Roohi Choudhry’s bold yet tender debut novel, Outside Women, follows two “outside women” who live a century apart. Hajra, a graduate student fleeing extremist violence in Pakistan, settles in New York just before 9/11. She begins to research the obscure histories of indentured Indian female laborers in the British empire, a project that takes her all the way to Durban, South Africa. Interwoven with her narrative is the story of Sita, one such laborer who in the 1890s arrives in Durban from India. Driven by poverty and desperation, as well as a fierce desire for independence, Sita becomes an ayah (nanny) in a white English plantation-owning family.

The two women’s lives are shaped and twisted by the political forces of their day: Sita’s by oppressive British colonial rule in India and South Africa, Hajra’s by religious nationalism and patriarchal social expectations in Pakistan. When each woman leaves the faltering shelter of her family, she faces real physical and emotional danger. As a peace activist in college, Hajra narrowly escapes a vicious street attack by religious extremists whom her own brother is involved with. Sita is at the mercy of both the plantation owner’s advances and his wife’s bullying outbursts. Though living centuries apart, both Hajra and Sita must decide if they are willing to stand up publicly and speak truth to power in order to protect the vulnerable women in their midst. Outside Women is about resilience, solidarity and the importance of bearing witness. It is also about finding joy and hope in asserting one’s agency and desires.

I spoke with Roohi Choudhry over Zoom about what drew her to write about two very different “outside women,” the kinship and community that Hajra and Sita find with others in dire circumstances, and the invisible yet powerful connections that connect the two women across time.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: In the first chapter of Outside Women, Hajra is intrigued by historical photographs of indentured women laborers from India. This prompts her to go to Durban, South Africa to research them. That’s the seed in the novel for what Hajra is doing. What was the seed of an idea that set you down the path to writing the novel? Was there also a photograph?

Roohi Choudhry: My family moved to Durban when I was about thirteen. At the time it was the city with the largest concentration of Indians outside India. I don’t know if that’s still true, but at thirteen I had a visceral feeling of being surrounded by people who looked like me but whose life histories and ancestral stories were different. I was immediately curious about those histories.

Much later, when I wanted to switch to longform writing, I wanted to reflect on that history, and the character of Hajra came to me. That took me back to Durban for research, and one day I was trying to find Phoenix House, where Gandhi and his wife used to live. I couldn’t find it, which was frustrating, and I ended up at the Old Courthouse, which is now a museum. I was demoralized—the place had nothing to do with what I was interested in—but there I came face to face with a photo of women in saris holding up a banner and one woman was laughing. It’s not the photo in my novel, it’s anti-apartheid activists from a different time. But something about the image stayed with me. It seemed incongruous but was also really interesting. It was a seed, in a way.

YB: It’s marrying fiction and real life. The photo you saw, and the weight of history and what that sparked in you. The laugh makes the photo in your novel mysterious and entrancing. The reader wonders, who is this person who’s undertaking a serious political act—a dangerous act—while laughing?

RC: In the revision process, when I was thinking about what it means to be an “outside woman,” I heard a podcast episode about laughter and how it’s closer to animal sounds than to most human language. They played a bunch of laughs on the podcast, and when they’re not associated with language, they sound so weird! I was also influenced by the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I was trying to make connections between being outside institutions and also being in the great outdoors. I wanted to communicate what it means to be an outsider and how that’s closer to the wild side of ourselves. Learning about laughter felt like a really cool and maybe not totally obvious way of communicating that. Laughing in that moment is like being an original wild self, rather than the way that we often are.

YB: Let’s talk about Sita, one of the “outside women” in the novel. The stories of indentured women laborers have not really been recorded, yet you’ve created a complex, full character. Sita dreams about leading an independent life despite her circumstances. How did you find your way into her?

RC: I’m indebted to the researchers who resurrected those stories. Most people in the U.S. know Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur. Before that book came out, I was relying on South African scholars and doing archival work. I felt I had to be faithful to the facts and the history, and Sita felt like she was from a distant historical period. That made it hard to write something that was alive and compelling. When I showed early chapters to my professor, Eileen Pollack, she told me about a well-known writer of the antebellum South. Many scholars thought his novel, which I really admire, was based on huge amounts of research because it was rich and detailed. He burst their bubble by saying, “Yeah, I didn’t do any research.” My professor used that example to say, it’s not as if he didn’t do the research. This is a subject he cares about and has been reading about. She showed me some passages from the novel where a character is sweeping the porch, and it doesn’t say what the character is wearing or what the broomstick or the porch looks like. It’s just creating that sense of a world and a person. Our minds are doing the rest.

