Gossip dangerous, dreams are evidence, and silence kills: inside **Maya, Dead and Dreaming**

A murder mystery inspired by Agatha Christie with a dash of Jhumpa Lahiri

In Maya, Dead and Dreaming, silence is never neutral. It gathers weight. It curdles. It becomes evidence. Lana Sabarwal’s debut novel begins not with a spectacle of violence but with whispers—women leaning closer over tea, neighbors trading fragments, a town quietly managing what it refuses to say aloud. Set in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Shogie, Washington, the book reframes gossip as an underground intelligence system: imperfect, distorted, but vital. At its center is Munna Dhingra, an Indian American woman who lives permanently in-between—close enough to listen, distant enough to notice. In this Film Daily Q&A, Sabarwal discusses gossip as survival infrastructure, dreams as narrative evidence, memory as an unreliable witness, and why the most dangerous force in her novel isn’t murder, but silence.

Gossip as lifeline

Film Daily: You reframe gossip as a conduit for truth and protection, especially for women in repressive communities. What moment first made you see gossip as radical rather than frivolous?

“I’ve always loved gossip. Not the cruel, tabloid kind, but the everyday sort.”

I’ve always loved gossip—not the cruel, tabloid kind, but the everyday sort. The whispered conversations of aunties and grandmas over tea. The loaded glances. The hushed references. The slow piecing together of motivations and truths from collective fragments: anecdotes, impressions, overheard tidbits.

Listening reveals truths through unexpected voices

For a long time, I felt guilty about this. Gossip has an ugly reputation, especially when women are the ones doing it. But five years ago, I read a paper by economist Abhijit Banerjee that changed everything. He showed that the most effective way to spread important, useful information in a community wasn’t through official channels, but through the people who gossip the most.

“This was like a lightning bulb moment for me.”

Suddenly, gossip stopped looking frivolous or mean and started looking powerful—especially for women in tight-knit, repressive communities who don’t have access to formal influence. Gossip becomes a lifeline: a way to make sense of the world, to protect one another, to survive. That idea became the beating heart of Maya, Dead and Dreaming. I wanted to write a mystery where two outsiders—an immigrant and a psychoanalyst—uncover truth not through police reports or newspaper clippings, but by listening. Listening to aunties, neighbors, anyone willing to talk. Of course, gossip is murky and unreliable. That complexity is the point. Once I saw that, the story crystallized.

Crafting Munna’s voice

Film Daily: Munna narrates in first person and lives in “the in-between.” What rules kept her voice intimate, contradictory, and credible?

Munna is the first-person voice of the book, and the most important aspect of her character is that she’s an outsider. As an Indian American woman in 1950s Shogie, she occupies a shadow space—accepted, but never fully embraced. That marginality gives her a unique vantage point. She can observe without the blinders of familiarity.

“She questions everything.”

Munna challenges silence and seeks belonging

I wanted Munna to feel real and complex. She’s smart, introspective, and careful, yet full of contradictions and subtle defiance. At 36, she’s still coping with unfulfilled emotional needs, guilt, and dread. Her restraint is both armor and liability.

Munna is inspired by my own experiences and by stories of people around me. I hope readers recognize themselves in the way her memories and dreams try to speak to her—revealing things she’s suppressing. Ultimately, she’s very specific, but her struggle—to belong, to find meaning—is universal.

The outsider lens

Film Daily: How does being accepted but never fully embraced sharpen Munna’s perceptions—and where does it distort them?

At its core, Maya, Dead and Dreaming is about confronting the illusions we carry—about ourselves, about others, and about how we’re seen. The book plays with duality: life and death, dreaming and waking, truth and illusion. Identity isn’t fixed. It’s constantly reshaped by experience and belief.

Munna’s in-between status sharpens her perceptions. She notices what others normalize. But distance also distorts. Observation can harden into projection. Curiosity can become misinterpretation.

Being in between holds power

“Being ‘in-between’ isn’t a weakness; it’s a kind of power.”

There’s quiet optimism in that tension. Even in dark places, there’s room to grow, to re-examine, to change.

The letter as explosion

Film Daily: “Why Maya Had to Die” detonates fourteen years of silence. Did you write multiple versions, and how did you calibrate ambiguity versus revelation?

The anonymous letter Munna receives is titled “Why Maya Had to Die.” The title itself was meant to function as an explosion—shattering fourteen years of silence and denial.

