“I am notorious for bestowing main character energy on cities. And Calcutta felt like the perfect city for him to appear in.” – Sonia Bahl (Author, Eighteen Inches Apart)

Team Kitaab is in conversation with author Sonia Bahl about her latest book, Eighteen Inches Apart (Fingerprint! Publishing, 2026) where she talks about the story behind the story.

Sonia Bahl writes about the kinds of encounters contemporary life trains people to dismiss: a conversation with a stranger on a delayed flight, a fleeting exchange at a café, a face glimpsed briefly in a crowd that lingers inexplicably in memory long after more important relationships fade. Across her fiction, these moments become emotionally catalytic because they quietly alter the texture of how her characters move through the world.

In her latest novel, Eighteen Inches Apart, Bahl returns to this terrain with greater philosophical depth and formal assurance, tracing the invisible threads that connect strangers across cities, grief, memory and longing. Moving between Calcutta and London, the novel explores what it means to be emotionally seen in an age of hyperconnectivity, and whether intimacy may sometimes reside most powerfully in transient human recognition rather than permanence.

In conversation with Kitaab, Bahl reflects on ephemerality, emotional restraint, urban loneliness, literature’s relationship with vulnerability, and the mysterious afterlives of chance encounters.

Team Kitaab: Eighteen Inches Apart seems deeply interested in the invisible emotional architecture that exists between strangers. What first drew you to the idea that brief encounters can alter the trajectory of a life in ways we only understand much later?

Sonia Bahl: Perhaps the foundation of that architecture is built on my having moved around a lot. Nine cities. Four continents. Familiarity was never something I took for granted. Ephemerality became my natural habitat. And I think that does something to you. It sharpens your awareness of moments, of the quality of a single conversation with someone you may never see again.

Real human connection, in all its forms, is a soul-shifting experience. It doesn’t require time or history. Sometimes a passing encounter leaves an imprint so indelible it outlasts geography, outlasts memory and evades your own understanding of why it mattered. You only arrive at the meaning much later. Sometimes years later. That gap, between the moment and its meaning, is where this book lives.
Sonia Bahl- Author , Eighteen Inches Apart (Fingerprint! Publishing, 2026)

Team Kitaab: The novel moves through grief very gently allowing silence, atmosphere, and gesture to carry emotional weight. Did you consciously resist dramatizing loss in more overt ways?

Sonia Bahl: I consciously resist dramatising most things—in life and on the page. I’m firmly in the less-is-more camp. Doesn’t restraint, when handled well, often land harder than declaration? I also feel an instinctive pull towards humour, even in melancholy. Especially in melancholy. The writers I return to again and again—Nora Ephron, David Nicholls, Nick Hornby, Dolly Alderton, Andrew Sean Greer—all have an extraordinary command of this balance: they navigate sadness without losing their self-awareness, their wit, or their lightness of touch. I love how in their hands, sadness is never theatrical. That’s the kind of balance I keep hoping to achieve.

Read the review of Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl by Team Kitaab

Team Kitaab: Leela is a photographer, someone trained to notice what others overlook. How much of the novel is concerned with the act of seeing emotionally?

Sonia Bahl: All of it, really. Starting with the title. Eighteen inches — the longest journey we ever take, from the head to the heart. The book pretty much turns seeing-is-believing on its head. It’s about believing first, until you begin to see. Leela understands this instinctively, even before she can articulate it. The words ‘don’t shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like’ are embedded in her. That’s also how she chooses to move through the world.

Team Kitaab: There is a haunting quality to the figure Leela glimpses outside the café in Calcutta: he feels at once real and mythic. Were you interested in exploring how cities themselves produce apparitions, memories, and emotional ghosts?