So I put away the research and trusted that I would come back to verify things later (which I did). That’s when I really started to get to know Sita. I wrote what is now the first scene of her narrative, when she’s a child at the river with her family. She’s tall and strong and likes to climb trees. Learning those physical details gave me insight into her humanity.

YB: It sounds like a journey of getting to know her and also getting to know your process. What about the underground network of activists in Durban who are trying to help the indentured women? How much of that was research, and how much was you wanting the reader to see a person with a broom on a porch?

RC: When I first had the idea for my novel, I was interested in linking it to Gandhi. He arrived in Durban as a lawyer and became an activist when he saw how indentured laborers were treated. I’m also thinking now about one of the questions you sent before this interview, about how I changed as I was writing and decolonized who I was writing for and the way I was telling this story. When I showed early versions of the chapters about Durban activists to my MFA classmates, they were excited to read about Gandhi because it was something familiar to them. Later, I wondered if that was leading me to want to write for a white audience and include Gandhi’s story when I wasn’t that interested in it. With many activism movements around the world, one person—and it’s almost always a he—becomes the figurehead of the movement. The other people who did the work aren’t given their due. They were the ones I was interested in. I also loved thinking about women being part of it, women who were prominent and had privileges that Sita might not have had, and I created the character of Meera Iyer in the novel.

YB: The activists in Durban are compelling because their work echoes other pockets of resistance in Sita’s story. When she’s traveling to South Africa with other women laborers, she finds an ally, Tulsi, and they find small ways to sneak off and explore.

RC: I was following my instinct in the writing process. The parts that you’re pointing to, sneaking off at the Madras port and in Durban, it was something I felt these characters would do. I liked the idea of them getting away with some things and for us to be able to see them as real people through those small freedoms.

YB: Let’s talk about Hajra. At the beginning of the novel, she’s a graduate student in New York. There are also sections when she’s an undergraduate in the 1990s in Peshawar. Like Sita, she’s trying to negotiate her escape from oppressive forces. How did you land on Hajra as the other linchpin for your novel?

RC: Initially, I had a different character who had more in common with my life experiences as a child of diaspora and a lot more privilege than Hajra. Juxtaposing that character with Sita, who was a historical character set against a grand canvas, the contemporary story seemed small and less important. The novel wasn’t working at all. Still, I wanted to have two narratives. I became interested in the story of someone who was not of the diaspora, who was in Pakistan and whose experiences were shaped by that. My mom grew up in Peshawar (I was born there too). Her stories informed the texture of Hajra’s daily life. Also, Hajra’s parents are refugees from India, like my grandparents—that was really important.

Like Sita, Hajra took on a life of her own. She’s this really bookish, sort of messy person. I identify with that very much. That’s not like my mom, actually! Then Hajra steps outside of that to put her body on the line with her activism. I was interested in how that transition happens and can be a source of power, although it’s scary for her to have to keep doing that.

YB: Hajra and Sita are both “outside women” whose lives don’t directly intersect or overlap. There are many points of contact, though, in the challenges they face from brothers, family, the demands of the world they’re growing up in, the kinds of bullies they encounter in different forms. We join the dots between what Sita experiences and what resonates a century later for Hajra.

RC: I think the writing process was me trying to answer certain questions for myself: I felt really sure about telling two stories together, but why? Why not just choose one or do it in a different way that’s less dependent on the braiding? I realized that writing only one narrative would not have scratched the itch for myself as a writer who wonders, why do I feel a sense of kinship with women who came before me, with people who have very different life experiences from me? Is it just a matter of being migrants, or is there something else? I want to show how people who are not related by blood can be family, how you can find and choose your own ancestors. It was really important to make that work.

YB: I think the deep connection between the two narratives comes from seeing Hajra investing energy in the research and trying to find out about the laughing woman in the photograph. To her, the search is worthwhile even though it initially seems futile. It’s pure curiosity, plus something deeper, perhaps an emotional connection passing to her through the air.

