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Pia Ghosh-Roy

@piaghoshroy

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Writer. Walker. Wildling.
Calcutta | Cambridge
Novel: AND I AM THE ARROW, @theindigopress

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The family epic is having a moment. From Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs to Nelio Biedermann’s breakthrough novel Lázar, to Min Jin Lee’s forthcoming American Hagwon, writers are exploring secrets, power, and inheritance.

However, Pia Ghosh-Roy’s And I Am the Arrow takes us somewhere darker, asking: how well can we ever know the people we call family?

Meet Mishu, a 20-something who has returned to India to be with her dying grandmother, Niyoti. At Chatterjee Mansion, the family’s sprawling 1940s Art Deco house in the heart of Calcutta, three generations of women begin to reveal themselves – grieving Mishu, her quiet mother Ira, and Niyoti, the formidable matriarch who lords over these women, even from her coma.

And then there’s the ghost. A man, cut in two on a railway track, who has his own story to tell.

Who was he? What did he mean to these women? And who are Niyoti, Ira, and Mishu once the roles of daughter, mother, and grandmother fall away?

In my conversation with Pia Ghosh-Roy, we talk about maternal relationships, how Sylvia Plath inspired her, and why female power is the ultimate muse.

Read the full interview at the link in bio.

Words by @lexicovalsen by @piaghoshroy

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Families tell stories about themselves. They also leave things out. Pia Ghosh-Roy’s debut novel, And I Am the Arrow, follows Mishu back to Chatterjee Mansion in Calcutta, where her grandmother Niyoti lies in a coma. Coming home means looking again at the people she grew up with, and discovering how much of their lives she has never known.

Around Mishu are her mother Ira and Bani, whose years in the household have made her essential without erasing the distinctions of class. Each woman gradually claims space in the story. Ghosh-Roy talks about how her characters surprised her as she wrote, particularly Ira, who grew beyond the quiet, accommodating woman she had first imagined.

The novel careens through Calcutta, London and New York, with a ghost called Opor/Neech helping readers travel through its shifting times. Writing him gave Ghosh-Roy room to play with language and bring the conversational pleasure of adda onto the page. Chatterjee Mansion remains the place the story returns to, holding its arguments and the memories its inhabitants carry differently.

In conversation with Shireen Quadri, Ghosh-Roy considers the “unspokens” families pass down and how experiences that predate us can shape our own lives. She also asks how much we can ever know about someone, however close we are to them.

Read the full interview at thepunchmagazine.com.

#PiaGhoshRoy #AndIAmTheArrow #IndianLiterature #ThePunchMagazine by @piaghoshroy

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5 days ago

I keep the best bits of my life far off this grid, but my favourite person in the whole wide world turned eighteen last week. Many of you who’d travelled with me through my blog know her as Chotto-Ma, my little ma, and she’s still that to me. I hear her playing the piano upstairs as I write this, as I struggle to write this...because I find that I don’t have the words. Her soul shines through the music she composes, the art she makes, the poetry she writes, so I’m sharing a little bit of that instead. The first is a piece of music she composed and played on the piano for a video I’d taken on my phone of the sun on our wall – she recorded and gifted it to me one morning: it’s called Dappled. The second, a self-portrait she painted when she was fifteen, about to turn sixteen, in movement, in transit, in between spaces. Both capturing light. And love. And the very heart of her. Raya, our chotto-ma ❤️

Music: ‘Dappled’ by Raya Ghosh-Roy by @piaghoshroy

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What a wonderful conversation with @lexicovalsen last evening at Heffers. We spoke about leaving - leaving a home, an identity, a body. How ‘leaving’ for me is simultaneously also ‘arriving’ because you leave a place only to arrive elsewhere. So much about this novel has been a celebration of the circular. The book too has left my side only to arrive elsewhere - the homes of readers, who now bring the characters back to me in new and visceral ways, especially during events like these when I get to hear from them. Such a gift, this loop: of a story leaving you and then returning even more alive ❤️ by @piaghoshroy

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17 days ago

Some bookshop love! ❤️ The book facing the world at the ever-magnificent Daunt Marylebone ✨ And postered up at Heffers Cambridge, where I’ll be talking about And I Am The Arrow with @lexicovalsen on Tuesday, the 29th. If you can make it, come! 😘 It’s free to attend, but you need to book your space - link in bio. by @piaghoshroy

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23 days ago

Pia Ghosh-Roy’s AND I AM THE ARROW is an exploration of death and grief, of memory and reality, and of the ways we love and bruise each other.

