A Journey to Remember in Six Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi

My guest today is Alka Joshi, author of four novels listed on Art In Fiction including Six Days in Bombay listed in the Visual Arts category.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eYPoIKk9pOk

• Inspiration for Six Days of Bombay and its relationship to the real life story of artist Amrita Sher-Gil.
• Background on Amrita Sher-Gil and how her personality and sometimes shocking activities influenced the creation of Mira Novak in Six Days of Bombay.
• Why Alka chose to write a novel about a fictional version of Amrita, rather than about the real artist.
• How Alka chose to frame Mira's story by telling it through the eyes of Sona Falstaff, the nurse who cared for Mira during the last six days of her life in a private hospital in Bombay.
• Background on Anglo Indians as inspiration for the character of Sona who must navigate two worlds after her British father abandoned her and her mother.
• Mira as archetype for the independent woman of the 1930s, that there were more of them then we think.
• How Sona is most like Alka herself compared to the other characters she has written.
• The role of grief for a mother played in the novel.
• Europe in the 1930s and its parallels to India during the same period.
• Researching the novel in Paris, London, Prague, Florence, and Istanbul.
• Reading from Six Days in Bombay.
• One thing that Alka learned from writing this novel that she didn't realize before.
• Alka's next novel, due out in late 2026/early 2027 about a girl wanting to learned classical dance in India when its practice was forbidden.

Read more about Alka Joshi on her website: https://www.alkajoshi.com/

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Transcript

Carol Cram

Hello and welcome. I'm Carol Cram, host of The Art In Fiction Podcast. This episode features Alka Joshi, the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris and her new novel Six Days in Bombay. Since the release of The Henna Artist in 2020, Alka has spoken to over 1000 libraries, book clubs, bookstores, literary festivals, podcasters, universities and colleges and corporations about persistence, patience and passion and her ten-your journey to overnight success. Because she started her writing career at the age of 62, Forbes selected Alka as one of 50 Women Over 50 who are shattering age and gender norms. 

Alka was born in India and came to the United States with her family at the age of nine. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts.

Welcome to the Art In Fiction Podcast, Alka. 

Alka Joshi

Thank you so much for having me, Carol. 

Carol Cram

I so enjoyed Six Days in Bombay, which is the third novel by you that I've read. Not your, not your third novel, but the third that I've read.

And of course, I had you on The Art In Fiction Podcast a few years ago to talk about The Henna Artist.

So, Six Days in Bombay focuses on the relationship between a female painter and her nurse in 1930s, Bombay. Let's start with you sharing a little bit about your inspiration for Six Days in Bombay 

Alka Joshi

Oh, my goodness. it started when I was writing The Henna Artist all those years ago, and I was doing research into the art of India, the economics, the politics. And I ran across this name of a famous painter in the 1930s who was known in both Europe and in India, and her name was Amrita Sher-Gil.

And I was so fascinated by her because I had actually gone to New Delhi and I had, at the Museum of Modern Art there, seen all of her paintings on display and I was really taken with them because they were a combination of avant-garde and surrealism and a little bit of impressionism and so on.

And so, I thought, wow, this woman, who is this woman? I have a degree in art history. I've never heard of this woman. Then I came to find out as I did a little more research and I got a bunch of books about her from that museum. She died when she was only 28 years old in 1941, which is why I think we don't still know about her.

Like a lot of women in fields where they had reached a sort of pinnacle, we lose these women by the wayside, we forget about them, or they get left off of history books and I think that's exactly what happened to her. People in India might have heard of her, but people in the west have not. And that's remarkable because she studied in France, and in Italy, and she was well known in Europe and became the youngest member to be admitted to the Paris salon, which was an amazing thing at the Grand Salon of Paris.

Painters who were forty years old had never been admitted before. So, I thought, if I could write about her, if I could let more of the world remember who this woman was, not only for her paintings, but also for her formidable personality, which was really out there

Because of those two things, we need to remember this woman and we need to remember her talent and how extraordinary she was. So, I thought if I could write a fictional account, perhaps of her life or death or something about it, then maybe I could go a little way towards helping, with that remembrance.

