How Hawaii Influenced Madhuri Vijay's Book!

While working on her debut novel on Kashmir, author Madhuri Vijay found inspiration in the unlikeliest of places—Hawaii. Here, she writes on how their similar histories of accession and violence influenced her book.

- Madhuri Vijay

Six years ago, I visited the Hawaiian Islands for the first time. The purpose of my trip was two-fold—I was going as a tourist, but I was also starting work on what would become my first novel, The Far Field (HarperCollins). Whenever I told people I was heading to Hawaii, they invariably responded in the same way: with sighs of envy. I was familiar with this response; I’d spent the past two years teaching at a remote school in the mountains of Jammu & Kashmir, and it was the same way people reacted when I told them about that. I could almost predict the moment a listener would shake her head and say, wistfully, “I’ve heard it’s paradise.”

Of all the places I’ve travelled, no two have been branded “paradise” quite so quickly as Kashmir and Hawaii, perhaps because they bear the twin crosses of being seductively beautiful yet eternally out of reach to those who would seek to possess them. In Kashmir, I found this paradox fascinating enough for it to become the core of The Far Field, which follows a young South Indian woman, Shalini, on an ill-fated odyssey to J&K. Having grown up in Bengaluru, I know the fraught position Kashmir occupies in our national psyche, suspended between crown jewel and black sheep. The last thing I expected, landing bleary-eyed at Maui’s plumeria scented airport on a balmy November afternoon, was to find the same forces at work in the Pacific.