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I get ideas from reading, too-magazines and newspapers as well as novels and stories. WOW: So, One Amazing Thing sounds a little different than other books you’ve written: “The genesis of this book is deeply rooted in personal experience (though most of my earlier books are not).” Where do most of your ideas for books come from then?Ĭhitra: Although the ultimate inspiration for books and stories remains a mystery to me, I get a lot of kernels from observing the world around me, particularly Indian or Indian American communities. That’s when I knew I’d have to explore this phenomenon in a book. Some were toting guns, snarling at people, getting into fistfights others were sharing their meager supplies of water and snacks.
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The pressure brought out the worst in some and the best in others. As we sat on the freeway late into the night, paralyzed by traffic and wondering what would happen to us, I saw people around me, responding in many different ways. I kept asking myself, Why? Why some and not the others?Ī few weeks later I was experiencing a similar situation first hand-Hurricane Rita was coming through Houston, and we were asked to evacuate. But others were able to maintain calm or even joke about things. Some of the people I worked with were very angry. When I was volunteering with Hurricane Katrina refugees in Houston in 2005, I first started thinking about the whole phenomenon of grace under pressure. I wouldn’t even have thought about writing this book if it weren’t for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and a major California earthquake I experienced in 1989.
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How did you come up with this idea?Ĭhitra: The genesis of this book is deeply rooted in personal experience (though most of my earlier books are not). We are so honored to have you as a guest for our fiction issue since this is your specialty! Your new novel, One Amazing Thing, is the story of nine people who are in a passport and visa office when an earthquake traps them together. As the stories begin, recounted in various degrees of enthusiasm and hesitation, we begin to understand that the journey each person must travel - their own person pilgrimage - will take place right here in the encased waiting room, and that the survival of their spiritual selves is as dependent on the telling of these tales, as the survival of their corporal selves is dependent on the basic acts of sharing food, water, and medicine until help comes.WOW: Welcome to WOW !, Chitra. To pass the time waiting for what they all hope will be rescue - much as Chaucer's travelers told stories to pass time while traveling to and form the pilgrimage site - Uma suggests each person recount a story from their life, an "amazing thing" from their own experience. We see the parallel as soon as Uma does: as in The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer's characters are pilgrims to a holy site, the visa applicants are also pilgrims, on their way to India. Suddenly thrust into isolation and facing annihilation, they become a group bound not only by human-created circumstance, but also by fate doled out from above, or rather, from the earth below. When an earthquake hits the waiting room, as if "a giant had placed his mouth against the building's foundation and roared", the room becomes a prison, a cocoon encased in concrete, rock, and twisted metal, and all the visa applicants become prisoners.