Author Spotlight: Karthik Sivaraman
People get a little thrown when they learn that the guy who measures how heavy oil behaves at high temperature spends his evenings writing about a trafficking ring and a soldier freezing in a cold-storage unit. The two facts don’t seem to belong to the same person. I enjoy that more than I probably should.
The book is called The Deccan Harvest. It’s a dark crime thriller, and I wrote most of it in the middle of a petroleum engineering PhD, which is not a thing I would recommend on paper and would absolutely do again.
Here’s the part nobody quite warns you about with a science PhD. For long stretches, it is pure logic with the lights off. You build an experiment so that exactly one variable is allowed to move. You read forty papers to find the three that matter. You write a manuscript in the most heroically boring prose our species has ever produced, you submit it, and then you wait for a stranger named Reviewer 2 to inform you that your life’s work is “incremental.” Do that for a couple of years and something specific happens to your head. A part of it goes stiff from lack of use, the way a leg goes stiff when you sit on it too long.
I did not start writing fiction to heal anything or to find myself. I’ll be honest about that, because the internet is full of writers pretending their hobby was a spiritual awakening. I started because I was bored in a very particular way, and because after a full day of trying to be a clean, objective instrument, the idea of inventing a genuinely nasty villain, a night train, and a terrible situation sounded like the most fun I could have without getting out of my chair.
And it was fun. That is the thing I actually want to say to other people who make things, especially the ones stuck in sensible, logical, productive jobs.
In the lab, the entire goal is to remove yourself. Be objective. Kill the variables. Be right, or at least be defensible. In a story I got to do the exact opposite, and it felt almost illegal. I got to decide what a frightened man notices first when he wakes up cold and doesn’t know where he is. I got to be dramatic. I got to be wrong on purpose, and let a character be wrong, and have that be the whole point instead of a mistake to scrub out before a deadline. Nobody was going to peer-review whether my soldier’s fear was statistically significant. After months of shrinking myself down to a measuring device, that freedom was honestly a bit of a high.
I’m not going to pretend it was some smooth, noble process, because it wasn’t, and pretending would be boring. I shelved the thing for months at a stretch. More than once. A conference deadline would land, or a paper revision, or a run of experiments that ate every evening for three weeks, and the file would just sit there gathering digital dust while I felt a low, silly guilt about it, like a houseplant I kept forgetting to water. For a long time it had no future. It was just the place I went when the logic got too loud.
Here is the opinion I’ll actually plant a flag on, because it goes against the usual story we tell. We love to cast logic and creativity as enemies. The cold scientist on one side, the free artist on the other. In my experience that is mostly a myth, and a lazy one. The thing that finally got that novel finished was not inspiration. Inspiration got me about four chapters and then wandered off. What finished it was the PhD. Years of being forced to grind through work I didn’t feel like doing, of writing the boring paragraph anyway, of treating a draft as something you fix rather than something you wait to feel ready for. Most people who start a novel never finish one. I finished mine, late and tired and in stolen hours, mostly because graduate school had quietly beaten the romance out of me and replaced it with something far more useful: the ability to keep going after the fun part ends.
So the science and the story were never fighting. They were two different gears for the same brain, and I needed both. The science stiffened my head and paid the rent. The fiction kept a part of me loose and a little reckless, a part the lab had no use for at all. And the discipline I learned doing the science is the only reason the fiction became a real object with a cover instead of a fun idea I mentioned at parties.
When it finally went up on Amazon, the feeling was great, and it was a completely different flavor of great than anything in research. In science the wins are slow, shared, and hedged with qualifications. This was a finished thing with my name on it, made entirely outside the field that eats my days, built in roughly the worst conditions a person could pick for building anything. That last part is what I keep grinning about. Not in a “follow your dreams” way. More in a “look what you can sneak out the back door of a miserable schedule” way. Bad sleep, a thin stipend, an ocean between me and home, a calendar full of other people’s deadlines, and a whole crime novel still got assembled in the cracks of it.
So if you are waiting for things to calm down before you make your thing, I have slightly annoying news. Things do not calm down. Mine certainly haven’t. You make it in the noise or you don’t make it, and the good part is that making it in the noise turns out to be one of the more reliably enjoyable things you can do when everything else is on fire. The lab still has no use for the part of my brain that dreamed up a villain. Lucky for me, I found something else that does, and it was a blast the whole way through, even the boring middle. Especially, maybe, the boring middle.
This is the spot where an author with any marketing sense would drop a link and tell you to go buy the book. I’ll do the lazy, honest version instead. A soldier gets pulled off a night train between two stations, the kind of nowhere nobody thinks to check, and wakes up in a freezing room he was never meant to walk out of, with a child who was taken the same way. What the people running that room actually want from the two of them is the part I had an indecent amount of fun writing at two in the morning when I should have been analysing data, and also the part I am not going to tell you here. If that did something to you, the rest is out there with my name on it, and you already know how to find books. If it didn’t, no hard feelings. The viscometer is calling me back anyway.
THE DECCAN HARVEST
By Karthik Sivaraman
An Excerpt:
Naik Arjun Pillai, a young soldier, has been drugged and taken off a night train. He wakes inside a refrigerated chamber.
He came up the way a man comes up from deep water, slowly, and from a long way down.
Sound reached him first. A low mechanical hum, steady and patient, deeper than a fan, deeper than a train. A compressor, somewhere close, working at chest level. He lay and listened to it for a long time before he understood that he was awake, because nothing else about him felt awake. His body was a coat someone had hung up and left.
