She wrapped rice and curry and pickle in a newspaper and gave it to me. Susamma was a sweet old woman I met in Vagamon, who caught me roaming around looking for a place to eat on my way back from a pine forest. I grew up believing it had magical healing properties. The solution to everything, just about everything, was coconut oil. When I was a child and had bruises, my mother would always apply coconut oil to them. Identities are shaped by environment, you can understand so much about a character’s history from their setting. I grew up in Kottarakkara and Trivandrum. Credit: Photographer Harsh Jani The book is rife with references from Kerala, such as the titles of some of the poems: ‘Coconut oil for trauma wounds’, ‘Gooseberry Pickle’, ‘Mattancherry Beef Biryani’. It’s her gaze, their world.Īuthor Megha Rao. That’s why the book is written from Achu’s perspective. That’s why some of these characters aren’t written in first person. I was able to understand a character as complex as Kochu’s after real-life conversations with people who had similar experiences as him. It doesn’t mean they aren’t familiar they’re people I know, but they’re just not me.Īnd a lot of Kochu’s experiences aren’t mine, and I refused to take them. But I’m not like the father, Sunny Kochachan. I am their euphoria, their grief, their bitterness, their innocence. I am giddy and naïve, like Kochu’s bride. I am also the lover, who mysteriously disappears. I am their grandmother’s kindness, their grandfather’s devotion. Their mother is me at my most vulnerable, utterly devastated. Molu’s feisty disposition is my spirit animal. His sister Achu’s angsty teenage self was me in college. Are the characters in Teething an extension of your own personality? Our encounters are so very different, but there’s this golden thread running through all of us, holding us together. There’s an urgency to tell my story, which is a sliver in the story of the world. The trauma of a child the traumas of an entire family, and the traumas of society. Do you feel the pressure to be politically correct?Ī lot of what I write is extremely personal, but I think the personal can also be incredibly universal. The personal and political often get intertwined while exploring complex themes like the ones you discuss in the book. It’s definitely open to interpretation too! That there were second chances, come what may. That you could lose your teeth as a kid, and still get another shot at life. And when I was rereading it again after seeing it in print, it felt like rebirth. When I was editing it, it meant the excitement of having your milk teeth being replaced by adult teeth, the tangible validation of becoming a brand-new self. When I wrote Teething, it meant the painful yet crucial process of growing older. I’d like to believe the experience of a book’s title is unique to every reader. In an interview with TNM, Megha Rao talks about the world of Teething, it's characters and plot, her process and relationship with the craft, writing that moves her and more. If Achu carefully folds her mother’s poems into paper planes, sends them out into the horizon to where they become one with clouds to return as a downpour, Megha’s retelling of growing up in a dysfunctional family through intimate poems is as scattered as rain across the book. The book, like the city drenched in poetry by Achu’s (Kochu’s elder sister) mother, is damp with fragmented memories and metaphors.