The Indian author and poet discusses the inspiration behind Anaya’s journey, the symbolism of mural restoration, the living presence of the Himalayas, and the emotional honesty at the centre of her fiction.
Book: When Mountains Remember Love | Author: Rheaa Noor | Approx. length: 2,425 words
Get your copy now: When Mountains Remember Love on Amazon India
EDITORIAL NOTE: The following answers have been drafted in Rheaa Noor’s voice using the supplied author material and prepared Q&A. The author should review, amend, and approve the final answers before publication.
In a literary culture often shaped by speed, visibility, and spectacle, Rheaa Noor writes toward quiet intensity. Her novel When Mountains Remember Love unfolds in a remote Himalayan valley, where a mural restorer named Anaya begins uncovering hidden images beneath a centuries-old monastery wall. The work leads her toward a deliberately concealed history, a landscape that appears to remember, and a growing connection with Tsering, whose presence changes the meaning of both belonging and truth.
The novel combines literary fiction, mystery, magical realism, and a deeply emotional sapphic love story. Yet its most striking achievement is the way these elements become part of a single question: what happens when the truths people bury—love, grief, identity, memory—finally ask to be seen? Anaya’s professional erasure and the mural’s historical erasure reflect one another, while the act of restoration becomes a way of imagining recovery without pretending that damage never occurred.
Book marketer and MissBookThief founder Asha Seth has described the novel as “a rare work of literary fiction that trusts silence as much as language.” That description captures Noor’s approach. Her characters do not announce every emotion, and the mountains do not explain every mystery. Meaning arrives through layers, gestures, gaps, and the patient attention of a reader willing to remain with uncertainty.
In this conversation, Rheaa Noor discusses the origins of the novel, why the Himalayan valley became more than a setting, how Anaya and Tsering’s relationship developed, and what restoration can teach us about memory, identity, and the courage to reclaim one’s voice.
Q1. What first inspired When Mountains Remember Love?
I have always been fascinated by the idea that both people and places carry memories beneath the surface. A person can continue living, working, and speaking while holding an entire hidden history inside. Places do something similar. A wall, a landscape, or a room can retain traces of what happened there even when the official story has changed. I wanted to bring those ideas together through a protagonist whose profession requires her to look beneath surfaces. Anaya enters the valley because she wants distance from her disappointment, but the work asks her to confront the very things she hoped to avoid: recognition, truth, and the possibility of being seen. The novel grew from the question of what happens when buried memory is not passive—when it begins asking for attention.
Q2. Anaya’s journey begins with professional erasure. Why was that important?
Recognition is something many people quietly struggle with, especially in creative and collaborative work. Anaya has not lost her ability; she has been denied ownership of what she contributed. That kind of erasure can alter a person’s relationship with her own talent. She begins to wonder whether speaking up will change anything or only make her seem difficult. I wanted the novel to start with a wound that was contemporary and recognisable before it moved into the historical mystery. When Anaya discovers that figures were removed from the mural, she understands the violence immediately. The scale is different, but the pattern is familiar: the work remains while the person is excluded from the record. Her restoration of the mural therefore becomes inseparable from the restoration of her own belief in her voice.
Q3. Why did you choose a mural restorer as your central character?
Restoration contains a beautiful tension. The restorer is trying to protect an artwork, but every intervention changes it. She must decide what belongs to the original work, what was added later, what damage should remain visible, and what can safely be repaired. That felt very close to the way people rebuild themselves after loss or betrayal. Healing is not returning to an untouched version of the self. It is learning how to live honestly with what has happened. Anaya’s profession also gave the mystery a physical method. She discovers the past through pigment, texture, cracks, and layers rather than through a convenient explanation. Her hands are doing the same thing emotionally and artistically: moving carefully toward what was hidden without destroying it through impatience.
Q4. The damaged mural becomes one of the novel’s most powerful symbols. What does it represent to you?
