Bella & Rami begins with first love in 1980s India and follows two people whose lives continue in different directions while their connection quietly endures. Why did autofiction feel like the right form for this particular story?

For me, autofiction was the most natural way to tell the story of Bella and Rami, as it allowed me to move seamlessly between memory and imagination, incorporating bits and pieces from my life along the way. I wrote Bella and Rami because I wanted to understand a puzzle that had confounded me all my life: Why did two people who manifestly loved each other passionately fail to get together when young, and why had the connection been broken repeatedly? At first I turned to the tangible, my diary from 1980, the letters, photos and keepsakes that I had carried with me through my life. But the record was incomplete. Although I had hundreds of thousands of words written to me by Rami’s real-world counterpart, all of mine to him had been lost. Reading his letters was like looking through a window and seeing him on the other side of the pane – my own image a mere reflection on the glass. It seemed that the only way to go back in time was to imaginatively inhabit Bella and see how she moved through the world. So this is what I did. Autofiction allowed me to anchor the story in lived experience while moving forward in time with my characters, revealing more and more about their internal and external worlds as I went. It is an emotionally risky way to write, but it is a form that sits naturally alongside being a diarist and a letter writer, both of which are intimate forms of writing.

Bella and Rami often understand their relationship differently at different points in their lives. What did you want to explore through those changing perspectives?

Bella and Rami are intelligent, reflective people, and yet the stories that they carry within themselves affect how they hear what the other says, interpret what is written, and understand what is happening to them. I think that this is true for most of us: In ordinary life, our understanding is imperfect. For Bella and Rami, distance and time amplify this ambiguity, making it sharper and more consequential. In one of my early attempts to describe Bella & Rami, I said that it was about “the search for self and other that takes most of us a lifetime.” It is that journey that I wanted to explore.

Letters, diaries, emails, poems, and WhatsApp messages all become part of the storytelling. How does the evolution from handwritten letters to instant digital communication reflect the changing relationship between Bella and Rami?

Bella and Rami are shy, young people when they first meet. In the beginning, letters let them share intimate thoughts and feelings in a way that they might not have been able to express in person. However, the time delay between letter and response means that the threads of the conversation are often left hanging and unresolved. Time in and of itself is not enough to bring clarity to Bella. Reconnection, and a change in the physical means of communication, from letter to email to WhatsApp, is what enables Bella and Rami to finally work through the missteps of the past in more or less real time and fully appreciate their respective journeys.

What do you hope readers take from the novel about first love, memory, and the stories we carry about our own past?

That the first love experience is profound and stays with most of us a lifetime, that memory is imperfect and coloured by things we are not conscious of at the time, and that by revisiting our stories and bringing them into the present, sometimes, if we are lucky, we can make sense of them.

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