My earliest memory is of three dogs fighting in Kigali, Rwanda. One of the dogs, Akitso, had revealed his weakness, a fact which the other two brutally exploited. I remember a bloody Akitso on the ground, our Rhodesian ridgeback Dushenka standing over him, lost in rage. Her muscles tightened, teeth bared, ridge sticking up like a horse’s mane—my three-year-old mind was gripped in fear. Then a pail of water came down on her and returned the sweet dog I knew. Curious that I should remember this moment and not that country’s eruption into violence and the evacuation that followed. The ten-hour odyssey from Kigali to Burundi, my mother outsmarting drunk AK-armed checkpoint guards, or my last clean diaper being used as a white flag. Those details I would learn later from the stories.

The narrative that has defined my life is harrowing, cinematic, and nearly unbelievable. A diplomat family is stationed in Rwanda just before civil war breaks out. They evacuate, forced to leave their beloved pets. After a resettlement in northern Virginia, the family finds that one of their dogs, Dushenka, survived the carnage. They employ the media, the US government, and an especially helpful Sabina airlines employee to bring her home. The climax is a Christmas reunion and a front-page story in the Washington Post. Everyone in my family has a version, whether they were there or not: my mother’s tale of resilience and survival, my grandmother’s attention to my father’s heroism, and mine: how my best story was handed down to me.

Not having my own story freed me to receive my family members’ perspectives. I am the product of meeting cultures, a marriage of my Punjabi mother’s enduring heart and intuition, and my Yale-educated father’s indomitable intellect. I spent my childhood comparing, picking out the different details that each person would emphasize, and the details they would omit. Instead of one story, I had a dialogue. Thus, I am drawn to theatre as a uniquely immediate battleground for clashing perspectives. As an actor I have had my boots on the ground, enhancing my ability to live others’ perspectives. But I was not satisfied as a player. I wanted to create new worlds, new opportunities for collision. Playwriting became the perfect medium.

My interest is in the creation of symbolic worlds on stage, not merely reflecting reality but refracting it. When I write, I strive for that first memory of the dogs that captured a country’s worth of violence in one surreal symbolic moment. It is a reminder for me of how circumstances can wreck havoc on a personality—how they can both fracture them and then make them whole again. Instinctual domination turned Dushenka into a beast—a splash of cold water from her owner brought her back again.