, finally now, in the third anniversary of the lockdown is available on thankfully non-lockdown-ed shelves.

Almost all bookstores across India stock it. (If they don’t, please let me know and I’ll fix it.) It would be very helpful if you were to actually go to a store and ask for it, space being limited, shops often only stock what’s “in demand” and only reorder books once the first lot of 3 or 4 sell out. Readers outside India, I have no good news for you yet, however, if you still have a Kindle India account, you can buy it wherever you are. I’m not in India to sign copies right now, although if you email me, I can send you a digital personalised inscription you can print out and stick to the front of your book, because we’re super modern like that. (Reply to this newsletter or meenakshimadhavanATgmailDOTcom.)

Of course, if you’re super busy and just don’t go to bookshops any more, here is the link to *sigh* Amazon as well. I hate linking to them because they offer hefty discounts where almost all of the discount is straight out of the author’s pocket, HOWEVER, they are extremely convenient, so don’t feel guilty, I do it all the time as well.

Buy Soft Animal online

I’d recommend you get a physical copy because it has these really cool footnotes that are more fun to read on paper, but of course, they’ve done wonders with the ebook version as well, and shelf space is valuable.

If you are buying it off Amazon, could I ask that you leave me a review as well? This bumps up the book in the algorithm and makes it more visible in search results. A totally honest review, of course. We’re not in the book praising business, only honest critiques.

Anyway, that’s my selling done for now. Expect to see a little reminder about the book in the intro section of this newsletter for a while, but no other news unless it’s really exciting.

