My family has always opted to confront our problems, which is probably why we’ve been known to take our own lives. My mother drank with remarkable discipline. After she died from liver disease, my father didn’t go through denial. He embraced his despair and hanged himself two days after her death, when I was five years old. My grandmother, who had the misfortune of finding him in his childhood room in Kolkata, didn’t think to deceive me about the suicide, and when I was older I resented her for her honesty. I wanted to grow up believing my father perished nobly, for some grand cause, perhaps starving himself like Gandhi.
Part of me wished I’d been lied to my entire life because prolonged exposure to reality, much like inhaling noxious fumes, seemed to either kill you or leave you in a vegetative state. After my father’s suicide, I lived with my grandmother until she died when I was ten, at which point I was sent to Houston, Texas to live with my uncle.
The journey from Kolkata to Houston was my first time on an airplane. As the plane began to descend, I saw that the buildings below resembled tiny carved stones, illuminated to a saintly glow by the artificial city lights. It was exhilarating to view the world from such an enormous—and deceptive—height. In India I lived with my grandmother in a modest, one-story house on the outskirts of the city, and when I walked through the heart of Kolkata, I’d look up at the three-story mansions towering above the streets, at the kids standing on their flat roofs, and imagine seeing the world from up there. From the roof of a mansion, your lens is larger, your sight panoramic, and you can remain a stranger to the grotesque. From such a height, you are not level with the rest of the world. You are above it.
My wife Caroline grew up in a suburb of Dallas, but her childhood home resembled those Kolkata mansions; it was massive, overseeing the entire neighborhood. Caroline, who had a vaguely stoned-looking Jesus tattooed on her lower back, clung to an absolute faith in God that is anachronistic in this day and time. She was an oncologist, like me, trained scientifically. When I married her, I attributed her optimism to her youth (she was twenty-four and seven years my junior) and her money. Personally, I’d seen far too much misery to harbor such delusions. But Caroline believed in God, which is why she was bowled over when she discovered that the Jesus tattoo on her back might be killing her.
The doctors suspected that the needle used by the tattoo parlor had been contaminated, causing an infection. Her symptoms mimicked those of Hepatitis C—significant damage to her liver and fatigue—but she had tested negative for that disease. She became the obsession of several prominent doctors in Houston.
When one doctor mentioned the possibility of the Jesus tattoo being the culprit, Caroline was stunned. “But it was a tattoo of Jesus.”
“If you contracted your illness through a contaminated needle,” her doctor said, “the tattoo itself wouldn’t make a difference. You know that.”
She shook her head. “A Jesus tattoo?”
The doctors had no answers for Caroline, so she insisted that faith would salvage all. With enough prayers and determination, she believed, Jesus would make her disease disappear. After all, He was responsible for it in the first place.
Caroline had always been a vigilant Baptist, one of the qualities that initially drew me to her because I’d lived in Kingwood, a suburb of Houston, after moving from India, and everyone there was Christian. I grew up Hindu. On Sunday mornings my uncle and I played tennis because the courts were empty then— everyone was at church. As we passed by the church on the way to the courts, I imagined the hot girls in my classes in button-down tops and pleated skirts, their thighs grazing as they clasped their manicured hands in prayer, sensual and reverent at the same time. And I begged my Hindu Gods to let me briefly court Christianity until I landed one of those gorgeous white girls who volunteered in youth groups but also wore shorts revealing heavenly legs sculpted in step-aerobic classes. The Hindu Gods didn’t respond to my prayers, probably because it wasn’t kosher of me to ask their permission to stray. But, to a teenage boy, the possibility of sex trumps anything God has to offer.
Caroline was one of those Baptist babes I’d dreamt of bagging. She was as pious as she was sexy, fiercely devoted to Jesus, her patients, and her husband. Because she’d remained faithful to Jesus her entire life, she was certain that Jesus would eventually zap away her illness. But she grew impatient as, months later, her health continued to decline despite her perfect church attendance. One day, she lost it. The church parking lot was divided into sections named after characters and places from the Bible, and every Sunday we drove to church early so we could park in the “Jesus” or “Virgin Mary” sections instead of a lesser one like “Bethlehem.” That morning another aspiring Jesus parker nearly T-boned me trying to steal the spot, and Caroline shot the bird at the tiny elderly man—a gesture I believed her incapable of. Then she started sobbing.
