Art mirrors life itself in author Parul Kapur’s latest novel, “Inside the Mirror.” The novel has won Kapur the acclaimed AWP Prize for the novel, and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize, as well as the 2024 New American Voices Award.
The story is set during the years following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and centers around twins Jaya and Kamlesh, who decide to pursue their passions of art and dance beyond their family’s choices for them.
“City Lights” host Lois Reitzes sat down with Kapur via the online platform Riverside to discuss the book.
Kapur lives in Atlanta with her family, but hails from northern India like the characters in her novel. She explained the fundamental crisis explored at the center of the book, sharing with Reitzes that “if somebody’s behavior goes outside the norm, that creates enormous problems for a family’s existence within the society they’re used to belonging to.”
Indians began to face these particular types of existential crises as India democratized and began to Westernize, adopting technology and social practices that went against the grain of traditional Indian practices. The novel explores these issues with a family being pulled in multiple directions at once, desperately trying to hold itself together through the tumult and brutality of the partition.
