Interview by Gemini Wahhaj
I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN (Sarabande Books)

Chaitali Sen’s short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books, January 2023) won the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her novel A Pathless Sky was published by Europa Editions in 2015 and her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction Online, New Ohio Review, and Colorado Review. The daughter of Indian parents, Sen grew up in the US and now lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an important part of the literary community. In the fall of 2022, we participated on a panel about Bengali women writers at the Conference on South Asia and I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her manuscript.

In “Uma,” a young woman emigrates from her native Calcutta to the US, where she is ultimately reduced to a guest in her brother’s atomized suburban home on Long Island. In the opening pages in Calcutta, though, Uma is surrounded by an abundance of human relationships and hilarity: she is deeply connected to the city, the streets, and the local politics. A romantic portrayal of her husband opens onto a rumination on the leftist heritage of West Bengal:

After eight years of marriage, his smile still excited her. He held a booklet they both knew well—Make the 1970s the Decade of Liberation. She always liked the simplicity of the first line, “The year 1969 has ended,” while the next two sentences were poetic, extolling the great victories of the revolutionary masses, culminating in the exclamation “What a year it was!” She wondered if those words had tethered their revolution to a kind of nostalgia in lieu of progress. They sounded distant to her now, from another time and place that could not be revisited.

Rereading A New Race of Men from Heaven, I became aware of the bones of Sen’s stories, as well as the laborious work of laying down their skeletal structure. I had to go back and ask, as a jealous writer, how she did this. I found, underneath a perfect skeleton, a long set-up.

Gemini Wahhaj: In so many of the pieces in the collection, you think you are following one story, but then at the end, it opens up, cracks open, and becomes a much bigger story. This happens for me in the title story, in “The Immigrant,” and also in “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly.” You’re following a rather enjoyable, contained narrative about a woman trying to get a date, or a little boy lost, or identity theft, and then suddenly there is the gut punch, and you are forced to see a whole universe. Can you talk about how you make this happen, as much are you are willing to share? Is that how your stories operate, by entertaining us, by offering the plot we enjoy and expect, to lead us to a deeper question at the end. And for writers, are there ways we can set up our stories in this way?

Chaitali Sen: Thank you, that’s such a wonderful observation and I’m glad that the stories open up a kind of universe at the end.  For me, short stories are like puzzles or codes that have to be cracked, unlike novels, which are less mysterious to me. It is somewhat a subconscious process, but I think the universe, or maybe what could be understood as the theme, is what I’m interested in, even if I don’t know exactly what that is when I’m starting or where the story will end up. I start with the characters in a situation, confronting a certain problem. Without that, I can’t really get anywhere. But once I have that, I look for the unexpected places the story could go and unexpected ways the problem could be solved or not solved. There is also a fair bit of trial and error. I have many, many stories that never get to that next level, or never even get off the ground. One thing I tell students is to think about what the story is about after a first draft after you’ve done some exploring. Then, once you have a handle on what the story is about, let that be your guiding star to help you make decisions during the revision process about what stays and what goes. Which choices best support what the piece is about? Even if the readers have their own interpretations of the story, if you have a sense of what you are trying to say, you’re more likely to have a well-structured and satisfying story.

Gemini: The title of the book A New Race of Men from Heaven is the title of one of the stories in the collection, but how do you think it defines the whole collection? After I read the last story, I looked back through all the stories again through new eyes, and they all seemed to come together for me. In one way or another, they lay bare the pretenses of our lives, the injustices of society, or colonial violence. As if the stories expose the fragility or imperfections of our humanity. Also, each story brings us to such deep, heart-breaking empathy in the end. It’s such a tense experience. On the one hand, you lay bare the pretense or violence or flaws of the characters we are following, and on the other hand, we are left with such a feeling of empathy for someone else at the end.

Chaitali: First, the title comes from what I believe is a mistranslation of a Latin inscription of a painting at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, depicting the arrival of the royal House of Hanover. The official translation is something like, “A New Generation of Men from Heaven.” But when I was doing research, the first blog I read translated it as “A New Race of Men from Heaven” and this was one of those uncanny, serendipitous, ‘divine’ interventions—I say that as an atheist—that gave me the title of that story and the collection. I think it points to the whole absurd way human society has been organized around hierarchies and divisions by race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, caste, and other arbitrary distinctions, and how much that affects our lives whether we are aware of it or not. So in every story, there is some straining against or grappling with these divisions and hierarchies as a constraint or chain on our aspirations. Maybe the empathy comes from the fact that we all live like this, under these constraints, and no one can escape having their lives shaped by them. We may experience them differently, depending on our circumstances or social status at any given time, but we are all shaped by them.

Gemini: You have mentioned that you do not speak from one identity, and you are not trying to represent an identity. And this is true. Many of the stories are not necessarily about Bengalis or Indians. In many instances I was surprised at first, reading from a wealthy, older male writer’s perspective. And yet, would you say that there is a philosophical consistency? That you’re rooting for the underdog? The children, the secretary, the young man in prison?

Chaitali: I’m definitely interested in the underdog, and I think it’s fair to say that I’m rooting for them. But in general, I’m also interested in power and powerlessness, and the ways that can shift from one moment to the next even though there are definite entrenched power relations in society that are set by the system we live in: class structure, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, ethnic hegemony, etc. I’m interested in vulnerability because no one is invincible and no one is immune from the chance that their world might be turned upside down. I’m interested in those small moments of instability, and how people get back their equilibrium, often going back to the status quo or some semblance of normality. And in the background, perhaps unstated within the story itself, I’m interested in the lingering question of what going back to normal means for all the people we don’t see and we don’t hear from. In “The Matchstick, by Charles Tilly,” only one person ultimately benefits from that situation, while the other disappears.

Gemini: There is a lot of wicked fun in some of the stories. You seem to be poking fun at characters that could be most like you/me/readers of short fiction: a writer, a liberal woman living in Texas, a yogi, an academic. And yet, there are very sincere, painful stories told from the perspectives of people who are very removed from these positions of narrative power. For example, the story “Uma” is told in a very serious tone. What do you have to say about that?

Chaitali: Honestly, I wish I could write more stories that are outright having “wicked fun.” The tone of the story, like the structure, sort of asserts itself as I write. I like to think that all of my characters have a good sense of humor, even if the story is serious, and then sometimes there is a narrative voice that is poking gentle fun at the characters, because people like me—writers, liberals, middle-class people, Americans, immigrants—we are full of contradictions and often delusional about ourselves and how we live. For example, in “The Catholics,” every single character is lying to themselves about their convictions. So yes, I think sometimes if we are able to poke fun at ourselves, if we are able to recognize our own tendencies in a character that is lying or acting irrational, we can also come to ask more questions and think more deeply about our lives and our world.

Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel Mad Man (7.13 Books, fall 2023) and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in Granta, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, Arkansas Review, Valley Voices, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She is an Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.