“I’m done with church,” she said. “It isn’t working.There’s this cat retreat in Austin that Emily told me about. She hasn’t needed chemotherapy since she came back from it. I want to go.”
Everyone was high-strung then—shaken by the threat of terrorism and discouraged by a war that seemed unending. People had grown impatient with relaxation techniques like meditation or acupuncture or yoga. The newest social trend among the upper classes involved trying to inhabit the minds of domestic animals: dogs, fish, even iguanas. Cat retreats were the latest fad.
“Please,” she said. “Please.”
I found the idea ridiculous, of course, but I’d have done anything to mitigate her pain. And so we made the three-hour drive from Houston to Austin on a gray Sunday morning, our car battered by a bullysome rain, the kind that pounds you relentlessly, breaks, then belts you for another half hour. Caroline was reading from a review about the retreat she’d found on the Internet—after her health declined, she’d gone on medical leave and spent more time in cyberspace than she did in the natural world.
“‘By the end of the retreat,’” she quoted, “‘you will achieve the purest, most sublime expression of happiness, the purr. Additionally, you and your partner will be able to communicate through meows and resolve disputes not with the fractured, judgmental shards of language, but with the distilled tones of raw feline emotion.’”
“We can’t tell anyone about this. We’re doctors, for Christ’s sake. We’re going to spend the weekend on all fours, meowing?”
“This is totally legitimate,” she said. “Research shows that the experience can help cure cancer. And it should speak to you anyway. The guru who founded The Magnificent Purr lived in a colony of cats in India for like a hundred years. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him.”
“There are a lot of Indians in the world,” I said. “Not all of us know one another.”
I occasionally suspected that she married me because I was a giant of a man, six-foot-four, and Indian. She hadn’t traveled outside the United States, and when we first started dating at Baylor College of Medicine and I told her about living in Kolkata—the mansions, the begging children, the temples—she’d peer into my eyes, transfixed. I embodied a world entirely unknown to her, a land as mystical and unknowable as God. And I’d never imagined that a devout Baptist would willingly fall in love with a non-practicing Hindu foreigner. I was grateful for her attention, grateful that I could bring to her the fuller understanding of the world she so yearned for, and my gratitude in time morphed into love.
We were about a mile away from The Magnificent Purr when Caroline told me about the no sex policy. “Why?” I asked. “Cats have sex all the time.”
“The expression is ‘hump like dogs.’ Have you ever heard anyone say ‘hump like cats’? Cats are too spiritual to be concerned with sex.”
“Why can’t we just be happy to be human?”
“Because the cat’s purr is the purest expression of happiness,” Caroline informed me.
“Why can’t it be the purest form of happiness for them?” I asked. “Why can’t a hug or kiss be the purest expression of happiness for us? Or even, um, self-love?”
I shouldn’t be condescending towards cats, she admonished me.
“I’m not being condescending.”
Yes I was. And, according to Caroline, I was a skeptic too.
“I just have an objection to spending five grand on a retreat so we can eat tuna out of bowls and groom each other. Where does the five grand go?”
Toward the training, Caroline informed me.
“Who’s training these people? A bunch of stray cats?”
The supervision was important, Caroline explained. People trying to purr magnificently on their own could seriously injure themselves. And, by the way, this negative mode of thinking was exactly what was getting in my way. I was so afraid of hoping for anything.
“Maybe you’re afraid of losing hope,” I shot back.
We’d arrived. You could see the sign for the compound from the highway, and the entrance was marked with a monstrous tree with two burly branches raised in a triumphant “V” surrounded by smaller branches. It stood the height of ten Carolines stacked on top of one another.
I’d hoped the tree would put Caroline in a better mood—she was mesmerized by anything grand in nature. But as soon as I’d parked, Caroline virtually leapt out, her bangles rattling as she slammed the car door shut. She raced toward the white compound with The Magnificent Purr painted in big green bubble letters. The owners probably decided upon green because it signified birth and renewal. What a load of crap.
My wife’s arms sliced the air as she strode away. Lately she’d started wearing linen dresses, hoping, perhaps, that the carefree attitude of the linen would seep into her state of mind. As she marched toward the registration office, I could make out the tattoo on her lower back underneath the transparent sheath of a dress, that homage to Jesus that cost Caroline her health.
