Bestselling author with JoCo ties explores choices, identity & more in new book

Novelist Alka Joshi had not set foot in her native India for 40 years when she and her mother decided to travel there and stay a while.

The former California ad agency owner — and Shawnee Mission East graduate — set out to soak in the landscape, culture and people of India as well as write a few stories. What came of the experience was a second career rooted just as much in India as it was in her personal exploration of identity.

On that trip, her mother’s admission that 1950s Indian cultural norms had stopped her from having the life she wanted led to two things: the revelation that Joshi’s mother had seen to it that Joshi had the freedom to choose her own path; and Joshi’s 2020 debut novel, “The Henna Artist,” which topped numerous bestseller lists and served as her mother’s alternate life history—one in which she also had choices.

“I said, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘Mom, I owe you so much because I have lived a very independent life and worked and traveled and lived all over the world,’” Joshi recalled telling her.

Her interest in identities continues in her most recent release — and the current KC Pop-Up Book Group pick — “Six Days in Bombay” (MIRA, $28.99).

It’s Bombay, 1937.

A nurse and a famous painter meet in a hospital six days before the painter’s death. The women have in common dual identities, what’s referred to in the novel’s 1930s parlance as being “half-castes.”

Nurse Sona’s father was an Englishman who abandoned the family. The parameters of her life are defined by poverty and caring for her mother. She wants a life of grand adventure and rich relationships with fascinating people.

Mira, the painter, is based on real-life artist Amrita Sher-Gil, whose father was Indian and mother was Hungarian Jewish. She has lived the full life Sona wishes for.

According to Joshi, Sher-Gil was someone “who was so outspoken politically, who was outrageous in her promiscuity, sleeping with men and women, who was not afraid of stepping outside of anybody’s comfort zone and not obeying the rules of society.”

But Joshi, who moved to the United States at 9 years old and has a degree in art history from Stanford University, hadn’t heard of her until a 2019 visit to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.

“I write fiction, so I can take the bare bones of, let’s say, my mother’s story, and turn it into a piece of fiction, just like I can take the life and artwork of Amrita Sher-Gil and turn that into a fictional story, so that maybe Amrita Sher-Gil’s name is not forgotten,” Joshi said.

The story she wrote does serve that purpose, and within the novel, it also allows Nurse Sona to see and achieve an alternate — much more expansive — version of her own reality.

“What they’re really wrestling with,” Joshi said, “is this idea of, can you be all of those identities? Can you pick and choose? Can you eschew one for the other?”

Moreover, she added, “Can you be comfortable with all these different identities?”

The novel’s answer seems to be yes, but that depends on what you’re willing to pay.

Meet the author

Alka Joshi discusses “Six Days in Bombay” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, at the Plaza branch, 4801 Main St. It’s free with RSVP at KCLibrary.org/events.

Join the KC Pop-up Book Group

The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection. We invite the community to read along.

Just before the author’s event, Kaite Mediatore Stover, the library’s director of readers’ services, leads a discussion of Alka Joshi’s “Six Days in Bombay” at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, at the library’s Plaza branch, 4801 Main St. Email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org to join or RSVP at KCLibrary.org/calendar.