Then the cold. Not the clean slap of mountain air, not monsoon chill. This was a flat, dry cold that pressed in from every side at once and slid through cloth and into the bone. The cold of stored things rather than living ones. It was the cold, some animal part of him knew before the rest, of a place built to slow down the rotting of meat.
He forced his eyes open. They had gummed half shut. He peeled them apart by will.
The room came up small and wrong. Pale metal walls, sweating with condensation. No window. A low ceiling. The only light leaked in around the edges of a heavy insulated door, thin blue-white strips that flickered along with some failing tube in a corridor on the other side. He was on a concrete floor. The grit bit into his palms.
Memory came back in broken pieces. The train. The biscuit. The slow halt. Hands on his arms. The needle. Blue letters under his fingers, Maddipalle Cold Storage.
His hand went to his side. The skin above his waistband was tender, a small hard knot risen under it. So that part had not been a dream.
He tried to sit up. His arms shook under his own weight, the triceps trembling as if he had done a hundred push-ups, his neck thick, a dull pressure behind his eyes. Not the full dose now. Enough to drag every movement through wet sand. He did not fight it. He worked his fingers into the grit and pushed himself up an inch at a time, until his back found the wall.
The metal was freezing. It went straight up his spine like a current, and he was glad of it. Cold meant he could still feel. Feeling meant he was not gone yet. His breath smoked faintly in front of his face. He counted ten slow breaths, and then he looked at the room like it was a problem somebody had set him to solve.
Three metres by four, give or take. Room enough for crates, a pallet, a few bodies. In one corner a small drain, a rusted circle of grille. He saw the drain and set it aside in a part of his mind that had gone very cold and very clear, because he knew what a drain in the floor of a place like this was for, and he did not let himself look at the knowing yet.
No hooks. No chains. No table. No ropes on his wrists or his ankles either, and he understood what that said. They were sure he could not stand properly yet, and if he did manage it, they had other ways to put him down.
The door was industrial, insulated, sealed all around with thick rubber. A single handle, on the outside. On his side, just a smooth plate where a handle should be. He listened past the hum. A dull clang of metal being moved somewhere. A motorbike starting, far off. An engine idling. Voices now and then, muffled, blurred. Not a crowd. Only a few.
Good, he thought, and did not entirely know yet why it was good, only that few men was a number you could do something about, and many men was not.
Something rustled in the dark.
He went still. It came again, a soft scrape against concrete, then a thin, shaky breath. Not a rat.
He let his eyes finish adjusting, and in the far corner, half hidden behind two stacked plastic crates, something moved. Someone. Small. Folded down tight into the angle where two walls met.
He did not speak straight away. He knew how people woke in strange rooms. A loud voice could break them. So he waited, and he made himself breathe slow and even, so that whatever was in the corner could hear that there was a calm thing in the room with it.
Slowly a face turned toward him out of the shadow. Eyes too big for the thin face around them. Tangled hair across the forehead. A cheap cotton dress, torn at one sleeve. A girl. Thirteen, fourteen. Small, but not tiny. Old enough to know what danger was. Young enough that she looked like something a person had dropped into a freezer by mistake. Her lips had a faint blue tinge. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms locked around them, every muscle in her wound tight enough to snap.
She stared at him without blinking, and he knew the look. It was not relief, and it was not hope. It was a question. Is he one of them, or is he something else.
He held her eyes for a moment, then he deliberately lowered his own, and dropped his head a little, making himself as small and harmless as a grown man can make himself inside a locked steel box.
“It’s okay,” he said, low. His voice came out rough, the Malayalam under his Hindi worn down soft by exhaustion. “I’m not with them.”
She flinched at the sound and pressed herself harder into the corner.
He tried again, in slow Hindi, the kind that might travel further here than Malayalam. “I’m army. Fauj. They took me off the train.”
The word army carried weight in most parts of the country, even places where uniforms rarely passed through. The stories travelled even when the soldiers did not. Her eyes went to the dull steel rectangle on the chain at his throat, the tag, and something in her face eased by a fraction. The fear did not go anywhere. It just shifted sideways and made a little room beside it.
“From which train?” she asked, at last, barely above a whisper. There was Telugu sitting under her vowels. She had to reach for the Hindi words.
“Sabari Express. From the Thiruvananthapuram side.”
She shook her head. “I was not on any train. I’m from a village. They took me from the road.”
So she was not from his coach. Not from his journey at all. A different road, a different path, feeding into the same room. Two streams, he would understand much later, running into one pool. For now it only meant that whatever this was, it was bigger than one train.
“How long have you been here?”
She hugged her knees tighter. “I don’t know. There’s no sun. Only this.” A small jerk of her chin at the glowing edge of the door. “They gave water. One time there was something in it. Then sleep. Then I woke up here. Then another room. Then here again.”
A broken timeline. The sedation did that. Without daylight or a clock, the hours ran together into one long grey smear. He did not push her.
“What’s your name?” he asked instead.
Her fingers dug into her own arms. For a second he thought she would not answer. A name made you a person, and they were trying to turn her into a thing on a list.
“Yamini,” she said, finally.
The name sat in the cold air between them, far too small for the size of the room.
From The Deccan Harvest by Karthik Sivaraman, available on Amazon.
About The Author:
Karthik Sivaraman is an Indian-born writer and a PhD candidate in petroleum engineering in Canada, who studies heavy oil by day and invents far more dangerous people by night. The Deccan Harvest, a dark crime thriller, is his debut novel, written in the cracks of a research schedule that left no room for it.
The Deccan Harvest: Amazon
