Devi Yesodharan interview: ‘Migration is a journey of hope, but it hyphenates identity’

Nita’s role as a live-in English tutor for a wealthy family in Dubai confines her in ways she never anticipated, while her invented story of Darius mirrors her own alienation. As their narratives bleed into each other, the novel unspools questions of power, survival, and the fragile ways we seek belonging. In this interview to The Federal, Yesodharan, who has worked as a speechwriter for Narayana Murthy, contributed to Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani’s first book, and now co-runs Trendlyne, a financial investing platform, discusses how even those rooted in one place struggle with being fully understood, making the ‘outsider’ experience a universal condition.

She says that the novel’s dual timeline — Nita in Dubai and Darius in ancient India — happened organically, which makes migration a timeless phenomenon. The paradox of migrants being both essential and invisible informs Nita’s experience, echoing real-life inequities faced by South Asian workers. The relationship between Nita and her employer, Rouhi, disrupts social hierarchies but ultimately succumbs to external pressures, while Haroun, Rouhi’s absent husband, looms as a symbol of power and male privilege. The novel’s unresolved ending reflects the nature of migration — an ongoing search for home rather than a final destination. Excerpts from the interview:

The Outsiders is a novel about displacement, estrangement, and the ache of belonging. But there is also an irony in that word — because even as they navigate foreign terrains, your characters carve out connections, moments of deep intimacy. Do you think true belonging is ever possible, or are we all, in some way, perpetual outsiders to the places we inhabit and the people we love?

I have met people who grew up and lived their whole lives in the same neighbourhood, and seem well-suited to where they are. So ‘belonging’ is probably easier for some people, thanks to a mix of circumstances, identity, gender and privilege. But even then we struggle, at least a little, to understand and be understood. Who among us has not laid awake, fearing that we came across badly to someone else, or been misunderstood? Even our lovers misread us often, so what hope do we have with the rest of the world? At some level, we all stand apart, which is probably why we root for the outsider in popular culture. We want Pushpa Raj, Harry Callahan, Vijay Khanna to come out on top.

Nita and Darius are strangers in mirrored ways, their stories nested like Matryoshka dolls. What was it about this dual narrative structure — the echo chamber between past and present — that felt right for the novel? Did it emerge organically, or was it a deliberate way to explore migration as a timeless condition?

Migration as a constant in human history is something I have always been interested in — the heroine in my first book, Empire, is a Greek woman in the Chola empire. People have always picked up stakes, travelled and made their home elsewhere, reshaping the places they arrived at.

But here, I honestly didn’t plan it. I admire writers who plan out the beginning, middle and end of their books, and who have the beats of the story down. As much as it pains me to admit this, I wrote this by the seat of my pants. I initially intended to write only about the life of a Dubai migrant, and the relationship between Nita and Rouhi. And then Nita seemed to decide all by herself that she wanted to tell Rouhi Darius’ story, and the book became much more complicated.

Darius has a bit of both Nita and Rouhi in him. He is Egyptian, like Rouhi, but a vessel for Nita’s desires. He helps Rouhi to see Nita more clearly, in a way that she can’t otherwise. He is essential to bringing them closer together.

Storytelling itself is a lifeline for Nita. She tells the tale of Darius for Rouhi, just as Scheherazade spun her thousand and one nights. But here, the stakes are subtler, more insidious — this isn’t a matter of life and death, yet it is. What does storytelling mean to Nita? And what does it mean to you? Does the act of telling a story, even in fiction, change the storyteller?

Nita is talking about her desires and her worries in the only way she can, through Darius, letting Rouhi see her insecurities through him. For her, storytelling provides a release for all the things she must keep quiet about, because Rouhi is her employer.

I often hear writers say that their stories aren’t biographical. That’s probably true, but your experiences are still a factor, it is the raw material you transmute into stories. I write stories partly as an escape, but writing them makes me face things from my life that I would rather not. That is true of Nita as well. Telling Darius’ story forces her to confront the truths of the relationship.

Nita and Rouhi’s relationship is a rebellion against the hierarchies that shape their world. Their bond, charged with friendship, desire, and the possibility of betrayal, is one of the novel’s most complex elements. Did you always intend for their dynamic to challenge the social order so directly? And what, to you, does their relationship ultimately represent?

I have come across many stories in books and films that deal with inter-class relationships. The maid-employer romance is a common trope, for instance. But when it is a man and a woman the power equation is different, and it is usually the man in the more powerful role.

A woman-woman romance that is employer-employee, migrant-resident, and goes against gender norms: this is something whose power dynamic I wanted to explore. When I started writing it, I was fairly sure that such a relationship would be hard to sustain, given all the potential for conflict within it. Eventually though, the relationship dies from the pressures outside it, because of what their world allows them to have.

Haroun, Rouhi’s husband, is both a presence and an absence in the novel — his authority lingers even when he is away at sea. Was it important to you to frame this story within a largely female space? And do you think women — whether Nita or Rouhi — are ultimately more adept at negotiating the liminal spaces of exile and belonging?

