PVLF 2025

Interview with Unmana, Author of “Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd: A Bibliomystery”

A queer, bookish murder mystery set in Bengaluru, featuring grumpy amateur sleuth Nilima, her crush-worthy boss, and a trail of secrets.
on Jun 04, 2025

Frontlist: Your protagonist Nilima—a fat, queer woman—breaks many stereotypes in Indian literature. What inspired her character, and why was it important for you to place someone like her at the center of this story?

Unmana: I’ve met so many people like Nilima in real life—queer, forthright, quirky, gender non-conforming—but rarely in Indian fiction. So I wrote her in. I didn’t see why someone’s appearance, gender, sexuality, quirks, etc., should preclude them from being the hero—in fact, Nilima’s heroism lies partly in her refusal to comply with others’ expectations and her determination to live on her terms, even when that makes her life uncomfortable.

I wrote the book younger me would have felt seen in, and I wanted queer people reading it to feel represented, to feel recognised as the heroes of their lives.

Frontlist: Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd is being celebrated as a queer bibliomystery set in Bangalore. What drew you to blend queerness, humor, and a murder mystery in a single narrative?

Unmana: It helped that the story started as assignments for a writing course; I was not ambitious enough then to start with an idea for a funny, queer murder mystery set in Bengaluru and peppered with references to books. Instead, I first wrote a couple of scenes with the three women who work at Chikkamma Tours—their interaction was a mix of friendliness, banter, and hostility that made it very fun to write (and hopefully, funny to read). I wrote in some of my own anxieties: about being an outsider in Bangalore, about recently coming out and feeling invisible in popular culture, about my own self-consciousness and preoccupation with books getting in the way of living.

When my writing teacher and mentor Zac O’Yeah suggested making it into a thriller, I reached for the plot of a murder mystery that I had started and abandoned, largely because the characters weren’t working. I have been trying to write a proper murder mystery since I was a teenager, so with Zac’s encouragement, it felt like the right time to try once more.

Frontlist: Pride Month often celebrates visibility. Nilima’s queerness is unapologetic and central to her story. How do you think representation in literature helps LGBTQIA+ readers find pride in their own identities?

Unmana: When I started embracing my queer identity nearly a decade ago, I soon found comfort and hope in the queer fiction I started reading. I wonder how my life would have changed if I had discovered, say, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show or Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet a few years or decades earlier. Novels were how I made sense of the world, and where I found some degree of understanding. What would it have been like to have read earlier about characters that are like me, that therefore tell me I’m not alone? I can only imagine.

So I wrote about a bunch of women—in India!—many of them queer, who co-exist in the same story, working and making friends and having fun and solving a murder. I created a heroine who says, not defiantly or apologetically but with an easy grin, “I would hate to be mistaken for straight. So go ahead, tell all of Bangalore and save me the trouble.”

Frontlist: There’s a beautiful tension between Nilima’s crush on Shwetha and her dynamic with her ex’s current partner, the cop. How did you approach writing queer relationships that are messy, complex, and real—without falling into cliché?

Unmana: By imagining the characters as real people, with priorities and values and insecurities and a variety of experiences. By writing from life and my imagination rather than from stories that stereotype queer people, I wanted my characters to feel real and wanted to portray relationships—including friendships—in realistic complexity and ambiguity. For example, how painful and conflicting is it to have a deep crush on the person who’s also in control of your employment and income?

How does it feel to need help from your first girlfriend’s current partner, and to be graciously granted it, especially at a time when you’re feeling a little unloved and alone? How does it feel to be that partner (and a cop), and want to be magnanimous and also be perhaps a little resentful of your partner’s easy friendship with her old love?

And especially, how do you balance queer solidarity and feminist bonding—wanting to work with people who face similar challenges—with your own preferences and dislikes and resentments? This is a question I certainly struggle with, and I imagine many of us do.

There are no simple answers to questions like this. I love novels for their ability to hold complexity and ambiguity and nuance, and to make us empathize with characters who may not be behaving very well.