Observations

I was recently thinking about this guy I used to know. Not know-know, but just know. We were friends, I went to his house for a few parties. I don’t know what brought him into my mind, I recall when I thought of him, sitting on a sofa, watching Indian Matchmaking—oh yes, it was one of the people on the show. He didn’t physically resemble this guy from my past at all, but something about the way he was talking triggered the memory. Anyway, I realised it had been a good fifteen years since I had heard anything of him, which would not be so unusual had I not been acquainted with lots of our common friends. How do some people vanish so completely from our lives? Is the severing of our connection a physical act, as though we are attached by string and it’s cut with scissors or is our connection more like a chalk line which fades away, blown away by the wind and when it isn’t refreshed, just vanishes, leaving no trace at all?
Connected: we are throwing our first Berlin house party. Or our first “official” Berlin house party, we’ve had smaller groups over before and last winter, right before I left, I invited some people to a bar and they came over after. This will be a party with food that I will cook, and people that I would like to befriend. Some are, of course, already friends of that special quality you only get in your late thirties and early forties with other people in your same circumstances. You become close, but you realise you have life and work and boundaries and so the closeness has mutual respect and regard for each other’s time, and yet so many years of stories to catch up on! So much to delight in!
How do you make friends in a new city is a question that comes up a lot on Facebook groups and the Berlin subreddit, and the answers are usually, “Join some sort of sports team” or “have a hobby.” And these are great answers! I just hate sports and my hobbies are solo ones: reading, art, watching TV, not a lot of group participation there. But really, it’s mostly about swallowing your pride. If you meet someone you like, you ask for their number. You message them, once, twice, thrice (maybe not all in the same week, there’s a balance between enthusiastic and stalker.) You arrange all the meetings, offering plans and times. You go to them. You put yourself out there. And sooner or later, you’ll have a friend who will also make plans with you. A bit like dating, but there’s no “wait for three days to call them back.” I say message them immediately saying how much you enjoyed your time together and making a tentative plan to meet again. Invite them to a party even. Now as to how you meet this interesting person into whom you will be pouring your effort, for that you might have to try hobbies or sports. (Sorry.) (I also have two good friends here but with whom I share Delhi connections so I got lucky in that regard.) People enjoy being liked and admired especially in a platonic way, so if you’re open about your liking and admiration I don’t see why you couldn’t be surrounded by people in your new city.
I wonder what it is that divides a city into blocks, so you’ll never leave your own neighbourhood if you don’t have to. Bombay had it, and I put it down to traffic, people don’t want to spend an hour on the road just to meet someone for drinks in another suburb, so you have friends limited to your area. (And why a Colaba woman might never date that lovely person in Malad.) Delhi also has horrific traffic, but somehow all of South Delhi is a monolith, you hop in your car (or an Uber) and travel ten-fifteen kilometres within South Delhi but somehow if it’s North or West, it’s “too far.” Berlin is very kiez-y (kiez = neighbourhood.) It’s almost a joke, but also not. Since we live in Friedrichshain (East, where a lot of your favourite clubs are, rapidly gentrifying but still refreshingly ugly) we are wedded to it. Luckily for us, there’s lots of reasons to explore other parts: the Turkish food is much better slightly to the West of us, a lot of friends live elsewhere etc, otherwise we’d never get out of our particular pocket. A lot of people in Berlin never do. It’s like a curse, a well appointed kiez.
Although finding a place to stay is half chance and half arranged marriage. There’s a good reality show idea for you: Berlin Househunting! Anyway, we weren’t really given much of a choice as to street and locality, we went to a bunch of viewings, saw a bunch of places and we were approved for this one (second on the list, but the first people got someplace else and dropped out.) It’s been lucky, I have a good friend who is my neighbour, two train stations almost equidistant to the house, four supermarkets from very cheap to fancy organic, lots of bars and a trendy area a ten minute walk away which is ideal because then people don’t wake you up by partying underneath your windowsill. [Also five Indian restaurants on this road alone but we avoid them, they cater to German tastes and are about as Indian as a Coronation Chicken sandwich.] [The restaurants are, on the whole, pretty average as I’ve said before. Not in all of Berlin, of course, there are some lovely places to eat, but in this area I haven’t found much to blow me away.]
So many times in the last three months I’ve found myself stopping and going, “Oh huh I’m living my regular life.” After a year and a half of back and forth between India and Germany, I’d gotten kind of used to constant motion. No sooner had I settled down in one spot than I’d be off again, no sooner were my groceries from India used up than I’d be able to buy new ones again. What I’m saying is this life, the one I’m leading right now, it always felt transient, temporary. Like I was just taking a break from my life in Delhi. We didn’t even have pictures on the wall. It was like the cats and K and me, we were all just taking a break from our regular programming. Sometimes I’d even feel jealous of the cats, like how they get to stay in our house all the time and I have to keep leaving. A few days ago, I bought something online for the first time. Here, I mean. I treated this like my normal life. I have to keep stopping and reminding myself that I don’t have to do everything immediately, that I have a long time to let things unfold. I was joking last time I was in India about how I have a Life A and a Life B, and they keep swapping depending on which country I’m in, and now I’m in Life A, and Life B is on hold. So bizarre but so comforting.
I was at this club called Sisyphos the other day, but not in its club avatar, it was actually open during the week as a flea market, which was quite bad. Children screaming everywhere, overpriced goods, but we (my two friends and I) had a drink and a snack and then walked home by the river, which was lovely and had a spectacular sunset. While we were waiting in line for pizza (other option: bao-burgers, which were very small and didn’t look that nice), we started talking about the German word “vielleicht” and how it sounds almost like Hindi. (Pronounced ‘fill-highsht’ I realised much later that it sounds like ‘filhaal’ which is ‘presently’ in Urdu and not at all the same meaning as vielleicht means “perhaps” but the same sounds sorta.) There was a woman behind us in the queue, German, our age, perhaps younger, and she began by saying, almost angrily, “Excuse me, are you [something] [maybe she used the word ‘upset’? I’m not sure] that German is not the same as Hindi?” So of course we laughed and clarified, but she took this as a way to, I don’t know, interrogate us about India, but in the most ignorant way. She wasn’t racist, I don’t think, but she was quite stupid. She seemed to get stuck most of all by the fact that all three of us were speaking English. “You’re from India and you’re speaking English!” she kept saying. At this point, I got bored and turned away from her to examine the slices, but my friend, with more patience than I, tried to explain about many different languages, blah blah blah but this chick would not stop with the, “omg how is English all of your [as in us three] first language?” I don’t expect people to know a lot about India (even though it’s a very large country and a little knowledge never killed anyone) but the confidence with which this woman just waded in to a private conversation between three people and displayed her ignorance was just baffling. And how she didn’t seem to pick up on any social cues either, just merrily being like, “OMG DO YOU GUYS HAVE ELEPHANTS?” (Not really, I’m only joking, but you know what I mean.)

