When I first encountered the work of writer Kiran Bhat, I was re-evaluating the role I wanted travel to play in my life.
For the decade after I graduated college, real life had only seemed possible on the road. There was the matter of making it in America, and there were the matters of the spirit. The two seemed increasingly irreconcilable. Work and school, no matter how demanding, no matter that they consumed the majority of my time, seemed only a bleak interregnum between the short bursts of travel that made all the rest endurable.
There was, of course, the superficial element of drowning internal conflict in a deluge of new colors, smells, and sounds. But there was also the allure of fixing what was inside by navigating what was outside. A journey through space could be a journey within the heart, a way to connect with an authentic inner self. For the span of an evening spent in a Prague dive bar with half a dozen new acquaintances, the power of serendipity to do that felt real. A new way felt possible.
Kiran had also spent years traveling the globe animated by a similar belief. His writing drew upon his experiences traveling, living, and working across cultures as well as his knowledge of multiple languages including English, Hindi, Kannada, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Turkish. When I first found his writing online, I was intrigued by his self-description as a global citizen, his background as an Indian growing up in a small-town of the American South. Working across genre, he’d published several books including a novel, 2020’s We of the Forsaken World, and a multilingual book of poetry, 2022’s Speaking in Tongues. Our superficial similarities held within them the hope that the way Kiran had made ceaseless movement the core of a productive writing life might have some relevance to my own predicament.
Because, by then, my unquestioning belief in the power of travel had begun to waver. The rise of Instagram was a factor. Tourism had always been a consumer choice, a shorthand for communicating one’s culture, means, and taste, but something about seeing influencers broadcast their neatly packaged trips to Iceland right next to targeted advertisements for sneakers made the connection unbearably obvious. Going to where the guidebooks recommended while trying to avoid being too slavish a devotee to what they told me I was supposed to see, the artificiality of the experience began to become clearer. Finally, there was the most obvious realization, that the best place to learn how to come to terms with my life was right where I had to live it.
Though my life now is much more rooted in a solitary location, the city I’ve decided to call home, the question of relating effectively to the wider world hasn’t lost any of its intensity. My interest in travel as a means for self-transformation has faded, but I still need a way to look outwards. The problems our world faces still seem to demand greater understanding between cultures, and despite it all, I still wonder whether travel could be a part of that. It was in the spirit of that ongoing inquiry that I first reached out to Kiran via e-mail.
My unquestioning belief in the power of travel had begun to waver.
He told me he was deep into the planning phases for his now-ongoing online novel project Girar. The novel, to be published in regular installments for subscribers, would take place during the current decade in 365 locations around the world, following the lives of an archetypal mother, father, and son as they navigated the challenges of family in an increasingly fraught world. He wanted readers to think globally, he wrote, to understand the commonalities that bound us.
He told me how the novel had been inspired by a particular experience abroad. Some years before, while an exchange student in Madrid, he’d visited a cathedral in Segovia that had once been a mosque and, before that, a synagogue. While there, he had a vision. He saw “primitive human beings sitting around a fire, African tribes being conquered by Europeans, Muslims of the Mediterranean converting to Christianity.” While standing in that building that contained in its architecture each of the medieval religions of Spain, he saw a vision of the entire world, a moment in which was born the deep need to create work that included in it as many of the globe’s cultures as possible.
It was an epiphany that served as the impetus for the years of travel that followed. He visited over a hundred countries. It was a fact-finding mission, an effort to learn languages and cultural practices that could be incorporated into what he’d later call Girar.
After our initial correspondence, I subscribed to the project, interested to see how the publication process would play out in real time. Kiran later described for me the significant technical challenges he’d faced in the weeks prior to the online launch of his work. He’d outsourced the creation of the project’s website to third party developers and, despite their significant expense, found them often unresponsive to feedback. Girar’s first iteration was unusable, and the second, while more navigable, still had significant issues with design and functionality. The third – and current – version was more stable and user-friendly, though there remained issues with crashing pages and stories that wouldn’t load. But by that time, the launch date had arrived. Kiran had to go forward with what he had.
I began to receive emailed installments of the novel at regular intervals. The book follows its three main characters into settings informed by Kiran’s travels. Mother is a religious housewife, Father is a senior hospital doctor, and Son is a gay male living away from his parents after a decade of estrangement. The stories that comprise the novel follow them over years as they learn to accept and embrace each other. The characters, while somewhat rooted in Kiran’s personal history, are fictional creations – archetypes, essentialist ideas of three particular figures who take the place of Kiran and his own parents.