So that's how Six Days in Bombay came about. 

Carol Cram

So why did you decide to make it fictional rather than base it on the real character? 

Alka Joshi

Well, because I'm not a biographer, and I really do think that being a biographer requires a lot of patience because you have to get into all of the diaries and the nitty gritty, all of the little, strange little remembrances you can find in articles or, whatever.

I did do a lot of research about her, but it wasn't so much her life that I really wanted to portray. I wanted to portray somebody like her living in that time period in the 1930s. So, Mira becomes my fictional sort of understudy of the physical painter Amrita.

And Mira is just as flamboyant as Amrita was. Mira is also a half and half identity, which means that she is half European and half Indian just as Amrita was.

And so, she is just as comfortable in Europe as she is in India. She loves wearing the latest Paris fashions, but she's also really comfortable in a sari. And she's outgoing. She loves to be the life of the party. 

And so, as a painter, you would think that most painters are sort of introverted. They want to spend a lot of time alone painting. She was not that. She really wanted to be in society. 

But at the same time, she was also a great seductress. She likes to seduce both men and women. This was like a particular pleasure of hers and we don't know really whether she did it just so that she could get her mother's goat.

Her mother was very traditional and wanted to be just in the fabric of society that she had grown up in very wealthy people and she didn't want a daughter who was going to be so scandalous, but Amrita was scandalous because of her sexual proclivities, but also because she was painting women in the nude, which was not something that was done in the 1930s by women. 

You know how men have always painted women in the nude, men in the nude, tons, things like that. But for some reason it was not okay for women to do it. And she's going out there with entire exhibitions are females in the nude. And when she didn't have a model, she painted herself in the nude, another big scandal for her mother and her father.

And then when her mother said, listen. I really need for you to calm down. Stop creating all this scandal. Why don't you marry one of these nice young men we meet in our social set? I'd like you to marry a maharajah. I'd like you to marry a businessman, an industrialist of some kind.

Come on you could do this. And so the painter said, oh, you want me to get married? Okay mom, I'm going to marry my first cousin. And so, she marries her first cousin. And in real life, this is what the real painter had done. And so her mother is even more scandalized because this is just not done in their social set.

So, I just think that at every turn, this painter was just willing to be her own person. She didn't want anybody else determining who she was. She was going to decide for herself who she was. And I loved this about her. And I loved it about the real painter. 

So I'm loving this character and I'm thinking, where do I start the story? Well, I want to start the story, I think at the most dramatic moment of this young woman's life, and that is actually her death.

The real-life painter showed up at a hospital at the age of 28 and within two days, slipped into a coma and died. And there's no explanation for how this happened. It could have been because maybe she had a miscarriage, maybe she had sepsis of some kind. Maybe she had a misdiagnosed tumor, maybe she had an abortion because the real-life painter had had abortions, by the way, because she wanted to sleep with everybody. 

And so, the idea that there was no explanation for this young woman's death really intrigued me and I thought maybe I could use historical fiction as a way to figure out how this young woman might have died.

Okay, so I'm going to start at the death. Then I think, Carol, okay, if I start at the death and this woman died, is she the one who's going to tell the story or is somebody else going to tell the story? So, then I thought, how about the person who is taking care of her in those last six days at a private hospital in Bombay?

How about that nurse gets to tell the story. And then I thought, all right, what would make these two women able to really bond with one another and for the painter to reveal all kinds of interesting things about herself to this nurse within six days? 

Well, two things. One is they're both in their twenties. So, they have an age familiarity. And then the second thing is they are both dual identity. So my nurse is also a dual identity because as it turns out, I set the book in 1937, and at that time in India, it was the English nurses and the Anglo-Indian nurses who got to work in private hospitals and earn a better salary.

