An Interview With Jai Chakrabarti

Each time I’ve encountered Jai Chakrabarti’s work, I’ve been struck by how his stories braid themes of parenthood, class disparity, and love into beautifully human moments that are fraught and true. His characters, and all their flaws, hopes, and loves, follow me around for days after I’ve put them down.

To celebrate the release of his critically acclaimed collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, and the inclusion of a new story, “Bought Baby” in Idaho Review issue #21, I had the privilege of asking Jai some questions about his collection and this story.

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Rabindranath Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Knopf, Feb 2023). His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize and also performed on Selected Shorts by Symphony Space. His nonfiction has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Berfrois, and LitHub. He was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and is a trained computer scientist. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.

IR: Congratulations on the release of your collection, A Small Sacrifice for Enormous Happiness! Having a collection of short stories celebrated in today’s publishing world is no small feat. What do you see as a place or future for the short form in a climate that prioritizes the sellability of the novel? 

JC: I love the short form and am perennially confused as to why it isn’t considered more sellable. With the short story, we can enter into a world and can have a complete experience in a single sitting. What a gift that is and one I’d think is even more desirable with increasing distractions and shortened attention spans. Like a poem, the short story also forces me to read slowly - if I miss a single line in a short story, I might miss something of great import, whereas novels often have ways of reinforcing or even repeating the important things. This is all to say that I know very little about publishing trends, but for me the short story will remain an enduring and essential form. 

IR: Many of the stories in your collection, A Small Sacrifice for Enormous Happiness, deal with the idea of parenthood. Some of these characters aren’t parents, but desire so deeply to be that they’re blinded to how their actions affect others. Some are older, watching their role as a parent fade and feeling the loss of that. Others still take on adoptive-parent roles–this is central to the plot of “Bought Baby” as well. Why do you think these characters often find a dissonance between their idea of what parenthood is (or could be) and the reality of their situations? 

JC: One reason: I’ve encountered dissonance between my own ideas of parenthood and the reality of being a parent. My partner and I struggled to conceive, and we yearned for a child for years. When the child finally arrived, I was nonetheless unprepared for the common experiences like sleeplessness but also the more spiritual ones, the complete absorption in another being’s world. Also: Kierkegaard said Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I suppose I see the short story as a technology by which we can understand our lives backwards, through the vantage point of characters on the page. This idea comes through in Bought Baby, I think, when the protagonist reflects on a dark event from the past. He was unprepared to be a father, unprepared for what happened next, and lying in bed he can only wonder how it all happened the way it did.

IR: Can you talk briefly about the inspiration for your story, “Bought Baby” [which is not in the collection but is forthcoming from Idaho Review]? 

JC As you’ve noted, many of the stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness circle around themes of parenthood, and adoption is a concern that’s explored in a few of the pieces. For Bought Baby, I suppose I wasn’t done writing about this theme, and I wanted to write a story that moved quickly through time. I had the frame of the idea after eavesdropping in a cafe, where a stranger was talking about meeting their biological parents for the first time. I don’t remember much about that conversation, but I know I was so moved by what I’d overheard that I came straight home and wrote the first draft of Bought Baby. 

IR: I think the first thing I noticed and admired about your stories is that many characters are flawed in their view of things: they believe their actions are for the best despite how they manipulate or harm others. Yet there’s always some compassion for every character, without ever letting them off the hook for what they’re doing. How do you strike a balance between depicting a character the reader might judge harshly, with writing them into moments of great empathy? 

JC: I suppose I try to think of my characters in the way I think of people I love, which is to say that I aspire to hold two truths at the same time. The truth of fallibility, of failure, of the small and large grievances. And the truth of their beauty, the truth of their luminosity. I think a story can not only acknowledge these tensions but also arrive at a deeper understanding of the whole person.

IR: Another trend I notice in your stories is a wealth or class disparity between characters. I think of stories like “Prodigal Son,” “Searching for Elijah,” and “A Small Sacrifice…” In “A Mother’s Work,” a well-off family hires someone to thwart their son’s relationship with his girlfriend, a single-mother. In “Bought Baby,” parents give away a child they feel they can’t afford to raise. [As a first-generation college student, these stories resonate with me a lot.] Can you speak to what draws you to explore class/economic dynamics/conflicts? 

JC: For as long as I can remember, I’ve been aware of class differences. It’s part of growing up in Kolkata, I suppose, where everyday I’d see children living on the street. I was not wealthy, I quickly realized, but I was also not living on the street. This realization informed a world view around class and how far reaching it is, how essential to the human condition. That being said, I’ve never sat down with the explicit intention to write about class–I think it emerges as a way of characterizing, as a way of trying to see people as they are through the muddle of their circumstances. 

IR: Apart from being a writer, you also trained in computer science. How did developing another profession and skill set affect how you approached fostering your craft as a writer? 

JC: I think of writing as straddling the subconscious and the conscious: the subconscious is often where the magic is, the unexpected, that creative spark that’s awfully hard to explain. But then there’s the revision process, which can also be magical, though it can also require the neural nets I engage when I write code, the synaptic connections that are particularly good at arranging, ordering, and structuring. I need both to find my way.

IR: Who are some writers who most inspire(d) you?

JC: So many! To list just a few from whom I learned much about the craft of writing: Alice Munro, Chekhov, Rabindranath Tagore, Ashapurna Devi, Colm Tóibín.

IR: Are you reading anything right now that you’re excited about?

JC: I’m teaching a class this summer where I look at poetic forms like the ghazal, the haibun, the zuhitsu and explore how these forms can be used to inspire works of fiction. So, I've been reading a lot of poetry: Kimiko Hahn, Aimee Nezukumathathil, John Ashberry… Novel wise, I just finished Soft, Sweet, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell and Greenland by David Santos Donaldson, and I’d recommend both!