“I surrendered to the chaos”: An Interview with Tashan Mehta, author of MAD SISTERS OF ESI
“I was chasing this desire to pin down the inexplicable when I wrote Mad Sisters, but acknowledge that it is inexplicable. It sort-of grew in the novel, intwining with the cosmos and the idea of the sublime, and how the interpersonal is the tether that keeps us sane—and perhaps caged.”
Mad Sisters of Esi (Harper Collins India, 2023) by Tashan Mehta is the story of two sisters, Laleh and Myung. They are separated when Myung decides to leave their home—the exquisite ever-expanding whale of babel—to explore the outside in search of their creator, the great Wisa. In the vast black sea, she explores many islands that are alive and changing, comes across friends, foes, and ghosts. When she begins to find her way home, she comes across the story of another set of sisters, an encounter that intertwines with her tale in the most riveting ways.
Mehta creates these impossible cosmic worlds, bending space and time, with the most intricate threads of love, longing, and loneliness. The museum of collective memory, festival of madness, and a very cute little bat are some of the cosmic elements that add intricate layers to this fabric of tenderness, so much so that the reader is surprised by such softness even in the most turbulent times as the countdown begins for the festival or the fever dream through which the process of creation and madness arrive on the page.
Tashan Mehta wrote the marvellous Mad Sisters of Esi in five years, working through twenty-four drafts and five versions. The book has won the Auther Award 2024 for best novel and the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award for best fantasy novel. The author’s debut novel The Liar’s Weave was published in 2017. Her short stories have been anthologised in Magical Women and the Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction: Volume II. She was part of the 2021 and 2015 Sangam House International Writers’ Residency (India) and was British Council Writer-in-Residence at Anglia Ruskin University (UK) in 2018.
In an email interview, Mehta spoke to The Chakkar about the portrayal of relationships, memory, and plurality in the book. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: Mad Sisters of Esi has a beautiful dedication. “For those who kept my courage safe when I couldn’t find it, / And who built me a raft when they learnt I couldn’t swim.” Could you please explain it a little?
Mehta: Ah, I love that you picked up on this! I wrote Mad Sisters of Esi during a difficult time in my life, when I felt lost and like I couldn’t make sense of things. I got through that time because of the people who love me, and who lent me their faith, love, and belief when I couldn’t find any for myself. It’s the greatest privilege to be loved, and for your sense of self to be kept safe by those around you.
Mehta creates these impossible cosmic worlds, bending space and time, with the most intricate threads of love, longing, and loneliness. The museum of collective memory, festival of madness, and a very cute little bat are some of the cosmic elements that add intricate layers to this fabric of tenderness
The Chakkar: The portrayal of nature in the story, the changing ecosystems on islands, and the grandfather’s character reminded me a lot of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. What was your inspiration behind these portrayals?
Mehta: I do love Blake—I remember reading him in university and he was by far my favourite, followed by Keats. The inspiration for the changing ecosystems in Mad Sisters of Esi, though, was simply Goa. I moved to Moira in 2019 and the bulk of the novel was created in that landscape; it took my breath away. That sense of awe engineered a desire to learn how to live in and with that landscape, which fed into the character of Kua (the grandfather).
The Chakkar: The book is quite telling of the times we are living in considering the rise in visibility of female friendships. The two pairs of sisters—Laleh & Myung and Magali & Wisa—are the central characters. Magali and Jinn share a romance that comes with its share of conflicts. What was your thought process in depicting such an intricate sisterhood without taking the radical approach of discarding heteronormal romance altogether?
Mehta: I think it was simply born from my life. Some of the deepest loves I have known have been my sisterhoods: both with my actual sister and with the sisters I have found along the way. There is complicated intricacy and depth to those loves that I keep seeking to capture through writing. But heteronormal romance has never felt in opposition to this love: the love I share with my partner is equally layered and complex, just in a different way. They both coexist in my life, like a two-sun solar system, and it felt very natural to capture both types of love in Mad Sisters.
The Chakkar: Mad Sisters is a story about creation, its impact on interpersonal relationships, and the perception of society towards that which it cannot understand. Could you elaborate on this vision of creation and its consequences?
Mehta: There is something mysterious about the act of making, no matter how much we try and pin it down. I can’t remember the exact quote but George Saunders said something similar in his newsletter; he said all these descriptions of the writing process were just a way for him to understand it, and that there would come a point where those descriptions wouldn’t work anymore and he’d have to find new ones. I love that we don’t really understand what we’re doing when we create, no matter how articulate we seem about creation: that it is outside of us, beyond us, and while we might be in the driver’s seat, someone else is laying the road.
I was chasing this desire to pin down the inexplicable when I wrote Mad Sisters, but acknowledge that it is inexplicable. It sort-of grew in the novel, intwining with the cosmos and the idea of the sublime, and how the interpersonal is the tether that keeps us sane—and perhaps caged.
The Chakkar: There’s pure chaos as all the sisters receive their unforeseen calls for adventures. What was it like to enter the realm of fantasy in such an elusive way wherein the structures and tropes are done away with?