Available now in bookstores and online. by @piaghoshroy

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25 days ago

As of today, the book has been out in the UK for exactly a month (a little less in India). My daughter baked me this glorious cake to celebrate its little life and the big love it has received in such a short time. I don’t know how she managed to orchestrate and execute this pandan and strawberry gorgeousness without me catching a single glimpse of the operation – I was only instructed not to open the fridge. She also made these pastel cards with quotes from the many beautiful reader-responses that have lifted and carried this book out into its first month. My heart (and mouth) is stuffed sweet this Sunday 🩷 by @piaghoshroy

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My Ma and her friends went book shopping. She insisted she had to go and buy her own copy, and that it had to be from the Oxford Bookstore on Park Street. Anyone who grew up in Calcutta in the 80s and 90s will know that that was the coolest place to be if you wanted to spend an hour with a book and a cup of tea. So it’s unbelievably special to me to have Ma standing there, so elegant and proud, holding my book. With her friends, who’re also very dear to me, aunties around whom I’ve grown up.

Ma’s a reader, a voracious reader. While Baba was an avid reader of History, Ma read fiction. If she wasn’t busy, she was behind a book. Her childhood bedroom, in my grandparents’ house in Assam, was like a library with a bed in the middle: floor-to-ceiling shelves of everything from Dickens to the Durrells, to leather-bound encyclopedias with everything you wanted to know about anything (these my brother and I spent hours reading as children). Ma studied English Literature, taught English Literature, and is gifted with the most beautiful penmanship.

Both my parents were people who paused at the craft of a good sentence. One of my most recurring memories is of Baba reading aloud to us sentences of beauty, often a single sentence multiple times, while admiring its particular confabulation. Today, Ma sent me a photo of my novel propped up below a photo of Baba that I’d taken in his last year, laughing, joyous: I think he sees a sentence or two in there that he likes.

Next to the book are photos of my maternal grandparents and my great-aunt (from whose bookcase I borrowed my first Georgette Heyers at fourteen), standing guard over its journey like loving sentinels.

10 years ago, I remember telling Ma that I’d written the first chapter of a novel. She wanted to hear it, and I read it aloud to her over the phone; that chapter hasn’t changed a word, even through years of edits. She’d loved it then – and now here she is with the whole story.

Thanks to my lovely editor at Picador India — Pujitha Krishnan, @stargazerpuj — the story has made its way back home. by @piaghoshroy

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2 months ago

What. An. Evening! ✨❤️
This book could not have been launched out into the world better. With dear friends and so many fabulously engaged readers, and a session moderated by @melissafuwriter with so much thought and care and just the best questions. Massive thanks to Leo and Alison at @verandabookshop for being the warmest hosts and championing this book with such passion, to my publisher and editor, Susie Nicklin @theindigopress for making all of this possible, and my agent @monicamacswan for being there to celebrate this story, and to everyone who came because they wanted to read this book and/or talk about it. I had Deba and Raya by my side – my loves and loudest cheerleaders. I had my Ma and my brother cheering me on from afar. My Baba right by me in spirit as he always is. I met so many wonderful people, signed many, many copies. Signed a bench too. Wore a sari after ages. Came back home with more flowers than I could carry. And got this show on the road in the best way possible! 💃🏽❤️

#andiamthearrow taken in Marylebone by @piaghoshroy

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This is a drawing of my childhood window in Calcutta. I haven’t done it justice — it is louder in its greens, lusher in story, more dense with magic and imaginings. Sitting on that window seat on my last visit, I wrote about death, poetry and parrots. About the monsoons in Calcutta. And the beginnings of AND I AM THE ARROW. It’s on Scroll now 🌿 Link in bio. by @piaghoshroy

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During the years spent writing the novel, there were several times when I needed to walk away from the manuscript and wait for the characters to tell me who they wanted to be, trust me with more of their story. During those times I’d often draw bits of the novel. It was a way of staying with the story when there were no words to put on the page. This photo is of one of these drawings — of the ghost called Opor/Neech, who is full of eyes, a clash of blood red and hot pink.

I love that the Indian cover of AND I AM THE ARROW by Picador, designed by @devanganadash, speaks in that language and in those two colours. I’ve been waiting to share it with you for a while! Isn’t it a stunner? 🔥 👁️ by @piaghoshroy

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August in New York, 2022, in front of the orange and red of a Rothko I’d written about in AND I AM THE ARROW.

August in Kolkata, 2025, in front of a house that made me stop mid-walk and think, Oh, that could be Chatterjee Mansion! because it was like the house I’d made up when I started the novel in 2015.

And now, August in London, 2026, launching this long journey of a book, a story that took me a decade to shape and hold and let go off.

Please come! Help me send AND I AM THE ARROW out into the wild on August 20 @verandabookshop, where I’ll be in conversation with @melissafuwriter — I’d love for you to be there! ❤️ (Tickets linked in bio) by @piaghoshroy

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