And so, I thought, my nurse has to be Anglo Indian. How is she going to be Anglo Indian? Now, she can be both, Indian and European. And so, I went and did all this research on Anglo Indians and, while the British East India company had wanted their employees, their British employees, to set up house with Indian women because their offspring they figured would be both able to bridge the culture, but also bridge languages.

And then these offspring got to have these choice jobs within the British administration in India because they could speak both languages and speak to the natives, and so on. And so, this particular young woman had one of three fates that could have happened to her after the British started to leave, after they were no longer in favor.

Three things happened to Anglo Indians. One is the British father stayed in India and raised the family there. Another is the British father went back to England and took the family with him and raised his children there. The third thing that happened is that the British father already had a family back home, went back to that family and left his offspring in the lurch in India.

And this is what's happened to our nurse. 

So even though she has a dual identity, she is not comfortable with her dual identity, has a lot of resentment against her father in a way that the painter does not have any issues with her dual identity. She loves flaunting both parts of her, the European and the Indian.

Carol Cram

Mira is sort of like an archetype for the independent woman of the period, which we don't hear a lot about. We still have this idea that women in past generations were not as flamboyant as they actually were, far more so actually than even women today. 

Alka Joshi

Yes. And I'm so glad that you mentioned that insight because I think that I keep hearing all the time if, starting with my first book The Henna Artist, oh, women like that didn't really exist back then, did they?

I want to dispel this notion. I think that these independent women have been in all parts of our lives, all throughout the centuries. But for some reason we forget about them. And I think it is important for us to acknowledge who they were and how hard it was for them back then to stand out in a way that the celebrity culture that we have today, it’s easier for people to sort of join that culture and stand out. But back then the social mores were so tight, so restrictive that they weren't able to do that. And yes, you're right, the Mira character, the painter, is very independent, very headstrong.

In contrast to Mira, we have Sona who is like a turtle in a shell, and she is about to come out of that shell. She so wants to come out of that shell. She doesn't really know how, but Mira understands that this woman deserves to come out of her shell and live this life of independence, and so Mira is going to help her do that.

When Mira dies, she leaves four paintings for the nurse to deliver to the painter's former friends and lovers. Now, in so doing, she is going to set Sona off on a course that is going to take her out of that comfort zone. She's going to go to different countries. She's going to go to Istanbul, Prague, Florence, Paris, London, and back home, and she's going to meet all of these remarkable people that the painter used to know in order to deliver the painting to them.

But more than that, she has to find these people first. All she knows about them are these little conversations that she had with the painter while she was her patient. And so, we don't have any Internet or an iPhone. We don't have easy ways to find people in the 1937 era. And so, the nurse has to figure out very clever ways in order to find these people.

At the end of this journey, Sona is going to figure out exactly how that painter died. But also, she's going to find out more about her own mixed parentage. And I think that that is the real crux of what she needs to find out. That I think even Mira before she died knew was really one of Sonas main goals in life.

Find out who that father was who left her.

Carol Cram

Exactly. Because it really is Sona’s story in this novel. Mira is in there, but you're rooting for Sona right from the start. She's a wonderful character. You must have had a lot of fun creating Sona. 

Alka Joshi

Well, I did, and I think Carol, she is most like me than any of the other characters I have written about so far.

So, like me, I think Sona was in this little shell and was just dying to be let out, like wanting to go and do different things in life. And I don't think that I got that opportunity until my mother really, really impressed upon me that I needed to go away to college. Don't stay here in this area that we live in, go far away to college, apply to places you've never even experienced before. I got to Stanford; I'd never even been out to California. I've never even been out there. I mean, now people have these lovely little campus tours they do and everything.

We had nothing like that, right? 

Carol Cram

No. We just showed up without our parents. You never went with your parents without your parents? 

