Sonya Lalli reflects on the 'good Indian girl' trope and the joy of writing in different genres
CBC Book | Posted: April 5, 2024 6:50 PM | Last Updated: April 5
The Vancouver-based writer spoke with The Next Chapter’s Ali Hassan about exploring cultural expectations
Sonya Lalli is known for writing romantic novels that centre South Asian families and experiences. In 2022, she published a thriller called Are You Sara? under the pen name "S.C. Lalli" which diverted from her stories with happier endings, but carried through a recurring question of what it means to be a "good Indian girl."
Are You Sara? revolves around a case of mistaken identity. When two women, each named Sara, get into separate rideshares one fateful night, one of them is murdered. But when the surviving Sara realizes that she might have actually been the target, it sets off a mystery involving race, class and ambition.
In 2023, Lalli released her latest romance novel, Jasmine and Jake Rock the Boat, a humorous romance novel about Jasmine and the unexpected companionship she finds in her childhood friend Jake Dhillon – who happens to be the other only young person on a seniors' cruise.
Lalli is a Punjabi and Bengali writer based in Vancouver. Her other novels include A Holly Jolly Diwali, Grown-Up Pose and The Matchmaker's List.
She joined The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan to talk about how her writing across genres is both similar and varied.
You have published six books so far and you have a background in law. Without bragging too much, can you tell us a bit about that? What did you have in mind when you turned to writing fiction?
I won't brag at all! So essentially I studied law in my hometown of Saskatoon. Although I loved that journey, there was always a part of me that wanted to write and tell stories — and share my experiences, my family and the people I grew up with.
So I started writing seriously about 10 years ago in my mid-20s. It was that time when I was asking a lot of questions about who I am. What do I want in this world? What is my purpose and what do I want my life to look like with a partner?
And those questions I put in my writing — and that ended up being perfect material for a romance novel.
Romance novels have love and happy endings which are very different from crime and suspense, which you find in thrillers. So how do you get the inspiration for each style?
In my romance novels, essentially each protagonist is going on this self love journey, figuring themselves out and navigating their family and cultural expectations — that's where all that material comes from. In thrillers, it was a very different approach.
I started writing Are You Sara? in the early pandemic when my headspace did not allow me to really think about happily ever after. I wasn't confident that there was going to be a happily ever after for my characters — or for society more generally — and that headspace is where I was when I started writing.
It simply was that I had an idea for that book and it felt like the perfect time to explore that darker side of me, or as my friends like to say, my alter ego.
I wasn't confident that there was going to be a happily ever after for my characters. - Sonya Lalli
In Are You Sara? we have one Bengali woman named Saraswati, who is Sara and then we have one white American woman named Sarah and they meet before mistakenly getting in each other's Uber rides. Saraswati finds that the other Sarah is dead in front of her door and these two women are … very different people. Can you tell us about those differences, why you wanted to contrast them?
The whole story revolves around which Sara was supposed to die and the surviving Saraswati spends the whole book wondering if she was the intended target, if someone's still after her and is wracked with guilt over the death of the other Sarah. I really liked, separate from the plot, the duality of them.
Saraswati is Indian, she doesn't come from much, she has to hustle for everything that she has. Sarah Ellis, on the other hand, comes from a lot of privilege and has squandered a lot of her opportunities. In a lot of ways these two women are polar opposites. At the same time, as you read the book, you discover that these two women are also very similar.
I loved exploring those two different women and what happened to them and what could have happened to them.
You explore this idea of the "good Indian girl" that often comes up both in Jasmine and Jake Rock the Boat and in Are You Sara?. What does that concept mean to you?
I think the "good Indian girl" [is something that] a lot of us have grown up with: it means a girl within our culture who follows the rules, who meets the expectations of her family, of her community, who doesn't step out of line, who doesn't bring shame or embarrassment.
And it's something that I think a lot of us want to follow, but it also feels very constraining — what is good?
Sometimes our social situation is very different from the world that we're growing up in; sometimes I think the experiences of myself and a lot of us is that we just want to go and do normal things in our society that would not be normal and are not looked upon well within our community.
So that's something that I explored in different ways in these books. In Jasmine and Jake Rock the Boat Jasmine has gone out and made some decisions and personal choices that have brought shame on her family and that has given her a bad reputation, unfortunately.
I wanted to play with that idea and contrast it to Jake, who never had a bad reputation, even though he made a lot of those same choices.
I think the "good Indian girl" [is something that] a lot of us have grown up with. - Sonya Lalli
This idea of pressure that characters face from cultural expectations, that's very intense and hard to manage. Why is it important to you to write about that?
It's because it's something that so many of us go through in so many different and nuanced ways, in different magnitudes, across generations, across cultures. It's certainly not something that only South Asians experience.
When my first few romances were coming out, I received a lot of messages from people across ethnicities and different backgrounds saying that my story resonated with them.
If even one of my books could resonate with anybody, that's beautiful and amazing — and so that's why I seek to do this.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.