The meeting room for The Magnificent Purr was crammed with people with tensed bodies and loose-flowing linen clothes, just like Caroline. Everyone was missing something—an earlobe, three small toes, hair. Those with no anatomical losses had someone or something stolen from them: a teenage boy his father, a matronly middle-aged woman a husband who, while stationed in Iraq, fell in love with a civilian. These people believed that they were victims of deprivation, so you saw them no other way.
The space looked like a huge garage decorated with bright, oddly shaped rugs. Large banners crowded every corner, with sayings like “The Purr = Peace” and “Claim your Inner Cat.” The retreat leader introduced herself. Her name was Ecstasy Brown.
Ecstasy wore a loose vinyl dress that hung from her body like a shower curtain. She made us store our wallets, purses, and cell phones in lockers because she didn’t want us to be concerned with material possessions (after I’d written the check, of course). Then she began handing out these hideous bodysuits made out of synthetic fur. Caroline got the Calico, and I was stuck with a Russian Blue’s coat.
“Please remove all your clothes and put these on. Everyone should wear one to experience the sensation of having fur. There are dressing rooms in the back.”
“Have these been dry-cleaned?” I asked.
Ecstasy flinched. “We ask that you don’t worry too much about hygiene while you’re here. Focus on your soul.”
“I knew it! They haven’t been cleaned,” I whispered to Caroline. “When do we shower?” I asked Ecstasy.
“Cats don’t shower,” the woman said, “so we ask everyone to refrain from bathing during these seven days.”
“But we’re not cats,” I pointed out.
“But you’re here so you can live inside the mind of a cat,” Ecstasy explained.
“But we’re not cats.”
Caroline dragged me to the dressing rooms. The catsuit was a one-pieced atrocity with hands and feet shaped like paws with tiny acrylic nails attached to imitate claws. I dropped my pants, and my dick drooped in grim resignation. “You and me both, pal,” I whispered. The catsuit swallowed my body. I pulled the mask—a cartoonish creation with whiskers and ears and holes for your eyes, mouth, and nostrils—over my head. Here I was, being forced to wear a furry costume, crawl on all fours, and meow persistently. And I was paying five grand for this torture.
I left my dressing room in a huff and waited for Caroline to finish getting dressed. I could see through the tiny blinds on her dressing-room door. Caroline was naked and hunched over in a small chair. She had been an avid runner before her illness, and up until a year ago her body was enviably graced with muscle. But now her skin was stretched over her skeleton like a glove; no muscle provided a buffer between body and skin.
I hadn’t seen her naked in months. All that time, her body had been dwindling. At that moment, reality socked me in the face. My wife was no longer just sick. She was dying.
When she came out of the dressing room I whistled, twirling her around. “Until now I’ve never considered bestiality,” I whispered in a thick faux Russian accent, “but you, my darling, are simply too delicious.” She laughed in surprise. I grabbed her hand. Too much time had passed since we’d stood still and taken in one another.
“That is why I’m called a Russian Blue. Because until I can make love to you this Russian will be blue,” I growled. At some point, I realized, I’d lost sight of my playfulness; I’d soured my temperament until it was as miserable as Caroline’s mysteriously declining health.
*
The group meeting, which began around eleven that morning, consisted of Ecstasy’s preaching.
“You will purr.” She repeated it several times in a hypnotic murmur. “You will purr. You will purr.” Then she paused. “Two conditions. One, if you do not believe, you will not experience the Magnificent Purr. And if you do not follow our rules, you will NOT purr. Our technique is foolproof—unless you question or undermine it.” She assured us that it was all about willpower. Experiments proved that cats were the happiest of all the mammals. I wondered exactly how these tests had gauged feline contentment, considering we couldn’t exactly poll cats about it, but I let it go for Caroline’s sake.
“Cats,” Ecstasy continued, “have the capacity to transcend everyday anxieties. They are graceful creatures with an intrinsic sense of balance. And their expression of happiness, the purr, is a scientific enigma.”
“Immerse yourself in the experience of speaking cat,” she said, lowering her voice. “Soon your pain will evaporate, and you’ll be wrapped in an aura of absolute peace.”
I was sweating underneath the synthetic fur, and a rash festered in my crotch. I scratched myself and felt half the room staring at me. Don’t be so damn judgmental—I wanted to shout. No mammal, however graceful, is beyond scratching his balls.