Alka Joshi

So, yeah, so I think she is most like me. And then this whole idea that, the discomfort she has with her dual identity is also like me because I grew up as an Indian girl in India until the age of nine. Everybody around there looked like me. I didn't, I didn't feel cast out, I didn't feel left out. I was just one of the kids. We come to the United States and now all of a sudden, nobody looks like me. We're my brothers and I in 1967 in the United States in Iowa are the only brown people in our classroom.

So, people are curious about us. Hey, what are you, we're Indian. What tribe are you? Oh, what is a tribe? We don't even know what that means. Then we go, okay, we are from India. And they go, is that somewhere near Texas? They would ask us things like, where did we get our tan?

At that point, Carol, I didn't even know anybody ever sat out in the sun to get brown. 

So, when people were sharing all of these things about India with us, that they really were misinformed about because a lot of people in the West just didn't understand India, and they certainly didn't understand the whole part about British colonization and what colonization does to a country after 300 years, and how difficult it was for India to get back on her feet again after they left.

She had to rebuild her infrastructure and so on and so forth. 

As a 9-year-old, I didn't have any of that language, so I couldn't explain that. And, what's lovely is that now that I can write fiction, I'm able to explain through historical fiction exactly what was going on in India. 

Now, I am much more comfortable being a little bit of Indian and a little bit of American because I will never be 100%, one or the other.

And I thought I could get away with being a hundred percent American when I decided, no, I'm just not going to be Indian because it's not cool. I get that. I am just being left out. No, no, no. I want to fit in. I'm going to be a hundred percent American, but how can I looking the way I do look like a hundred percent American?

So, like Sona, I have this real discomfort with my dual identity, and eventually I have gotten to the point where I'm like, okay, I get it. It's fine. I can deal with both parts of me, and both of them are perfectly wonderful. 

Carol Cram

And of course, I think we all as North Americans, I'm Canadian actually, but it's the same idea.

We're still immigrants. Unless you're Native American, you're an immigrant. And, um so I think we all have that, those of us that, that are, immigrant background, we do have that identity crisis a little bit. It's different for you being from India, more of Avis visible, whereas my, my heritage is English. But still, that is my background is, is Northern England working class. And I'm always going to have a foot there, right? So, I think that we relate to that. 

And I was just going to say that I thought Sona was very relatable for many, many reasons. But one that stood out for me personally was how she related to her mother and the grief for her mother, like yourself. I remember, I recently lost my mother. And it sounds like you were very close to your mother as well, as I was. And so, I wonder, I'm presuming that a lot of yourself went into that, the depiction of the grief.

Alka Joshi

Yeah, because I think no matter when your mother dies, I don't think you're ready to let go of her.

No, and I remember this feeling when my mother died. I thought to myself, now, I have a lovely husband. I have a wonderful father. But I thought to myself, the person who loved me most in this world is now gone. I know, isn't it?

Carol Cram

It's tough. My mother was 93 and she wanted to go. She and I were super close, but it doesn't matter. I didn't think it was going to be as difficult. So, I really related to how you depicted Sona’s grief, and I did as an author myself, I thought that's really interesting how you're probably putting a lot of yourself into that experience. Because I think we do that, don't we? 

Alka Joshi

As yeah, absolutely. And as I wrote that, I was crying, I was just sobbing and because I just remember, when Sona says, I'm not ready to let you go. I still need to learn so much from you. And I remember thinking that and feeling that. Yeah. When my mother was gone.

Carol Cram

It totally got me. My mother's actually been gone for four years now, but it doesn't matter. It seems like yesterday. 

So, one of the other things that was fascinating about this novel, because it was a period I didn't know a lot about was India in the 1930s time of huge change. I always think of it as the big change in the fifties when they became independent, but of course it started in the thirties. So that must have been very interesting to research because it's before your time.

Alka Joshi

Yes. So, and I could do it through the lens of Sona because she's half English and she is feeling the sort of animosity towards the British at this time. She's feeling that all of a sudden now she has sort of become the enemy when she's among Indian people.

