The Literature Times: “All the People I Became” is structured around five women who shaped Vishesh’s life, each returned to again and again as the story deepens. What made you choose that excavation-style structure instead of a linear one?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I chose the frame-narrative style, which you are calling excavation-style structure, because memory itself doesn’t move in a straight line. When we look back at our lives, certain people keep resurfacing, and each time we return to them, we understand something we couldn’t see before.
The five women in Vishesh’s life were not simply chapters in his story—they were layers of it. By returning to them at different points, I could reveal new dimensions of their relationships and, more importantly, show how Vishesh’s understanding of himself changes over time.
A linear structure might have told the story chronologically, but this structure allowed me to explore it emotionally.
The Literature Times: The novel’s frame has Vishesh telling his story to Anwesha over a single rain-soaked day. Why did you want the entire emotional excavation to happen within such a compressed timeframe?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I wanted the story to unfold within a single day because emotional revelations often happen in moments of intensity rather than over long stretches of time. The rain-soaked day creates a kind of enclosed space where Vishesh can’t really escape his memories—or the questions Anwesha brings into the conversation.
The compressed timeframe also gives the story a sense of urgency. On the surface, it’s just one day, but emotionally, Vishesh is travelling through years of his life. The present keeps colliding with the past, and that contrast was important to me.
In a way, the rain becomes part of that excavation. It slows everything down, creates an atmosphere of introspection, and gives Vishesh and Anwesha the space to confront things that might otherwise remain buried. I wanted the reader to feel that although only one day is passing externally, an entire lifetime is being revisited internally.
The Literature Times: Each woman gets her own recurring chapter title, from “When the Light First Fell” to “The Idea of Her.” How did you approach naming these movements so they carry both intimacy and distance at once?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I wanted the chapter titles to feel less like labels and more like fragments of memory. Each woman occupies a different emotional space in Vishesh’s life, so the titles needed to capture not just who they were, but how he remembers them.
There’s intimacy in phrases like “When the Light First Fell,” because they suggest a very personal moment or feeling.
So, I approached the titles almost like emotional signposts. They had to be evocative without explaining too much. I wanted each one to leave some space for the reader to wonder what happened.
The Literature Times: Vishesh is described as undone repeatedly by the same flaws; fear disguised as principle, ego mistaken for love. Was it difficult to keep a reader sympathetic to a protagonist who keeps making the same mistake?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: Yes, and I think that difficulty was important to the story. I didn’t want Vishesh to be an easy protagonist to love or forgive. Most of us don’t repeat our mistakes because we don’t know they’re mistakes; we repeat them because, in the moment, they feel justified. Fear can look like principle, pride can look like self-respect, and even love can become a way of protecting our own ego.
For me, the key was not to make Vishesh innocent, but to make him understandable. I wanted the reader to see the emotional logic behind his choices, even when they disagreed with those choices. His self-awareness also develops gradually, so the reader is discovering his flaws alongside him rather than being told from the beginning what is wrong with him.
The Literature Times: Zahira’s chapter, “She Lived in Her Body,” deals with devotion and tragedy involving a sex worker. What did you want that relationship to reveal about Vishesh that the others couldn’t?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: Zahira’s story allowed me to explore a part of Vishesh that the other relationships couldn’t—the difference between loving someone and believing you can save them.
With Zahira, his feelings are stripped of some of the usual defences he carries. Her life forces him to confront questions of dignity, vulnerability, desire, and the limits of his own compassion. He wants to believe that devotion can somehow overcome circumstance, but the tragedy of their relationship makes him confront the uncomfortable truth that love does not always give us the power to change another person’s life.
I also wanted Zahira to exist beyond the label of being a sex worker. “She Lived in Her Body” is very deliberately about her presence, and the complicated relationship she has with her own body and circumstances.
The Literature Times: Anwesha isn’t just a narrative device; the book reveals she has her own reasons for listening that go deeper than curiosity. How early in writing did you know she wasn’t simply a framing character?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I knew fairly early that Anwesha couldn’t simply be a listener. The moment I began thinking about the story as a conversation rather than a confession, it became clear that her presence had to carry its own emotional weight.
I also wanted the reader to experience the same shift Vishesh does. At first, he thinks he is the one revealing things. Slowly, he realizes that Anwesha’s silences and questions are revealing things about her too—and perhaps about him that he wasn’t ready to see.
So, yes, I knew quite early that she was more than a framing device.
The Literature Times: You’ve said the novel grew out of reflections on how relationships shape identity across life stages. How much of that exploration came from observation versus personal experience?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: The novel is entirely fictional, so I wouldn’t want to draw a direct line between Vishesh’s experiences and my own life. That said, like most fiction, it grew out of an interest in things that are universally human—how people change within relationships, how we remember different versions of ourselves, and how certain people leave an imprint on us long after they are gone.
A lot of the exploration came from observation: watching how people behave differently at different stages of their lives, how relationships evolve, and how our understanding of the same person can change with time. I was particularly interested in the idea that every relationship can bring out a different version of us.
The Literature Times: The book also engages with contemporary Indian masculinity and the cultural expectations around relationships. What did you want to challenge or complicate about that image through Vishesh?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I wanted to complicate the idea that masculinity is primarily about being in control—of your emotions, your relationships, and even the people you love. Vishesh has grown up with many of those expectations, and he often mistakes emotional restraint for strength and certainty for maturity.
I didn’t want Vishesh to represent a single definition of Indian masculinity, nor did I want the novel to offer an easy judgment of it. I wanted to show its contradictions—the tenderness alongside the ego, the desire for intimacy alongside the fear of vulnerability, and the pressure to appear certain even when you are deeply confused.
The Literature Times: You run a restaurant in Greater Noida and studied management, quite far from a literary background. How did the discipline of that world shape the way you approached writing a 70,000-word novel?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: Writing a novel requires the same kind of discipline as running any long-term project: consistency, planning, patience, and the ability to keep going even when the immediate result isn’t visible.
Running a restaurant has also taught me a lot about people. You’re constantly observing personalities, relationships, conflicts, expectations, and the small ways people communicate. That kind of observation naturally feeds into fiction.
At the same time, I didn’t approach the novel like a business project. I didn’t want to over-engineer the creative process. The management side gave me the discipline to sit down and do the work, while the writing itself required me to be much more intuitive and emotionally open.
The Literature Times: By the novel’s end, Anwesha reframes Vishesh’s losses as a climb rather than a series of failures. What do you hope readers, especially those who see themselves in his mistakes, take from that reframing?
Nikhil Bhardwaj: I hope readers come away with the understanding that a life cannot always be measured by what we managed to hold on to. Sometimes the relationships we lose, the choices we regret, and even the mistakes we keep repeating become part of the process through which we understand ourselves.
Anwesha’s idea of seeing Vishesh’s losses as a climb is important because it doesn’t erase his mistakes or turn them into something noble. He does make mistakes, and some of them have consequences. The reframing is about recognizing that failure doesn’t have to be the final definition of a person.
For readers who see something of themselves in Vishesh, I hope the book offers a little compassion without offering easy absolution. We can acknowledge where we went wrong and still believe that we are capable of becoming someone different.