Each of the 365 planned installments of the novel takes a part of this core narrative and imagines it into a new part of the world, also addressing a political or cultural problem affecting the particular country in which it’s set. Each occurs on a particular date and time, the same date and time on which it’s eventually emailed to paid subscribers.
I was interested in how Girar fit into the long tradition of the serialized novel, which was, not surprisingly, still alive in our internet age. Kiran, currently living in Mumbai, told me on a fractured Whatsapp call over a poor connection that he wanted to publish the book in a way that “captured something of the particularities of the unique globalizing period we live in, both in the content of the fiction and in the means in which it is published”, mirroring the way that “information and news flood us with perspectives of all backgrounds all at once through our computers and smartphones.” But he also said he hadn’t delved into the existing world of serialized fiction available online before making the instinctive decision to go about putting Girar out the way that he did.
Poking around, I found that there were millions of readers already consuming longform fiction in this way. Thriving communities on sites such as Wattpad, Radish, and yes, even Substack had formed around many kinds of writing, especially genre work in romance, fan fiction, and fantasy. While translating this kind of enthusiasm to a more literary endeavor seemed unrealistic, the pandemic success of Dracula Daily, a wildly popular online serialization of Bram Stoker’s novel, showed how a diverse community of scholars, casual readers, and everyone in between could form around more ostensibly serious writing.
He visited over a hundred countries. It was a fact-finding mission into what he’d later call Girar.
Yet many writers trying to build similar online conversations around their own serialized work expressed their frustration with how difficult it could be to do that when operating apart from an established intellectual property. The possibility of a steady income and creative freedom continued to draw people to the attempt, but the same debates about how to build a relatable online persona that attracted readers and kept them engaged echoed what I’d heard for years from those wondering how important a social media presence was in getting a traditional publishing deal. Speaking to Kiran after Girar had been running for a year, he had no easy answers. But he did tell me how grateful he was that he’d found a way to drum up support for his work through word of mouth online and in person. In fact, unlike his previous published work, subscriptions to Girar were eventually able to fully support Kiran’s life in Mumbai, which he now views as home.
Girar continued to arrive in my inbox one email at a time. I read some parts, but, on busy days, missed others in the deluge of emails I received daily. Some I read with undivided attention in deep quiet, others I scrolled through my smartphone while waiting for my sandwich at lunch. Reading the novel online became enmeshed in my broader struggle to reclaim attention from the buzz of the internet. And while I appreciated that Kiran had told me this was exactly the struggle he wanted to interrogate with the way he’d decided to publish, I wondered if that decision left the work more vulnerable to being totally submerged by the firehose of “content” that constantly threatened our focus. After all, I’d have to put down a book to click through some Instagram reels, set aside my e-reader to refresh my email. If the work was just another tab among many, how could it hope to consistently hold our attention against the algorithmically-determined distractions that were only a click away?
One way was the quality of the work. Another was the frequency with which it appeared, which needed to be metronomic, conducive to the establishment of a new reading habit. Yet even that could pose problems. Kiran told me that when he first conceived of Girar, he assumed that readers would be able to keep pace with its planned release schedule. The pandemic and its psychic demands quickly put that notion to bed. Though each chapter builds on the previous into an overarching narrative, each is also a stand-alone story involving the same core group of archetypal characters. The reader can still dip in wherever and whenever they’re able in order to learn more about Fijian Indian culture or what might be happening in one of the high-end resorts of the Maldives. That’s what I found myself doing.
Though Kiran had previously written that he “really wasn’t thinking about models of publishing and how much or little I fit them,” it was clear to me in later conversations that in choosing to publish his work online, he was consciously trying to forge his own literary path. He’d been influenced by the unwillingness he saw in big publishers to take on what he described as aesthetically demanding titles as well as the difficulty he’d seen small and independent houses face in supporting their releases, including his own previously published work.
Kiran still hoped to traditionally publish Girar in a single volume once its serialization was complete. But while the technical challenges he continued to face in maintaining the website’s security against hacking incurred significant ongoing costs of time and money, he told me he appreciated the financial and creative freedom his choice to publish online had allowed, and that the personal connections he’d built with readers along the way had been invaluable. And, while he felt traditional publishing “continued to choose its books based on commercial viability rather than aesthetic,” he hoped more and more authors were inspired by work like his to “find ways to think outside of the box and create unique publishing models that benefit literature as a whole.”
