In her debut collection of short stories Peacocks of Instagram, Deepa Rajagopalan weaves a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Characters break rules and take risks in tales of revenge, love, desire and family.

In fourteen stories, coffee shop servers and hotel housekeeping employees, engineers and orphans explore the ramifications of privilege or lack thereof, and discover what it means to feel safe, to survive and to call a place home.

Peacocks of Instagram is on the shortlist for the 2024 Giller Prize.

The Ontario-based Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc.

She spoke with Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter about how her heritage influenced the book.

When I was writing this story, I watched a documentary about peafowl. I learned so much about peacocks that it somehow made its way into the story. I just like that idea of something absurd in fiction and literary fiction while you're trying to talk about other things.

I wanted to present South Asian people as well-rounded people, in many ways.

It could be dismantling the stereotype of what we think they should be, and also separating race from the characterization, because race should never be a shortcut to characterization.

One of the ways I tried to do it is by giving them a sense of humour, by writing characters who are funny. There was this essay that Pasha Malla had written called CanLit's Comedy Problem. This was a few years ago, and he said at the time that the Stephen Leacock Medal for humor was never awarded to a person of colour. I thought it was staggering, right? I know more Brown and Black funny people then I know Caucasian funny people. That made me think, who gets to decide what's funny? What's the barometer? And I think the more people who look like you and me — who are funny — are there on the page, the more that palette will develop for all the possibilities of humour.

I wanted to centre a brown woman that you normally don't get to see in literature. I wanted to first present that stereotype in the sense that this is a coffee shop server, a cashier who works at a coffee shop who you think you know and who you think is ordinary — and then kind of show her extraordinary life and what she's endured.

She has a past that is quite tragic. She lost her entire family back in India and then she moves to Canada where she starts a new life. But she doesn't have a small life. Despite what she does for a living, she has ambitions and dreams and desires.

The last story in the collection is called Best Sellers, and it's about a woman who turns to making pottery to heal from a traumatic experience. It feels like a nice bookend to some of the themes that your book explores. How did the idea come to you?:

I did take a pottery workshop once and I was so bad at it. And the instructor said, 'You have really small hands,' and that's where the idea started. I wanted to end the book with these two characters because they're quite different from each other in terms of their personalities, even in terms of their craft.

In Peacocks of Instagram, she sells these peacock accessories which she starts doing by chance because her husband is a peafowl researcher.

But she's really good at it and she takes a lot of pride in it and then in Best Sellers, there's this other woman who makes really bad pottery. She also ends up selling these pieces on Instagram. But because there's a story attached to each piece, that's the beauty of the piece.

I just wanted to see the beauty in things that are not traditionally considered beautiful.

I'm a very sensitive person. I just feel things deeply. That's one of the reasons why I write; it's an avenue to take what you're feeling and what you're thinking out of your body and into the page.

And I just think deeply about grief and what it does to you and the boundaries between grief and love and intimacy. It changes you as a person.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia, in a small town where we had no entertainment. If we were lucky, we got like 30 minutes of cartoons in a day. But I never felt bored, my parents are very creative. Even now, they're in their 60s and if I spend some time with them I end up feeling energized. But they were creative not just in what they did, but also the way they think.

Growing up, my parents — especially my dad — was always making things with his hands. Most of the furniture in our house, he made. He also had a full time job at a hospital. So I kind of absorbed that you can always make things and in my case, make up things. And I think writing kind of goes back to being sensitive and being able to be clinical about those feelings and thoughts and get them on the page.

I think it means giving yourself the space to do and try things, and know that you're not going to beat yourself up if you fail. And I didn't do that until the last five years, I was not very kind to myself. I mean, growing up in a very ambitious environment, we were never taught to be kind to ourselves.

And I think writing kind of helped me with it because it is so subjective and creative. I think that's what being kind means, right? Just trusting that you're not going to beat yourself up.