And then when she's among English people, she's also a bit of the enemy because she's not a hundred percent English. And so, she's feeling this push and pull of being an English person. And so, this is a time at which the Indians are saying, listen, you have got to leave now. You guys have been here for 300 years, and you’ve overstayed your welcome. Yes, we really need you to leave now. We are ready. 

So, there is a period, it's about 10 years away from the actual independence mm-hmm. of India. And it's fraught with a lot of rebellion. There are freedom fighters everywhere. There are uprisings everywhere. There are riots of the college students in India. All the Indians are getting very het up about independence. And of course, like a lot of college students very passionate. They want India to have her independence. And Sona sees all of this in India. But then when she goes to Europe, guess what? The same thing is happening in Europe, but in a different way.

So, in Europe, the rebellion is against the fascists and the Nazis, but the same underground movements are going on. There are freedom fighters. There's a lot of whispering going on when she gets to Prague. Remember, when she meets up with Petra. Mira's old love, Petra, cannot very easily talk about the Czech, feeling about the Nazis because the model that she has sleeping in her bed right then is a male model and he is a German Czech, and so everybody's very careful about what they can say and how they can say it. 

It was amazing to me to find the similarities between the two different places that are going on at the same time. 

Carol Cram

It was a very interesting period, the thirties, wasn't it? Of course, it was wonderful because you've got Bombay and then you have Europe, which you don't usually have a novel that spans that large, an area. You must have had a lot of fun with the research of the European parts, for example. 

Alka Joshi

So much, so much fun. So, this is what I do every single time that I need to research a book. yeah. And I want to research it. I want to show my readers what it feels like, smells like, looks like all of these kinds of sensory sort of experiences. I want them to feel them. 

And so, the only way I can do that is if I go to these places. So, of course I went to Istanbul, not a couple of years ago, but before that. So, I know very well what Istanbul smells like and what the food tastes like and all of that. Then I went to Prague. I went to Paris and Florence and London. And the way that I schedule my time is while I'm still here in the United States, I find the experts I need to talk to. I needed to talk to experts in the interwar period. So, what was happening between World War I and World War II? I find, um art historians who can tell me a little bit about what artists were doing in that time period.

And I found out at that point about the fact that Picasso painted his famous Guernica painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Expo. How interesting. I didn't even know there was a world of. A

Then I have to find, these cultural historians. And so, in Prague, I met up with a woman who teaches at the Czech Academy of Sciences but is an amateur historian about Prague. She walked me around to all the places where she thought Sona, the nurse, would have gone in order to find Petra in order to find, what, the artist Mira. was doing at that time.

And then of course in Florence I met up with an art historian professor. He teaches at the University of Milan, but he met me in Florence, and he'd walked me through all the downtown area.

Well, I call it downtown, but old Florence. And also, the area where all the expats used to live, because he said, this is where if you have any expats in your novel, this is where they would have lived at the time. 

So that gave me the idea that when Sona is looking for Paolo. Paolo is now married to an American woman who lives along that Via Tornabuoni, but also that she's rich because only wealthy Americans were living in Florence at the time.

So, it’s just like walking through these streets just gives me such a great flavor for my character walking through these streets. And um and then I supplement that with things that I am looking at through photo archives at the time period. What people are wearing, um how the men and women are relating to one another.

You know that wonderful movie tone newsreels at the beginning of movie theaters back then. Well, I watch a whole bunch of those. They're all available on YouTube, and that gives me a great idea of how they were letting people know what was happening in the World War II era.

So yeah, it was just an amazing education for me as well.

Carol Cram

Would you like to do a reading for us, please? 

Alka Joshi

Oh, my goodness, yes, I would love to. And in this particular passage, we are on the express with Sona and her compartment mate, a woman named Agnes, whom she has just met.

Agnes is very well put together. She's European. She has a beautiful skirt suit on, and she has a sophisticated air about her that Sona is very enamored of and wishes that she could be more like this woman. 

Agnes looked thoughtful. She tapped cigarette ash on the glass ashtray embedded into the table.