Mehta: Oh, it was the best part. Early drafts of Mad Sisters were very focused on order: on building a magical world logically, with a categorized magic system, with maps and a format that would be recognizable for lovers of fantasy. But it felt too stuck, too flat, for this book; it simply wasn’t alive. Somewhere along the way—between reading on Calvino’s approach to writing, M. John Harrison’s approach to world-building, and my desire to create something—that was genuinely exciting for me. As opposed to a dead idea of ‘good’, I surrendered to the chaos. It was exhilarating and empowering, to chase what is alive underneath the text and do your best to pin it to the page.
The Chakkar: Were you sceptical about the reception of the book as a fantasy in the Indian market where the audience is perhaps inclined towards epic fantasies based on Hindu mythology?
Mehta: Honestly, I was sceptical it would ever see light of day, in India or otherwise. I love it dearly and believe in it, but I also knew it is a strange book that asks a lot of its reader and I wasn’t sure there was a readership that would be willing to give it so much.
I will say that from the beginning I was proved wrong, especially by the Indian market. Three publishers offered for the novel, and each of them seemed perfectly delighted with its unruly, insane nature. The editorial and publishing support I got from HarperCollins has been unprecedented, from edits to cover to marketing; it’s been incredible. Basically, the approach was: ‘This book is so strange, there’s no point trying to fit it into existing fantasy markets or literary markets; we’ll throw it out there with all the love and support we can, and hope it will make its own way.’ And it really did! Now it’s found a home in North America with DAW Books (coming Fall 2025) so it will have a whole new market to make friends with.
The Chakkar: The story showcases various forms of deliberate remembrance by adults: diaries, leaves, drawings, Museum of the Collective Memory, etc. It also talks about the Vortex of Noma which is inaccessible to adults and no one knows what happens during the Festival of Madness. Tell us more about this juxtaposition.
“Both forms of knowing felt vital: these desperate scribblings we make to try and hold on to the largess, and the opaque and unknown ways in which the largess becomes known to us, in glimpses, out of the corner of our eye, always too big to hold, understand, or look at directly.”
Mehta: I am interested in various forms of knowing: knowing intellectually (via books or deliberate acts of recording and remembrance) and knowing instinctively or opaquely (via the body, instinct, dreams, and other forms I don’t have the language for). In the book, you have this massive, sublime cosmos that’s swallowing you whole, that you can barely understand, and then you have you, an individual, trying to survive by capturing whatever you can on the page, by ordering the chaos into systems and museums and diaries, by forming bonds with other people so you can link together and not drown. Both forms of knowing felt vital: these desperate scribblings we make to try and hold on to the largess, and the opaque and unknown ways in which the largess becomes known to us, in glimpses, out of the corner of our eye, always too big to hold, understand, or look at directly.
I also loved playing with our deliberate acts of remembrance through time: So, you have this ordered, neat record a person made and then time comes and morphs it, with the world shifting, changing, repurposing the record to make new meanings. That’s why all the stories in Mad Sisters shift form (from history to myth to sea phrase to fable to fairytale), and why the museum of collective memory has corridors humans cannot access; because no matter how much you try and claim order, chaos comes for it.
The Chakkar: The ending brings with it a sense of catharsis. It tugs the heartstrings of anyone who has understood the nuances of waiting. Could you talk about how you led your characters home?
Mehta: I love the phrase ‘led your characters home’; it reminds me of the tenderness it takes to craft an ending that feels true. I always knew the line I would end Mad Sisters with, and I knew the reveal that would comprise the end of the book. The nuances of those two things came with the drafts: Laleh accepting the concept of ‘enough’, of dancing in the now, Myung searching for her again—those were layered in by the characters themselves.
The Chakkar: Mad Sisters of Esi, embodies plurality in its narration, languages, and landscapes. How do you dwell, as a writer and a person, in a space of plurality?
Mehta: For me as a writer, plurality feels essential to the creation process. I don’t think I can make unless there are multiple floating aspects to a novel that I can (hopefully) layer, blend and smooth into a complex whole. I’ve always admired books that are fluid and whose nuts and bolts are invisible, and that’s what I draw energy from when creating. As a person, I am not sure plurality is the most conducive for what goes on in the mind. There is a lot of plurality right now in my life, and I am actively seeking stillness, singularity, spaces of emptiness and (hopefully) boredom so that it’s easier to slip into the chaos of creation.
The Chakkar: For readers who want to read books similar to Mad Sisters in its essence, what are your recommendations?
Mehta: For readers who liked the Whale of Babel, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. For those who want a sense of chaos and anarchy from a book, all of Italo Calvino’s books, specifically Invisible Cities (which has a brilliant sense of worlds within worlds) and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. If you’re looking for the emotion of Mad Sisters, then The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It’s very different from Mad Sisters in tone, content and style, but gosh, it is the most beautiful book of tenderness.
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Akankshya Abismruta is a creative writer and independent book reviewer based in Sambalpur. She has been published on various digital platforms and in Indian newspapers. You can find her on Instagram: @geekyliterati and Twitter: @geekyliterati.
