Deepanjana Chatterjee
The Literature Times | The Women She Became
• • •
The Literature Times: What inspired you to explore fractured identities, silence, and psychological becoming through The Women She Became?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: I have always been curious about the versions of ourselves that nobody else meets. Most of us learn very early how to remain recognisable. We answer to our names, perform our roles, go to work, make tea, remember birthdays. From the outside, nothing appears to have changed. But internally, a person may have travelled an enormous distance.
The Women She Became grew from that curiosity. I wasn’t interested in women dramatically abandoning their lives. I wanted to explore what happens when a woman stays exactly where she is, yet quietly creates another place within herself where she can exist differently.
That, for me, is where the idea of psychological becoming began.
The Literature Times: Your book explores women who create alternate versions of themselves within ordinary lives. What does identity mean to you, and how much of it is shaped by memory, expectations, and circumstances?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: I don’t think identity is one fixed thing waiting to be discovered. I think it is constantly being negotiated. Memory tells us who we have been. Other people’s expectations tell us who we are supposed to remain. Circumstances teach us which parts of ourselves are convenient, acceptable, useful, or safe.
And somewhere among all of that is the private self, which may not agree with any of those versions.
That interests me enormously. A woman can be completely recognisable to everyone around her and still feel unfamiliar to herself. In the book, the alternate selves are not costumes. They are attempts to inhabit feelings and possibilities that the recognised self has no room for.
The Literature Times: The book deliberately avoids reducing its characters to ideas of madness. Why was it important for you to present their experiences as stories of becoming rather than stories of madness?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Because ‘madness’ can become an easy full stop. Once we use the word, we sometimes stop asking questions.
I didn’t want to diagnose these women from outside the story. I wanted to stay inside their experience. What if something that looks irrational from a distance has its own emotional logic when you stand close enough? What if creating another self is not simply a collapse, but also a language for something that could not otherwise be spoken?
That doesn’t mean every perception is reliable or every choice is healthy. The ambiguity matters. I simply wanted the reader to observe before deciding what to call these women.
The Literature Times: In “The Woman With Many Names,” names become different states and versions of the self. What made you choose multiple names as a way to explore identity and emotional transformation?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: A name is such a small thing to carry so much expectation. We hear it and turn around. It gathers history, relationships, obligations, and other people’s memories of us.
So I began wondering what would happen if a woman gave herself another name without physically becoming another person.
Jonaki, Brishti, Roopkotha, Dhanshiri and Raka are not disguises to me. Each name creates a different emotional climate, almost a private country she can enter. She does not need to pack a bag or leave her home. The shift can happen internally.
Raka became particularly important because she feels unclaimed. She belongs to no one’s idea of who this woman is supposed to be. That freedom is both beautiful and unsettling.
The Literature Times: “In Her Silent Mind” explores marriage, suspicion, memory, and unreliable perception through seemingly ordinary details. Why did you choose everyday objects and routines as psychological anchors in the story?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Because our lives rarely announce their fractures with dramatic music. They appear in a cup of tea, a receipt, a crack above a switchboard, a notebook, a sentence remembered slightly differently.
I wanted the ordinary objects in Naina’s world to remain ordinary and, at the same time, become unbearable under attention. When trust begins to shift, a harmless detail can become evidence. Then the mind returns to it, examines it, rearranges it, gives it meaning.
That is why the domestic details matter. The reader is looking at the same objects Naina is looking at, but neither of them is always certain what those objects prove. The psychological tension lives in that gap.
The Literature Times: Silence is one of the strongest elements throughout the book. How do you think silence can influence relationships, identity, and a person’s inner world?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Silence is not empty. That is probably the simplest way I can put it.
In relationships, silence can protect, punish, conceal, postpone, or simply grow because two people have forgotten how to cross the distance between them. A marriage can contain thousands of words and still become silent.
Inside a person, silence behaves differently. What is repeatedly left unsaid does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes it changes shape. It becomes an imagined conversation, a private argument, another name, another voice, another version of the self.
I am interested in that transformation. Not only in what people say, but in what the unsaid eventually becomes.
The Literature Times: Your stories often exist between reality and perception, leaving readers without easy answers. What draws you to psychological ambiguity and deliberately unresolved questions?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Because certainty can close a story too neatly.
I am much more interested in the moment when two explanations can sit beside each other and neither can be dismissed completely. Human memory is imperfect. Perception is intimate. We interpret people through love, fear, suspicion, guilt, hope, and whatever we already believe.
So when I leave something unresolved, I am not hiding the answer from the reader. Sometimes there genuinely isn’t one answer that can contain the whole emotional truth.
I like the reader to participate. To close the book and continue the argument privately. If a story becomes slightly different depending on who reads it, I find that far more interesting than telling everyone exactly what happened.
The Literature Times: As a storyteller and content strategist, how has your professional experience with narrative and communication influenced the way you approach psychological fiction?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: My professional work taught me to pay very close attention to what people say, what they avoid saying, and what they actually hear.
In strategy and communication, one learns that the same sentence can mean very different things depending on context, expectation, timing, and the person receiving it. That awareness inevitably enters my fiction.
But fiction also gives me something my professional work cannot. In professional communication, clarity is usually the goal. In psychological fiction, I can deliberately leave a crack open. I can let contradiction remain. I can allow a character to misunderstand herself.
Perhaps the two sides of my work meet in the same place: I am fascinated by how human beings construct meaning.
The Literature Times: Kolkata, memory, rain, domestic spaces, and ordinary routines appear closely connected to your creative world. How does your environment influence the characters and emotional landscapes you create?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Kolkata enters my writing even when I don’t invite it.
It comes through rain on old windows, balconies, tea, narrow rooms, familiar streets, the peculiar intimacy of neighbourhoods, and the way the past seems to coexist with the present here. I don’t always need to name the city for its emotional weather to be present.
Domestic spaces matter to me for a similar reason. A room remembers us differently from a city. We repeat ourselves there. We sit in the same chair, reach for the same cup, notice the same crack on a wall. Those repetitions make very ordinary spaces psychologically charged.
I like placing inner disturbance inside familiar surroundings. The room remains the same. The person looking at it does not.
The Literature Times: If there is one question you would like readers to carry with them after finishing The Women She Became, what would you want that question to be?
Deepanjana Chatterjee: Perhaps this:
How much of the person I call ‘myself’ is truly mine, and how much was built so that other people would continue to recognise me?
I don’t want the reader to answer it immediately. I would rather the question follow them home.
