“There is nothing to do but open the teakwood box…Here, a memory, and a memory, and a memory. Ridges along a spine.”
The Bombay Circle Press is delighted to introduce our latest Author, Asha Thanki. She is the debut author of the historical fiction novel, A Thousand Times Before, along with being an essaysist. Her work has been published in a plethora of literary platforms across the globe and has won many critically acclaimed reviews. The novel has already been published in the USA, Germany and Italy—and now in India, by The Bombay Circle Press. A Thousand Times Before won the prestigious 2025 Balcones Prize. It also was selected as the 2024 Best Book of the Year by NPR & the Boston Globe and July 2024 Book of the Month. Come along with us, as we spill more tea about Thanki and her literary persona in this spotlight blog.
The idea for this novel came into being during a college assignment where Thanki had to interview a family member and their relation to a fraught historical event. She interviewed her late grandmother, to pen down the migration story of their family during the Partition, from Karachi to Gujarat. This story became the core of her novel, encapsulating the intense journey her family had undergone, being mirrored in her characters. She was working on the research for her graduate thesis and she had someone who specialised in Gujrati history and political movement as one of her advisors to make sure to fact check. Thus, the fictional part of the story was fitted around the factual parts.
She began working on the draft during the pandemic, channeling the fear, angst and fear that she experienced during the isolation, which also contributed to the quick pace of writing the draft. The grief of losing her grandmother translated into a desire for ancestral memory, leading to extensive interviews with her family members, especially about the partition and their migration from Karachi. She also found out that her grandfather owned a snack shop in Karachi, which directly influenced Amla’s father’s character in the novel. On Amla’s character, she says that both her mother and her grandmother had trajva on their bodies, and that is why she wanted Amla and Fiza in the novel to have that connection through the traditional tattoo, symbolising the unity of hearts, even when the country was divided. The magical tapestry that connects the women of the family in the novel, becomes the site of exploring generational trauma and healing in an intimate yet accessible way.
The novel became an act of rebellion against the dominant narrative of history, creating memory as a tool to explore the partition era through the eyes of women. Thanki wanted to explore the diasporic intersectionality of gender with the partition era through her layered characters, hence, creating a unique sense of identity. This beautifully intricate novel came through a long process of tracing existing published history and the story of her family members.
What would it mean, to impart an impossible burden? To withhold the incredible gift of memory? Sweeping, deeply felt and intergenerational, A Thousand Times Before is a debut as poetic as it is propulsive, as healing as it is heartbreaking. It examines what it means to carry our past with us and to pass it on. Rooted in a tender love story, and spun with a tremendous amount of care, this book is a rare, remarkable feat from an incredible new literary talent.