Although I haven’t verified this yet, I suspect Rheea Mukherjee is a couple of years younger than me. Why is that relevant you ask? Because she’s who I want to be when I grow up. Let me tell you why. I have known Rheea through Facebook now for about five years or so. We have never met in person but in addition to reading both of Rheea’s books—the short story collection Transit for Beginners (Kitaab, 2016), and the novel The Body Myth (Unnamed Press, 2019)—I follow her on every social media platform. Rheea is one of those rare artists who actually walks the walk and talks the talk. On any given day, she might be posting about the ten upcoming South Asian writers to watch out for, or participating in a march against the government’s discriminatory practices, or leading an online class on how to allow vulnerability in one’s writing, or cooking and feeding disadvantaged members within her larger community in Bangalore, India. I can only imagine what a source of energy and inspiration she must be in person.

If you visit her website, here are some additional details you will learn about Rheea. That she has worked as a barista, a counselor, and an ESL teacher. She co-runs Write Leela Write—a Design and Content Lab based in Bangalore—and she earned her MFA in fiction from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

This conversation, however, is mostly about Rheea’s novel The Body Myth.

—Sayantani Dasgupta

Sayantani Dasgupta: May I begin by sharing how tickled I am to discover that both you and I have had stories published in the Southern Humanities Review? What was yours about?

Rheea Mukherjee: That’s an incredible coincidence because I remember the acceptance of my story to Southern Humanities Review with great clarity. It was my first high-flying literary magazine acceptance. I had just moved back to India in 2011, I remember getting the email and doing a happy dance. The story was called “Help with Packing” and it was about a lonely alcoholic woman in Calcutta. The story outlined the relationship with her son who lived in another country, and her growing affection for and bond with her domestic worker, Paromita.

SD: Let’s talk about The Body Myth. I am curious and fascinated by the title. What was the inspiration behind it? Is it that we mythologize our bodies or that our bodies revel in myths? I am also wondering about the sorts of myths we tell our bodies.

RM: It actually came out of a process that first involved my publishers telling me my working title at the time was not going to cut it. The novel, when it was being submitted to publishers, was titled Malaise. I was quite attached to it, but my publishers had good reason to change it. So we started brainstorming a new title. The Body Myth actually came out of a line written by Simone De Beauvoir; “the body is not a thing, it is a situation.” And from that we got to The Body Myth. To answer your question, I do think from one perspective everything we physically think we are, is a myth—one we have constructed from society, gender role assumptions, social hierarchy, and ideas about beauty. On a spiritual level, do the body and mind really determine who we are on a pure consciousness level? Aren’t we more than this body and mind?

SD: The Body Myth is by far one of the smartest and most intelligent books I have ever read. I love all the ways you teach your reader to read Aristotle, Simone de Beauvoir, et al. You are not just quoting them but there is an immersion that feels easy and natural. As an author and professor of creative writing I know that it is the “easy” and the “effortless” that takes an extraordinary amount of time. Were you ever worried that this level of research might be a risky thing to do in a novel? That it might render it less “mainstream?”

RM: I am so honored to hear that, Sayantani, thank you. I actually had to do a lot of research for the book. Although I am interested in philosophy and had quite the fascination with the French existentialists, I wasn’t as widely read as my character Mira. I also don’t have the bookish memory she does to recall lines, names, and dates. To show you just how much of a construct the research process is, I can tell you now, two years later, I barely remember most of the context and names in that book. For two months I watched a lot of videos on YouTube that gave me crash courses on the people, ideas, and histories that are detailed in the book. And then, I honestly had to forget more than fifty percent of it, because even if a character “knows” all that, it doesn’t mean it comes out of their mouth every two seconds. I had to make sure Mira was illustrating her insights in the book in a way that made sense to the story. If you look at Mira, she’s actually coping with her grief by trying to intellectually validate herself. So I had to ask myself, if I were trying to validate myself based on the knowledge I had, how would I do that? To start with, Mira takes every opportunity to define parts of her life through what she’s read, so that’s one way. The other powerful way is her exchanges with Sara, one of the other two main characters in the book. Here, Mira tries to be the sturdy, rational one, only to be dismissed by Sara’s more spiritual understanding of the world.

SD: I am not aware of any recent books written in English from India that have taken this sort of a deep dive into loneliness, grief, clinical depression, and Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. What inspired you to go down this path? I am also thinking of the Toni Morrison quote here, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” Did you feel the absence of just such a book?

RM: In a way, yes. I grew up reading a lot of immigrant Indian fiction and it didn’t capture my life. Although I spent quite a bit of my life in the U.S, I also spent a good part in India and ultimately chose it as my permanent home. I’ve always been obsessed with mental health, grief, and spirituality. And I see links between all of them. But you know, the West is not used to investing in a story that has an all-desi cast barring two situations: if it has mangoes, pickles, and arranged marriages OR if it talks about the desi struggle to fit into mainstream American culture. There is so much of the country that’s excluded when you read about India only in those two ways. Not that my book makes a dent in the other millions of stories, but it doesn’t fit into these two expected norms. In that way, I was so in awe of Unnamed Press for taking risks and publishing books like mine.

SD: I love how you write about cities. This was my observation with your first book Transit for Beginners as well. That’s another great title by the way. You are such a keen observer of urban life and spaces. Is Suryam composed of both Indian and American cities you have lived in? What did a fictitious city allow you that a real city wouldn’t have?