“Things are never as they seem, you know. Take a look at my trunk. What do you see?”

I looked up at the luggage rack and cringed. My tweed trunk is sagging in places with its tarnished latches and her smart one, a wax cotton canvas and warm brown, outlined in leather with brass tacks and three gold initials CRS.

“It's a beautiful trunk. I'm not sure I could ever afford it.”

“Is that what you see?” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. What more was there to see? But I took another look and then it dawned on me. “The initials are different from yours?”

She released a cloud of nicotine letting the smoke swirl around her as if she were a genie from 1001 nights.

“If my name were Agnes Kalmendi.”

I frowned. “But you told me…”

“Or perhaps Agnes is my name, and I stole that trunk.”

“I don't understand.” I said. “I was so confused. 

“Or I could have bought that trunk from someone with the initials CRS. It could also be that I was married to a wretched man with those initials and I claim the trunk in the divorce.” Her white teeth gleaned between pink lips. “Any one of those could be true. How are you to know?”

The train was slowing down. We were nearing Belgrade where our sleeper car would be uncoupled and added to the train headed for Prague.

“I don't understand,” I said again. I felt as if I'd missed a part of the conversation and was having a hard time catching up.

“You will.”

Agnes crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. She pulled on her gloves and gathered her clutch. The porter appeared at our cabin to take her luggage off the train. She cut my chin in her hand and smiled. She seemed sad. I caught a whiff of her jasmine and sweet cigarette scent when she said. “If you're a sweet girl, the world is a big place. You'll learn.”

Carol Cram

And no spoilers, but we do know what's going to happen next. I love that scene. I was actually, I was driving, I was driving because I listened to it and I gasped out loud because I just thought, oh, this is not good. Yeah, right. I, and so, whatever I won't say. Because you're so invested in Sona at this point. 

Alka Joshi

Yeah, and this is Sona’s first lesson in things are not as they seem, and she keeps having to learn this lesson over and over again. 

Carol Cram

It takes her a long time, doesn't it? 

Alka Joshi

Yes. I loved creating these characters, and I don't know about you, Carol, but the characters just show up. This Agnes character, she just showed up as I was imagining Sona on this train. And then there is this well put together woman, and I know she's not going to be good for Sona, but she shows up and then I'm like, what is she saying? And I'm just listening to that conversation and writing it down. 

Carol Cram

See, this is why we do this because you never know. I would not want to have everything all planned out because these things happen, don't they? These characters show up and you go, oh wow, where'd they come from? That's what's so much fun. 

So, one of my goals in the art fiction podcast is to inspire other authors. So, this's a question I ask, um everybody actually. What's one thing you learned from writing this novel that you didn't know before? 

Alka Joshi

I learned so many things, and I think some of them we just covered about the fact that there was so much going on, um in Europe at the same time that there was, going on in India. And one of the things I love about writing historical fiction is that I learned so much.

One of the other things I learned, which was very interesting, is that some of our earliest Bollywood actresses in India were Indian Jewish women. I didn't even know there were Indian Jews. Apparently, there are huge communities of Indian Jews who existed before Israel became a state. And then it became a country, and then, they fled to Israel. But in India. Jews escaped persecution from other lands because India never discriminated against the Jews. They said, come on in. Whatever it is you want to do here. You want to set up a synagogue, fine. You want to wear the kippah on your head, that's fine. You want to set up a community center for Jews?

Fine. Whatever it is you want to do, it's fine. Just be a valuable contributor to the rest of the community. And they were. And so, at a time when Hindu and Muslim women were not allowed to be performing on the stage, Jewish women stepped up in India and they became our earliest actresses. I was just blown away by that.

I had no idea. And then six out of the eight Bollywood studios at the time were run by Jewish men who then used to go to Hollywood, learn the new techniques in Hollywood, come back and put them into practice in India. 

Amazing. Right. 

Carol Cram

This sounds like another novel. 