Sonia Bahl: I am notorious for bestowing main character energy on cities. And Calcutta felt like the perfect city for him to appear in. The man Leela glimpses and Calcutta are inextricably connected. Both majestic in bearing, both draped in a kind of magnificent dilapidation. The city has poetry and gravitas and pride, and like him, it often wears broken slippers. That contradiction is precisely what makes both of them haunting. Cities like Calcutta don’t just provide backdrop, they generate mythology. An apparition like him somehow feels possible there, perhaps even inevitable.

Team Kitaab: Your work often returns to fleeting intimacy and emotional afterlives. Do you think contemporary life has made people more connected, or simply more aware of their distance from one another?

Sonia Bahl: More fluent in the performance of connection, for sure. Which isn’t quite the same thing. Status updates, voice notes, location pins, read receipts – everything visible, measurable, endlessly comparable. And I never want to dismiss that entirely. It still feels something close to a miracle when my daughter says good morning from her bed ten thousand miles away. But convenience isn’t always connection.

If anything, hyperconnectivity has quietly eroded our ability to listen, look, and feel for that deeper moment of real human contact. That electric quality of being utterly lost in a moment and acutely alive to it at the same time. You can’t curate it. You can only feel it.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl on Kitaab

Team Kitaab: Neel’s journey is particularly moving because purpose arrives quietly for him, almost accidentally. What interests you about characters who discover meaning indirectly rather than through ambition or certainty?

Sonia Bahl: Honestly, I find both equally fascinating to write. In A Year of Wednesdays, one of my protagonists runs on high-octane ambition and an almost annoying sense of certainty and goes through an arduous unlearning. I loved writing him. Neel interested me for entirely different reasons. He’s a trust fund slacker, almost vacant of ambition, accidentally transformed. This is story of meaningful but unplanned arrivals and Neel is proof of that.

Team Kitaab: The title—Eighteen Inches Apart— itself suggests proximity and distance existing simultaneously. What does that space between people represent to you emotionally or philosophically?

Sonia Bahl: Possibility. Hope. That space between people—between what we know and what we feel, between where we are and where we’re meant to be—is not empty. It’s full of everything that hasn’t happened yet.

Mary Oliver says it better than I ever could, and she says it inside the novel too:

“Only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.”

Team Kitaab: The novel is full of moments that feel coincidental and yet strangely inevitable. Do you believe fiction has a responsibility to impose meaning on chance encounters, or to preserve their mystery?

Sonia Bahl: Full disclosure: I’m a moments junkie. Addicted to mysterious, synchronous occurrences. So, I may be biased. What I set out to do here was layer the novel with easter eggs. Subtle threads connecting Neel and Leela’s lives that the reader might catch before the characters do. A detail in Leela’s world that quietly echoes something in Neel’s. A moment that rhymes across continents without either of them hearing it. They are always this close. Never quite close enough.

As for whether fiction has a responsibility to impose meaning or preserve mystery, I feel I lack the adequate authorly heft to answer that yet. I know what I lean into. But I also know I have a long way to go in the world of fiction. Ask me again after my fiftieth novel.

Team Kitaab: Your writing has an unusual tenderness toward flawed, uncertain people. What do you think literature can reveal about vulnerability that other art forms sometimes cannot?

Sonia Bahl: Could it have something to do with having read and loved The Great Gatsby as a teenager? Jay Gatsby was so vividly flawed: obsessive, ostentatious, morally ambiguous. He did it all for the unattainable love of his life. Could there be a more vulnerable, tragic, and beloved hero?

As Anne Lamott said: “Tell me a story, make me care.” Who cares for perfect people? Literature reveals vulnerability through interiority—the private, unspoken life of a person. Cinema can portray it beautifully through gesture, silence, performance. But literature has the luxury of language. It allows us not just to witness vulnerability, but to inhabit it. To linger inside contradiction, longing, shame, self-deception.

We experience emotion from within rather than interpreting it from the outside. How it feels while it is being lived.
Sonia Bahl- Author , Eighteen Inches Apart (Fingerprint! Publishing, 2026)

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