In part two of our Q&A with Mala Kumar, a global leader in technology for social good who has worked with the United Nations, including the World Health Organization, and GitHub, we speak to her about her two critically acclaimed novels, The Paths of Marriage and What it Meant to Survive. Her writing explores a myriad of topics, including migration, sexuality and gun violence. Mala was a student at Virginia Tech when the 2007 mass shooting occurred, and her second book, What it Meant to Survive, examines mass shootings on a personal, political and global scale. You can read part one here.
*Note this interview occurred before the Trump Administration’s executive orders to dismantle the overwhelming majority of USAID programs.
Could you tell me about how you first started writing creatively?
I had just finished grad school in 2010, right in the middle of a bad recession – the worst in modern history. Unemployment was sky-high. I also had some family issues, so I had to move back to my home state of Virginia to help out for a year.
During this time the idea for my first book came to me. I messaged my friend about it and from her reaction I just knew I was onto something. That’s how I developed my first book, The Paths of Marriage.
What is The Paths of Marriage about and what was your inspiration?
The Paths of Marriage is an intergenerational story, loosely inspired by my own family – but all the characters and events are fictional.
The first generation follows Lakshmi, who grows up in 1950s Chennai, India in abject poverty. She is smart, ambitious and determined to make something of herself, but due to the patriarchy and societal expectations she realises her options are limited. So, she gets married as a way to leave India. She and her husband move to West Virginia, thanks to a senator who helps their young family stay in the U.S.
This is all happening before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which eventually changed immigration laws to be merit-based rather than nationality-based.
The second part of the novel shifts to her daughter Pooja’s perspective. Pooja grows up in the 1970s and wants to carve out her own path, but because of everything Lakshmi went through, she ends up being forced into a marriage. She does her best to make it work, but ultimately, it isn’t possible. During that time, she has a daughter – Deepa.
The third part is told from Deepa’s perspective. She is a gay Indian woman living in New York, navigating her own struggles, identity, and relationships. The final section ties everything together and looks at the three generations of women – Lakshmi, Pooja, and Deepa – figuring out how to come to terms with each other, their choices, and everything they’ve been through.
Would you be able to tell me about how your personal life influences your creative work?
What It Meant to Survive is a much more intimate book because it is about a real event that I lived through.
In 2007, I was a senior at Virginia Tech which is a top engineering university, with a big computer science department that attracts a lot of international students.
That year, something truly horrific happened. Because George W. Bush had let the assault weapons ban expire a couple of years before, a young man was able to legally purchase guns and ammunition from a store just a few miles from campus. Then, on April 16, he opened fire at Virginia Tech.
He first killed two students in a dorm, then walked across campus and entered Norris Hall, where I had taken a French class two years prior, killing almost everyone in the room. He then opened fire in a German class next door and an engineering class down the hall. In total, he killed 32 students and professors, and injured 17 more before taking his own life. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. It was terrifying. I personally knew six people who died – three of whom were friends; we had worked together in a student organisation I ran. I remember spending more time at funerals in my last semester of college than I did celebrating my graduation.
I knew that my next book had to be about this, as it’s an event that has fundamentally shaped me. It took a while to figure out the story arc, but after meeting my wife and feeling a bit more stable in life, I finally sat down to write.
What It Meant to Survive follows two characters, Ramya and Juliet (intentionally named after Romeo and Juliet). Ramya is an Indian American woman who survives a mass shooting, and Juliet is a Nigerian woman who has endured extreme patriarchal oppression. They meet on Tinder, while in Ghana. They hit it off, decide to stay together, and the novel follows their relationship over the course of a year as they figure out how to build a life together.
Despite Juliet’s deep concerns about how Black people are treated in America, they decide they will move to New York – because Ramya is a U.S. citizen, and it’s a place where they can legally marry and live openly as a gay couple. But as their relationship progresses, Ramya experiences terrifying memory loss, sometimes forgetting who she is entirely. Meanwhile, Juliet is experiencing strange distortions in time – in one case, she feels like 36 hours have passed, but only an hour has gone by.
To build their life together, they need to understand what’s happening to one another. And in the final chapter, there’s a grand reveal – one that is both shocking and emotional. I think it captures what I felt after losing so many people who were just starting their lives.
I didn’t want to sugarcoat the repercussions of mass shootings. Unlike The Paths of Marriage, which has a more uplifting, “classic American” ending, What It Meant to Survive ends on a more complex note. It’s not a book where everyone moves forward happily, because that’s just not the reality of mass shootings – they bring so much unnecessary loss and grief, and I wanted the reader to feel that. As hard as it is, that’s the reality of such tragedies.
What role does sexuality play in your creative work?
In The Paths of Marriage, Deepa – the third-generation character – is a gay Indian woman, and that is a key part of her storyline. The way I structured the book, each generation directly interacts with the previous one, so their tensions become the central focus of the narration.
When the book came out in 2014, same-sex marriage was not federally recognised in the U.S. yet. That only happened in 2015 with the Supreme Court decision, and it was later codified by Congress just two or three years ago. For most of American history, there was no federal same-sex marriage. If it is not legal at the federal level, it means you do not have marriage-based immigration rights. A state-issued marriage certificate doesn’t allow you to bring a spouse over from another country. That theme – how legal recognition affects queer relationships – runs through both books.
In What It Meant to Survive, sexuality is also central, not just because it’s a love story between two women, but because it explores the cultural realities of being queer in Nigeria versus being queer in the U.S. – especially after surviving a mass shooting.