As I tried to weigh the clear benefits of doing things the way Kiran had against the difficulties of maintaining reader attention inherent to the online form, I found myself returning to the varied settings of the novel’s chapters, following the story as it developed week by week. Kiran told me his overriding concern in writing the novel was “a certain level of authenticity or verisimilitude.” Recognizing that he was not a native of most of the cultures he wrote about, focusing on marginalized and indigenous communities, he felt a particular obligation to get the details right. He started with his own research, reading books, watching documentaries, thinking back to his own relevant travel experiences. He would then draft the chapter, bringing the story forward, building on his growing knowledge of the characters of Mother, Father, and Son. Then, drawing on the network of friends and readers he’d built during his circumnavigation of the globe, he sent the work to people belonging to the communities was writing about.
In one way, we are just shapes. In another, we are part of a space that knows no gender or nationality or race.
An installment set in Zimbabwe was criticized by a friend from Harare, re-written, then sent to another friend from the south of the country, who told him the story reminded her of her own mother. Another installment, about the culture of the Russian republic of Buryatia and its Siberian capital Ulan-Ude, also got mixed feedback – one friend from the region hated it, while another found it relatable and true. Both were female, educated in the West, around the same age. Yet their differing reactions made clear that culture is a subjective experience, and that the exercise of writing the novel could not be driven by a desire to please everyone.
However, our interest remained easily distractible at best, and Girar needed to be more than a factually-accurate encyclopedia of indigenous culture. Whether he was writing about the Lakota or the Sindhi, whether he set a story in a Libyan desert oasis or a Dutch-style fishing port in Malaysia, that grounding in diversity was only a means to inspire in readers a greater curiosity and empathy towards differing global perspectives. Perhaps even to begin to recognize that while the superficialities of the story of Mother, Father, and Son were ever changing, the core thread remained smooth and unbroken.
As another Indian kid born in the American South and raised in the Hindu tradition, I saw in that some echo of the teachings of our common religion, the mystical insight into the essential one-ness of man. I’d felt the limitations of our Western conception of identity, based as it is in the body and its always changing particularities. I wanted to know if Kiran, who’d told me that the literature and mythology of India’s Vedic period had also influenced him deeply, felt that Girar‘s focus on how archetypal characters – Mother, Father, and Son – moved through the shifting superficialities of global culture could help us understand something deeper about the word “identity”.
In his response, he told me that sometimes readers expressed confusion about the novel’s central conceit, thinking that its characters were a distinct trio physically traveling to the varied locations of the story rather than archetypes changing context. When he tried to explain more clearly, he returned to the idea of the avatar. Throughout the Sanskrit texts, Lord Vishnu, the Hindu preserver, takes various forms, among them Narasimha, half-man and half-lion, the illumined sage Buddha, and the giant fish Matsya. In each of his forms, Vishnu remains Vishnu, but he changes his shape to fit the context of how he must preserve the state of the world at that particular time.
Mother, Father, and Son were far more prosaic, three regular people in a regular family. But they too were fixed subliminal essences changing only their external human context as circumstances demanded. In one way, we are just shapes. In another, deeper way, we are part of a much wider space that knows no gender or nationality or race. Bedrock truths can often turn into cliches when we attempt to render them in language. Yet that doesn’t mean we won’t keep trying.
Kiran ended that e-mail with thoughts that mirrored my own. Whether we take the shape of a male or a female, a frog or a human, he wrote, what comes first is this essence and its connection to the universe. Yet, though our physical representation is temporary, there is still a beauty in that too. While wrapped up in contemplation, we can’t forget to rejoice in the multiplicity of forms that pervade our reality. He hoped that Girar’s attempt to do that would not be seen as an attempt to appropriate perspectives that didn’t belong to him, but rather as a heartfelt attempt to tell stories that are emotional and penetrating, that remind us of the diversity of our world and the obligation we have to ensure that each of its cultures is preserved and respected.
I can’t say that Kiran’s work has rekindled in me the insatiable need for movement that once felt so central to my self-conception. The ways in which we get what we need can change, after all. Now, I travel primarily from the couch in front of my television, watching videos of people in other parts of the world, reading work like Girar when I can, still working to find a way to relate to the world without making myself the center of every story. Those of us that feel movement through time and space is secondary to the changes in consciousness it makes possible must fight against the inevitable momentum that drives a search for self into simple solipsism. We must continue looking outwards – whether online fiction like Girar can help us do that depends on whether we can reclaim the focus to give it the attention it deserves.