The letter serves several purposes at once. It’s a catalyst for memory and action. Who sent it? Why now? What do they know? It disrupts Munna’s carefully maintained emotional distance from Maya’s death and forces her to re-examine not just how Maya died, but her own role as a passive bystander. It destabilizes her perception of the past and the people around her.

Letter unlocks a hidden awakening

But more deeply, the letter symbolizes repressed truth. It unlocks Maya’s ghost in Munna’s subconscious and reawakens conflicted feelings—admiration, resentment, guilt, longing. In doing so, it initiates Munna reclaiming her voice.

“I wanted the letter to be more than a clue. I wanted it to be a provocation.”

Dreams as evidence

Film Daily: Dreams can feel profound or precious. What was your editing test to ensure they did narrative work?

Weaving fragmented memories and dreams into the mystery was one of the hardest parts. I wanted them to feel unreliable and confusing—because that’s how memory works.

“I rewrote the dreams again and again.”

Dream clues push the mystery forward

The test was strict: every dream had to reveal something essential without doing so directly, and it had to carry emotional weight. No dream exists purely for atmosphere. Each one advances the investigation, even as it destabilizes the narrator.

Memory’s reliability

Film Daily: You lean into fragmented memory. How did you manage continuity so readers feel unsettled yet anchored?

One of the hardest scenes to write was Munna’s flashback with Maya when Maya is fifteen. I avoided it for a long time because it felt too heavy. But there was no way around it. The murder happened fourteen years earlier. Readers needed to see Maya alive.

“I needed readers to care about her.”

Maya and munna spark braided longing

The challenge was conveying Maya’s fierce brightness while showing the layered relationship between her and Munna—love braided with jealousy and resentment. Continuity comes from emotional through-lines rather than clean chronology.

I also loved writing the romance subplot—the triangle between Munna, Andrew, and Max. Romance lowers defenses. It reveals longing and vulnerability, and it sharpens stakes. Moments of warmth make the psychological dread more acute by contrast.

And then there’s Ma—Munna’s mother. Writing her was pure joy. She’s the quintessential Indian aunty: warm, blunt, nosy, imaginative. Readers keep asking for her return.

Ma embodies lively indian american life

“Ma embodies the delicious chaos of Indian-American family life.”

Sense of place

Film Daily: You set Shogie in the Pacific Northwest. What sensory details were your north star?

Shogie is fictional, but the Pacific Northwest offered a misty, melancholic backdrop that mirrors secrecy, repression, and buried guilt. Dense forests. Overcast skies. Isolation.

“A mood of quiet unease.”

Small town secrets hint at danger

The small-town setting feels intimate and stifling at the same time—perfect for a mystery where beauty and darkness coexist.

Page to screen

Film Daily: What cinematic devices could honor the book’s psychology?

The hardest elements to translate would be Munna’s interiority and the dream sequences. Novels access inner life through language; films must show it.

What’s poetic in prose can become vague or even unintentionally comic on screen unless handled with precision. Stylized cinematography, sound bridges, careful editing, and strong visual metaphors could make it work—if the psychology stays central.

Casting the soul

Film Daily: If adapted, who would you cast?

Kate Winslet for Karenina. Simone Ashley for Munna. John Hamm as Andrew. Robert Pattinson as Max.

“That’s a triangle I’d pay to watch.”

Maya channels lady bird energy

For Maya, Saoirse Ronan—specifically her Lady Bird energy. I had her in mind while writing Maya.

Reader reactions

Film Daily: Which response surprised you most?

Many readers focused on how the book explores identity, illusion, and the porous boundary between reality and perception. One review said the novel doesn’t just ask who committed a crime—it asks why we choose silence, how grief transforms us, and what happens when the ghosts we bury refuse to stay buried.

“I cried when I read that.”

Unspoken choices shape what we become

Maya, Dead and Dreaming ultimately refuses the comfort of clean resolution. It insists on reckoning instead—on sitting with partial truths, distorted memories, and the moral weight of staying quiet. By the final pages, gossip has shed its stigma and emerged as a flawed but necessary force, while Munna’s in-between existence becomes a source of agency rather than erasure. Sabarwal’s novel may solve a death, but its deeper charge is more unsettling: it asks what silence protects, what it destroys, and why the past, once buried, never stays buried for long.