RM: Most people in India who have read the book came right up to me and said, “Suryam is pretty much Bangalore, right?” This is funny because I actually made up a fictional city to avoid it being set in Bangalore. I did that because I didn’t want the familiarity of my own city to creep in and spoil this myth-like tale I was telling, it was so intimate, and to me there was an urban fairytale emerging. Having the word Bangalore there would just upset the delicate fragility of all that. Oh well, most people relate to it as a bigger Indian city.

SD: You invent the fruit Rasagura that only grows in Suryam. What is the Rasagura a stand-in for?

RM: To me it’s a metaphor for how we normalize certain things in our ecosystem. And how we don’t understand why it’s such a big deal for outsiders. It also stands in for how we glorify things that have nothing to do with us, and when that glory is taken away, our egos take a personal hit.

SD: The supporting characters also have fascinating narrative arcs. For example, the young student Samina. She is unafraid and opinionated from the very beginning of the novel. Her story reaches its highest point of tension toward the end, when we are in that particular classroom scene and her audacity stuns everyone, your readers included. How important was it for you to grant her this level of agency over her own body?

RM: This is a great question. Because I struggled with the believability of what Samina actually did in class that day. Now, I could not dream of even thinking on the lines Samina did when I was her age, forget doing what she did in an Indian classroom (although this would be an issue anywhere I’d imagine). But that’s the thing with characters, they take on a life of their own. When I was writing that scene, it came naturally. This is exactly what Samina would do. There is always this one person who can turn our idea of normal on its head, on a whim. That was Samina. And I had to grant her that autonomy.

SD: Since you have lived in both India and the U.S., what, according to you, is the biggest difference in the way mental health is talked about in these two countries? Let me elaborate. When I first came to the US in 2006, I was under the impression that in a first-world country, both the awareness of mental health issues as well as its treatment will be easy, accessible, and without shame. Having now lived and taught here for over a decade, I know that that’s not the case.

RM: My doctor in Bangalore once told me she preferred practicing in India (she had practiced in the U.S. for a long time), because you can be a little more philosophical with your patients here. That stayed with me. I think the biggest difference is this; America relies on a lot of labels and boxes to identify and treat people. India relies on a lot of emotion which can also blur into moral judgment. I also see a class section of India looking at mental health on the internet from a very western understanding of it. This can be unreliable because there are so many people in India who do not get access to mental health care and are prevented from accessing it because of language, class, caste, and cultural expectations. So I see a huge class divide in the way we look at it. Of course, social privilege gives us the most amplification, which is why a lot of discussions on mental health seem evolved and “woke,” but that’s maybe one percent of the population and it’s mostly on Twitter. But it’s not just that, there is an intersection with mental health and social oppression too, and I think both countries are starting to acknowledge that in meaningful ways.

SD: One of my favorite sentences in the book appears early on. “The world loves a beautiful mad woman.” It’s so true. Literature, particularly, is saturated with such mad women. Whether it is Mr. Rochester’s first wife Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, the grandmother in Stephen King’s Gramma, or the female ghosts in Hindi films such as Suryavanshi, Bhoot, Pari, Bees Saal Baad, Mahal, Woh Kaun Thi (granted some of these are thrillers more than supernatural horror). What have these women meant to you?

RM: It’s these women who get left out of the heart of our stories, you know? She’s only there to show you why it’s bad or sad to be her. We illustrate this through her sexuality, her body, her off-kilter presence in this world. And therefore, if you ask me, their perspective of the world is often much more enriching. But that said, to make these women more palatable, there is often an imposed standard of physical beauty that allows us to embrace them. But what about the bodies that don’t submit to gender, to mainstream perceptions of beauty? I want to be able to write about this too, so we can tilt our heads and see beauty in new forms. For us to challenge the perceptions we’ve made about gender and bodies.

SD: Who are your literary influences? Who should the readers of The Body Myth read next?

RM: My influences are vast. I grew up reading Readers Digest and, in secret, Jackie Collins. I moved on to literary fiction in my very late teens. As a young adult, I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk, Anita Nair, Haruki Murakami as well as a lot of non-fiction and memoir. If you enjoyed The Body Myth, you should definitely read Ottessa Moshfegh’s work, perhaps start with My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I also enjoyed My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite and A Handbook for My Lover by Rosalyn D’Mello.

SD: Now for the dreaded question. What’s your next project?

RM: Well, I can say this much. It’s not what would be expected considering my most recent work was a novel. I can tell you it’s about love, but not in the standard definition. It’s nonfiction, and it’s about resistance.



An alumna of St. Stephen’s College and JNU, SAYANTANI DASGUPTA has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. She is the author of Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between—a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction—and the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Hindu, the Rumpus, Scroll, Economic & Political Weekly, IIC Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and has also taught in India, Italy, and Mexico.


RHEEA MUKHERJEE is a Bangalore based writer who grew up between the U.S. and India for most of her life. She graduated with a degree in social work and in her previous life worked at the intersections of mental health, domestic violence, and teenage and young adult rehabilitation. She then did her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her writing, advocacy, and workshops work at the intersections of gender, social justice, mental health, and sexuality. She is the author of The Body Myth and was shortlisted for the TATA Literature Live First Book Award 2019. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Scroll.in, Electric Literature, Out of Print Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and currently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design, and Content Laboratory.