Why I Wrote Māyā

I grew up in the countryside outside Lebanon, Tennessee, about an hour east of Nashville. My three brothers and I lived a comfortable, sheltered life, all thanks to my parents’ unconditional love. I grew up believing there was nothing I couldn’t do or become if I set my mind to it.

My upbringing was quintessentially All-American—nine years of tee ball, coach pitch, and little league; becoming an Eagle Scout, just like my brothers, dad, and uncle; reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. I went to a private Christian high school and a public Tennessee university. I sang in my church choir, made straight As, and went to prom with a girl. Life was a box that felt safe and made sense. But what I couldn’t know then was how much of the world around me was really an illusion—a beautiful, comfortable, loving one, but an illusion nonetheless.

In my second semester of college, a sociology class cracked that illusion wide open. Words like ethnocentrism, stratification, caste, and disparity entered my vocabulary for the first time, and with them came the earth-shattering realization that the way I had lived was only one version of reality. I started to see how much of what I knew had been filtered through a Western perception—a narrative that placed the history of the world on a timeline that inevitably led to the founding of the United States and celebrated its role in the world today. I don’t resent the way I was taught, but I don’t deny it either.

This is the core of the illusion I’m talking about: we can only understand the world around us from our own perspective, our own perception of reality. In Hindu philosophy, I later learned, this illusion is called māyā. It’s a veil that covers the eyes of every person, creating illusions even more powerful than the ones I grew up with—illusions like time, matter, ego, and death. But behind those illusions lies the truth that all of us, across time and space, are connected in a continuous form of energy.

That philosophy is the underpinning of why I wrote Māyā and why I believe in its message. I saw a connection between the spiritual truths of māyā and the political and social truths of the unequal world we live in today. The colonizer gets to set the rules for how the world works, but those rules are just another illusion—one that places power in one arena and marginalizes another in the name of influence, wealth, and empire. When that illusion begins to fray, revolution follows.

Maya Mehta finds herself in the middle of such a revolution, experiencing a similar awakening to mine. She’s an artist who has been raised to believe the world works one way, only to have her eyes opened and never shut again. When that happens, how can she go on as the artist she was? What is her duty now? What is her larger purpose? And what kind of difference can she truly make, especially when blinded by ambition, ego, and a limited understanding of the world around her?

At some point in my own life, I decided to challenge the path I once thought inevitable—to search for a deeper truth about how the world works, to broaden my horizons, and to connect with parts of history and culture I was never taught. In many of the workshops we’ve had so far, when someone says, “Ah! That is so Indian,” I smile because more often than not, they’re reacting to a memory or personal experience of mine that made its way into a scene. What I hear is not “that’s so Indian!” but rather, “Ah! That’s so human.”

It has been the delight of my career to realize that within the specificity of this time and place - 1930 British India (a time and place none of us alive can visit first-hand) there lives an invisible thread to a man who grew up on the other side of the world nearly 100 years later. I believe the same is true for you. Maybe you already know about the Salt March, or satyagraha; maybe you have family from Gujarat, or maybe you can’t point to Punjab on a map. No matter. Maya is for you to experience and support because it is a universal story of a family in a time of great uncertainty and change. The common threads are all there for you to pick up and begin to weave.

And the next time you are standing on a precipice in your life, perhaps you’ll think of Maya Mehta, and, instead of choosing the safety of the world you know, you’ll take a leap into the unknown, and watch the world open up for you.