A group of assistants strolled around as Ecstasy lectured to us. They wore yellow T-shirts with logos in big black letters on the front reading: PURR YOUR WAY TO GOD.
“Your cat suits might seem uncomfortable at first,” Ecstasy said to the crowd, though I was quite sure she was addressing the ball-scratcher of the group, “especially because we have chosen not to indulge in air-conditioning. Happiness is a state of mind. Once you learn to tune out external discomfort, you’ll be able to endure any obstacle.”
A twenty-something kid inched toward the exit. Ecstasy called out to him. “You’re leaving?”
He nodded. Poor bastard.
Ecstasy approached him. “Fear always precedes the sublime. This retreat relies heavily on the group energy of its participants. Without you, who knows what we’ll accomplish. It’s your decision. But our founder had a mantra: ‘Unless all stay till the end, we cannot transcend.’”
Two assistants ushered him back to the group. The room broke into applause and catcalls. The next hour, Ecstasy said, would be our time to silently explore our surroundings and access our inner catness. “Remember,” she said. “The purr will save you.”
Caroline scurried past me. Crawling, I followed her limp calico tail until I lost her in the crowd of furry, uncoordinated people slogging around on the floor. Double doors opened onto a lawn featuring a pond and the enormous tree we’d seen at our arrival. It had stopped raining. A man, whose portly body had been unfortunately forced into a tiny black catsuit, beat me outside and raced to the tree. I rushed toward the pond on my hands and knees, desperate to dip my paws in the water. The cat costume was unbearably hot. When I was a few feet away, someone called out behind me: “You don’t like water.”
Ecstasy was chasing after me, panting. I dashed on all fours toward the water.“Stop!” She yelled. “You’re a cat. You need to fully inhabit your feline nature.”
The huge man clawed at the tree trunk, attempting to climb it before falling on his ass. For a moment, Ecstasy was distracted. “Don’t give up,” she called out. “You are a cat.”
There’s a reason cats don’t come packaged in 300-pound bodies, I thought. I dipped a synthetic paw in the water, sighing with contentment.
She turned her attention back to me, and for a moment I thought she might bend down and swoop me up. Just try it, bitch. “You either support your wife or leave, so she can recover in peace.”
“Fine,” I mumbled.
“Good then.”She turned to walk back to the compound.
The 300-pound man-cat again tackled the tree. He made it a few inches up the trunk before crashing onto a cluster of rocks. He limped behind me as I crawled back to the compound. “I’m really trying,” he said. “But I feel like such a pussy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a bitch being a cat.”
*
On Day Two we began the meow dialogues, which had apparently healed Ecstasy’s own marriage, giving her and her husband the ability to communicate complex, nuanced feelings.
“A meow,” she said, “can convey love, anger, or sorrow. Words and sentences splinter our emotions. But a meow is entirely pure, uncensored. Don’t hold back.”
A cat psychologist supervised us as Caroline approached me on all fours. “Meow!” she belted out. “Meow,” I said, grinning at her.
“Meow!” This one was more confrontational.
“Meow.” I tried to summon the appropriate amount of fervor.
“Meow!” Don’t be so passive, her meow said.
“Meow.” Do you really expect me to get excited about meowing?
“Meow!” What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just try?
“Meow.” Because this is ridiculous. And it’s insulting to cats.
“Meow!” Fuck you for not believing in miracles.
She raised a paw, sprung toward me with a low growl, and scratched my nose.
“Meow!” I hollered. I lunged forward to head-butt her.
A woman too heavy for her tiny Siamese cat get-up yelped and threw herself on all fours in front of Caroline. She lifted a thick paw threateningly at me. Ecstasy stomped over to us, gripping a blue spray bottle. “No, no, no,” I said. “She scratched me.”
She squeezed the trigger and sprayed me in the face with a bitter blend of water and vinegar. “No,” she barked, spraying me again in the eyes. “No.”
An assistant knelt by me, holding the consent form we’d signed. She pointed to the clause reading: Violence, including but not limited to growling, scratching, clawing, biting, wrestling, head-butting, and or humping will not be tolerated under any circumstances and may result in expulsion from the premises and forfeiture of entire deposit. Day Two, and I was already being condemned for feline domestic abuse.
Apparently our skirmish had distracted the crowd from mastering their new language. Ecstasy ended the session early. “We’ll now take a brief cat-nap,” she announced to everyone. “Purr away your hostility. Forgive those who have interrupted your meows.”
