Chitra’s mind is in Kolkata, India, where she has a house she lovingly built with her late husband. But her physical body is stuck in a power wheelchair — in an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. Because of this, Chitra is in a terrible mood most days. Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay’s debut novel, Chitra Demands to Go Home (out now from Modern Artist Press), follows the 75-year-old Bengali widow as she navigates her new existence after suffering a stroke.
Chitra, it seems, will stop at nothing to leave this place she refuses to call home.
This is a story with many themes: cross-cultural tensions, a mother’s immovable expectations for her adult children, friendship, and late-in-life identity. Readers can also expect plenty of humor thanks to the novel’s cantankerous main character. Mukhopadhyay herself was trained as a scientist and has spent much of her career in science communications. But for her book, she was largely inspired by her personal observations as a third culture kid who has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. We spoke with Mukhopadhyay about the demanding and difficult Chitra, humor’s role in this bittersweet, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.
Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on Chitra Demands To Go Home. This book is about a 75-year-old Bengali woman who is desperate to leave the assisted living facility she was placed in by her two adult sons. What or who inspired this very specific story?
Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay: The idea for this story came to me in 2018. My mom and I talk pretty often, almost daily or weekly, and she was talking about a family member who had to go to an assisted living facility. And I just started thinking about, ‘OK, what would it be like to go into an assisted facility, not quite on your own terms?’ It took off from there. I was like, ‘Well, what if she’s not even in her hometown? What if she’s somewhere else? What are the circumstances?’ It was just a bunch of ‘What if, what if, what if?’ I just sat with that story idea for this whole time and, finally, in 2024, I started to write it.
I’m a mother myself, and a lot of Chitra’s inner monologue comes from a lot of my own fears as a parent. I always want to make sure I’m a good mother, and that I’ve done right by my kids. A lot of Chitra’s behaviors and characteristics come from my own fears. It also comes from me observing mothers around me. I grew up in very cross-cultural ways. I’m a third culture kid. I’ve watched and lived through culture clashes happening, so Chitra is a manifestation of things I saw happening around me, and things I myself fear as a mother of two children who I absolutely adore to bits. But I’m always like, ‘What if what I think is best for them is not what they think is best for them?’ So all those things coming together.
AC: One can argue that Chitra is obsessed with traditional societal expectations for adult children. She feels that, because she poured her all into raising her children, that it is her turn to reap the benefits of their loyalty. They should accommodate her wishes and make sure she lives comfortably back in India. While writing this book, can you share how you planned to lay that deep tension out on the page?
RM: It’s what I have observed. I’ve seen cross-cultural tensions happen over and over again. As a third culture kid, I’ve experienced it and watched it. Parents, leaving their hometowns, going abroad, living a life of a diasporic community, there’s always this struggle of what is it you hold onto from back home? And what is it you adapt to in your new home? And sometimes the kids get caught in the crosshairs of that tension.
I’ll give a very lighthearted example. My dad never understood my taste in music. He liked Bengali music and music that’s traditional from our part of the world. And my taste was Duran Duran, Wham! and Madonna. He was just like, ‘What the hell is this you’re listening to?’ He thought of it as noise. It was this tension of, who gets to own the music that they listen to? The tension that’s running in the book is that tension of: When you become part of the diaspora, when you leave your hometown, yes, your identity matters of where you came from. But what do you hold onto? To what extent do you hold onto those things? And then to what extent do you adapt? Or are you forced to adapt? And is the adaptation easy? Chitra picked and chose which things she was going to hold onto, and which things she was going to let go of.
AC: While at the facility, Chitra makes a new friend, Helen. Though Chitra comes across as difficult and unbending, Helen shows her nothing but grace. What message were you hoping to send by painting this budding friendship between these two older women?
RM: I am a firm believer in friendships, and in friendships that can cross geographical barriers, language, food. Again, this is drawing from my own life. Some of my closest friends are people with whom, on paper, we have nothing in common. We’ve lived in different ways, and yet they are the people who make my life so much richer. Like Chitra, I lived in the Arabian Peninsula. I watched my parents find community with people who were their friends. Honestly, I am closer to my childhood friends than I am to my own blood relatives, simply because we had experiences together. Friendships can do that in so many ways. They give you that sense of belonging that, on paper, you don’t even share the bloodline, same culture, same food, or same music. But there is that finding safety with somebody else that you never imagined you would.
