Diagrams of the Soul: A conversation with Karan Mahajan
In a detailed interview, Karan Mahajan spoke about exploring the uneven spaces between love and lust in the characters of The Complex, the prism-like perspectives of an extended Indian family, and how Delhi inspires his literary work.
In his 2026 novel The Complex (Fourth Estate), Karan Mahajan tells the story of a large, Delhi-based, Hindu-Punjabi family. The Chopras of A-19 Modern Colony are the descendants of the freedom fighter SP Chopra, and decades after the death of their patriarch, the family strive to bask in the glory of his afterlight. In the hands of Mahajan’s narrative voice, however, the reader never looks directly at this fading glow; instead, we are presented a complex prism, where the reflections slant and shift and scatter, where each character adds to the montage of perspectives and complications.
For example, through the perspective of Vibha—an elder stalwart of this residential complex—Mahajan writes:
So many feelings and eras existed at once in this room in the complex. Old paint on the wall, mere powder in places—paint chosen by her father and never recoated. Old black switches, the wires running in covered plaster rails along the walls. To live in this house was to live inside their father’s mind: half village, half city. (164)
With each such “feeling” in this house, Mahajan builds a complex tapestry of desire, motivation, guilt, lust, ambition, and love. There’s Laxman, who is often referred to has the worst of the Chopra men for his passionate extremisms, but rides his ambition and guile to become the “foremost member of the clan” (3). There is Sachin—Laxman’s nephew—who leaves Delhi and the toxic influence of his family to make a living for himself abroad in the quiet suburbs of Michigan. There is Gita—Sachin’s wife—who finds herself torn between the past of Delhi and the present of the U.S., between the role of a dutiful daughter-in-law for this reputable family and her personal desires. There is Brij—Sachin’s brother—a short-tempered pilot always embroiled in personal scandal, and Karishma—Brij’s wife—another daughter-in-law who responds to the discontents of her life by radically seizing her own individuality. There is Mohit—Karishma and Brij’s younger son—who, disturbed by internal family drama, seeks revolution outside the gates of the complex
The story unfolds with a tumultuous Delhi in the late-20th century in the backdrop, from the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh riots, the Mandal Commission protests, up to the Ram Mandir Rathyatra. Mahajan’s expansive cast of characters are hardly immune to the outside world, but The Complex’s focus remains largely in the inner melancholies of the family itself. Through the prism, no truth is the absolute truth, and no one person’s story is complete unless seen through the spectrum of the prism.
“This is just how my inner soul is constructed. Outwardly, I’m dealing with this American present, but the past in India for me is much more alive. And I’m dealing with that through my characters.”
Mahajan is the author of the critically-acclaimed The Association of Small Bombs (2016), which was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, won the Muse India Young Writer Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Crossword Book Award, and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, among other honours. His debut novel, Family Planning (2012), was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Originally from Delhi, he now teaches at Brown University.
In a video call from Providence, Rhode Island, Mahajan spoke about exploring the uneven spaces between love and lust in the characters of The Complex, the prism-like perspectives of an extended Indian family, and how Delhi inspires his literary work. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: Despite being a thoroughly Delhi story, The Complex opens through the perspective of Gita, who is married into the Chopra clan and only makes brief visits to A-19 Modern Colony while living abroad in Michigan. Why was it important for you to begin with this partial-outsider’s perspective as a window into the world of the Chopras (and to Delhi and India itself)?
Mahajan: This is a question no one has really asked me so far. Some of it was because that is how the novel was conceived, that Gita was going to be main character. I thought it was going to be her story. I was interested in her experience, precisely, which is this idea of someone who has left for a place that is supposedly better than the place she is from, especially in the 1980s. But she is finding it unfulfilling in many ways, and she is now longing for the place where she’s from, like many immigrants.