Beautiful Spree sunset, I took this on my phone and I’m very pleased with it
There is, I have heard, the occasional very mean racist person in Berlin that one encounters, but on the whole this is a pleasant open-minded city which is extremely diverse and also pretty safe for your lone woman walking home by herself, which is a TREAT. These days I’ve got a Stephen King audiobook I borrowed via my library app and I just get out and walk for about 30-45 minutes, listening to the story, just wandering about, making the streets my own. It’s really nice.

On that note, I end. I just poured myself a glass of wine (7 pm and I’m alone at home writing this to you, the sun’s just come out after a long cloudy day) and I’m thinking of you reading this at whatever time it is for you. I hope you’re also well and happy.

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Currently reading:

I’ve been in a huuuuuuge reading rut, so literally all I’ve done recently is re-read Marian Keyes, but yesterday I went to my own shelves and pulled out Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil which is beautiful narrative non-fiction about the American South, specifically Savannah, where the author had to put a little note in going, “hey btw this is non-fiction and not a novel.” I too would like to visit Savannah.

Today my friend wanted to go to a few bookstores so we walked to the Berlin Shakespeare and Sons (not related to the Paris one, I asked) where instead of just looking at the books, I actually bought one (SO EXPENSIVE HERE) but this was one I wanted in print and to own. It’s collected German stories and essays but with the English translation on one page and the German on the other. Very cool, and nice stories as well.

We also stopped at a little cafe I know of which sells all their second hand books for 2 euro, and has a sizeable English collection. I bought:

Mutton by India Knight (hilar.)

The Collector by John Fowles (re-read but TERRIFYING, I don’t know what possessed me, a woman who is enjoying walking around on her own, to purchase this book that is a cautionary tale for women who walk around on their own. One of the scariest books I’ve ever read, keen to see if it still scares me since I’m somewhat inured to that sort of thing now.)

Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn (have wanted to read the Patrick Melrose books for a while. Enjoyed the first in a ‘this is good writing’ way not in a ‘great story’ way, because again it’s quite desperate, and this is a trilogy.)

The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen (looked nice, I like her.)

The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin (is that one word or two? Re-read, wanted to own it.)

What have you bought and/or read recently? (Besides my book OBVIOUSLY!)

5 April 2023

The Internet Personified: How to write a book

Gather around, my supportive satsumas,

Happy Easter weekend! Here in Germany, it’s a loooong weekend, so I anticipate Berlin will be quite empty by Thursday evening. As for us, we just have to be organised enough to shop for our groceries much in advance, which is a tall order, and I suspect we’ll be down to pantry staples and pommes (fries) from the shawarma shop across the road by Tuesday. It’s still much colder than it has any business being in April, but every morning my little winter garden/study is flooded with sun, so the cats and I sit here and bask.

The pre-order link for Soft Animal is live! The book comes out on April 24, and if you’d like to read it the very minute it hits stores, be sure and click the link which is here.

Here’s the praise the book got already.

I’m not going to be in India doing any book events this year, so all my appearances will be virtual, which means it’s extra important you pre-order (or just order!) Authors get new book deals based on how well their previous books have done, and if you vote with your wallet, as it were, then it helps keep me afloat. To paraphrase what Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet, I wish I could give you all copies of my book because it makes me so happy when my words reach people that actually get them, but sadly I am poor and don’t own more than ten author copies. The rest depends on people buying them and letting bookstores know to stock me.

So pre-order! Push me up the Amazon rating list! Let me write more books for you!