It’s a good observation. I wanted Haroun to be a shadowy presence over the story. A monster out of sight, waiting to pounce. The household is all women, but he has his allies, his spies. Just because someone is a woman doesn’t mean that she is on your side.

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I do think women are usually more adept at navigating outsider identities, because of how they have to constantly negotiate social rules and expectations. Even within their own families, they don’t necessarily fully belong: a comment made out of turn, a wrong clothing choice, even (when I came back to Kerala as a young woman, I discovered that some of my very ordinary outfits were considered risqué), can become an issue. A woman becomes a daughter-in-law, and is again an outsider. Women understand these unspoken rules better.

Darius and Nita are both travellers, seekers, and risk-takers. They cross oceans, but what they find is not always what they expect. Do you see their journeys as fundamentally hopeful, or is there an inevitability to their longing — to the way migration, by its very nature, resists resolution? Is home something they can ever return to, or is it always just ahead, just out of reach?

This is something I have grappled with a lot. Migration is, by definition, a journey of hope: you are reaching out for something better. But you are also leaving something behind. Your identity becomes hyphenated. I think it’s all right for this struggle to never resolve. We humans have always been migrants. My state, Kerala, has across its history, seen settlers from Syria, Oman, Greece, and many parts of Africa. I now live in Bangalore, and as a Keralite in the city, there are many spaces that I will never fully belong in. But you carve out a space for yourself that you try to fit into. The number of people in it may be small or large, but it is still home.

Your prose is shot through with sensory detail — the shimmer of gold in a souk, the aroma of kyphi incense, the oppressive heat pressing down on Nita like a weight of silence. How do you approach world-building in a novel that spans both the intimate interiors of a home and the vastness of historical migration? How much research, and how much instinct, goes into making these landscapes breathe?

I initially thought that a visit to Dubai would help me remember the city of my childhood. I hadn’t been there for over a decade. But when I finally visited, I couldn’t recognize it. The city had moved on without me, and had become the glitzy metropolis that was in the process of being constructed when I was growing up there. So I had to build the 1990s’ neighbourhoods from memory, from talking to my mother and friends who’d been there with me.

I did a lot of research to bring Dubai and Muziris to life in the novel, including digging through historical texts covering the pepper trade between the Roman empire and the Kerala port, and anything that I could get my hands on that were written during that specific time period — travelogues, administrative debates about taxes, and so on.

The Arabic word ‘gharib’ haunts Nita — meaning both stranger and intruder. There’s a double edge to migration, where one is both necessary and unwanted, vital to the economy yet invisible in the social order. How does Nita negotiate this paradox? And in writing about the immigrant experience, were there real-life stories or encounters that informed the fractures and negotiations of identity in your characters?

Working class migrants are invisible-visible. They disappear into anonymous jobs in factories, construction sites and homes. But they are also the “threat” that supposedly takes government benefits, steals jobs, commits crimes, and so on. This dual identity limits their freedoms, makes them cautious. Nita navigates it like many migrants do, by attempting to stay close to the walls, under the radar.

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When I grew up there, I noticed how migrants like us gravitated to specific neighbourhoods and shopping markets, staying more or less ‘out of the way’ of the locals. “I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me,” was a common saying. My mother worked in Emirates Bank, a government-owned bank — she was a valued employee, but her promotions were limited, since Indians would hit a ceiling in terms of their career progression, unlike the British and European expats. So even qualified migrants experienced racism — and of course, for working-class South Asians, the environment was a lot worse.

Your novel leaves us in a space of ambiguity — there is no neat closure, no finality to Nita or Darius’ stories. It’s an audacious choice that forces the reader to sit with uncertainty. Do you believe that unresolved endings are more true to life? And did you ever feel tempted, at any point, to tie things up more neatly?

In an earlier draft of the book, Darius met a watery death, but it didn’t feel plausible to me. I have never been one for neat endings. They don’t feel real. I always feel that the characters are capable of many different choices. So I wanted the reader to imagine potential paths for Nita and Darius — what they think the characters will do, based on their own life experiences. I didn’t want to force my own ideas. I believe it can sometimes be more satisfying for the reader to fill in the blanks.

If you could sit across from Nita — if she could step out of the pages of your novel and speak to you — what do you think she would say? Would she ask you why you wrote her story the way you did? Would she be grateful? Angry? Would she tell you what happened to her after the last page?

I don’t know if she would be grateful, but I don’t expect her to be angry. Her character has a particular set of strengths and flaws. She is empathetic, open-minded, and takes an astonishing amount of risk. But she does not advocate for herself.

This decides her fate, the events have an inevitability to them. When she was standing outside Rouhi’s door, she could have chosen to walk away. But she doesn’t, and falls into a dangerous relationship. She’s also bad at reading the writing on the wall, or at forcing the relationship to any kind of favourable conclusion. She lights a fuse, and then sits back and watches as the spark inches closer to the bomb.

What would she say? She would probably tell me that the relationship was much too painful, too one-sided for her to contact Rouhi again. She will say that she never wants to fall in love again. But about that, she will be lying to herself and to me — she will recover, and metaphorically dust herself off. Love will happen sooner than she thinks.