A Conversation with Rohit Karir
Rohit Karir is a storyteller, freelance writer, and blogger. His poetry and flash fiction have appeared in Haiku Shack Magazine, Delhi Poetry Slam, Serotonin Press, Books Ireland Magazine, and Paragraph Planet. He has been a journalist for news publications that include The Times of India and the global newswire Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). He can't last long without an itch for putting together himself and the world in words. Find him on Twitter @RohitKarir and medium.com/@rkarir.
Rohit’s flash fiction, “Uproar,” can be read in Issue no. 1 of Sabr Tooth Tiger Magazine.
Ridah: Tell me about your background with writing. When did you start, and what has it been like for you? What are some goals you have for yourself for the future?
Rohit: “Background” is not how I would put it. I didn’t break my back to rake up the ground. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the dig! I think I came pre-set, like an operating system in a mobile phone. As a child, I narrated stories. I had to be told to stop. In school, I had little motivation to find the answers to quadratic equations, chemical compositions, or electric circuits. They didn’t push any buttons in me, though, today, almost everything interests me. The only activity that set off bulbs and neurons was recognizing when I was completely immersed, or not, in stories in elective English, comics, novels, and biographies of people in textbooks, and when the quality of continuity and disbelief broke my trance. Conscious and unconscious human behavior, with its infinite variety, yet sameness, as captured in storytelling, caught my attention early on and continues to intrigue me in innumerable ways.
I wrote a few stories in college and later utilized storytelling in advertising and public relations, print and online journalism, and content writing as a self-employed content provider. I wrote hundreds of news stories and editorials, some through the lens of intention and conditioning; however, one can’t push boundaries when a story needs to pass internal corporate tests and status quo requirements—especially when those really responsible for the mayhem in the world are apportioned the blame. So, as I had written a lot to persuade, now I write to capture whatever and wherever my radar takes me, and I stay tuned all the time, indiscriminately. I have recorded flash fiction stories for All India Radio’s foreign service, published poetry and flash fiction pieces, compiled an assortment of poems, and now I hope to complete and publish a collection of short stories.
Ridah: Your prose piece, “Uproar,” encapsulates a description of a Bengal tiger. What was your inspiration for the piece?
Rohit: The calculation of the tiger about its power and how it times it in a successful hunt is humbling, and the corollary being: if the prey doesn’t time its escape well, it’ll be three lunges, neck, bite, and over. After seeing a video of a tiger—which materialized from the camouflage of tall grass, almost flew up with a run up of a few strides, let out a roar, swiped and tore the arm of the forest ranger sitting on top of an elephant in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park, and disappeared into the grass—I wanted to capture the beginning and end of a royal Bengal tiger hunt and attack in the wild, the sanctuary landscape, the meal itself, and how it’s connected to the food chain in the wild. Everything re-enters the soil, to Earth—even ideas, our thinking—and comes back in again. Death gives and sustains life in the jungle: if the tiger doesn’t eat, it has a cascading effect down the chain. Unfortunately, we humans don’t let ideas die easily. We eat them, over-identify, and don’t shed them, which harms people and the world around us.
Ridah: What was your writing process for this piece like? Did you write all of it in one sitting or in parts?
Rohit: I wrote it in parts and multiple sittings. “Uproar,” originally, was a poem titled “Meal.” The story carries a few staccato, cryptic elements of the poem. In the narrative, I tried to capture a tiger hunt from different perspectives, with the observer behind and in front of the tiger, the antelope, trees, monkeys, birds, jackals, fireflies, the last few minutes of sunlight, and the anatomy of the predator and the prey as the action unfolds and comes to an end. First, I wrote a draft of ‘what will happen,’ researched tigers, how they hunt in the wild, their prey, and the environment in a large sanctuary. After that, the piece ran in sequence, from the imagined paw-over-paw muscled tiger stalk, the blurred chase, to the eager wait of savvy scavengers.
Ridah: What drew you to submit this piece for the magazine?
Rohit: The magazine’s title and the story’s protagonist are both tigers—one, the extinct Saber-tooth, and the other, the thriving royal Bengal. And I thought, if there ever was a clinching clue, that was it. When the editor accepted the story, she said it had both a bite and a soul. I hope both resonate with the readers. I am glad that the magazine showed ‘sabr’ with the piece and that the Bengal and Saber-tooth got along.
Ridah: Was this a piece you wrote specifically for the magazine or something you had written before? When did you first complete it?
Rohit: It wasn’t written thinking of the magazine. The story was nearly complete about two months before submitting it. When I read the magazine’s title, I included “Uproar” along with other pieces. Then, when the magazine suggested a few editorial changes before publication, I added more immersive details as background. The imagination and the core of the story tend to project missing nuances and details, no matter how complete one thinks a story is at the time of submission.
Ridah: What emotions were you trying to channel while writing this piece?
Rohit: Personally, the tiger is a self-reliant animal that uses its body and senses without hesitation, with much success; but do we, as individuals and a collective? Life in the wild, without knowing, tends to operate as a unitary inter-dependent system, inclusive of the cycle of gain and pain; do we, as humans, despite knowing so? We seem to revel in separateness. In the story, the veins of emotions include: tension, fear, uncertainty, pain, vulnerability, alarm and warning through the calls of the birds and monkeys, anticipation of rummagers for left overs, the certainty of worms and flies who will always feast, the amoral soil that will continue to churn with the help of the dead and the alive, the magnetic, majestic, momentum of the tiger once it gets going and the uproar it causes, and the innocence of the prey before its veil is torn apart.
Ridah: Feel free to add any other further thoughts you have!
Rohit: What’s the nature of writing? I think, writing and reading, especially stories and poetry, are probably one among a handful of conscious activities for which a human being stops, asks the ego to go take a walk, wonders, inquires, and asks, hang on, what’s going on inside and outside? That being so, telling a story or writing a poem and inviting the reader to fill in the blanks is both an act of acceptance and unacceptance. And then there are wondrous, enclosed-in-a-time-less shell moments, when the writer is in perfect harmony or chosen disharmony, and images and connections come unstuck and drip or break into the conscious, wanting to be framed and recorded—threading the aglow mind with the collective deposits of ancient material. For example, while writing “Uproar,” I tried to think what emotions would flow if the antelope and the tiger crossed eyes? When a tiger kills and eats, what’s the reaction in its environment?
I sometimes think that writing a story is like planting a fruit tree. One can offer an almost-ripe piece of fruit and wait for a reader to bite and ripen it with the help of the thoughts and feelings elicited by the fruit's size, juice, and texture. If it hits the sweet spot, sweet, salty, and sour, a reader shakes the branches for one more bite.