In real life, Virginia Tech tried to provide mental health services after the shooting in 2007. However, as a gay woman of colour in a conservative part of the country, I couldn’t fully trust those services; I would have had to hide a critical part of myself. At the time, I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and I was feeling incredibly lonely and vulnerable. I couldn’t openly talk about all of that. If I let something slip about my sexuality, I didn’t know what the consequences would have been for me.
That is something Ramya, the protagonist of What It Meant to Survive, has to unpack throughout her journey. She was still in the closet to her parents until the middle portion of the book. So, when the (fictional) shooting happened, she had to face a lot of that pain alone.
Do you believe that creative writing can be cathartic, and do you think that plays a role in your passion for creative writing?
It is definitely cathartic for me. One of the questions I get a lot is, ‘why didn’t you write a memoir instead of a novel?’ And honestly, it’s because I wanted the freedom creative writing offers me. If you try to accurately recount real events, you could end up misconstruing someone’s words in a way that’s misleading. That is something I’ve always been really aware of in my writing. Both of my books have characters inspired by real people, and some small events are based on real experiences – not the major plot points, but little details here and there. But it is clearly fictional. If someone sees themselves in a character, I can say, yes, you inspired this person, but by no means am I saying this is you or that this actually happened, and that allows me to make the points that I believe are important.
How did your approach to addressing gun violence in the U.S. in your writing develop over time?
When my first book came out, I gained some recognition in the literary world. I even got recognised on the street a couple of times, which was humbling and surreal.
So, I thought, how can I take this tiny sliver of recognition and turn it into something meaningful? I wanted to write about gun violence in the U.S,. I met with a journalist from a major publication, and we started brainstorming how to craft a piece that would finally grab politicians’ attention and drive real change. But the more we explored it, the more I realised how complex the issue is and how much had already been attempted.
I think the Supreme Court interpretation of Constitutionally allowing individuals to carry firearms is dangerous. We’ve seen other countries like Australia and New Zealand successfully implement strict gun control. I understand that the U.S. is not an island in the middle of the ocean– so we have more ways for trafficking weapons – but the reality is the U.S. makes most of the firearms in our country, so there are straightforward and popular ways to reduce the number of firearms available.
Factors like capitalism and gun manufacturers, lobbying influence, and politics are extremely difficult to navigate in the U.S. to affect change. There are also communities of colour that feel constantly harassed by the police and believe that small arms are a means of protection. When you take all these perspectives into account, it’s impossible to tell one clear story. There is not a single narrative that will make everyone suddenly change their minds.
What made me step back from the political angle entirely was a chart that mapped out American public opinion on gun reform versus actual legislation. It showed that the vast majority of Americans support meaningful reform, but the laws had not been passed. Most people already agree that we need change, but politicians are not doing anything. So, what would another article accomplish? Even if I managed to shift public opinion by a small amount, it wouldn’t translate into political action. Real change has to come through legislation, and I wasn’t interested in running for public office.
I have deep respect for the people from Virginia Tech who have dedicated their lives to gun reform, and they have done incredible work making communities safer. I decided to continue to take action through creative writing.
What do you hope that readers will take away from What It Meant to Survive?
I don’t think it’s going to be some huge ‘aha’ moment where readers suddenly realise, ‘oh, we need gun control’. People who read this book are probably self-selecting and already know that and agree.
What I wanted to do was focus on one story. A concept that stuck with me from a class on nonprofit fundraising in grad school, is how people respond to tragedy. When we hear about suffering in large numbers – for example ‘100,000 people have died’ – it often does not land emotionally. It becomes abstract. But when you zoom in on one person or one family, people connect with it more deeply. That is why documentaries that follow individual stories often move people to action more than just hearing statistics.
That idea really influenced my approach. If I was going to write about gun violence – not necessarily to push for change, but to make a point that this is tragic, and it needs to stop – I wanted to focus on a single, intersectional queer character. I did not want to dilute the story by making it more palatable for a broader audience. I wanted to go deep into her experience, rather than smoothing things over to make it more universal.
The other thing I wanted to explore was this frustration I feel as an American – specifically, as an American who has lived through this tragedy. People from other countries often tell me, ‘gun violence in the U.S. is insane’. And I’m like, ‘yeah, we know. We live it.’ I don’t own a gun, and I’ve been directly affected by gun violence. But this is my reality.
So instead of getting lost in the political weeds, I wanted to tell a human story – one that adds nuance to the conversation, and, honestly, I also wanted to write a story for queer people who have lived through this. There are a lot of queer victims of gun violence, but I don’t think there are enough stories that really explore what that means.
Do you have any future creative projects that you could share with us?
I’m thinking about my third book. Originally, I wanted to finally write about a male character, because I have not done that yet. I had this idea about an Indian man who comes to the U.S. to get his MBA, with the dream of becoming the next Satya Nadella, i.e. a CEO of a big tech company. The CEOs of Alphabet and Microsoft, are both Indian men, so it’s not an unheard of achievement.
The way I envision the story is the protagonist has been in the U.S. for years but because of how the tech industry and skilled immigrant workers programs (H1-B visas) work, plus the decisions he makes to achieve his goal, he is never able to get his green card. He eventually gets married and has a daughter. Because of his ambition, he goes from one visa to the next, caught in a bureaucratic limbo. This happens a lot for Indians on H1-B visas, because the wait time is so ridiculously long. In the U.S., a limited number of people per nationality can get permanent residency. So, it turns into this immigration battle that intersects with the tech industry, which I think is a really timely issue.
With Trump winning again and the tech industry playing such a massive role in global politics, part of me feels like that plot does not go deep enough. If I really want to comment on the tech industry and the rise of strongman politics in so-called Western liberal democracies, I need to push the story further. I do not know what that looks like yet, but I feel like there is something much more sinister to explore.
Read part one of Mala’s Q&A which explores technology for social good