AC: There are many funny moments in the book, like when Chitra sees some visitors with Cincinnati Bengals paraphernalia and thinks it represents a local Indian community. Her son then explains that it’s a sports team. That whole scene made me laugh. What role did you hope humor would have in this novel?
RM: I’m a voracious reader, and I have always been drawn to writers who are funny. I’m going to cite my inspirations like Bill Bryson, David Sedaris, Samantha Irby — people who are geniuses at making everyday observations and just finding the humor in them. Humor is the thing that sometimes brings people across gaps. It brings people together, because that sharing of a common moment of joy is so amazing. So humor, to me, is a critical component of fostering community. I have always admired writers who’ve been able to do that on paper. I’ll be frank. As a writer, I was terrified to be funny. If you don’t do it right, you bomb, right? If you’re a stand-up comedian, you would lose the audience. But in the end, I had to give myself permission to put those bits of humor in, because it made me laugh.
AC: You wrote your book in third person, which I found interesting. I still felt like I came to understand Chitra so well. She has what feels like a running list of expectations for what her remaining days should be like, and she has many views on American culture. Why did you decide to write this novel in third person?
RM: That is a question I even didn’t think about. I think it’s because Chitra is such a mosaic of so many different things I’ve been thinking about. As I said, some of it is from my own fears of a mother, and some of it is what I observed. I felt that as a character that I composed from threads from my own life, from people that I saw around me, and conversations and stories I was hearing and thinking about, it became easier to pull all those threads together in a third-person narrative. I think that was what, in the end, dictated my choice. I actually struggled with the last chapter, when the POV changes. I almost wanted to write it in the first-person (voice), but then I decided to go back to it being the son’s inner monologue.
AC: One of the most prominent themes, for me, was this debate about home. Where is home, and what is home? Home is even part of your title. Do you think the meaning of home changes for Chitra as the novel progresses? Or maybe it doesn’t.
RM: I don’t think it does for her. That’s the debate she and Helen have (in the book). Chitra always holds onto the fact that she truly belongs to this particular home, in a particular city in India. That’s where home is. Helen has a more flexible view of, ‘Home is where I find rest and I find companionship,’ and it’s not so tied to four physical walls and a roof.
As a person who has lived in different parts of the world and has lived as part of a diaspora for much of my life, it is something that I personally wrestle with a lot. When I say home, what do I truly mean? It’s only now, after so many decades of living in different places, that I’ve come to understand that, to me, home has layers. There’s the hometown I was born into that feeds into identity. It’s the homes where I spent my childhood, and then the different homes I’ve made for myself as I pursued my career and my educational aspirations. Home is context for me.
AC: You mention your children in your acknowledgements, and you add that you pray that you never end up being a Chitra in their lives. Having read the book, it made me chuckle but also nod. Why don’t you want to become a Chitra?
RM: When you read the very last chapter, you see the heartache that her son, especially her younger son, goes through with wrestling with all the choices he has to make. As a mother, I never want to put my kids through that. I don’t want to be a thorn. I always want to be the person who is there to help and support. My parents have done that for me, and so I hope to pass that along.
AC: What do you hope people take away from your novel?
RM: That’s such a rich question because, as you yourself have said, there’s so many themes and layers to the book. I just hope that anybody picking up the book to read it finds a point of connection to one of those themes or layers. I hope it’s a story that will hold meaning at different parts of people’s lives, no matter where they are. Whether they read it as a young adult, or whether they read it as somebody who is at Chitra’s age. I’m a firm believer that, if a writer has done their job well, a story can shift in meaning and can shift in resonance in different times of a reader’s life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, who goes by “Raj”, originally trained as a scientist. After earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology, Raj launched a career in science communications. For nearly two decades, she worked as a science storyteller in various forms, including as a journalist and the leader of an award-winning custom content studio. Raj was selected by Poets & Writers to be one of the 2025 Get the Word Out fiction fellows. Raj has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. She is now based in the U.S. with her partner, two children, two dogs, and two cats.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Amaris Castillo is the author of the forthcoming Bodega Stories. A former newspaper reporter, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Lowell Sun, Bradenton Herald, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and lives in Florida with her family.