Author Q&A Kiran Manral on More Things in Heaven and Earth: “Sometimes trying to get closure can open fresh wounds.”
“I wanted to explore being widowed when one is still in the early thirties, especially in a highly patriarchal society like India.”
Monster Complex talks with Kiran Manral about her haunting novel More Things in Heaven and Earth
Kiran Manral is an Indian author, TEDx Speaker, columnist, mentor and feminist. She has written books across genres in both fiction and nonfiction. Her books include The Reluctant Detective, Once Upon A Crush, All Aboard, Karmic Kids, and A Boy’s Guide to Growing More.
In her latest novel, the haunting More Things in Heaven and Earth, a woman troubled by the death of her husband goes to extraordinary lengths to seek closure.
In this interview, the author talks about the ideas fueling her novel, her mission as an author, and why her fiction helps readers to better understand the female perspective.
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“If pressed to provide a warning, I would say it is all about letting well enough be and not pick at scabs, to let wounds heal, and that sometimes trying to get closure can open fresh wounds.”
About the book More Things In Heaven And Earth
When Kamla Malik's husband Nihar dies of a heart attack in Goa, she’s devastated. Haunted by the lack of closure, she tries mediums, séances, and Ouija boards to help her establish contact. All she wants is a final goodbye.
She tries to find him in the twisted labyrinthine worlds that he now inhabits, but does she really want him back, and worse, if she finds him, will he let her go?
Or is she, as the doctors believe, living in the tunnels of her mind, making it impossible for her to distinguish hallucination from reality?
Coincidentally, her eccentric and ailing maternal aunt invites her to visit at her splendidly isolated and crumbling villa in Goa. Here, Kamla meets Victor, her aunt’s stepson.
He stakes his claim over the villa and with it, over Kamla. While she accepts that Victor is her here and now, why does Nihar continue to torment her? Is she doomed to be forever haunted by him?
An exquisitely sinister tale of bereavement and the grey lands between the dead and the living, both within the mind and outside of it, More Things in Heaven and Earth is the horror of what happens when love, obsession and betrayal collide.
The Monster Complex Interview with Kiran Manral
1. What inspired MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH?
In my books I write about the lived female experience at various life stages. I’ve written protagonists who are twenty something in my romance and chick lit books, in their mid forties, late thirties, late seventies in my darker, scarier books.
In this particular book I wanted to explore being widowed when one is still in the early thirties, especially in a highly patriarchal society like India.
What does it take to pick oneself up and move on, how does one deal with the loss, what is an acceptable mourning period, how does one deny the body which continues to assert itself, what gives a woman power and agency over herself when society tells her that she now has no power because she is widowed.
My protagonist is 32, and is trying to move on with her life. But she is still seeking closure, she is torn between the paradoxical needs of moving on and staying with the memories of her deceased husband.
Through her story, I wanted to tell the story of the many women who have been widowed young, perhaps drawing on the experience of my own mother who lost her husband, my father, to a sudden heart attack when she was still young.
2. Your story almost sounds like a warning for readers. What were your goals writing this story?
Ah, there’s no warning, there’s only a what if that I throw at the reader incessantly. What if, what if, what if. I delve deep into the what ifs that we deal with every single day.
Goals, if any, were and have always been, to write a story straight from the heart, a story that stays with the reader long after the last page has been read and the book shut, to write a story that lingers and disturbs, and yes, also scares.
I don’t like to give a story with all the questions answered at the end, tied up neatly, I keep things open so each reader can come to a differing interpretation of what really happened, as I did in Missing, Presumed Dead and The Face at the Window.
Or in this case, with More Things in Heaven and Earth, of the fresh horror that is to come. If pressed to provide a warning, I would say it is all about letting well enough be and not pick at scabs, to let wounds heal, and that sometimes trying to get closure can open fresh wounds.
3. Are your stories just “entertaining” or do they contain a moral or lesson for the reader?
I don’t believe in morals. I believe in stories being told because they have something to share, a life experience that is universal perhaps, a moment where the reader feels this could be me, this could be my story, I have been here, I could be here, experiencing what this protagonist is experiencing.
I seek to take readers on a journey of exploration and experiences. If there are any lessons that come along the way, so be it.
4. What aspect of your book would you consider uniquely “Indian”?
Perhaps the locations. The book is divided between a small hill town in North India where the protagonist spends her childhood, Mumbai, the city that never stops, and Goa, the state that lets you be.
These are three very distinct locations geographically, and have very different moods, and I’ve tried to capture them all as honestly as I could.
5. Is there any cultural stuff that outside readers should know to understand your book better?
This is a book that is universal in its premise, I think any reader from any part of the world would be able to get it. This is a story about grief, loss, closure and memories, also the urge to reclaim oneself from the debris of a marriage that ended with the sudden death of a spouse. It could be set anywhere in the world.
6. How does this new book compare with your previous works?
I’ve written across genres, from humour to chicklit to non fiction, thriller and horror. This book, along with The Face at the Window and Missing, Presumed Dead, is among the noir books I’ve written, with dark, supernatural elements, as well as an internal exploration of the mental state of the protagonists.
With The Face at the Window, I wrote about a retired Anglo Indian school teacher living isolated in a cottage in the hills of North India, waiting to die and a haunting that is inexplicable.
In Missing, Presumed Dead, I explored the mind of a middle aged woman struggling with mental ill health and a dysfunctional marriage, who goes missing but continues to linger in her absence.
And in this one, I talk about a woman who is haunted, literally and metaphorically, by her dead husband. In these three books I explore different life stages, and the issues that a woman deals with at each. This book, I would think, is the darkest of the three, the spookiest.
7. What’s your favorite thing about writing?
I get to live through multiple lives while sitting at my desk. That is the best part about writing that nothing else can give me.
8. What are you working on now that’s coming next?
I’m never sure how a story will turn out because my process is organic, scattered and something I totally don’t recommend to aspiring writers.
But what I do know is that it is a dark, surreal story, one that explores certainty and what we know, or think we know of ourselves and how it can all be upended any moment into something we don’t recognize at all.
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