In that space is our power

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Lucky lucky (and smart you) for being here today!

 Let me introduce you to Damyanti Biswas. Here’s how we met: Damyanti was on our schedule for First Chapter Fun. (You know it, right? If you don’t, more on that later.)

To prepare for reading the first chapter of her book YOU BENEATH YOUR SKIN out loud, I, um, had to read it. (You can watch the reading here. And hear some amazing things about what Damyanti does.) And I fell in love with it. Then I read her bio, and fell in love with her. Then we exchanged emails, and blogs, and interviews, and then she asked me to do a guest blog and I asked her to write a short story for the Bouchercon anthony. Which turned out to be one of the best stories ever.

And now, if you don't already know her from her amazing writing blog or her book or her work, you get to meet Damyanti, too.

And you tell me whether this changes your life. It did mine.

In that space is our power

By Damyanti Biswas

Last year, during this week in February, I’d begun to hear of covid in distant news: it was happening in other countries. I was upset for my Chinese friends in quarantine. Then of course the world as we knew it changed, and we all got a taste of isolation, anxiety, and a crippling loss of certainty.


With nowhere else to go other than parks, I discovered many green places not far from where I live, and rediscovered the joy of an activity I’d forgotten: nature walks. When walking, I couldn’t doom-scroll and consume the barrage of negativity that was my social media and newsfeed. I could control where I was going—and better still, take refuge in the green.


Cocooned in my privilege of not having to know all that’s going on in the world, I switched off my social media and landed in a weird but increasingly welcome mind-space of blank stillness. Strolls brought new pleasures. The much-spoken-about joy of noticing the small things. The way a road curves in a series of arcs. Weeds by the highway, flowering. Tiny butterflies no bigger than my nail flitting among them. Snails sliming their way onto mossy walls. Beetles and birdcalls, big and small. Dewdrops lingering on spiderwebs in stray sunlight. A dog panting up at its owner, all adoration, frolic, eagerness.


These are (poetic but undeniable) reassurances. Things that go right, creatures and people about their business, the security of knowing I’m a link in this chain, in interaction with it all. That I’m a part of the picture in other people’s eyes. The world goes on, despite humanity’s cumulative attempts at destroying it. We are getting a lot of things right.


I also got hooked on podcasts as I walked. Many of them were about fantastic books. I tried making my way through all those recommended reading lists during the day or at bedtime, but soon realized that an anxious mind could not focus for more than five minutes.


This was when someone suggested audiobooks. I’d never taken to them before because they either tended to put me to sleep, or sent me into a daydream. I wondered if they might work with my morning walks. By this time, I was putting in 2 hours of walking every day, beside the sea, under the shade of trees, in neighborhood parks.


The first audiobook I listened to was Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. The long lyrical nature descriptions hooked me in. It didn’t hurt that the reader had a soothing lilt. Simple as the concept was, having a story read into my ears as I walked turned out to be an experience I hadn’t considered or imagined before.


The Austrian holocaust survivor, psychiatrist, and author Viktor E. Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”


The first two hours of my day will be my self-care, I’ve decided, the stimuli I seek in my life. Unless someone in the family needs immediate medical attention, you’ll find me walking, often before sunrise. I’m fortunate to live in a tropical country, but on mornings with tropical downpour, I head to an indoor stadium. Audiobooks plus walks is my new formula for sanity, even on days my anxiety makes it hard to breathe.


I find myself in absolute agreement with Søren Kierkegaard, who said, “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”


I heard this passage in an audiobook, during one of my morning walks.


HANK: See? How much is walking a part of your life, reds and readers? Does it work for you like this?

All author proceeds from You Beneath Your Skin go to Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks.

Damyanti Biswas is an Indian author currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming at Smokelong, Ambit, Litro, Puerto del Sol, Griffith Review Australia, as well as other journals in the USA and UK. Her work is available in various anthologies in Asia, and she serves as one of the editors of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her debut literary crime novel, You Beneath Your Skin, was published by Simon & Schuster, and optioned for screen by Endemol Shine.




YOU BENEATH YOUR SKIN


LIES. AMBITION. FAMILY.

It’s a dark, smog-choked new Delhi winter. Indian American single mother Anjali Morgan juggles her job as a psychiatrist with caring for her autistic teenage son. She is in a long-standing affair with ambitious police commissioner Jatin Bhatt – an irresistible attraction that could destroy both their lives.

Jatin’s home life is falling apart: his handsome and charming son is not all he appears to be, and his wife has too much on her plate to pay attention to either husband or son. But Jatin refuses to listen to anyone, not even the sister to whom he is deeply attached.

Across the city there is a crime spree: slum women found stuffed in trash bags, faces and bodies disfigured by acid. And as events spiral out of control Anjali is horrifyingly at the center of it all …

In a sordid world of poverty, misogyny, and political corruption, Jatin must make some hard choices. But what he unearths is only the tip of the iceberg. Together with Anjali he must confront old wounds and uncover long-held secrets before it is too late.