That Shade of Purple
Neel Preet: Your writing is known for emotional precision and the unspoken truths of growing up. What drew you to the story of Sukanya and Adarsh?
Piyush Mahiskey: That Shade of Purple was initially the story of Adarsh — how society conditions a person, and how a person is expected to behave within his society, his family, and so on. That was the core factor in writing it. Society wants so much from a person, but what about the person’s innermost desires, and how he actually wants to live? That was the original theme I wanted to explore through Adarsh. Sukanya was developed to give Adarsh a counterweight to all these desires.
I never wanted to write a conventional love story. All I wanted to write about were the difficult truths, the unspoken things in the society we grew up in. That was the main theme behind That Shade of Purple. It became a romantic story only while I was developing it.
Neel Preet: Your book, That Shade of Purple, explores love across social and familial boundaries. What inspired you to examine this complex dynamic?
Piyush Mahiskey: In India, even today, if a person chooses their own partner, he or she still finds it difficult to convince their family and society of their marriage intentions.
There have always been differences of caste, of class, and sometimes of religion in marriages that are not conventional arranged ones. Love marriages still face some opposition even today.
That is why That Shade of Purple was largely developed around how a gardener’s daughter could marry the heir of the family — and how it would not be easy for her to achieve it. That was the initial inspiration for Sukanya’s arc. Adarsh was always designed to be a self-conflicting character, caught between his desires and how he was expected to behave. Most of the story was about Adarsh’s own desires.
Neel Preet: Sukanya grows up inside the Thakur Haveli while always knowing that she is the gardener’s daughter. How did you approach her sense of belonging and identity?
Piyush Mahiskey: Sukanya was developed as the character who would drive the marriage plot of the story. She had to be close to Adarsh, and that is why I made her a childhood friend. For the two of them to share so much time together, I decided she would grow up in the haveli. That is why she is shown as the gardener’s daughter who was also Adarsh’s childhood friend. But Sukanya is a very intelligent character — she ultimately cracks the UPSC.
Through all her romantic longing, her intelligence keeps reminding her who she is: that, as the gardener’s daughter, she is still not worthy of marrying Adarsh. I gave her identity a counterweight, though — Adarsh’s mother, Maitree, wholeheartedly pampered her, simply for who she was. That is what makes Sukanya’s place within the family slightly more dynamic.
Neel Preet: The story is set against the traditions of a Rajasthani joint family. What role does the cultural setting play in shaping your characters and their choices?
Piyush Mahiskey: The Rajasthani joint family was used to portray the rigid, orthodox culture of Indian society — a world where caste and class hierarchy are everything, and where the whole setting is semi-royal, so that all of it presses heavily on a person like Adarsh. I gave the Rajasthani joint family so much social weight precisely so that escaping such a rigid structure would be genuinely difficult for Adarsh.
Neel Preet: The novel gradually reveals that something is wrong beneath an apparently perfect marriage. How did you build this atmosphere of unease without revealing too much too soon?
Piyush Mahiskey: It was a conscious choice to signal that something was fundamentally wrong in the marriage while keeping the main twist hidden. When the secret is finally revealed, the reader should realise that he or she had been misreading it too, all through the early chapters.
Even once the secret is out, it causes a great deal of angst for Sukanya, because it means her marriage was built on a flawed foundation. Now she must decide whether she can live with that unease, or whether she can free both herself and Adarsh. The main aim in developing the story was to explore exactly this. What if you believe your perfect marriage is fundamentally wrong in the first place? That was the emotion I set out to explore, and so I developed the story this way.
Neel Preet: Your stories often explore difficult truths that society leaves unspoken. What uncomfortable truth lies at the heart of That Shade of Purple?
Piyush Mahiskey: My writing always deals with the unspoken, uncomfortable, and difficult truths of society — whether it is bullying and toxic masculinity in my Schoolboy Saga novels, IX B and X C, or unhealed childhood trauma in KG II B. In Durga in Nigeria, I explored how faith is manufactured, and how hard it is to deal with the inner war of an extramarital affair.
In That Shade of Purple, I set out to explore what a person actually wants, as against what his family and society expect of him. The pressure of society is so strong that the individual ends up having to sacrifice his own desires. That was a theme that genuinely needed exploring, and that is what I set out to do.
The truth here is so heavy that society still cannot accept it, even today. It needed to be discussed — along with how society forces Adarsh to carry that truth, hide it, and live an outwardly normal life: one that looks perfect from the outside but is fundamentally wrong on the inside. The uncomfortable truth is that the marriage rests on a false foundation, and yet Adarsh and Sukanya are both forced to carry it. That was the difficult truth I wanted to explore, in much greater depth, in That Shade of Purple.
Neel Preet: Family, honour and social expectations strongly influence the characters. How do these forces affect their ability to make honest choices?
Piyush Mahiskey: Family and social expectations were among the core themes I needed to explore — how they prevent an individual from making his own choices, and push him instead to act only according to what society expects of him. These forces deeply affect how a person lives, or adjusts, within a society that rarely allows anyone to live authentically and choose for themselves.
A person like Adarsh — treated as the ideal, the heir, the one expected to carry the burden society has placed on him for the rest of his life, and for the generations after him — finds it very difficult to shake off and break such patterns.
I wanted to emphasise this point: family and social expectations can sometimes become an enormous burden in life. For someone like Adarsh to live honestly, he must first face a family and a society that will not easily accept his truth. However much we may have evolved as a society today, in many ways we remain very backward. That is what I wanted to bring out through my story.
Neel Preet: Friendship becomes an important force in a story filled with secrets. What did you want to convey about friendship when love and family relationships begin to break down?
Piyush Mahiskey: Sukanya has been a lifelong friend of Adarsh, and she finds it very difficult to break that friendship even after the secret of her marriage comes out. Friendship is a very pure relationship for all three of them — Adarsh, Sukanya, and Samarth — and in this story, at least, it is a bond greater than love. That is why, in the end, friendship is the bond that is honoured across all these relationships, even as the romantic dynamic shifts for each of the leads.
Neel Preet: As a mentor to aspiring writers, you encourage authors to honour their unique voices. How important was it for you to preserve your own emotional and narrative voice while writing this story?
Piyush Mahiskey: I usually write about subjects that are not spoken of openly in public. It is a recurring thread in all my books, and I carry it into each of my stories.
As a mentor to aspiring writers — I guided them in the Likhega India Mission 2025, and will do so again in the Likhega India Mission 2026 — I want to say this: if you have a story inside you, let it out, and make it the truest version of that story you can. It will shine, because it will carry the realism that readers are truly craving.
Neel Preet: Finally, if readers remember just one emotional truth from That Shade of Purple after turning the final page, what would you want it to be?
Piyush Mahiskey: If there is one emotional truth I would want readers to carry away from That Shade of Purple after turning the final page, it is this: be true to yourself, and to the life you want for yourself. Society, family, expectations — all of it will weigh on you. For generations, people have done only what society told them was right. Now the time has come to finally choose yourself, and to live as your own truest, best self.
