Preeta Samarasan

What sparked Evening is the Whole Day?
No specific event or encounter; I'd always wanted to write about a servant girl and her employers.  I'd started and begun this several times, in different forms: poems (which I no longer write!), short stories, once even a play.  But I think the whole project coalesced when I had the idea that the servant girl should be accused of a crime she hadn't committed, and that her character should be thrown against those of the family's own daughters -- that she should be reflected, observed, and analysed by these two other girls.  Immediately, I knew that these would the perfect ways to explore the issue of class and the imbalance of power in which I was interested.

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
The novel takes place almost entirely in the Big House, the home of lawyer Rajasekharan, his widowed mother, his wife, his three children, and a servant girl.  It begins with the dismissal of that servant in 1980, and moves backwards from that dismissal to trace the events of the preceding year.  Interspersed with this narrative is the story of Malaysia, and specifically of Indian immigration into Malaysia, which, despite this family's wealth and privilege, ultimately decides their fate.  Underlying the story of this servant girl and her employers is a larger story about the disillusionment and apathy of an entire generation of Malaysian Indians.

Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
I have a definite and deep attachment to Ipoh, my hometown and the location of the Big House.  Although the novel is intentionally claustrophobic (we really don't leave that house much!), the atmosphere of Ipoh in the late '70s and early '80s -- its climate, its limestone hills, the rivalries between its different ethnic groups -- colours everything.  As to characters: Aasha, the youngest daughter of the family, is very much like I was at age six, and for this reason I'm both immensely sympathetic towards her and very impatient with her.  I thought it would be interesting to create a child just like I was, a child who watches instead of talking, who keeps secrets and distrusts everybody, and then to throw her into a completely invented situation.  I never experienced anything remotely like what Aasha goes through in this novel; the whole thing is a what-if exercise, a psychological game I'm playing with my childhood self.

What are you reading at the moment?
The Northern Clemency and Half of A Yellow Sun.  Two very different books, which satisfy two very different sides of me.

What are you working on now?
I've been writing a lot of short fiction, but also working on my second novel, which is also set in Malaysia.  It's about a group of people who come together to form a Utopian community in response to some of the same political events depicted in Evening Is The Whole Day.