"Writing the scenes that required Shashi to shed her grandmotherly instincts and become a woman with desires didn’t come naturally."- Sudha Subramanian

Team Kitaab is in conversation with author Sudha Subramanian where we discuss her debut novel The Invisible Lines (Vishwakarma Publications, 2026)

Sudha Subramanian lives in Dubai with her husband. She was a columnist in Gulf News for over fifteen years. Her articles and opinion pieces have been published widely in many newspapers and magazines while her short stories have appeared in many Indian and international literary magazines.

Her flash fiction was nominated for inclusion in the Best of the Net Anthology for three years in a row. Sudha is an alumna of Write Beyond Borders, a prestigious mentoring project for emerging writers of South Asia. She is an amateur birder and a tree hugger.

About the Book

Shashi was married once, but an unexpected encounter with a sexagenarian paediatrician, reignites all her suppressed desires. If the invisible lines are leading her on a path to the ubiquitous “happily ever after”, Shashi has to stand up to the challenge, face the dark secret. She has to seize the moment, write her destiny because she will soon turn sixty and she cannot waste any more time.

Team Kitaab: Shashi is a deeply layered protagonist navigating desire, memory, fear, and reinvention at nearly sixty. What first inspired her character?

Sudha Subramanian (SS): I wish I had a great story to tell. Like everything else, Shashi’s character started from an idea focused on the unusual, older protagonists, and forbidden topics.

Almost 25 years ago, my aunt lost her husband. She was in her 40s. I kept thinking, would it be so bad if she found a partner? As I tossed the idea over, I came up with a short story called New Beginnings. When I wrote that, I discovered – there could be judgements, reactions, emotional outbursts from children, grandchildren, neighbours in the story. And the story stayed untouched on my hard drive.

In 2021, after dropping my son off at university, I was experiencing acute empty nest syndrome. All I wanted was to keep myself busy with, and I remembered this half-baked story. And on the 1st of November 2021, on the first day of NaNoWriMo, I wrote the first sentence – a prayer, asking the Universe to grant me enough headspace to write. And that’s the novel was conceived.

Team Kitaab: The emotional world of the novel feels intimate and restrained rather than overtly dramatic. Was that tonal balance something you consciously worked towards while writing?

SS: The novel wasn’t written overnight. From the first draft in 2021, it has gone through at least fifteen to twenty iterations. Balancing the emotions was paramount for a character like Shashi who is quiet and private about her life. For a story set in a small town, with all the trauma that Shashi bears through her life, it was important to tie her to a place.

Another reason for the restraint is her loneliness, and her demeanour demanded that I keep the emotion as intimate as possible.

Team Kitaab: An unexpected relationship becomes the catalyst for Shashi’s transformation. How did you approach building emotional chemistry between two older characters in a believable way?

SS: My first approach was to keep it as generic as possible. While the shade of love changes with age and time, the primary tone of the emotion remains the same – that of a friend, a partner.

As someone who has friends in that age bracket and as a person who is shy of a few years of that age, blending emotional chemistry between two characters came quite naturally.

Team Kitaab: The novel deals with suppressed desires and unresolved emotional wounds. Did writing Shashi require you to unlearn common stereotypes around ageing and femininity?

SS: Certainly, writing the scenes that required Shashi to shed her grandmotherly instincts and become a woman with desires didn’t come naturally. It required that I suppress my natural urge to lend her with ‘maternal’ instincts and instead dig into the mental makeup of a middle-aged woman and make Shashi pick make up over puja. It was challenging, but it had to be done to make the character believable.

Team Kitaab: How long did it take you to write The Invisible Lines, and did the story change significantly from your earliest draft?

SS: The manuscript took a little over five years to finish. While the story has remained mostly intact, the characters gained layers, emotions and depth over these years.

Team Kitaab: Were there particular scenes or conversations in the novel that were especially difficult to write?

SS: A couple of scenes were hard, especially the ones where Shashi deals with her trauma. Most rigid, regressive rituals made me angry, but the most difficult part of the book was this one particular scene with Shashi and her son. How does a son and his mother talk about Shashi’s future? There wasn’t any reference point, and I had to battle self-doubt.

Team Kitaab: Your writing seems to rely heavily on emotional observation and interiority. Which writers or literary traditions have influenced your style the most?

SS: I read a lot of regional literature, the ones translated and the ones in local languages. The ideas and metaphors, the narrative style these writers adopt, are vastly different, which helped my craft immensely.

I also write a lot of flash and read many flash writers who have also dipped their fingers in longer forms. These styles have influenced my writing in no small way. That’s how this novel came into being.

Team Kitaab: What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing Shashi’s story?

SS: A sense of accomplishment. I want my readers to champion Shashi and rally for her to fulfil her dreams. Some of my readers have written to me saying they were angry, sad, and finally happy when they turned the last page, and that’s when my job as a storyteller is done. It shows how my readers empathise with the character. The biggest compliment I have received is a non-reader turning into a reader. This is my dream.

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