As crushing as it is beautiful, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows two Indian girls through the most hopeless of circumstances, but their enduring friendship burns brightly—endlessly—through it all. Girls Burn Brighter is a light that will not go out. Here, Rao shares a look behind her book.

In November of 1999, two young Indian girls were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment building in Berkeley, California. One of the girls, who was 13 years old, died from the poisoning; the other survived. The building was owned by Lakireddy Bali Reddy. And as it turned out, so were the girls. Over the course of the investigation into the girl’s death, it was found that Reddy had trafficked the two girls, along with an alleged 99 other women and girls, into the United States over the course of a 13-year period. The girl who died, Sitha V., had served as a sexual and domestic slave to Reddy. These findings eventually led to the conviction of Reddy, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landlords in Berkeley, to eight years in prison.

Many years later, I found myself working at a South Asian domestic violence agency in nearby San Jose, whereupon I came into contact with one of the victims. She never told me her story, as all documentation related to the case was sealed, but meeting her—witnessing her warmth, her laughter—made me think more deeply about the case.

In this thinking, the first question that came to me was: How much did Reddy pay for Sitha?

The second question was: How much was she worth?

The answer to the first question was simple. I didn’t know it, but it was most certainly simple. At some point, in a small village in South India, Reddy had approached the destitute parents of a young girl. He had handed them money: a set amount of money, decided upon, bargained, negotiated by the powerless parents of a powerless girl. The exact amount he paid for her may be unknown, but it is not a mystery, it is currency: Somebody paid it, somebody accepted it, and a girl was bought.

It happens every day.

The second question though. The second question is what haunted me: How much is a girl worth?

It is this question that I set out to explore in Girls Burn Brighter. In some ways, the writing of the novel, the exploration of what a girl is worth is as straightforward as taking a knife to a frog on a dissecting table. There is a body. You can cut up the body, carve away the limbs; you can make a slit, take out the organs, put them back in. That is a body. It is, for instance, generally worth less without all the limbs intact, without all the organs in place. It is worth less if there’s a slit. Or if there’s a scar. Or if it is too fat. Too thin. Too short. Too tall. Or if the skin is too dark. It is worth less if the frog isn’t the exact shade of green that is preferred by the men of the country it is born into, and the culture and proclivities and notions of beauty that dictate its mores. The frog is worth less if it questions a single one of these mores.

In other ways though, writing the novel was nothing like looking at a frog on a dissecting table. It was instead like looking at a frog in a stream. The same frog, let’s say, but now sunning itself on a rock. The light glinting off the silk of its skin. Its eyes deepened by the memory of that first step onto land, feeling in that step the density of the waiting shore, its unending promise. But this frog on the rock is a girl frog, and so that promise is sometimes meager and offers hardly anything. It is sometimes false and feeds her with lies. It sometimes says to her, you are on a rock, dreaming, but you might as well be on a dissecting table, dead.

And so, then came the true question. What am I worth? What are you worth? Your body, your memories, the depth of your eyes, the fall of your foot, what you give to the world, what you take. What do they add up to?

It’s easy to blurt out a number: a million trillion dollars! A number that has no meaning. A number that is not a true reflection of anything but our fragile egos. A number that we hope and want to believe is maybe not even a number. But whatever it is, whether it is coins of gold or coins of light, we know, in the depth of our hearts, that our number is most certainly larger than Sitha V.’s number.

Is it cruel to admit this? Or is it cruel to not admit this?

And really, why admit anything at all? Why talk about the body of a girl? Now long dead. And why ask what she was worth? Why ask ourselves what we are worth? For surely, you and I will never be for sale. We will never be so poor as to be forced to sell our daughters. We will not lay awake, wondering if there is another way, aching to find it. We will not drop to our knees and clasp her in our arms, wordless, silenced by poverty, by inequity, by the ruthlessness of birth and chance. We will not (no, never) live in a place so horrible and unenlightened and remote as Berkeley, California. We will not let it happen in our midst, nor under our noses.

So why worry about a thing that is not our concern? That is not relevant to us. That is not worth our time.