Pre-order Soft Animal

How to write a book: an explanation

Begin in childhood. Be an odd, lonely, bookish child. Realise the difference between having lots of people around you and people knowing your heart. When you think of being a child, you often think first of being alone with a book, but if you start to unravel that memory, you remember you used to have a lot of friends. They just weren’t like the people you knew intimately, people you had read about so often that their pages grew spattered with food, the spines bent, the covers fell off, again and again you returned to them, almost like you were being them, pulling yourself into their world, until you knew them better than yourself. Admit this to no one. Play with your friends and your cousins so well that no one realises you are actually two people, an inward and an outward. Begin keeping a diary, but soon grow dissatisfied with your own limited vocabulary. Begin writing a book in a spare notebook in class, a large family saga, the kind you like to play by yourself in your room—an orphan girl taken in by a large family, but this time everyone is Indian. You read books about white children, and you adapt them to your world. You find a tape recorder and record an audio play—all parts played by you. You call the family you invent something long and elaborate, the Goenkars, say, or the Goswalas. Every book you read has a large family, it is the only one you know how to invent.
Are your imaginary friends imaginary to you as well? You know they’re not real, right? How did you name them—what made them be called Sarah and Gaurav? Sarah is the bossy older sister, Gaurav is a little whiny. They both think you’re great, they both think you could do anything you want. They will teach you how to fly. In your new neighbourhood, the other children aren’t very nice. You wait instead for Sarah and Gaurav, the three of you can play, but you know they’re not real, and so you drift wistfully to the park, and watch the other children who have known each other since birth, swap friendly asides. They’re all in twos: sets of siblings. Even your imaginary friends are siblings. George of The Famous Five isn’t, though. She has a dog. You wish you had a dog.
When you make friends, Sarah and Gaurav disappear and never come alive again. You feel guilty, where do imaginary friends go? But they have each other, so they’ll be fine.
The other twelve-year-old girls seem so much older than you at your new school. You are still reading Judy Blume, but the bookshop owner recommends Sweet Valley High. It’s what everyone else your age is reading, he says. You clutch your copy of Superfudge.
You see a captive bear and it makes you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper. The editor not only prints it, he sets it in the centre of the page with an illustration. It’s your first byline—it has your name and your age and your school. An older student comes up to your classroom and asks for you, asks if you’d like to join the nature club since you seem to have an interest in nature. Nature Club isn’t as exciting as it sounds, but you are so thrilled to have been personally recognised, personally requested. You realise how heady that feeling is—your classmates still don’t get you, but someone else did.
Your parents’ friend is starting a children’s section in a newspaper. You’re too many years away from learning about nepo babies so you ask if you can get paid. To your surprise, the editor agrees, you get Rs 350 per article. You begin the personal essay trend in the kid’s pages of a newspaper, writing about your friends. You get into trouble for mentioning one by her initials, how many boyfriends she has. She’s only thirteen. Your friends surround you the next day, slit-eyed with judgement and superiority. “My father said,” says one, “That Meenakshi must not be a real friend at all.” Luckily, the subject’s parents don’t get the newspaper. It cures you of writing about your friends—at least, with identifying details. You learn a valuable lesson: if you don’t want to get caught, enough of it has to be made up. You also don’t know the words “plausible deniability” but if you did, you’d be applying it here. You don’t write any more for the newspaper, you wonder: am I a real friend? It’s sad to think maybe you’re not, but everyone had read your writing. There was that.
You keep a diary. You make friends. You work on the school newspaper. You learn human connection, and you know some parts of you are just yours. You’re living a story you’re telling yourself about a well-adjusted young woman. Where there were Sarah and Gaurav, now there is you. When you’re out, some part of you detaches, and this part writes everything down—in your head, and later in your journal. Because it’s private, you use it for social observations. Sometimes you’re so pleased with your turn of phrase, you wish someone else could see it, but mostly, you’re happy to have a place where you admit to being uncomfortable and angry and sad. That’s the only time you write in your diary. The rest of the time, you’re drifting along, but you’re keeping up your fiction in other notebooks. It gives you pleasure to write, to tell yourself a story. You’re not writing it for anyone else, and so your stories are as self-indulgent as it is possible to be.