On the surface, it is a work of art in need of restoration. Beneath that, it represents hidden histories, forgotten voices, and the truths that survive despite attempts to erase them. I did not want the mural to have only one fixed meaning, because art rarely does. For Anaya, it reflects her professional experience and her concealed emotional life. For the valley, it is part of a history that has been managed through silence. For the reader, it can become a question about what we accept as the official image of the past. As Anaya uncovers the mural’s layers, she is also discovering parts of herself. The important point is that the hidden image is not dead. It continues affecting the surface even before anyone knows exactly what is there.
Q5. The Himalayan valley feels almost like a character. Was that intentional?
Absolutely. I never imagined the mountains as mere scenery. The valley remembers, protects secrets, and observes generations come and go. Mountain landscapes can create a powerful sense of permanence, but they are also constantly changing through weather, erosion, movement, and human history. That contradiction interested me. The people in the novel may believe they have successfully buried a story, yet the land has a much longer memory than any institution. I wanted readers to feel that Anaya was entering a presence rather than simply a location. The valley does not provide easy answers, and it is not always gentle. It responds to attention. Whether readers understand that response as magical, spiritual, psychological, or cultural is something I wanted to leave open.
Q6. How did you approach the magical realism in the novel?
I wanted the magical elements to feel inseparable from emotional truth. The valley’s behaviour is unusual, but it is not presented as a separate system with rules that must be explained. Memory itself can feel magical. A smell, a colour, or a place can return something we believed was gone. Communities also understand landscapes through stories, rituals, warnings, and inherited knowledge. The magical realism allowed me to honour that way of knowing without turning it into a puzzle. I kept it subtle because the novel is ultimately grounded in Anaya’s experience. The land’s response should deepen the emotional and historical pressure of the story, not distract from it.
Q7. What drew you to the theme of buried or erased histories?
I am interested in the difference between forgetting and being made to forget. Some memories fade naturally. Others disappear because they are inconvenient to people with power. The erased figures in the mural represent lives that someone decided did not belong in the visible record. That decision can happen in families, institutions, workplaces, art, and national histories. The novel asks readers to notice the labour involved in creating silence. Erasure is not emptiness; it is an action. At the same time, traces remain. A gap in a composition, a story told indirectly, or a feeling that the official version is incomplete can become a form of resistance. I wanted the mystery to emerge from those traces.
Q8. Readers have responded strongly to the sapphic love story between Anaya and Tsering. Why was it important to tell their relationship in this way?
Love, identity, and belonging are central to the novel. The relationship between Anaya and Tsering is not separate from the story’s larger themes; it is another form of hidden history shaped by silence, longing, memory, and the need to be seen. I wanted their love to develop naturally through attention and trust rather than through immediate certainty. Both women understand that visibility can carry risk, so intimacy has to be negotiated carefully. It was also important to write queer love as fully human—joyful, vulnerable, complex, and transformative. Their relationship contains fear, but it is not defined only by fear. It offers them the possibility of belonging without being erased or possessed.
Q9. Their relationship develops through shared silences. What does silence mean in the book?
Silence can protect, but it can also imprison. Anaya seeks silence because she is exhausted. Tsering understands silence as part of living with a history that may not be safe to reveal. The monastery has its own sacred silence, yet that silence also conceals decisions about what could be remembered. I did not want the novel to treat speech as automatically brave and silence as automatically weak. People sometimes need silence in order to survive or understand themselves. The question is whether that silence remains chosen. Anaya and Tsering become closer when they can sit inside silence without using it to avoid one another. Eventually, the novel asks when protection becomes erasure and when speaking becomes an act of care.
Q10. How did you ensure that Tsering was more than a guide to the valley for Anaya?
It was important that Tsering have her own relationship with the valley, the hidden history, and the risks of disclosure. She is not there simply to explain local culture to an outsider or to make Anaya’s transformation possible. Her quietness contains knowledge and choice. She decides what to reveal, what to protect, and how close she is willing to become. The relationship also required Anaya to recognise the limits of professional expertise. She may understand the material condition of the mural, but Tsering understands the emotional and communal consequences of uncovering it. Their connection becomes meaningful when neither woman treats the other as a resource.
