Shoutout Q&A with Vaidhy Mahalingam
Author of "The Vandal" in Solstice Literary Magazine
Welcome to our new Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A.
Check out this past Wednesday’s Story Story Shoutout: an appreciation of Vaidhy Mahalingam’s “The Vandal” in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Winter 2025 issue.
Vaidhy was a San Francisco Bay Area tech worker for over twenty-five years. His writing explores the complexities and struggles within the prosperous Indian American community, and his published pieces are available in Arkana Literary Journal, Pembroke Magazine, and Mudroom Magazine, among others.
You worked for decades as an Engineer before retiring and devoting your energies to writing (and as you put it domestic bliss – congrats on that!) Has your technical expertise found its way into your prose, and if so, how would you define the collision of those two worlds?
Most of my stories have no connection with my engineering life. I had never thought about writing, or ever wanted to write, until I was about fifty. I was a voracious reader, but mostly of nonfiction.
Around 2015, I was invited to join a Facebook group of college alumni. I was thrilled to reconnect with people from thirty years ago, but the group had very little conversation except for retellings of the glorious parties of yore. So I started to infuse some content there—a paragraph about a dark event here and there (drug-related suicide, ill-treatment of the few female engineering students, caste bias, etc.)
Then the paragraphs became longer, and soon I was writing 1,000–3,000-word essays on engineering life and related topics. By that time, the writing bug had gotten to me, and I thought I should write for a wider demographic. And the only thing I felt deeply enough to write about was family dysfunction, especially in Indian immigrant families in the USA.
In my stories, I have tried to touch upon a few different patterns. But the one I am most familiar with is that of tech immigrants. They tend to be well-educated and very wealthy, especially in the Bay Area, and they set their children up for extraordinary success. They often have strong connections with extended family and religious institutions.
But there are always exceptions—those who don’t make the cut for various reasons, personal or circumstantial. That’s the world from which I draw inspiration for my stories.
What was the impetus for creating “The Vandal,” and did the story veer from its original conception through the writing?
The spark for this story came from the real-life travails of a person my wife and I know who raised a child with mental health issues. In addition, I have met several single parents who have had to sacrifice their personal aspirations for the sake of their child’s well-being. The actual incidents in the story, as well as “Vineet,” are fictional.
The concept was always the same, but my revisions tend to be more about rounding out the characters. In my first draft, their personalities are somewhat constrained by the needs of the story. I slowly try to add more flavors to them. I was still revising this story when it was accepted by Solstice. In those later versions, I try to make “Vineet” look less like a serial impounder of schizophrenics.
Could you tell us the story of your most exciting / surprising / enlightening / frustrating / insert-your-own-extreme-adjective path to short story publication so far?
Obviously, the first one (“Glass Doors” in Arkana magazine). At that time, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I barely knew about the submission process, let alone how difficult it was to get an acceptance. The surprise here was that I got an acceptance so quickly, with just a handful of submissions (29 submissions, 20 rejections). Compare that with “The Vandal” which went through 61 submissions, 43 rejections. If that surprising event hadn’t happened, it is quite possible that I would not have written another story.
Can you Shoutout the work of an author whose voice you think the world needs to hear?
Since I gravitate toward quirky family stories, one that really captivated me was Lori Ostlund’s “Just Another Family,” which was featured in The Best American Short Stories 2024.
Your 1992 engineering article “Unsteady Separated Flow Around Blunt Bodies,” based on its title alone, sounds like a NYT best-selling thriller in-the-making. Any plans to adapt it into a screenplay and get it in front of Emily Blunt’s people?
My thesis adviser came up with that jazzed-up title for a work that is essentially about “forces on a cylinder under water waves,” a topic one would want to study when calculating forces on underwater structural members in an oil rig. But the screenplay is definitely a stellar idea, and I am going to chew on it.
You have a new book, “Smoulder in the Fog,” set for release in the summer of next year – what can you tell us about it, and the story of its path to publication?
The story has a lot of references to Hindu mythology and scripture. It is about the troubled friendship between two college friends, who represent two conflicting Hindu gods who are avatars of the same Universal God. The “nice guy” is resentful about perceived injustices and slights from the “cool guy” and travels to an alumni reunion with a subconscious desire for confrontation.
I wrote the first version of the book before I knew anything about writing. I hadn’t taken a single class on writing, read a single book or blog post on the subject, or known anyone who was a writer.
In a year, I was able to finish a 180,000-word tome.
The day after I typed “The End,” I started researching agents. After about 50 rejections, I realized I was doing something wrong. I hired an editor from Reedsy. I was working then, and I could still afford one. She gently explained all the things I needed to learn before taking on a project of this kind: POV, speech tags, overwriting, show vs. tell, building a resume, etc.
Then I spent a year reading books about writing and taking online classes, allowing me to feel disgusted about my own work. After that, I rewrote the story using better writing practices and trimmed the book to around 60,000 words.
I queried that new version, and it too received about 50 rejections.
Since the topic was heavily Indian, I thought I’d try my luck with Indian publishers after rewriting it for an Indian audience. The market and processes are extremely different in India. Fortunately, I found a very helpful agent (via The Book Bakers) who takes chances on first-time authors, and he helped me get a contract. It’s been around four years since I first contacted the agent, and it appears that the book will finally see the light of day.
The book had a parallel second thread that was completely edited out. I am now working on using that material for a second novel, this time for an American audience.
What book do you think everyone in the world needs to read yesterday?
I don’t believe in universalities of any kind, but right now, 1984 seems appropriate.
Check out more of Vaidhy Mahalingam’s work at his website.
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