I was talking once to a friend about overpopulation. I was having a pragmatic conversation about food distribution, water scarcity, land resources. But he was having none of it. He looked right at me, his eyes afire, and he said, “Saying there are too many people in the world is like saying there are too many stars in the sky.”

Too many stars in the sky. How romantic.

See. See how one of them is felled. A 13-year-old girl—born into poverty in India, sold by her poor parents to a rich man, trafficked to the United States, fettered into forced labor and raped repeatedly, before dying alone on a dirty floor. She was born and she was bought and then she died.

And like all stars, she hung for a time in the sky. She burned.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Girls Burn Brighter.

Photo credit Carlos Avila Gonzalez

Like a 17-year cicada, my novel, Bearskin, spent a long time underground before emerging. I was in my early 30s and just starting at a graduate writing program when I heard about people finding mutilated bear carcasses in the Virginia mountains where I grew up. Poachers were killing black bears out of season and cutting off their paws and gallbladders for sale on the black market. The big money was in exporting the bear parts to East and Southeast Asia, where the native bear species had been hunted to rarity. Back then, the profit margins approached those in the narcotics trade, and organized crime outfits were moving into the bear parts market. All of this struck me as a compelling backdrop for a story, and I decided I would write about a guy who has to confront bear poachers on his property.

Most of the original story depended only on my own memory of the forest where I’d spent a lot of my childhood, but there was still a bit of interesting legwork to be done. I interviewed an undercover game warden who was infiltrating a bear poaching ring. I researched the worldwide black market in wildlife (at the time, it was just behind trafficking of drugs and weapons in terms of total annual dollar value). I learned bear paws are a delicacy in certain cultures, a prized and prestigious dish—the front paws are supposedly more tender than the back paws, but all four get eaten. And bear bile, used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine, contains ursodeoxycholic acid, which helps bears avoid losing muscle when they’re dormant during the winter. The acid has real therapeutic effects in humans—so much so that it was synthesized from cow bile in the 1950s, and you can buy FDA-approved, bear-free medicine with brand names like Actigall, Ursodiol and Urso Forte (“strong bear”).

Read our review of Bearskin.

I finished Bearskin 1.0 while I was in the writing program, but it wasn’t what I’d hoped, and after another year or so of revisions I set it aside. Most of a decade passed while I worked on another novel, stories, essays. My wife and I moved west; I helped start a small business. When a good friend who’d read the first Bearskin suggested I go back to the book and try again, I spent a few weeks stripping it to the essentials, inventing new characters and rewriting the first few chapters. This exercise led to a published novella, agent inquiries and . . . several more years of work extending the novella into a novel.

Writing the second version of Bearskin involved far more research than the first (note: as a cicada nymph nears maturity, it burrows deeper into the soil, searching for larger tree roots to feed on). My new main character was a completely different person, much more interesting and dangerous than the original protagonist. He has a violent history in the cross-border drug trade in southern Arizona, so I spent a lot of time looking into the Mexican cartels and the ways drugs are smuggled north—and how cash and other easy-to-carry valuables are smuggled south. I had an excuse to visit Tucson and explore the Arizona-Mexico border. I learned about local law enforcement, gunfighting and how to disappear and start a new life with a new identity. I had nearly finished the book when it occurred to me that I should update my research on bear poaching.

What I found out was complicated, and it required some tweaks to my plot. While bears in Asia are still under tremendous pressure from poachers, bear poaching for gallbladders and paws has fallen off in the U.S., and the American black bear population in most areas has increased dramatically. The law enforcement efforts I’d witnessed in the late ’90s presumably had an effect, and responsible bear hunters have pushed for more sophisticated management of the species by state agencies. Wildlife and animal rights groups reported some success, at least in the U.S., with convincing traditional medicine practitioners to substitute herbal ingredients for bear bile. And a more troubling development was the growth of “bear farms” in parts of Asia, horribly inhumane institutions that have become a significant source of bear bile in Asian markets.

