Anushka Jasraj on Principles of Prediction: “The Stories Became a Way to Process Ideas for Myself”

Writer Anushka Jasraj says her short stories grew out of an intense period of personal and intellectual exploration, when questions around relationships, desire, gender and identity were becoming increasingly difficult to define.

Her collection, Principles of Prediction, first published in 2020, brings together stories written over more than a decade. The book moves through unconventional relationships, queerness, non-monogamy, desire and emotional connections that often resist easy labels.

Looking back at the work now, Jasraj describes it as the “manic fiction of my twenties” and wonders whether she would write in quite the same way today.

Writing relationships that resist labels

Many of Jasraj’s stories focus on relationships that exist somewhere outside conventional definitions. Characters experience attractions and connections that may never become conventional romances, yet still leave a lasting emotional impact.

Jasraj says some of these stories came from experiences that were difficult to name at the time.

She points to the later emergence of the term “situationship” as an example of how language can give shape to experiences that previously had few accepted definitions.

For her, fiction became a way of giving those experiences a place to exist — including relationships or connections that ended without ever being formally acknowledged as losses.

In Drawing Lessons, for instance, desire is not necessarily straightforwardly romantic or sexual. The uncertainty itself becomes part of the story.

Gender studies influenced her fiction

Jasraj says her academic interests strongly influenced the stories she was writing during that period.

While studying gender studies, she was reading writers and theorists including Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde. Those ideas began entering her fiction, allowing her to explore questions about bodies, sexuality, ageing and the ways certain people are desexualised.

“The stories became a way to process and condense things for myself,” Jasraj explains.

She says she did not consider herself a particularly strong academic writer, and fiction became a form through which she could work through complicated ideas.

Her writing emerged during a period when theory-fiction and autofiction were prominent in literary conversations, something that also shaped the intellectual environment in which she was writing.

Family history inspired Radio Story

Not all the stories in Principles of Prediction are rooted in contemporary relationships.

One of the earliest stories Jasraj substantially revised and completed, Radio Story, was inspired by her great-grandfather, who was a ham radio operator during the period surrounding India’s independence.

Her grandmother had told her stories about the clandestine radio operations of the period, including memories of equipment being hidden and people arriving to inspect what was happening.

Jasraj used those family memories as a starting point before conducting further research and transforming the material into fiction.

She says her grandmother recognized emotional connections between the fictional story and the family history that inspired it.

The history behind Westward

Another historically rooted story, Westward, developed from an anecdote involving Durgabati Ghose, daughter of Indian psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose.

Ghose wrote about travelling to Vienna and meeting Sigmund Freud. One episode particularly interested Jasraj: Ghose recalled being afraid of dogs and Freud dismissing the issue by suggesting she ask her father what the fear meant.

What stayed with Jasraj was Ghose’s imagined response to Freud — what she wished she had said to one of the most influential figures in psychoanalytic history.

That moment led Jasraj to research the development and practice of psychoanalysis in India during the period.

The result was a story that blends historical material with fictional reconstruction.

From fiction to psychoanalysis

Jasraj’s literary interests have also developed alongside her academic and professional engagement with psychoanalysis.

After returning to India in 2018, following an MFA and studies in gender, she initially struggled with the question of what professional direction to take as a fiction writer.

She worked as a writing tutor, including with younger students. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she conducted creative-writing workshops for children.

The experience reinforced her interest in how people communicate through stories, fantasy and imagined characters.

That eventually led her toward psychoanalytic training.

Jasraj initially trained at a school in Mumbai influenced by the Kleinian tradition, associated with the work of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. She eventually entered analysis with a Lacanian practitioner and says her thinking evolved as she moved beyond accepting established authorities without question.

That intellectual shift ultimately influenced the direction she wanted to pursue.

Two new stories explore AI and motherhood

A new edition of the collection includes two additional stories: “Virtual Baby” and “Hair.”

Virtual Baby examines motherhood through the relationship between a woman and her premature newborn while also exploring her attachment to a virtual baby in an immersive gaming café she frequented during pregnancy.

Hair, meanwhile, turns toward a more contemporary question: what happens when artificial intelligence becomes part of an intimate relationship?

The story follows a woman who regularly speaks to an AI system about her marriage.

Jasraj says Hair was written roughly a year and a half before the interview and emerged partly from speculation about the ways AI might enter human relationships.

The addition of these stories also demonstrates how her interests have shifted since the original collection appeared.

Why Jasraj removed two stories from the new edition

The new paperback edition is not simply an expanded version of the original book.

Jasraj removed two stories — “Feline” and “Notes from the Ruins” — because she no longer felt connected to them.

With Feline, geography played an important role. She had originally wanted the collection to contain a story set in Texas after spending five years there. On revisiting the collection, however, she felt the story no longer belonged alongside the others.

She ultimately removed two stories and replaced them with Virtual Baby and Hair.

Jasraj says she writes short fiction relatively slowly, at approximately one story a year, and has not written many short stories recently.

Her literary interests are changing

Perhaps the most revealing part of Jasraj’s reflection is her admission that her relationship with fiction itself has changed.

She says she is increasingly drawn toward nonfiction and experimental forms rather than conventional fiction.

That interest is not entirely new. Even while writing the stories in Principles of Prediction, her academic work included a lyric-essay-style gender studies thesis.

For Jasraj, then, the revised collection is not simply an updated version of an earlier book. It also reflects the changing interests of a writer who has moved from fiction and gender studies toward psychoanalysis, nonfiction and more experimental forms.

Principles of Prediction ultimately stands as a record of one period in that intellectual journey — a collection in which unusual relationships, desire and uncertainty became ways of thinking through ideas that were not always easy to articulate directly.