I guess, I am in some way a writer who really deals with ironies, because the irony I wanted is that she is longing for this place that also has its own problems, right? I don’t want to romanticize any part. And A-19 Modern Colony in someways became a microcosm of all those problems. She is thinking about how great it would be to be back in the crowds, to be back in Delhi with all those people. But in Delhi now, she is—by dint of having stepped out—considered an outsider. And that leads to all sorts of issues with her in-laws who are complexed in terms of their relationship with the West, and they haven’t succeeded as much as their patriarch had. So, it became an interesting entry point.
Also, I became aware that the thing that I’m writing about in this book is this idea of the desperate ways in which we try to go home, and how that can actually be a bad thing. Later on, that’s what Laxman starts to do, also. It’s like, ‘I’m feeling displaced in Modern India. I don’t think my family is getting the respect it deserves. I want to go back to this imagined past, where the family was whole, my dad was alive, the country was great—before the British, before Muslims.’ And so, those two things started to link up together.
I was kinda surprised—oh wow, this has turned into a fully Indian book. The concerns are very Indian. And some of it, I do get the sense that readers in the West are not going to get, like the stuff about the reformist Hindu sect that somehow connects to Sanatan Dharma. That is pretty micro-Delhi stuff.
In the end, I guess this is how these novels work: They are really, in a way, diagrams of your own soul. This is probably just how my inner world is constructed. Outwardly, I’m dealing with this American present, but the past in India for me is much more alive. And I’m dealing with that through my characters.
The Chakkar: Early on, there is indeed this thematic connection to India as a place of the ancestors and the past, while the U.S. seemed to represent the future and their envisioned descendent. But this notion, of course, is reversed later in the book. Their story is set decades ago, but did you intend for the book to be a commentary on this flip-flopping idea of Indian aspirations—between home and abroad—which continues to this day?
Mahajan: I don’t think it was done consciously. Towards the second half of the novel, [Sachin and Gita] do return to India, and they do make their life there. I don’t necessarily love the idea of an Indian novel where the solution is that the person is gonna go away from India, and that will solve their problems. That’s not to say that it can’t work in the context of a specific novel.
The way I was thinking of it… The U.S. is infertile in some ways. It’s not fertile ground. It’s safe but not fertile. Whereas India is unsafe but fertile in a way. And that trade-off is what these characters decide to make—that, actually, it’s better to live among this mess, and to make one’s own way.
“The U.S. is safe but not fertile. Whereas India is unsafe but fertile in a way. And that trade-off is what these characters decide to make—that, actually, it’s better to live among this mess, and to make one’s own way.”
It would be different for different sort of characters. For whatever reason, Gita seemed to me a kind of person who is unable to make her peace with this new setting.
The Chakkar: The Complex also explores the uneven spaces between love and lust within the family, whether it is Gita who turns to Hector after the Laxman incident, or the slow-brewing affair between Laxman and Karishma. In Indian families, where talk of personal desire—particularly for its women—is often considered taboo and only presented in subtext, did you feel it was necessary for the novel to bring these desires into the forefront, as major pivot points for the plot?
Mahajan: This question of desire being taboo in Indian families has been one of the major driving forces for why I write. For me, this was an important subject because, as you know specially for people our age, we grew up in the repressed Indian families that were not dissimilar to the families from the 50s or the 60s or 70s, but we were suddenly being exposed to a lot of Westernized content: first, Star TV, the first cable channels, the internet, all this stuff. And I definitely felt that his was a kind of dissonance that I was not able to process. I remember even silly things like FTV (Fashion TV) that was always on, or Baywatch or whatever, and thinking: All the uncles and aunties are watching this also. There’s actual nudity on FTV. And obviously this is a very fecund country in other ways, too. But nothing is being discussed.
