Catching up with Krishna Kumar- and her author, Anahita Karthik.
Chai-logues with The Chai Literary - Interview by Niharika Jain & Geyati Rananavare (The Chai Literary Team)
Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar is just the beginning for an author determined to write the stories she wished she’d had as a teen.
For Anahita Karthik, writing was never just a pastime, rather it was a way of carving out space in a world where queer, brown, multilingual characters rarely made it to the page. Today, the Mumbai-based author is set to publish her debut novel Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar (January 2026), a young adult romcom that blends Bollywood aesthetics with universal coming-of-age themes.
But behind the book is an author whose own journey is as layered, chaotic, and hopeful as the stories she writes.
Who is Anahita Karthik?
Born in Mumbai to a Tamil family, Anahita grew up moving across India thanks to her father’s transferable job. That nomadic childhood gave her an absolute wide lens on various languages and cultures. Today, she speaks English, Hindi, and Tamil fluently, understands bits of Marathi, and can even throw in Assamese phrases she picked up while living in Guwahati.
Her characters reflect this multilingual, multicultural world that she herself has experienced.
“The characters in my stories are always and unapologetically desi and queer like me” she says. “I’ve always believed in writing stories younger me would’ve loved on my bookshelf.”
Anahita’s path to writing was not an absolute straight pathway but rather a long yet rewarding mountainous trail.
After high school, she pursued a degree in Computer Science Engineering and even worked briefly as a software developer. “I never believed that as a writer from India writing her weird stories with queer and brown characters I could ever have a lucrative career”
Finally, the burnout from trying to balance coding with her passion for storytelling finally pushed her to take the leap.
And that leap landed her at the University of Cambridge, where she completed a master’s in Creative Writing with a specialisation in screenwriting. Her dissertation? A full-length horror film script. “I’ve always been fascinated by switching mediums” she exclaims, hinting at her dream of one day adapting her own books for the screen! (Which we wouldn’t miss it for the world, and you should not too).
Confessing that her STEM influence hasn’t disappeared entirely, she calls herself a total “spade nerd” and jokes about missing coding— and in fact, she’s currently co-authoring a book featuring a coder as the protagonist. (Shh, it’s a secret guys!)
Writing may be her primary identity now, but Anahita is refreshingly multi-faceted. She takes on design commissions, often for international clients. “Because of the conversion rates, getting paid in dollars while living in India is surprisingly lucrative” jokingly, she laughs.
Music, too, is part of her life. In college, she sang and played the ukulele in a band, performing at competitions and gigs. That love of music found its way into Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar, where the love interest is something of a musical genius who is apparently inspired by her partner of six years!
And then there’s her fascination with space. She once considered a degree in astrophysics, and though she chose another path, the cosmic curiosity occasionally sneaks into her writing!
Let’s walk through Anahita’s writing journey!
Anahita’s commitment to storytelling began early. She picked up a notebook at eight, completed her first full-length novel at fifteen, and even self-published a couple of titles with vanity presses. But she dreamed bigger: to be traditionally published, to see her books in stores, to hit bestseller lists.
The road there was punishing.
“It took me 5+ books, 300+ rejections, and buckets of tears to get my first big break”
Yet she never gave up. Her persistence became a defining trait, and today she also mentors other writers (BIPOC writers) through platforms like SmoochPit, guiding them toward agents and publishing deals.
Her resilience is perhaps best summed up in her own words: “My dreams just weigh down on me too much for me to be able to ever truly let them go.”
For someone so disciplined in persistence, Anahita’s actual writing habits are charmingly chaotic. “I don’t plan my stories, I don’t do sprints, I don’t have specific times of day when I write” she says. She might write 3,000 words at midnight or sit in a café and barely manage a sentence. (who hasn’t faced this— arghh)
The only constants? Coffee and music tailored to her work-in-progress. “Those are my only rituals”. Well, aren’t we relating to her quite a bit.
Her debut novel— Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar (BCUKK)
As we see Anahita’s debut is Krishna Kumar, an eighteen-year-old Maharashtrian teen caught between Mumbai and the US, tradition and freedom, seriousness and spontaneity. Set over the course of a summer road trip through Mumbai, Pune, Prabalmachi, and Goa, the novel follows Krishna as she pushes herself out of her comfort zone, chasing a crush, testing boundaries, and, as the title cheekily suggests, “catching up” both to her friends’ experiences and her own desires. (That’s the reason we are so excited to see her book title, knowing its significance!)
The level of detail is striking: Anahita personally visited each location in the book, right down to the petrol pump in Navi Mumbai where her characters make a brief stop. “Driving is therapy for me” , “So I wanted that sense of travel, of looking out the window and soaking in India, to shine through.”
The title itself carries layers. Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar is both a pun on her protagonist chasing a summer crush and a metaphor for growing up.
Anahita’s storytelling draws as much from Bollywood as it does from international YA. Jab We Met, the quintessential grumpy-sunshine romcom, was a major inspiration, as was the Tamil road trip series Sweet Kaaram Coffee. From the West, she cites Jenny Han and Axie Oh as models for weaving heart and humor into teen narratives.
She builds moodboards for every project, relying heavily on Pinterest (“though I despise how much of it is AI-slop now” she jokes, but we know it’s truly infuriating!).
For BCUKK, the moodboard helped her blend the dramatic aesthetics of Bollywood with the calm world of YA romcoms. “My ultimate dream would be to have BCUKK made into a Bollywood film”.
Anahita finds joy in the friendships she has cultivated in the literary world. Among her closest friends are Birukti Tsige, Sujin Witherspoon, Swati Hegde, and Catherine Kennedy, with whom she’s currently co-authoring her coder novel (guys, we are already so excited for this debut, and now she teases us with another book in writing!? YIPPEEE)
She also remains deeply connected to her mentees, many of whom are now friends, like Cynthia Timoti and Yi-Jun O. She champions their work online, ensuring their voices reach new readers. “I genuinely think they’re all so talented”.
Looking back, Anahita resists pinpointing a single defining moment.
Instead, she describes herself as a “collection of moments.”
The struggles, the rejections, the books that never saw light, the opportunities that slipped away; absolutely all of it, she believes, has shaped her into the writer that she is today.
Publishing may be brutal, but gratitude fuels her. “A lot of my childhood dreams have recently been coming true” she says. “Appreciating how far you’ve come is just as important as aspiring to do better.”
With Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar set to release in January 2026, Anahita Karthik stands at the beginning of a career that promises both warmth and resilience, the very qualities her readers will find in her stories.
Chai-logues with The Chai Literary Team — Episode 01!
Interview taken, written, edited by Niharika’s Archive (Niharika Jain)
Questions by Niharika Jain & Geyati Rananavare
-The Chai Literary Team.
