We chat with author Sonali Dev about How Simi Got Her Groom Back, which follows two sisters who face the real consequences of a fake marriage scheme in an emotional yet hilarious novel about immigration, healing, and family.
How Simi Got Her Groom Back is the story of Simi and Rupi, two sisters who escape a traumatic past in Mumbai to come to the United States, but under vastly different circumstances. What led you to focus on this dynamic?
I believe the sibling bond is a large part of our personality blueprint. How many siblings we have, our birth order, our parents’ perception of each child in comparison to the other. These are some of the earliest voices that get stuck in our heads, the basis of the language we learn to speak to and about ourselves. Rupi and Simi aren’t just sisters who survive childhood trauma together, but Rupi practically raises Simi, so their relationship foundation is sacrifice, which is thematically the heart of the book. How far can one go for love? But also, what is fair and what is justice, when the circumstances of our birth are such a matter of chance? We’re taught to think of things in terms of right and wrong, but when you add the lens of survival to that how do things look? I think I just wanted to poke at some of my own beliefs and see what happens.
Your character Simi is working toward a bright future as a pediatric nurse in a small town in Kentucky, and you capture the hospital setting and its politics so astutely. Did you do special research to understand the inner workings of hospital management, or did that come about naturally?
I was lucky enough to get to interview hospital nurses and administrators who recruit and manage the nursing staff. This helped me get some insight into the working culture in a hospital from the perspective of the nursing staff, but it also helped me understand the pathway to international recruiting for nurses which was important to getting the story right. As far as workplace politics, based on my own experience, all workplaces are essentially similar. Everyone is trying to succeed in terms of a larger goal which involves cooperation but then everyone’s also looking for as much personal power as they can squeeze out of every situation. This makes for very interesting human behavior, and exploring that is probably the best part of writing fiction.
At first glance, Rupi couldn’t be more different than her sister Simi. She’s so fierce. And a tattoo artist! Why is this the perfect career for Rupi? And side note, do you have any tattoos?
I think with Rupi I wanted to explore the part of being a woman that’s so vulnerable to judgement. I’m very interested in characters whose outer appearance and inner world are drastically at odds. Rupi has worked hard to cultivate a persona that works as spikes to protect her, but she’s also very conscious of herself as a protector and nurturer. She balances and plays with her own softness and hardness in a very self-aware way, which is the artist side of her. To me, her being a tattoo artist was completely organic to who she is.
And yes, I do have a tattoo. A matching one with my daughter that we got together.
How Simi Got Her Groom Back centers around the trope of a green card marriage. What drew you to writing about the complexities of immigration?
I am an immigrant myself. I consider it a central part of my identity. This experience of belonging to more than one place is an experience that my parents and the generations before them didn’t have and it’s one my children and the generations after them may never have. It’s a unique lived experience that I get to have. It’s also an identity that’s weaponized for political gain. But really, the one definitive truth about those who leave their home for another is that they carry a deep ability to hope, to believe in a better future. To be an immigrant you have to believe in this new place, you have to believe in who you can be there. On one hand we glorify these qualities in past generations as part of history. On the other hand, we completely invalidate and ignore that component of it in the present. I’m naturally drawn to exploring the courage inherent to that journey and how that translates into life choices, to the human aspect of it beyond the political divisiveness and hatemongering.
You don’t shy away from difficult subjects in this book. Rupi spends most of her life trying to protect her sister and fleeing from human trafficking, herself. What made this an important story for you to write now?
We live in a world where we are constantly being presented with horrible injustices and tragedies. We’re constantly in a state of processing these and finding ways of living with the knowledge that we have very little control. To me, one of the reasons for writing is to process my own feelings about the world. It’s why I started writing as a child, to lay out the things that felt too overwhelming to handle inside my brain. The kind of fiction I write essentially asks over and over again: How much power do I have over my own life? Are the labels and limits I was given by the world to define my own power absolute? So, I play with situations where tweaking your own self-belief changes your world. In some ways, it’s escapist in the extreme, but it’s also spectacularly hopeful. And honestly, it’s the kind of hope rooted in understanding that I need to live my own life. Readers just get to come along for the ride.
You have such a gift for balancing humor with seriousness and trauma with healing. One sub-plot in the novel that is especially tender is Rupi’s bond with Prem’s father, Pankaj, who is recovering from a stroke. What inspired you to include this special relationship in your novel?
Our responses to trauma become habit that we often interpret as our nature. With Prem’s father I wanted to show what someone entirely open to healing might look like. It’s such a privilege to be able to believe that you are worthy of healing. Rupi’s journey could never make any kind of meaningful progress without internalizing that belief. Then there’s the entire thing about modeled behavior and the power of a gentle and loving patriarch (by which I mean the person holding power) and how that can flip the scripts on families and maybe even society in general.
Your supporting characters are just as fully realized as your main protagonists. Prem’s mother Tanjuja, for instance, is a wonderful blend of a traditional Indian matriarch with a strong modernist streak. The scene where she supports Rupi and stands up to the classist snobbery of the dressmaker is priceless! Is Tanjuja and your rich cast of characters inspired by people you know?
I’m from a large extended family, including friends who are family in every sense of the word. A lot of very strong, opinionated, quirky, silly characters who aren’t too well versed in boundaries. There’s a lot of cycling between hard times and joy, but mostly everyone is trying to actively do their best toward one another. I’ve learned that the only kind of person who definitively and stubbornly remains miserable is one who believes that there is only one way to do something. When I look at my eighty-year-old mother having conversations with her twenty-something grandchildren, there should be so much judgement and fear, but there’s often curiosity and awe and of course worry and humor. There’s a loving way to live in the world and I’m surrounded by people who make it look easy, but also by people who can’t seem to pull love off. Obviously, these are the people who populate my books.
What were some things that surprised you while writing this book in terms of new plot twists or how the story developed while writing?
I had absolutely no idea where this story was actually going to go when I started writing it, so everything was a surprise. I just kept trying to understand the characters and their circumstances and worked hard to keep myself open to whatever showed up. In terms of process it was entirely organic with the plot twists coming from how the characters reacted every time they learned something new about themselves.