Alka Joshi

Wouldn't that be interesting? And I found a way to work all of that, all of these little tidbits that I learned. I find a way to work them into the narrative which I just love to do. I think in terms of craft, one thing that I learned from writing this novel is that not everything has to be explained. 

I think that there is so much in a novel that readers can pick up from the context or they can pick up because they're following the story, following the character.

And I think that we as authors don't have to explain everything. For example, towards the end, when Sona makes certain choices about life going forward, I have many readers who say, why did she make that choice? And I thought to myself, it's because I wanted you to think about this, right? Everything should not be handed to a reader on a plate at the end. They should have the ability to say, now, why did that happen? Could she have done it because of this? Did she do it because of that? You know? So, I love the idea that a reader can be left with questions that they need to answer on their own.

Carol Cram

Just like in life. Right. We don't know everything about everybody. I like the way you did that. I think I know what question you're talking about at the end. Yes. Um so what's next? What are you working on right now? This is your fourth novel, right? 

Alka Joshi

It's the fourth. Yes. And book number five is almost finished. I just need to go back and do my next round of revisions. But it is taking place in 1920s, back in Jaipur again, and there's a young woman, she's only 17 years old. She wants to learn the classical dance in India. That is called Kathak. And it is a dance that has been, for centuries, a classical dance in India.

But what happened at the time that the British learned that the courtesans of India used to dance this because the courtesans are like the geishas of Japan. They were trained in the classical arts, music, dance, poetry, all of that. And so, they used to practice this dance. But in 1857 when there was the first mutiny against the British in India, the Britishers learned that that mutiny had been financed by courtesans.

So now anything associated with courtesans to them was anathema and they thought we're going to destroy these women. And they did that by ruining their reputations and calling them prostitutes. So now, no Brahmin family, no respectable family of any kind, wanted their daughter to learn this dance, even though it had been practiced for years and years.

And so, there was a period of about eighty to a hundred years before Independence of India that women were not allowed to even learn this particular dance. And so, it was only the courtesans in their houses who practiced it, and it was men who practiced it in professional dance troops. And the men would play both sides just like in Shakespearean troops. They would play the men and the women's roles in these dances. And so, I thought, well, what if this girl wants to learn this dance? She's going to have to learn it in secret. How will she find an instructor? She's going to have to learn to perform it somewhere in secret. How will she get away with that?

And then there's a side story going on about a mother who has disappeared, and so what has happened to the mother and how is she going to get reunited with that mother again? 

Carol Cram

Oh, exciting. And when is this one coming out? 

Alka Joshi

This one should come out probably late 2026 or early 2027. 

Carol Cram

We'll look for that. Do you have a title for it yet? 

Alka Joshi

I don't, and I don't know if you know this, Carol, but I don't come up with my own titles. And, for example, Six Days in Bombay. That was something that the editorial and sales team came up with together, and I think it's a great title. I had no idea what they were going to title this one, but starting with The Henna Artist, I had wanted to title that, the enemy of the crocodile and the sales team and the, the editorial team. They looked at me and they said, why? And I said, because there's a famous proverb in the narrative that goes like this. Only a fool remains in the water and stays an enemy of the crocodile. So, it made total sense to me that that this would happen.

Carol Cram

Thanks so much for chatting with me today, Alka. This has just been fabulous. 

Alka Joshi

Well, I love it too because every time I speak to you, I get a new insight. I get an insight into something about my characters. Like, it was somebody else who said to me, I think Sona is just like you, Alka, and I thought, oh my God, she's right.

I didn't even think until then that that was me, I was really writing about. Yeah. That's wonderful. 

Carol Cram

Well, thank you. 

Alka Joshi

You're so welcome. 

Carol Cram

I’ve been speaking with Alka Joshi, author of four novels including Six Days in Bombay listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Alka’s website at www.alkajoshi.com. If you are enjoying the Art and Fiction podcast, please help us keep the lights on by making a donation to the Kofi website at www.Kofi.com/artinfiction.

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