Given those findings, I had to make some quick revisions to plausibly account for a resurgence of bear poaching in the Virginia mountains circa 2011. And those plot changes in turn opened up an entirely new criminal dimension for my book, and another series of interesting rabbit holes for me to dive into. But the process was dragging on by then, and I finally managed to quit the research and finish the book so it could crawl up out of the earth like one of those cicadas, molt and start making noise.

Photo credit Nancy Assaf McLaughlin

I first started writing Severance around the time I realized I was going to lose my job, although I did not know that I was working on a novel. The company I worked for was downsizing and consolidating their West Coast and Midwest offices. As a result, many employees in the Midwest office would be let go, some who had been there their entire careers, spanning several decades.

Most colleagues felt like they had been screwed over by management. As we came to the office day in and day out, the low morale in the work environment was palpable.

I needed to figure out what I was going to do, but instead of applying to other jobs and taking interviews, all it seemed that I could do was write stories. In those final weeks of my job, I wrote more fiction than I had in years. Since some of our tasks were drying up, I would write those stories at the office. Taking a break during lunch hour, I would walk around through downtown, drinking iced coffee and eating pastries. Buoyed by sugar and caffeine, plot ideas and character details would come to me. All around me, people went about their days, using their lunch breaks to window shop, to take dentist appointments, to go to the gym.

One of the pieces I worked on was an apocalyptic short story. Writing anything apocalyptic just seemed fun—the destructive glee of toppling office buildings, of disrupting everyone’s routines, of crushing clamshell containers of sad desk salads. My target was all of these things and none of these things. My target was the larger system, the capitalist power structures that enabled all of this. The authorial power that a writer gets to wield is irresistible, especially to someone (like me) who does not have a lot of power.

Originally, the story was written in the first-person plural—one collective voice that embodied all of these disgruntled employees. But one voice kept breaking out from the rest of the pack, and that was the voice of Candace Chen, who eventually became the protagonist of Severance. I knew her job right away. She worked in New York, as a production coordinator for the manufacturing of Bibles, which was all taking place in China and other Asian countries. It became clear that the apocalyptic story was really a meditation on work, of its routines and its conciliatory satisfactions in the age of globalism.

When I first interviewed at the company, a VP had perceptively mentioned to me, “I think you’re qualified for this position, but you’re going to get bored in two years.” He said he would recommend me for the job, but that I might reconsider my options after two years. Around the time of the corporate downsizing, I had been working at the same job going on three years. I wondered, what kept me working there? This is a question that many of my friends also asked of themselves, about why they still stuck at their jobs. I think writing the novel was also a way of trying to answer that question.

“The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.”

As I wrote, I found inspiration by reading the works of Kafka, everything from his short stories to his journals, in which he complained about how a job disrupted his writing. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, about an English butler, always seemed like the ultimate office novel to me. The TV shows I watched were at heart narratives about work: “The Sopranos,” “The X-Files” and “Mad Men.” I’ve always maintained that I learned how to plot by watching eight seasons of “Mad Men,” the way that the storylines were organized more by thematic layering than a string of causal events. I didn’t write the novel in any particular order, simply jumping to whichever scene felt the most urgent at the time, and organizing the novel around those guideposts.

As for my job, the closer the end date neared, the emptier the office became. Some employees found new positions at other companies and left, while others made the move to another branch office. All the rules flew out the window. Going to work was a surreal experience. I have this memory, set during those final days, of coming into the office at nine in the morning and being handed a plastic flute of champagne and a donut. There was no one watching us. The feeling was despair, but also one of giddiness. The feeling was one of liberation, and maybe that feeling comes during apocalyptic, chaotic times.

After my last day at the company, I took my severance and got on unemployment. I called it my arts fellowship. I continued working on the novel. However, in order to secure more funding, I ended up applying to MFA programs and was accepted by Cornell University. I moved to the remote town of Ithaca, New York, and spent the next four years steadily working on Severance. During the summers, I established a writing routine that was very similar to my office routine: I would begin writing at nine in the morning, take a long lunch break and then resume writing until six in the evening. It serves me still.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.