A Delaware author’s award-winning debut hit bookshelves last month.
Chital Mehta’s book, “Have You Seen Romit?” won the 2025 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, and hit bookstores on October 1. It tells the story of Usha, a wife and mother of adult children, who leaves her predictable and routine life behind to search the woods of Southern India when her son, Romit, goes missing.
“This woman has never left her house, she's not made any big decisions,” Mehta says. “It's going to be a big challenge for her to leave the house in order to find her missing son.”
The idea for the novel was sparked when Mehta stumbled across an article about a man who disappeared in the forests of Southern India, leaving no clues behind. The investigation, Mehta says, seems never to have been resolved.
“Nothing came out of it,” she says. “But meanwhile, I kept on asking myself a question. What might happen if the family went looking for this person?”
Mehta originally intended to have the protagonist of her novel be the father, but soon realized that having a mother in a traditional Indian family embark on the search would make for a more compelling story. As she began to write, her main character, Usha, introduced herself on the page, and Mehta began to learn more about her as she wrote.
“Over time, it became just myself building this connection with my character and just waking up to meet her on the page,” Mehta explains. “I would send my kids to the school and my husband would leave for the office and I would just rush to the computer just to meet her on the page just to see what she's going to do next.”
Sometimes, Mehta says, Usha surprised her with the decisions she made and the resolve the previously-sheltered matriarch showed.
“I was like, ‘you're fifty-six years old, you are in this really rigid Indian society, and you're going to do this. Are you sure you want to do this?’” Mehta says. “ I kept asking my character the same question, and she said yes.”
“Have You Seen Romit?” is not Mehta’s first award-winning work. Her story "Damaged Gifts" won the Boggs Fiction Contest, and her story, "The Weight of Happiness" was a finalist for the Pinch Literary Awards. She also received an Individual Artist Opportunity grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