RC: When I was doing my final revision a year ago, I watched 32 Sounds, a documentary about sound. I learned about a nineteenth-century philosopher who had a theory that all the sounds that have ever been made are around us at every moment, and if we invented a certain kind of machine, we could hear them. That captured my imagination in terms of how we think about echoes of history. What if those were real echoes around us, and we’re hearing but also not hearing them? I’m not saying this is or isn’t the case. I just tried to work into the novel the idea that other people’s lives are around us all the time and continue to influence our bodies in space.

One novel that really inspired me was Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I was revising my novel and struggling with the question of whether Hajra’s and Sita’s stories belong together. A Tale for the Time Being has two narratives as well. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say you know right away that its characters are inhabiting different places and times. It’s not the only novel that does this, but it’s one of the few where they’re not related though they share something. I returned to that book often to ask, why does the fact that they’re not related work well? What is it about the way Ozeki is doing it? We don’t usually use the term “magical realism” for her writing, but there’s a sense of connection between people in that novel that is not of the corporeal world. I kept thinking about what that meant for my characters.

YB: What other expectations about novels or historical novels were you trying to subvert or reinvent as you were writing your novel?

RC: You referred in one of your other questions to the cultural tour guide thing—

YB: Which was from your interview with Nawaaz Ahmed—

RC: It was a quote from a Sanjana Sathian essay. I do think that there can be an expectation for a writer to be a teacher, if not tour guide. I remember getting that feedback from writing groups, which were primarily white. One person said, “Oh, I always learn so much from your stories, Roohi,” This was when I was in my twenties. I was annoyed, though I hadn’t yet figured out what rubbed me the wrong way. Embedded there is the expectation that fiction is an educational tool for people who do not share the characters’ experiences. It’s a very earnest, white liberal type of thing. That’s not the kind of writing I do or want to do. It might be a compliment for someone else. But I want to come from a place of empathy and heart, a place of feeling, an emotional resonance that’s not about teaching.

I wanted to steer clear of using my characters as puppets to teach white readers something. In a way, that’s an injustice to the real historical people, that their only role would be to teach us something. In my novel, Vasanthi, another woman laborer, says to Sita, “Your story? You don’t have one anymore. No one will tell about you. No one will remember you. You’re just ayah in their story.” This is the reality in most archives and books that I wanted to move away from.

YB: Let’s talk about a different historical moment. You decided to have Hajra move to New York just before 9/11. She’s there on the cusp of everything that’s about to happen.

RC: I moved to New York right before 9/11 too. I wrote that scene fairly early, well before I had finished the first draft, then I wondered, what is this doing here? It wasn’t until the very end of the writing that I understood why it had to be there. Hajra’s relationship with Islam and religiosity is an important throughline in her narrative. But there was always a risk of it being simplistic and angry at extremist ideologies or Islam. That would be an unfortunate simplification of her experience and the experiences of a lot of people like her. I tried to complicate that and make it more universal, in that there are people everywhere who use religion to exploit people’s emotions and get them to hurt other people. That’s not about the religion itself. The short chapter on 9/11 closes that circle for Hajra. She leaves Pakistan because of the way religion has been used against her. She might think of herself as leaving because of religion itself. When 9/11 happens, however, that complicates her understanding because religion was used as an excuse for violence. Then 9/11 itself is used as an excuse to commit violence against Muslims in America. Hajra is no longer able to rely on the simplistic kind of anger she might have felt in Pakistan.

YB: That sounds true to how Outside Women avoids neat conclusions. By the end, we sense that so much is going on below the surface, not just individual human emotions but also the social and political currents that are pulling characters in different directions. Most of the characters are in a gray area too, even the ones who are trying to do good. Everyone seems very human and flawed.

RC: In an early draft, Hajra’s brother was just a cardboard villain. A lot of righteous indignation fueled my writing and made its way onto the page. I worked really hard at removing some of that. I needed to come to terms with it, to explain to myself that there are ways to use anything good, including religion, to exploit other humans. Those humans being exploited can be really harmful, but it’s limiting to paint them as villains. I’m glad it’s coming across that people are imperfect. They’re shaped by the forces around them, but they’re also capable of being something better.