How Sujatha Gidla Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Book

“I would work on the memoir on my commute and in the crew room on my breaks.”

Illustration: Lorenzo Gritti

Sujatha Gidla’s memoir, Ants Among Elephants, traces an educated family deemed untouchable (Dalit) by the caste system in India. It was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017. Gidla wrote banking software applications for almost 10 years before becoming a subway conductor with the New York City Transit Authority. Here’s how she made ends meet.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Medium: As a child in rural India, what did “going to work” look like?

Sujatha Gidla: My mother and father were [college] lecturers. My father taught English, and my mother taught history. In India, if you don’t speak English, you don’t go anywhere, so people used to come to our house for private tutoring. They adored my father and dressed like he did, so we thought that was pretty cool.

Your uncle was the poet and Maoist leader K.G. Satyamurthy. Was he able to show you what the life of a writer would look like?