Frontlist:Can you talk about the importance of queer joy and friendship in Chikkamma Tours? Amid the murder mystery, there’s still laughter, found family, and flirtation.

Unmana: Oh gosh, yes! Found family is my biggest source of optimism. That’s the best part of being an adult—being able to build your own family of people you like and grow to trust and love.

I wanted this book to be comforting to queer readers. I wanted to show the joy in queer lives—that there are many kinds of love and many ways to learn to love someone. Friendship, communication, and trust are important in every relationship, whether or not they coexist with romantic love. And the mystery plot helped heighten the stakes while exploring these concerns: for example, do you trust your friend to have your back when you’re attacked by a murderer? When they hide something from you, do you recognize that everyone has the right to keep aspects of their lives private, or do you instead start suspecting them of being the murderer? (Not to give too much of the plot away.)

Frontlist: As a queer author writing a proudly queer book, did you face any internal or external pressures about how much to "explain" or "tone down" queer themes for a broader audience?

Unmana: I decided early on that I did not want to slow the story down to explain or preach. I felt having these characters investigating a murder, running a business, making jokes and teasing each other, and making friends in the process was better preaching than any polemic about the value of queer lives would be. I didn’t think it would be hard for straight, cis readers to follow; after all, we read about straight characters all the time. And to the credit of Westland, my publisher, they appreciated the book for what it was and did not attempt to tone down its queerness, either in the editing or in the marketing.

Frontlist: The book world within the book—especially the murdered bookstore owner—adds a metafictional layer to the mystery. What role do books and bookish spaces play in your own life and identity?

Unmana: I was a lonely child and would have been far lonelier without books. Books told me that a better life was possible, that there were others in the world who thought and felt like me, that love was waiting, that I should be able to make my own decisions. But reading also alienated me from others—I seemed weird; I thought differently from everyone around me. Nilima embodies that dichotomy.

I was also writing from some anger and grief that people like me didn’t exist in the books I loved. The stories I loved didn’t have room for me. That’s changing now—the world is filling up with so many wonderfully varied queer stories, on screen and in books (here’s a round-up I did for Scroll recently)—and I am thrilled to be part of that change.

Bookstores and libraries have been a refuge for me, and Nilima, and many others. That’s partly why Bangalore was such a source of inspiration: I’ve never lived there for more than a few months at a time, but the story of Chikkamma Tours emerged when I was there, inspired partly by how vital the city’s bookstores are to its society.

Frontlist: Lastly, what does Pride mean to you personally, and how does Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd reflect your vision of queer liberation and storytelling?

Unmana: Pride is accepting myself as I am and refusing to contort myself to fit into a box that has been constructed for me.Pride is solidarity and inspiration and the joys of creation and friendship, and grief at all the lives and possibilities that hatred has erased, anger at the hatred and control and just sheer lack of imagination that refuses to leave us alone and let us thrive. Pride is trying to thrive anyway.

I didn’t set out to write queer liberation in Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd. I was merely reflecting the world I live in, a world that most books seem to not acknowledge the existence of. There are many queer people all around us, and I wrote a story that incorporated this reality. I wasn’t attempting perfect representation either—there are no acknowledged queer/trans men or non-binary people in the book, for instance. But if you have a queer protagonist/point-of-view character, you’re more likely to meet other queer characters in the book, just like if you’re openly queer in real life you’re likely to (at least eventually) have queer friends or know more queer people.

The other way in which I used a queer and female narrative was by not making it the story of a “lone wolf” hero. Nilima is in many ways solitary, even lonely. But she cannot get far without turning to others for help—especially her colleagues, Shwetha and Poorna, and of course Inspector Lamani, but also the employees of the bookshop she interviews. I didn’t want just a hero solving a murder; I wanted a small community (or found family, to callback to your earlier question) protecting itself. After all, doing anything worthwhile requires support and collaboration. Putting it another way: queer liberation lies in solidarity.