You grow up. You get a job at a newspaper. You decide for the first time since that kid’s page many years ago to write about your life, but for an audience. You start a blog. You haven’t learned, you never will learn. You don’t mention people’s names, but the identifying details are so strong that your colleagues find out anyway. They don’t like being written about. The ones you haven’t written about loudly wonder why—mainly this one guy, much older than you, who seems to hate you. Later you realise his constant comments about what you wore to work—just normal tank tops and jeans—making it so you’d shrink as you passed him, would count as sexual harassment. Of course, it is him who finds your blog, he seems obsessed with you, this older man, he never gives anyone else such a hard time, and he mocks you loudly. You go home in tears and take your blog offline—only, you’re really proud of it. You worked really hard. You delete the post about your colleagues, they’re not that interesting, decide never to write about work people, and change the URL. You call it The Compulsive Confessor, it’s what your mum says you are. You change your username to eM, me spelled backwards, the first letter of your name. You say, “Oh no, I stopped blogging” if your colleagues ask, but honestly, who else is that interested in you, the youngest and least important member of the newsroom? They forget all about it, and as the youngest and least important member of the newsroom you have to stay late with the air conditioning and the fast internet and you write and write and write.
Success! Your first book deal! Editors reach out to you because of your blog, you choose Penguin. The newspapers make a big deal about how you write about sex—relationships, really, you tell them. You’re not Belle de Jour-ing, you’re blogging about being a single woman in India. It’s certainly not X rated. But that doesn’t sell papers—or books for that matter, so you give in. You are very young, you believe you will always be able to write from 1 am to 3 am and then wake up the next day and go to work and go out with your friends and that it’ll only get easier with practice.
And then? And then you do it all again, except you can’t, blogs are slowly not becoming a thing any more, other people are writing about single women in India, and besides, you don’t want to repeat yourself over and over again. You branch out. You write other books, just by putting one word in front of another, each time wondering if this is the time you’ve completely forgotten how to do this. You are poor, you are rich. You are well known, you are obscure. Literary darlings appear and disappear. You steal from people’s lives like a magpie and then put them together and tear them apart in your fiction. You don’t discuss your writing while you’re writing. You hate editing, it never comes naturally to you, but as you get older, you realise that for the book you have in your mind to match the book you’ve just put down on page, you need to rewrite, restructure, cut, polish.
You wonder: how do I write a book? You realise it is by writing. You work on your books and you occasionally write shorter pieces for money, but you also write for joy. You keep a little notebook next to your laptop where you can make notes about people who pass underneath your window. You need your novel-in-progress to rest between chapters, like dough, so you write down the beginning of a short story, just as a warm up exercise. An email newsletter, even. Joy isn’t to be found in imagining a book launch or big international success, those things are lotteries, some people get them, some don’t, some deserve them, some don’t. Joy is taking something you’re good at and doing it just for you. Joy is writing down things for people, and having them know exactly what you mean.

I hope you’ll all read (and love) the book! Just sharing the pre-order link once more, because maybe you just decided to buy it and it’ll save you scrolling back up again.

Pre-order my new book!

Meanwhile, here are some links, because I also read some excellent things this week:

I wrote about crows and Berlin last time, and so did someone else!

A mean but entertaining profile of fantasy writer Brandon Sandersen in Wired which the author responded to very graciously on Reddit, so worth reading both side by side.

Arundhati Roy on free speech.

Breeding dogs to be cute is animal cruelty. (Quite a sad piece because you’ll never look at a pug or a French bulldog the same way again.)

Fomo and chronic illness.

Inside the home life of women across the world.

And: because I was intrigued by how Germans eat a cold supper—as compared to India where it seems traditionally women slave over stoves to produce several fresh hot meals every day, I wondered if it had anything to do with female emancipation here. It turns out… sorta? But also the thick German folk bread everyone loves was popularised by, yup, the Nazis.

Have a great week! Don’t forget to share the pre-order link with everyoneeeee you know!

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who tell you they never read fiction if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Compulsive Confessions

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26 April 2023

The Internet Personified: Several observations and an event

5 April 2023

The Internet Personified: How to write a book

How to write a book: an explanation

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