The Literary Mirror

Ledger of Small Gods is a retelling in which the gods barely appear. What led to that choice?

I was tired of retellings competing on whose god has the best interiority. I wanted to write about devotion as a logistics problem instead — who pays for the oil, who fixes the roof — because that's the actual daily texture of religious practice for most people, historically.

Ratna, your bookkeeper protagonist, is entirely invented. How did you build her?

From temple account books, mostly — real historical ones, studied at a remove, not transcribed. The rhythms of donation and dispute in those records suggested a personality before I'd written a single line of dialogue for her.

The late miracle subplot has divided early readers. Do you feel it belongs?

I go back and forth. Some days I think the book needed one moment where certainty breaks down for Ratna too. Other days I think I should have trusted the ledgers all the way to the end. I haven't fully resolved it, if I'm honest.