Ruchira Gupta is the author of the new middle grade novel The Freedom Seeker. Her other books include I Kick and I Fly. She is the founder of the anti-trafficking organization Apne Aap.
Q: What inspired you to write The Freedom Seeker, and how did you create your character Simi?
A: The Freedom Seeker was born from decades of listening. I have worked with children in red-light districts, met migrant families in Queens, walked the U.S. Mexico border, and served as a UN advisor in places like Kosovo, Nepal, Cambodia, and Bangladesh.
I have met children who had to grow up too fast and who crossed borders not for adventure but to find safety. Simi, the main character, is a composite of those children. She is brave, unsure, thoughtful, and relentless.
I also read many testimonies from Indian families who crossed into the U.S. through Mexico or Canada. Their stories were full of pain but also full of hope. Simi’s voice carries the emotional truth of their journeys, the longing, the confusion, the love, and the will to keep going.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the novel says, “This sobering novel’s optimistic and steadfast tone— highlighted through Simi’s own self-determination, and in joyful instances of kindness and connection— rings true across grim depictions of loss.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: Writers spend years carrying a story inside them. We live with the characters, worry over every sentence, and hope someone out there will not just read the book but truly feel it.
So when a reviewer listens deeply and reflects the story’s soul back to you, it feels like being seen. It reminds you that your words landed in the right hands and that the story will travel further than you imagined.
This one mattered because it caught the emotional truth I hoped readers would feel, that in a story filled with loss, the choice to center kindness and courage is not sentimental, but radical.
In the story, a border guard plays a quiet board game with Simi. An officer lets her keep a small token from home. A boy from Honduras shows her compassion. Mothers care for other people’s children.
These small moments of humanity are not side notes. They are central. Even in broken systems, people can choose to do the right thing. That choice can give others courage and strength.
Simi’s courage returns because strangers help her when she is at her lowest.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did anything surprise you?
A: I walked through the Sonoran Desert, stayed without water to experience thirst. I stood at the border fence where families pass flowers and Coke bottles through the gaps. I spoke with detained children, legal aid workers, and social workers. I read government documents, listened to court hearings, and talked with Indian families who made the crossing.
What surprised me most was how invisible Indian asylum seekers are in the broader immigration conversation. Indians are now the third-largest immigrant group in the U.S., and many are fleeing political persecution, economic hardship, or caste- and gender-based violence. Yet their stories are barely mentioned in the media.
I discovered hundreds of Indian migrants, including children, languishing in shelters, detention centers and jails, often without legal representation.
In Queens, New York, where much of the book is set, Indian immigrants are everywhere. Yet we mostly talk about the tech executives, doctors, and engineers.
What about the taxi drivers, grocery store workers, cleaning ladies, delivery boys, construction workers, cooks, and nannies living day to day? Their stories, too, are full of bravery and resilience. I wanted to shine a light on the lives we overlook.
Q: At a time when immigration is a focal point, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope young readers understand that strength and courage already live inside them. Simi is scared and uncertain, but she still takes action. She smuggles a note to a journalist. She faces bullying, loss, and injustice, and still keeps going. Her bravery is quiet, but powerful.
And I want children to know that kindness matters. When a group of mothers drive across the country to bring Simi’s mother home, everything changes. What seemed impossible becomes possible. Compassion is not a weakness. It is a form of resistance.
For adults, I hope this book becomes a bridge, a way to talk with children about the world they are living in. About injustice and hope. About how systems sometimes fail, and how communities can step in. Too often, we are forced to criminalize when what we need is to humanize. That is the choice The Freedom Seeker asks us to make.
Since January 2025, new enforcement policies have made things even more difficult. Children are being detained for longer periods. Family members who try to claim them are tracked and sometimes deported.
So families stop coming forward. Children are left in shelters for months. Others vanish into the shadows, afraid to go to school, ask for help, or even play outside.
The system says it is protecting children. But it is actually isolating them, cutting off care, and creating the very conditions that predators exploit. That’s when traffickers find them. Some are being deported back into the danger they fled.
And this is not just about children who cross the border alone.
One in four children in the U.S. now lives in a household with at least one immigrant parent. Children like Simi are not rare. They are all around us.
This book is my way of saying, look again. Listen. Talk to children about what they or their friends may be going through. Help them make sense of it. That is how we build understanding. That is how we build community and solve daunting problems together.
I wrote The Freedom Seeker as a fast-paced adventure. It is about crossing deserts, facing fear, dealing with the loss of friends and family, outwitting criminal coyotes and navigating a completely unfamiliar world.
Some of these are challenges that any child, immigrant or not, can relate to. This story helps young readers name what they are feeling and gives adults a powerful engaging tool to begin necessary conversations.
That is why I say this book is for anyone between the ages of 10 and 100.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on two new books.
The first is a ghost story set between India and the United States. It is about memory, colonialism, and forgotten parts of India's freedom struggle. It is haunting, poetic, and timely.
The second is a memoir about how I became an activist. I am writing it as a call to action. I want people to see that we can take on massive problems if we work together.
I call my secret superpower “the human chain.” When I first saw girls in cages in Mumbai, I had no idea how to help them. But I made friends and allies wherever I could. That is the story I want to tell, that there is power in the linked action of community. That together, we can solve what seems impossible.
I call my books social justice adventures because that is what this journey has been for me. From journalism to rescuing girls, from changing laws to founding Apne Aap, from teaching at NYU to advising the UN, it has been an unlikely but rewarding journey of finding hope in action.
I also continue to lead Apne Aap’s work, supporting vulnerable girls, building anti-trafficking curriculum, and amplifying survivor-led storytelling across communities.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I want people to know that before I was an activist or a writer, I was just a girl who loved stories, painting, and being outside. I grew up listening to my father’s bedtime tales, helping my mother in her garden, walking in the park with our dog Minnie. That rhythm of everyday love and beauty shaped who I am. It taught me to see the world not only as it is but know that it is possible.
Simi had a world like that too. She was raised by her grandparents in India, in a home filled with books, festivals, food, games. She was hockey captain at her school. Her life was full of joy and belonging until it was suddenly ripped apart by religious bigots who targeted her parents’ interfaith marriage. That quiet, safe world vanished overnight.
I wrote The Freedom Seeker to show what happens when that kind of ordinary joy is stolen and how children like Simi still find the strength to keep going. Because underneath the politics and headlines, this story is about a girl who just wants to go home. It’s about all of us who believe that children deserve love, safety, and the freedom to dream.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment