Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s words not only burn into your brain—they burrow into your marrow. Her short-story collection White Dancing Elephants is no exception. While the book tackles hard-hitting topics like gang rape, racism, and child abuse, her stories are never focused on a single idea. Each story encompasses the breadth of human emotion, which is why they resonate in your very bones, whether that story is about a chronically ill woman feeling replaced by her husband’s robot or a husband and father whose life is consumed by the care of a daughter who will never mature beyond her elementary school years. Bhuvaneswar gives honest, unfiltered observations on life and the human condition in all of her writing.

White Dancing Elephants won the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize, and Bhuvaneswar’s work has appeared in Longreads, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, I, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Natural Bridge, apt magazine, Quiddity, and Hobart. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She is the 2018 Walter Robinson Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is a practicing physician and writes when she is not in the hospital, a topic she has written about in essays at Medium and elsewhere.

Please See Me talked with Chaya about how she became the multifaceted person she is and how fiction and medicine fit in.

Please See Me: What is your literary origin story? When and why did you start writing?

Chaya Bhuvaneswar: I love the framing of this question as “origin story” which takes us right to the superpower concept. Writing well certainly feels like a superpower to aspire to! Yet the reality of how becoming a writer evolved for me is so much less intentional and linear than that. It’s more like one of those telekinesis origin stories, where the person starts by bending spoons through mental power alone, and then over years (and many spoons) progresses to splitting atoms, ha. I know that I read pretty early—like three or four—and that as a child, I had many hours to myself and that reading and eventually writing became wonderful ways of not being alone. Often in a literal sense, since in elementary school and even through high school, I’d write stories for and with my friends and we’d share them around. I always thought of literacy as this really special, saving thing  and I still believe it can be.

PSM: You mentioned that your mother was a pediatrician in your essay “Behind the White Coat,” but in your Longreads essay “As Beauty Does,” you write that your father was against you going into the medical profession. What inspired you to enter the medical field? 

CB: More and more, I feel that our choice of profession is less an isolated choice we make as individuals in a vacuum, i.e. the Kantian model of starry self-determination, where we look up at the night sky, see God’s creation, know God is with us and we are in image, and decide ourselves accordingly. I also don’t feel that what we do is random though (I’ll never be a Humean no matter what, though I enjoy a good game of billiards). Now most of the time, I feel that “choice” is our word for something that has grown, often without our realizing it. I knew I really wanted to help and connect with others. I knew this to be healing for me as well as for them, and also that it would be worthwhile to see how I could balance that caring for others with truly caring for myself and nurturing my own life apart from what anybody else might need from me.

I had thought initially I would go to law school or grad school and either teach, practice law, or some combination, and that definitely could have been a happy and logistically perhaps easier life. I’ll never know! But having gotten into law school while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, I went to India for a summer to volunteer in my cousin’s hospital in South India (Christian Medical College, in Vellore), and the experience of being part of such transformational human change, to be there for someone going from suffering to not suffering anymore, was important to me, spoke to my religious faith as a Hindu, essentially converted me into wanting to be a doctor for myself rather than for my parents.

There probably also was some element of wanting to carry forward a tradition since six women in my mother’s family became doctors, scientists (one zoologist) or other clinicians (clinical psychologists) in the generation that was allowed to pursue any education beyond the fourth grade. The lives of these women were hard, though. Two remained unmarried, for instance. That was what my dad was probably (and realistically) the most concerned about. That if I took a nontraditional path into medicine, in the sense of starting about four or five years after college, rather than right away (which is now the norm, but he didn’t know that!)—then “no one would marry me.” And in his universe of arranged marriage between a subcaste of South Indians, that was actually true. And he could not envision anything else. He saw a life of real loneliness and hardship in front of me if I chose medicine. Also there was an element of misogyny that he, too, inherited from men in his family, who didn’t think women should be doctors, period. But I think when my dad looked at me, he really was moved by the sadness of the idea that I would spend my life completely alone. And I love him for that.

PSM: In your essay for Off Assignment, “About Portobello Road,” you write:

But after my required work was finished I wanted to think. I wanted—needed—to keep my mind. Keep it free, keep it dreaming, keep it focused, just keep it, versus trading it for good to the medical machine. Keep my own mind for what, I wasn’t completely sure—the memory of when I had believed I would publish literature, now painful, sitting here in this dismal room in London.

Do you believe that people forget that doctors are not solely defined by their profession? That they have more to give, more to think about, than simply the pursuit of medicine?