Q11. The novel connects creative erasure with historical erasure. What do you hope readers notice in that parallel?
I hope readers see that credit is part of memory. When someone’s contribution is removed from a project, the loss is not only personal. The record becomes false. Future readers, viewers, or colleagues encounter a version of the work in which the contributor never existed. The mural makes that process literal: the image remains, but certain faces have been covered. Anaya’s professional experience allows her to recognise the moral seriousness of what she finds. The parallel also helps her understand that reclaiming her voice is not vanity. It is a refusal to let convenience become history.
Q12. What role does grief play in Anaya’s journey?
Grief in the novel is not limited to bereavement. Anaya grieves the career she thought she was building, the recognition she expected from her work, and the version of herself who once trusted those systems more easily. There is also grief in the valley for lives and relationships that were never fully acknowledged. I wanted grief to appear as something that changes shape rather than something a character simply completes. Restoration does not remove it. Love does not erase it. But grief can become less isolating when it is recognised and given language. Anaya’s journey is partly about discovering that disappointment does not have to be the final interpretation of her life.
Q13. Your writing is often described as lyrical and restrained. How do you balance atmosphere with narrative movement?
For me, atmosphere should always be doing narrative work. A description of the mountains must reveal something about Anaya’s state of mind, the valley’s history, or the pressure of the mystery. Restraint is equally important. Characters do not always understand their feelings at the moment they experience them, and forcing them to explain everything can make a scene less truthful. I try to let images, gestures, and repeated details carry meaning until the character is ready to speak. At the same time, the novel needs movement. Each atmospheric passage should alter the reader’s understanding, deepen a relationship, or make the hidden story more urgent.
Q14. Who do you think will connect most deeply with the book?
Readers who enjoy atmospheric storytelling, emotionally layered characters, and stories where place becomes inseparable from identity will probably connect strongly with it. I also think it will resonate with anyone who has felt overlooked, underestimated, or disconnected from her own voice. Artists and creative professionals may recognise Anaya’s experience of having work claimed or diminished. Queer readers may recognise the complicated relationship between visibility, safety, and belonging. But the emotional question is broader: what do we do when the version of us that the world recognises feels incomplete? The novel is for readers willing to sit with that question rather than rush toward an answer.
Q15. Ultimately, what does Anaya’s journey represent?
On the surface, she is restoring a mural. Underneath, she is restoring herself. The novel is about reclaiming your story after you have been told that your contribution does not matter. It is about remembering who you are when the world has forced you to forget. I do not mean that Anaya returns to a perfect earlier self. She becomes someone new because she has learned to recognise erasure, in the mural and in her own life. Her journey represents the courage to stop waiting for permission to exist visibly. The valley does not give her a simple answer, but it gives her a place where truth can no longer remain comfortably buried.
Q16. What do you hope readers carry with them after the final page?
I hope they carry the feeling that buried truths are not the same as lost truths. Silence can last for generations, but traces remain—in art, in landscape, in memory, and in the ways people continue searching for connection. I also hope readers remember that restoration requires care. Revealing the past without considering the living can become another form of harm. Most of all, I hope the novel leaves readers with a sense that recognition is possible. To be truly seen does not mean becoming simple or completely explained. It means being allowed the fullness of one’s history, love, grief, and becoming.
About the Author
Rheaa Noor is an Indian author and poet whose work spans literary fiction, contemporary romance, and poetry. Her writing explores memory, identity, belonging, love, loss, resilience, and self-discovery, often centring emotional truth, quiet intensity, and experiences that have historically been overlooked. Her published work includes The Library That Remembers and Blame It On The Wedding Season, along with other fiction and poetry. She shares her writing journey and ongoing work on Instagram at @rheaa_noor.
Get your copy: When Mountains Remember Love on Amazon India
