This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Madreiva Jay Jay read her story, Laura's theme from the November 17th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

The Jay is the author of the novel The Far Field, which won India's JCP Prize for Literature in 2019.

She is at work on her second novel.

Now here's Madreirae.

Lara's Thiem.

That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Allianz Francaise in Bangalore,

and she claimed that her teacher had been

impressed with her from the start. Madame Oralee says I have a natural ear, she announced one evening.

Wonderful, my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table.

Tarun, my 16-year-old brother and I, were at the table too, wrapping our notebooks and brown paper.

Summer was over. On Monday, we'd return to school.

I must have said something similarly vague and admiring, but Tarun said only,

denim.

What?

I asked.

De Neme, means from Neme.

Well, technically it's Serge Deneem, which was a type of cloth from there.

"'Anyway, it's French.'

"'Nobody asked how he knew this.

"'Tarun was the brilliant one in our family,

...