I read an article this morning about how almost every major Indian writer lives abroad. Rushdie in New York. Ghosh in Brooklyn. Lahiri in Rome. The piece made the familiar argument, that distance has shaped which India the world gets to read, that diaspora writers tend to write from memory rather than immersion, that R.K. Narayan never explained Malgudi and that kind of confidence is rare now.

One line stopped me.

Expatriate Indian fiction tends to explain India. Festivals are glossed. Hindi words are italicised and translated. Social customs are contextualised for an audience that does not already know them.

I live in Exton, Pennsylvania. I have lived here longer than I lived in India. By the article’s geography, I belong in the category of writers who explain. The diaspora voice. The one that italicises kaapi and glosses puthandu and adds a parenthetical after idli.

I don’t do that. None of us who write this way do.

My books are set in Malvern and Chennai and Bengaluru and Coimbatore. They move between kitchens where filter coffee is made without explanation and classrooms where a girl is asked why her hair is the way it is. Tamil words sit on the page in plain Roman type. Amma is Amma. No footnote. A child going to Paati’s house is going to Paati’s house. The reader who knows, knows. The reader who doesn’t will catch up, or won’t, and either is fine.

This is not a stylistic choice I had to be brave about. It is the only way the sentences work. The moment I italicise a Tamil word, the sentence tilts. It starts performing for someone standing outside the room.

The article frames the problem as geographic. Writers who stay can assume their reader. Writers who leave cannot. But the real variable isn’t where you live. It’s who you are writing for. A diaspora writer can absolutely refuse the gloss. The question is whether the publishing apparatus around her will let her.

This is where independent publishing changes the equation.

When you publish through a major house, there is a long chain of readers between your manuscript and the book. Agent, editor, copyeditor, marketing team. Each of them, with the best of intentions, will ask whether that Tamil word needs a gloss. Whether that scene needs more context. Whether the Western reader will follow. The manuscript does not always arrive at the reader intact. Sometimes it arrives translated.

My kidlit publisher and I already thought the same way. The books I wrote for them, Why Is My Hair Curly? and the forthcoming Why Is My Skin Brown?, were built for an Indian child first. A girl in Coimbatore reading about another girl in Coimbatore does not need the Tamil word footnoted. That was never a fight I had to have.

The books I publish independently, The Smudged Hyphen, A Star Keeps Its Distance, Hindsight, I control all the way through. The sentence I write is the sentence that prints. No one is standing over the page asking whether the American reader will follow. She will, or she won’t, and I have decided that is not the sentence’s problem.

Two paths. Same refusal.

I think about R.K. Narayan often. Not because I want to write like him, but because of what he took for granted. He did not think of Malgudi as a place that needed to be decoded. It simply was. The reader arrived and made her way.

There are more of us now than the major prize lists suggest. Writers on Substack, writers publishing independently, writers who have built small presses. We are not the writers the article counts, because the article counts by institutional recognition, and the institutional recognition still flows through the same few gates. But we are here. We are writing from inside our lives, diaspora or not, and we are refusing the translation.

Somewhere a girl is reading a book in which the kolam at the threshold is not explained to her. She knows what it is. Or she is finding out by reading it, as she finds out about everything else.

That is the reader I write for.