The desire to write about all those things directly was very much there with me, that these are not things that we should bury. That it is not good to bury it. And, this novel, I think, continues that, because the big thing that the characters struggle with—that Gita struggles with—is being able to talk honestly about a kind of sexual violation. This sexual violation makes it even harder for Gita to be honest about desire and love. Obviously, she is dealing with the second layer, as her body is being probed and prodded by these doctors because she is dealing with infertility. The book is really about her journey towards an honest understanding towards all of that.
Similarly, I thought to myself that we’ve heard of these stories in Indian families of affairs, of second families, and so on. I thought to myself: How does that function? What would it be like for a woman to be a mistress to someone like Laxman? At what point would lust shade into love. That became another way of expressing it. On one hand you have Gita’s repression, and on the other hand you have the more direct sexuality of Laxman and Karishma. The novel is trying to explore the different ways of trying to get there.
The Chakkar: It’s hilarious that Indian families love nothing more than to talk of each other’s private business—whether it’s relationship, business, children, whatever. It’s the ultimate sport, and is captured perfectly in The Complex. It’s as if you are translating gossip for literature. When Laxman says to Gita that, “We don’t lie in this family” (298), I felt that the subtext and history between the two of them honestly made it one of the funniest lines in the book!
“I also enjoy writing these big crowds, because I do think that many people in Indian families have a double consciousness: The part of yourself that is on for relatives or how people are going to perceive you, and the part of yourself that’s deeply private.”
Mahajan: Again, this is why this is such a rich subject: The difference between the outward image that a family wants to present, and the inner controversies. Outwardly, they want to cover up this affair, they want to say this transgression is not happening, or it shouldn’t be happening. But inwardly there is an aspect, as you said, of ‘sport’, where people say, ‘Oh, they were seen together’, or ‘What’s going on with them?’ There’s almost this kind of thrill, a kind of titillation that everyone is aware of, and I think that’s another aspect of our repression in these families.
This is why I think I also enjoy writing these big crowds, because I do think that many people in Indian families have a double consciousness: The part of yourself that is on for relatives or how people are going to perceive you, and the part of yourself that’s deeply private. There must be something generative about this state, too, because it produces many original individuals, many great artists. It is a country that produces fascinating individuals, despite the fact that it has such an overlay of family structure. Family is not able to destroy the individual.
The Chakkar: I wondered often while reading this book: What, exactly, do you feel qualifies as ‘family’? What do we owe people who we are related to? And what about the Indian family system makes this bond simultaneously stronger and suffocating?
Mahajan: This question of ‘what do we owe’ is really fascinating, because what do you owe a chacha, or a maami, or some kind of grand-uncle? At one point I was horrified with my novel: Oh my god, so many chachis, who’s gonna be able to follow it?
‘What do we owe?’ I hadn’t quite articulated it until you’d asked that question. They are all trapped in a net of obligations. I even say that obligations don’t end, because bad things happen to you. It is this fear of being cast out, the fear that, ‘I don’t like this, but I don’t want to be disowned.’ I think that is operating in this novel even vis-à-vis the country, where, for example, Sachin and Gita might have a problem with India, and they might want to leave, but they also don’t want to be seen as outsiders. They want to be accepted.
A lot of the motivations of the characters are driven by that notion. So, Gita is like, ‘I don’t want to speak up about what Laxman did to me, because people will blame me, and then I’ll be cast out of the family.’ Laxman and Karishma are having, somewhat, this openly secret relationship, but even there, they are very careful to maintain appearances. Laxman is buttering up his sisters. Buttering up his brothers. In some ways, the moment Laxman really stands up for himself is when Vibha finally scolds him, and he basically says, ‘You can’t cast me out. You don’t have the right.’ And that’s when, in some way, he starts exerting his power over the complex.
I think there is this very primal feeling that, it’s tough to have an entire crowd against you. And you will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve that situation and preserve your independence. That’s also what leads to conflict in these novels.
The Chakkar: There is the aura of many other literary classics of multi-perspective family dramas that The Complex seems to be in conversation with, from Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Lives of Others. The plot is like a prism that scatters the light of one family into numerous perspectives to create the final, mosaic-like projection. Why did you feel this storytelling approach best suited the complexity of an Indian family’s dynamics?
