Writes
Indu Subaiya is a writer and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles by way of Bangalore, India. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Stone Canoe, Lunch Ticket, The Table Review, Writing the Resistance, Animal Literary Magazine, and Immigrant Report. She also wrote and directed the autofiction short film The Apartment. She's an alumnus of the Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) and received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University.
A selection of Writing:
FROM THE TABLE REVIEW
“Pieve Santo Stefano is called the “City of the Diary,” Citta Del Diario, and is about an hour and a half by car from Siena, in Tuscany. I’m going there because, in these years of returning to graduate school for creative nonfiction, I’ve found myself drawn again and again to the diary as a way of writing a life. I’ve wondered if a diary is the book that never got written, something between books, underneath our books, a book the market cannot sell because our lives aren’t organized neatly by theme and chapter.”
FROM LUNCH TICKET
“I wanted the essence of the cuisine of my country of birth, the first food of all foods, ground zero, the basic building block, the iconic yellow Lego brick. I wanted to eat the thing that reminds me of when eating started, of the foundation on which culinary castles are built that would collapse without the base of it all, the orange that turns into a fluffy yellow, thick, creamy, salty, steamy, garlicky, with a bit of bite on a warm bed of rice: dal, dhal, or even doll as my grandmother, dainty and Indo-European in her sensibilities, called it.”
FROM LUNCH TICKET
“Creative nonfiction is about what to include and what to exclude. The act of selection – of a period of time in one’s life, or of a key event, of where to begin and where to end because after all, life is continuous, so the story is continuous and meaning builds over time – is a critical part of the art. Days (until we invent time travel) proceed sequentially but lived experience does not, and when it’s translated into words, it alchemizes with the written to deepen metaphors and meaning over time. Who among us CNF writers thought their piece was done when another life event happened and you had to ask, is this part of the story or is it a new story?”
Rumpus original art by Sumayya Ansari.
Accidental Altars
from The Rumpus
“Before these last few years, my Catholic Protestant heritage as an Indian American woman married to a Russian Jewish man with a biracial son was mostly a good thing. But Trump’s election and the climate in this country afterward upended the basket of identities I carried around so casually; now, a nagging, headless specter seemed to follow me everywhere, whispering choose.
In his memoir, Brown, Richard Rodriguez describes the paradox (to some) of being gay, Catholic and Hispanic American in fruitarian terms: “When you slice an avocado, the pit has to go with one side or the other, doesn’t it?” My answer to Rodriguez is a qualified yes. An undisturbed avocado is a peaceful fruit, carrying its heart in its center, balanced. The choice of which side the pit goes, is only on the occasion of the avocado’s wholeness being severed and exposed.”
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On Arrival
from Immigrant Report
“My stepmother is my introduction to America and I am her introduction to being a mother. We are both immigrants in that sense, me in my new country, she in her new daughter’s life.
For now, I am waiting. Intezar. It’s one of those Hindi words that doesn’t translate perfectly into English. There’s a whole host of these in different languages, a testament to how much more there is to say, always. Technically, Intezar means ‘waiting’—but it’s a specific kind of waiting. Full of desire, and yearning, but it’s likely for something that can never be, or someone who will never arrive. It is a lover’s promise. I will wait for you. Forever, if I have to.”
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The Opposite of Resistance Is…
from Writing the Resistance
“As we talk more about our families I think about how this year had turned private spaces inside out and forced us to internalize public spaces. And in the mixing of these dislocations, will there be combustion or a more perfect recombination?
Marsian, the avante guard puppet artist, posts a video of himself doing a handstand in front of a yoga studio in slow motion. The world is upside down. I wonder about the Women’s March of the coming year. I wonder what it will really be the anniversary of.”
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Lost | Found
from Stone Canoe
“I went to Pune once to visit my mother in the hospital and then, unexpectedly, to bury her. I was two years old.
The places we visit when we’re “too yount to remember” might still wind their way into memory. We recall them differently from later memories, maybe through smell or an inexplicable sense of comfort when we return. Pune was a place like this. I don’t remember my mother who I called Amma… Amy suggested I return to the place I saw my mother last. Maybe then I can access and process any visceral impresions of her I might remember. I’m not sure I want to; I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”
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Here, Not Together
from Animal literary Magazine
“Just a few black letters on a white screen, but the scene assembles itself instantly. We were on a flat clearing with tall rocks behind us that we hoped would buffer us against the wind, but around the bend, the tents came at us, wild, lopsided, empty, tossed about by a disorganized wind, abandoning their owners without shelter. Taking note, we foraged for rocks heavy enough to ground an object but light enough to carry and placed them inside our tent in the corners, along the edges, as the yellow light turned pink then blue then grey then black ink. And we slept safely.”
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The Price Is Not Right. Indu Subaiya Speaks out
From The KHIT Blog
“That’s great you say. We’ll keep this thriving and virtuous economy alive, we’re just going to get rid of the individual mandate, some nasty corporate penalties and poorly run exchanges that limit choice and raise premiums for patients and we’ll handle pre-existing conditions with hiving off those patients into separate pools. But that’s a fool’s errand.
It was precisely because the ACA widened the tent of coverage that new private sector markets were created. It was precisely because of exchanges that Americans woke up to the fact that you need to take responsibility for your health and spend your pre-deductible dollars wisely, and private sector businesses rose to the occasion to build tools to educate consumers on managing health care expenses and decision-making.”
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