I crawled to the other side of the room, curling into a fetal position. I tried to purr as magnificently as I could. All that emerged was a thick, phlegmy sound. God, I prayed silently, this better help Caroline. Have we lost our minds in trying to save her life?
*
After breakfast on the third day, which consisted of tuna fish and vegetables in cat bowls (they’d advertised it on the website as “grilled tuna mixed with delicate greens”), we attended the Creative Expression seminar, during which we were ordered to channel our emotions through imitating cat poses. When struck with a memory or emotion, we were to contort our bodies, liberating repressed feelings through our postures.
“Cats are astonishingly flexible,” Ecstasy said. “Remember, this is an opportunity for you to push the limits of your body. Now, act out your greatest hope.”
My greatest hope as a cat, I mused, would be to stand as tall as a human. I stood up and stretched into tree pose. I towered. Ecstasy rushed to my side.
“It would be impossible for a cat to get into this pose. Please try another.”
“It’s impossible for me to be a cat, right? So why can’t a cat be a human? If I were a cat, I’d want to stand taller than all the other felines.”
“You’re not permitted to talk,” she said. “Please obey the rules. This, sir, is the kind of attitude that interferes with everyone else’s ascent to inner peace.”
Unfortunately, no one seemed to be ascending; most of my fellow felines had already fallen out of their postures. One poor kid landed on her chin and started wailing. “Cats don’t wail,” Ecstasy admonished. “Enact your grief using your feline instincts, not your human ones.”
I really hoped the kid would sue the crap out of Ecstasy.
Caroline was curled up into a ball behind me, grimacing. She had folded into herself because of the pain, I realized. At times my obstinacy diverted me from the reality of her disease, which, despite her prayers and attempts to subvert it, doggedly harassed her.
“I can’t be sick anymore,” she said. “This has to heal me. It has to.”
I crawled over to my wife, placed my paw on her shoulder, and began to lick her hair, ears, face, and neck. Ecstasy nodded her approval.
“Yes,” she said, hovering over us, “grooming demonstrates that you two have an affinity towards one another.”
I ignored her. But I continued to lick Caroline’s hideous synthetic coat, her fake paws, her matted tail. Caroline leaned into me after I finished.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “That was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever done for me.”
*
Caroline and I separated for our individual therapy sessions. My feline therapist was a pretty, restless woman who had an unhealthy attachment to her pen—she tapped it against her desk, stuck it in her mouth, twirled it in the air.
“So tell me a little about yourself,” she said.
I tried. I meowed away. I complained about how unfair it was that Caroline got her Jesus tattoo to consummate her faith, and then it came back to bite her in the ass. I talked about the sweets my father brought me after work when he was still alive, and how my mother scolded him because I was already chubby, and he said that every pound I gained added weight to my happiness. And how I cried for months after he died because his ashes weighed next to nothing, and all the happiness he’d stored up in his body over the years of his life were gone. I shed all the excess weight on my body in the year after his death and mourned the loss of my own joy.
I meowed all this the best I could, and tears congregated behind my eyes, threatening to escape. The cat therapist jotted something down and said, “Your poor pet squirrel.”
I stared at her. “You’re having some problems, um, translating.”
“Really?” she asked. “I’ve been translating for The Magnificent Purr for years. Maybe you need to hone your meowing skills.”
*
I crawled out of her office at three, exhausted, and curled up in a corner with my towel. I had just closed my eyes when something furry rubbed against my feet.
Caroline peered up at me. Her eyes were amber, her pupils tiny black specks preserved inside those orange orbs. They were lovely.
“Let’s get out of here,” I begged.
She shook her head. “I haven’t been able to purr.”
“Of course you haven’t. You’re not a cat.” Her eyes clouded over. “I thought you were growing here. But still you have no faith,” she said and stalked away. I had no energy left to coax her back to reality.
*
I reported her missing at the 5:30 p.m. purring practice on the fourth day of the retreat, and at six we began searching for her, crawling around the compound. I was surrounded by a medley of meows as we dispersed. Ecstasy was driving me crazy with her tirades—she kept saying, “Someone must have seriously upset that fragile kitty” and glaring at me.
I wandered outside. It was still light out as I crawled toward the pond. The leaves on the tree were a crisp, vibrant green. In the winter the leaves would curl into decay, overtaken by a dull brownness, but for now they were in their prime. In the pond yellow and red slivers of fish ventured close to the surface.