Mahajan: I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best approach, it’s just the way I’m able to write. There is something about I myself must’ve been formed psychologically, which is that, when you grow up in a large Indian family, your consciousness is sort of distributed. At least it was for me as a sensitive child growing up… What is this person thinking? What is that person thinking? How am I responding to them?
I have this weird thing where I struggle to write a character that is like myself. I find it easier to enter the heads of other people. That extends to scenes as well, like: What it this person thinking? They seem to be having a more interesting thought right now. Let’s just move to their perspective.
There’s a way in which I find my books are almost orbiting some kind of void at the centre. Something that they can’t touch or something that they can’t speak about, collectively. In this novel, they cannot collectively speak about the fact that their family is in decline, and they have to just accept it. They can’t accept the fact that things will have to change in a big way, the family will have to break apart.
So, there’s something going on there. Again, I can’t fully articulate it. The novels also have this weird, digressive, circular [shape]… even in The Association of Small Bombs I did this. In [The Complex], Laxman is kind of a digression, and it keeps digressing, and it comes joins back in the end. It’s a strange, circular structure.
“In this novel, they cannot collectively speak about the fact that their family is in decline, and they have to just accept it. They can’t accept the fact that things will have to change in a big way, the family will have to break apart.”
So, I don’t know. I don’t think this is necessarily the best way. Maybe there’s a better way. A House for Mr Biswas is one character, and he really gets into what an extended family is like.
The Chakkar: The main drama of The Complex takes place in the forefront of a turbulent Delhi, and we see the chief characters of your story often actively help in shaping the city’s social and political milieu from the 1970s to the early 90s. But what made the reading of this book poignant is that Delhi is almost never free of turbulence—and I could imagine Mohit taking the streets for the ‘Cockroach’ protests this year. You have returned to Delhi in each of your books: What is it about this city that specifically makes it such fertile ground for the cross-stitching of the personal and the political?
Mahajan: I remember with Family Planning, my first novel: That felt like, classically Delhi, where I was writing about a minister with a large family who lives in one of the Lutyens’ bungalows, not far from Khan Market. That kind of character could only exist in Delhi in some ways. Someone with that much power. That was a comedy, and it was kind of about his misdoings in Parliament and so on.
But after that, I think it’s been much more about the landscape of Delhi and my familiarity with it. And probably, feeling that, certain parts of Delhi that I had experienced had not been represented in literature. It presented an interesting opportunity. When I was fictionalizing the Lajpat Nagar bombings in the last novel—that whole setting in refugee Delhi, which I grew up next too, spent a lot of time in Lajpat Nagar Market—I remember thinking, ‘This is interesting’. That Punjabis in Delhi could be the subject of serious literature was interesting to me.
In fact, I don’t necessarily think the political angle in Delhi is that much of an advantage. If you try to capture all the political events that happen in Delhi, you could end up writing a pretty banal novel. In The Complex, I was almost hesitant: Do I really want to wade into 1984? I was interested in the Mandal Commission because I didn’t feel like it had been written about in a way I found interesting in fiction. But ’84, I thought, so many books have done it. Same with Babri Masjid. So, I definitely felt that in these cases, I’m going to only address them at the level of the colony and at the level of this family. I’m not going to try and give a broad sweep that this is what happens in different localities. It’s going to be filtered through the consciousness of these very self-involved people.
The bottom line, though—after I’ve given this complicated answer!—that it’s just the place I grew up in. Emotionally, every part of Delhi is charged for me, in a way has nothing has charged me in the U.S. This is the problem also of being a diaspora writer now: That you hope that the charge will transfer to the new place, but sometimes it doesn’t, or sometimes it takes much longer.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024) and A Beautiful Decay (2022), both published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Plank, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
