Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy comes out today! It’s a debut book of interlinked stories about two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, and about the ways people ask as unknowing mirrors to each other. We asked the author how she’s celebrating.
On the day of the publication, I will probably be in Jersey, helping my mother sort through the years of accumulation to piles of joy and less joy. She plans to move in the near future and Marie Kondo’s method of tidying has been her mode of being for the past couple of months. Last weekend she piled all the books we possessed in the living room until it was uninhabitable. I sat on the outer edge of the room and picked through spines of books I had forgotten. Did I really own the whole box set collection of the Chronicles of Narnia?
On June 5th I will dive into cleaning because it’s one way to clear out your head. Maybe it’s time to confront the beanie baby collection that I had saved for almost two decades with its fading promise of quick liquidity. It’s insane what we hold onto. I still have a drawing I did in third grade, which is basically a poorly copied sketch of my hand. We are fiends for our past selves. Nostalgia is an ugly word according to my mother. She could use it interchangeably with shabby sheikh. I think this is how we will empty the house, relegating the past to fashion trends that don’t suit us. Remember, this polka dot blanket you wore around the house when you thought you could fly.
I was always intrigued with cultures that buried the dead with material things or told stories of the deceased longing for personal items from their time on earth. Maybe there’s no escape from this consumer hunger. But when you’re dead, what need do you have for jewelry, a bed, or even underwear? It’s all a burden for the living. In the winter, I had donated most of my clothes on the impulse that I wanted to be lighter. June 5th might be a day where I try to shed the rest. It can give you clarity, the sorting of your things. Instead of thinking of joy, I sometimes think of embarrassment like if someone found this when I died, would I be embarrassed. I’m trying to cultivate joy. My mom cleared up a cabinet to fill it up with comic books to remind herself of what she wants to do one day. She has collected all the hardback copies of Osama Tezuka’s epic Buddha manga. Together the spines form Buddha’s head. It looks almost like a shrine.
All this is to say that when the book comes out I’m not too sure what I will do with myself. Maybe I’ll plant a tree, do something fruitful that will outlast me to mark the occasion. Nothing like a tree to ground you and well I’m named after a tree. And this book, made of raw wood pulp, I will thank it and those that made it possible. Wait for that kindling of joy. A slow burn.
Akil Kumarasamy is a writer from New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia. Half Gods is her first book.
Author photo by Nina Subin.