Meera Rajagopalan is an author and social entrepreneur. Her debut book, THE EMINENTLY FORGETTABLE LIFE OF MRS PANKAJAM (Hachette), was shortlisted for the AutHer awards. This was followed by CONTROL THE SHIFT (self-published). Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies including the Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing Vol. 6, Amaryllis’s Have a Safe Journey, and Out of Print, Gulmohar Quarterly, Muse India, and Indian Review, among other literary magazines. She is the co-founder of Club Artizen, a craft social enterprise. 

Meera’s story ‘Water Buckets’—in which water is used to talking to the protagonist and others like her—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION. The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed her to find out about her literary influences.

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

I like to think of the world as an ever-changing system of wheels and cogs. When I start a story—it’s the same for literary fiction and speculative fiction. While the question for literary fiction is around how people react to a particular situation, in speculative fiction, my question goes a bit deeper, questioning the premise of the world. How would the character/world react if this component changes? Consequently, most of my speculative fiction is what they call slipstream fiction—set in identifiable areas of the world and speaking to an alternate reality where one or a couple of features change.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

Some of my influences are: Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Gaiman (he is cancelled; is his writing?), and our many puranas.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

This is the toughest one! There is a concept, or a video that I saw (perhaps of Jaggi of Isha, I am not sure), where he talks about the memories that water carries with it. In today’s world, which is likely to run out of water, what would water tell us humans? That was where this story started. Set in my hometown of Chennai, the story tells the story of the relationship of this speaking water with the protagonist who is blessed (or cursed) with the superpower of hearing water speak.