“Meow.” The noise was coming from above. I glanced up. Caroline was shimmying up the trunk of the massive tree. She’d made it halfway to the top. A human could have never made it that high. I wasn’t sure a cat could do it.
“Jesus,” I said. “How did you get up there?”
A coquettish smile passed over her face. She responded with a demure “Meow” as she ground her nails into the bark and ascended higher.
There she was, scaling the tree with her furry appendages. In the pond I could see the reflection of my face and the smooth, elegant line of Caroline’s climb. She was no longer an awkward human, but a bold feline. The water rippled gracefully, and I wondered how the water could move on a day so still. But the water seemed to possess a grace, a rhythm, unaffected by the world’s moodiness. Light emanated from beneath the water, transforming our reflections into something divine. And, for a brief moment, I swear the entire world glistened.
Then, Caroline squealed.
There she was, straddling a tiny branch near the top of the tree, stroking the leaves like they were the ears of a beloved horse. She extended her furry arms toward the sky in triumph, grinning at me, as proud as a kid on bicycle boasting “No hands!”
I laughed, staring up at her and the light and the benevolent sky. “You’re unbelievable!” I was still laughing when the branch snapped like a broken neck. It was a swift amputation. The branch plummeted to the ground, with Caroline on it. She didn’t tense up during the fall, as humans do, anticipating the devastation to their bodies. Instead, her body remained entirely unclenched, as sleek and confident as a cat dismounting after scaling a tree. But, despite the strength of her faith, she was no cat. I was too transfixed to move for a few moments. Then I hurriedly extended my arms to catch her but couldn’t get to her in time. Part of me expected to see her navigating the skies on that branch. Moments earlier, at that tremendous height, she’d seemed invincible. But there she was, a few feet away, her head angled in such a way that I didn’t have to look closer to know she was gone.
I crawled away on all fours and kept going until I stumbled into a ditch and buried myself underneath a thatch of leaves.
Surprisingly, Caroline’s death garnered little negative publicity for The Magnificent Purr. My lawsuit—I was never able to muster my wife’s level of faith in this pursuit—was summarily dismissed after the judge ruled that neither The Magnificent Purr, Inc., nor any of its agents or employees, had encouraged, expressly or implicitly, the climbing of trees. Instead, Caroline was touted as a martyr, a woman so immersed in her inner feline that she’d achieved the impossible in climbing that tree, and had died for her faith in the Purr. Over the next several years many aspiring purrers attended the retreat, some hopeful that they too would die and, like Caroline, be proclaimed a messiah. One guy heaved himself five feet up the tree, threw himself off, and suffered only minor bruises. But no other person ever came close to Caroline’s legendary transcendence.
*
Before my wife got sick and we stopped making love, sex with Caroline occasionally aroused in me a transient sensation of God. Sometimes we’d spill into one another as we finished, and if I opened my eyes Caroline’s head would be tilted back, her lips parted in a smile more goofy than alluring but gorgeous in its sincerity. My mind would drift to the purest and most psychedelic of images— golden ornaments suspended in the sky and pillows of blinding light wafting along like clouds. I’d assail her with gratitude—I never knew an orgasm could be so celestial—and she’d laugh and press her hands against my face as though it were wet clay she was molding with her fingers. After Caroline, I never again stumbled upon the celestial. She was my last link to the divine.
I am, however, unable to part with those few moments before her death; even years later, they replay constantly in my mind, and leave me only half in the present. There is Caroline, taunting me from the impossible height she somehow conquered through her faith in a notion every bit as absurd as it was—it turned out—miraculous. She lets go of the last branch and waves her arms in celebration. She will fall, of course, but that comes later. For now, I gaze up at her delighted face from the ground, as I once gazed upon the wealthy children playing on their roofs in Kolkata, and wish once more that I might view the world and all its mysteries from that great height.
“The Magnificent Purr” originally appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA. She also worked as an assistant professor of creative writing at Gonzaga University for three years. In 2008, Keya spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing. Keya’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She has completed a novel as well as a short-story collection and memoir.
Furthermore, one of Keya’s novels has been a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and her short story collection has been a finalist for the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. In 2005, Keya received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Keya also had the privilege of working as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years and edits the literary journal Silk Road.
More About BLR
