Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyyat, the Rains, and Writing About Death

A writer is sitting in her childhood bedroom in Kolkata, India, while monsoon rain falls outside and green parrots fill the trees.

Her mother gives her a very old, red cloth-covered book of poems called the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, printed in 1859.

Reading it makes her think about death, something she has wondered about since she was a little girl.

When she was about six, she saw the body of a much-loved relative for the first time, dressed in white with cotton balls in his nose.

Years later, in 2015, she started writing a novel called And I Am The Arrow about a grandmother named Niyoti and her granddaughter Mishu.

A ghost named Opor/Neech walked into her story and surprised her so much that she hid the book in a drawer.

Almost a year later she took it out again and found she understood her characters better than before.

It took her ten whole years to finish the novel.

Through the book, she tries to understand death not as an ending, but as the other side of life.