Interview by A.N. Higgins
Kiran Bhat is a novelist, short story writer, and poet who has travelled all over the world. When we spoke, he was based out of Sydney, Australia, but he never stays in one place for long! We spoke about his next big project, favourite places, and of course, the impact of Covid-19.
A.N. Higgins: Girar is a global streaming novel that will take place in 365 locations around the world over the course of the next decade. Could you tell me a bit more about the novel? Where did the first glimmer of the idea for this project come from?
Kiran Bhat: I grew up in the US in a South Indian family, and when I went to Madrid, I suddenly had this realization that, more than any country I’d known, I felt like I belonged to Spain. Of course, with age and life, that changed. In Madrid–which is a multinational, cosmopolitan city that attracts people from all over the world–I was living with a Dominican, a French person, and a Turkish person. I realized that I liked living in a country that wasn’t mine, learning a language that wasn’t mine, being around people who weren’t part of my community.
I visited a house of worship in Toledo that was part church, part synagogue, part mosque. Seeing a building like that, I wanted to create the world in a piece of art as well. I decided to be a vagabond who travels all over the world and writes. My parents weren’t happy with that, and we fought a lot. I taught English online and hopped countries for a decade. I went to 134 countries and learned how to manage in twelve languages. And I got the idea for a novel that could coalesce a narrative of the world.
Girar is an attempt to tell the story of the world in a way that also allows me to tell a bit about myself. The word “girar” means “turn” or “gyrate” in English. Girar tells the story of an archetypal mother and father that you could find anywhere in the world. The father is a hardworking hospital staff member, and the mother is passionate, religious, family-and-neighbourhood-absorbed. These two people are dealing with the fact that their son is queer, not living at home, and doesn’t really listen to them. And they’re trying to make sense of that and be at peace with it.
Girar is going to be a streaming novel–I’m not going to traditionally publish it. I want it to be not just a story about globalization, but a story that could not exist without the forces of globalization. I’m creating a streaming platform that will allow you to get the stories in real time, as they’re happening. So if a story happens on April 23, 2023, in Beirut, Lebanon, you’ll get it at that time even if you’re in Vancouver or Sydney.
There’s this Hindu myth in which Ganesha and Karthik are told by Shiva, “In a contest, I will prize the one who is able to travel the world first.” So Karthik actually goes around the world, while Ganesha circles around his mother and father and says, “My mother and father are my world.” And therefore Ganesha becomes the winner, because he circles the world first, by just circling his parents.
I’m someone who chose both my family and the world, so I’m going to circle both the world, and I’m going to circle my parents.
ANH: How has the pandemic impacted your thinking about this project?
KB: I’ve had to change it a lot. 2020 happened and the world changed dramatically, but it helped me. The theme of a son coming back after many, many years of not talking to his parents makes sense because the Covid virus has destroyed the global economy, so it makes sense that the son who has no work anymore would have to return home and might be in a place where he can’t have a visa anymore. So Covid helped me give the son a reason to leave.
It also creates more frustration. The father really wants the son to be a productive member of society with a job, but he can’t because there’s no economy anymore–how is he going to get a job when nowhere is hiring? So that helps to fuel the flames of aggression and conflict.
ANH: What is your writing routine like?
KB: I know that some people have a very fixed way of answering this question–I don’t think I do. I’m fairly busy, and when I Skype people and do events, that interrupts things. The time zones don’t allow me to live uninterruptedly! Whenever I have time, I write: that’s it. I have something to get done, I get it done. I don’t know if my routine is anything fancy. It’s just, if you have three hours, why not use it and write something?
ANH: You’ve travelled all over the world, and global interconnectedness is a major theme running through your body of work. Climate change is arguably the biggest issue the world is facing right now. How do you think this will factor into Girar? Are you anticipating that the project will be impacted by the climate disasters that we know will take place over the next ten years?
KB: I wrote another novel called We Of the Forsaken World…that was released in January. That novel had a lot more of an anthropocenic relation to it. I think Girar will be indirectly shaped by climate change because I’ll have to capture spaces in real time. Certain countries are sinking into the ocean, and some lands are irrevocably changed now, so obviously that’ll have to be in the novel. The book will be influenced by the coming apocalyptic situations that will inevitably result out of climate change. So climate change will be there in the story, but it’ll be mostly subconscious–I wouldn’t want it to be too on the nose.
ANH: How do you hope this project will impact readers?
KB: I think this book will be wonderful for people who are curious about the world and want to travel–those who may have never left Canada but might be curious about what life is like in Indonesia or Mali. But there’s also this very strong, archetypal narrative that hits all those emotional notes in the way that a lot of socio-realist novels hit. I think people might just be drawn to the storytelling and enchanted by the characters, too.
ANH: You’ve visited or lived in 132 countries. Where would you say is your favourite place on Earth?
KB: It must be Mumbai, because I think Mumbai collapses so much of the world in it. It’s a global city like New York, but a global city that collapses India into it, so it has all the complexities of India, the hyper-rich, hyper-poor, all the different cultures and sub-castes and languages as well. It’s a city where East and West meet.
ANH: Will Mumbai be one of the settings in the novel?
KB: It has to be! If there’s a global city, it has to be in this book.
Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in the suburb of Jonesboro, Georgia, USA, to parents from villages in Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but he considers Mumbai the only place of the moment worth settling down in. He currently lives in Melbourne.
A.N. Higgins is a queer writer living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is an MFA Candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CV2, Pandemic Publications, untethered, The Maynard, Lida Literary Magazine, and The Anti-Languorous Project.