CB: A version of this question came up at a wonderful panel I was so happy to be part of recently, hosted by the brilliant writer Michele Filgate (who’s out with a new book this year, on the theme of “what we can’t talk about with our mothers”—check it out!). I want to emphasize what I said then; the panel transcript will be up on the Lit Hub website in April if people want to see that. It is imperative that when any patient comes to a doctor, he or she knows and can have absolute faith that the doctor is thinking solely of that person. There has to be intense focus and concentration.

For me what helps to sustain that intensity and that devotion to the details of patient care is having an outlet like writing fiction when I am not practicing medicine. I can’t even read fiction during my lunch hour—I have to be looking at lab data or writing a note or on the phone or just sitting with students in the cafeteria, hearing about their career plans. I have to stay in it and what I’m increasingly better at, with time and the passing years of practice, is condensing my day so that I maximize the face-to-face time I spend with patients, which is the heart of what I do. Then go home and really be off the clock, spending time with my family and when I can, usually very early in the morning on weekends or after the kids go to bed on the weekdays, I write.

I think people are right to want to have their doctors defined solely or even mainly as doctors. The beauty of medicine is the humility. You get up at a certain time, whether you’re one year out of your training or fifty years out of your training. You have to live in a way that makes you available when you’re needed—for this reason, being Hindu, not drinking or smoking, is valuable. You show up in a reliable way. You show up for every single patient on the basis of humanity regardless of who they are. You treat the perpetrator and the victim of violence with equal compassion and care. You stay until certain work is done. If, as I am, you are a mother with time-specific duties, you come back after hours and you finish. You check. You make sure. You connect with families. Above all, you care. That doesn’t change. That is the beauty of practice.

PSM: The stories in your collection White Dancing Elephants allude to various works of literature, as you discussed in your interview for Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and in your interview for Scoundrel Time, you mention a comprehensive list of influential authors. Can you talk about the role of fiction in your life? What does reading fiction do for you?

CB: This is a great time to ask me that question, because I have a few days off and a knapsack stuffed with books! I think reading fiction, above all, gives me pleasure, something I try not to forget when I write. That necessity of being entertaining. That wish to be entertained, that sweet childish command “tell me a story”—I hope we never forget it. I worry sometimes that everyone (including me) will lose the immediacy of storytelling because of the intrusion of email and social media into our lives, but then I think of how much of a story can be told over social media (i.e. someone’s story, over days and weeks and years, of working up the courage to come out to his parents) and how interesting it is to look back at email threads with my good friends sometimes and realize how different our emotions were about a given topic (i.e. finding a babysitter) years ago when our kids were younger.

Besides entertaining us, I also think fiction provides a way to exercise the brain that nothing else can duplicate. Many ideas come to me when I read fiction, yet I am absorbed in the “fluid and continuous dream” that, as John Gardner wrote, is the hallmark of well-written fiction. Most amazingly, the emotions inspired by a really successful story or novel stay with me and make me reflect on my life long after I’ve closed the book. I hope so much to do that with my writing as well, but obviously it’s a hope that is distant from the much more mundane (and humble) act of simply sitting and writing.

PSM: You write in various forms: nonfiction, poetry, fiction (short stories and novels). What does each form do that the others do not? How do you find the right form for the story you want to tell?

CB: This is a wonderful craft question and worth spending time on as well for the number of readers who are also writers themselves!

I have a few reflections about this. Poetry is kind of a separate category for me and often a poem kind of makes itself known quickly. Usually when there’s a particular phrase or couple of sentences that resonate, I start writing a poem. Versus a sentence that someone, a new character, seems to speak, and then I need to write that down in a way that lets me follow it into the character’s entire voice and point of view and ultimately something that happened to that person that they want to talk about.

Then I feel like whether it’s a long vs. short piece of fiction has so much to do with how interested I am in the character and the character’s story and the other people involved with that character. It’s really driven by how interested, how consumed I feel by it, versus wanting a shorter engagement. Like wanting a short visit vs. wanting to move into a whole house and look at the entire thing and sit inside through different seasons of the house.

Finally, nonfiction vs. fiction. This decision is also very visceral and feels like something that grows. There are essays that start in my mind specifically as essays and I can’t explain why, but writing these as essays proves to be satisfying without necessarily providing explanations either. I think nonfiction often arises from the predominance of a feeling over an event in my mind. So that I’m still playing with tone and emotion and don’t necessarily know what (nonfiction) “story” needs to be told—what I really need is just the emotion played out on the page, and nonfiction allows us to do that, particular examples including the essays of Virginia Woolf and more recently, Alexander Chee and Zadie Smith.

A. M. Larks is the fiction editor of Please See Me.