PVLF 2026

Interview with Mayank Gupta Author of “Voices in the Waiting Room”

A quiet, introspective novel set in a hospital waiting room, where five doctors confront silence, failure, and longing, revealing shared human vulnerability beneath professional lives.
on Dec 30, 2025

Frontlist: What sparked the idea for Voices in the Waiting Room, and why did you choose a hospital as the space where these five lives intersect?
Mayank: The idea for Voices in the Waiting Room grew out of a very personal reflection on how much of our suffering is shared, even though we experience it privately. I became increasingly aware of the quiet failures we carry as human beings, not failures of ambition or intelligence, but failures of connection, meaning, and emotional honesty. These are not just individual shortcomings; they are collective ones, shaped by a culture that rewards achievement while often ignoring the inner emptiness that can accompany it. Many people who seem successful on the surface are silently struggling, adapting themselves to systems that value output over authenticity. Their pain is real, even if it is rarely acknowledged. I chose a hospital because it felt like an honest and intimate place to explore these ideas. Drawing from my own experiences, I have seen how healthcare professionals are often defined only by their roles, their competence, and their capacity to endure. What is rarely seen is their inner world, their doubts, moral fatigue, and emotional vulnerability. Placing the story within a medical setting allowed me to look at care and healing from the inside, not as abstract concepts, but as lived human experiences shaped by uncertainty and limitation. At its heart, the book is about failure and the longing to transcend it. It explores repetition, existential doubt, and the ongoing search for meaning in a world overflowing with answers that somehow still leave us unsatisfied. The waiting room becomes a space where time slows, defenses soften, and people are forced to sit with themselves and with one another, often for the first time.

Frontlist: Each doctor in the book carries a different kind of silence about identity, belonging, or grief. How did you shape these voices while keeping them emotionally authentic?
Mayank: Over more than a decade, I closely observed how people navigate relationships, inner conflicts, and social pressures. I was struck by how much effort it takes simply to keep going, to function, adapt, and endure. That repetition felt draining not just on a personal level, but on a deeper existential one, and it became a foundation for how I approached these characters. The doctors in the book come from very different backgrounds, yet they meet at a shared human core. That common ground was important to me. I wanted the story to feel accessible and emotionally real without explaining everything or telling the reader what to think. Much of what matters most in these lives exists in silence, and I wanted to leave space for the reader to sense what is unspoken. As a psychiatrist, I am naturally drawn to those quieter layers where meaning, conflict, and authenticity often live. Writing this book was challenging because fiction is not my primary professional space. Finding the right balance between the voices took seven to eight years, alongside my clinical work. Over time, the writing became a parallel journey, one that allowed me to reflect, think more deeply, and grow. In many ways, the book shaped me as much as I shaped it, and that shared process is what ultimately gave the work its clarity and emotional truth.

Frontlist: As a psychiatrist who has worked across Mumbai, London, and New York, how have your clinical experiences influenced the emotional depth of this novel?
Mayank: My experience across Mumbai, London, and New York has shaped this novel in very fundamental ways. Growing up within a more traditional Eastern philosophical framework and then living in the intensity of Mumbai gave me an early awareness of both difference and shared humanity. Later, coming of age in the pre-digital 1990s, I began to notice how bias, othering, and historical patterns quietly repeat themselves. These dynamics often remain invisible until you move across borders and are forced to see yourself through unfamiliar cultural lenses. My journey in London expanded that awareness further. Beyond differences in education or clinical systems, what stood out to me was the human condition itself. People from different backgrounds, cultures, and histories were living side by side, much like in Mumbai. When I later worked in New York, that realization deepened. Despite extraordinary cultural diversity, I kept encountering the same emotional themes again and again. Suffering, longing, fear, hope, and aspiration looked remarkably similar across continents.

Cities promise opportunity, safety, and progress, and many of us are taught to organize our lives around those goals. Yet they can also leave people feeling internally disconnected, removed from deeper questions. Instead of turning inward, we often rely on inherited beliefs, social narratives, and learned ideologies, losing the ability to pause, reflect, and think freely.

What ultimately stayed with me was how quickly genuine connection can happen once those layers are examined honestly. At a fundamental level, human values are deeply shared. That insight became central to the emotional depth of the book. Voices in the Waiting Room invites readers not just to understand these inner lives but to engage with them. Satisfaction ( and not pleasure), in my view, is not found through observation alone. It emerges through lived experience and through action.

Frontlist: The book explores displacement and the feeling of being seen as an outsider. How personal is this theme for you as a writer and observer of human behavior?
Mayank: This theme is very personal to me, both as a writer and as someone who observes human behavior closely. From an anthropological perspective, mistrust of the outsider came long before complex thought. Early human survival depended on quickly distinguishing who belonged and who did not. That instinct still exists today. We see it across primate behavior as well, where unfamiliar groups are met with immediate suspicion. At one time, that reflex served a protective purpose.

As humans evolved, with greater self-awareness and critical thinking, that instinct should have softened. In theory, wisdom was meant to replace reflex. The line between insider and outsider could have become more flexible, allowing us to see individuals beyond surface differences. Instead, we continue to fall back on the same patterns of othering. This reflex often distracts us from deeper questions about who we are and why we are here. When we stay locked in these primitive loops, we limit our own growth. Rather than moving toward understanding or transcendence, we fall into cycles of comfort seeking, emotional avoidance, and adaptation that may keep us functional but not fulfilled. Displacement itself is not unusual. Human history is defined by movement, migration, and the ongoing search for meaning. In many ways, we are all displaced, even when we feel settled.

Real connection becomes possible when the idea of the outsider begins to dissolve. When judgment eases and free will is unleashed, something important happens. We are forced to confront our own contradictions, and the insight that follows can be powerful.

Feeling like an outsider is one of the most basic and universal human experiences, yet it often operates quietly, beneath our awareness. This theme runs through Voices in the Waiting Room because the book asks readers to notice these ancient reflexes and reflect on them. The goal is not to deny them, but to understand and move beyond them by engaging the reflective, thoughtful parts of the mind. Only then can we shift from simply surviving to living with a deeper sense of wholeness.

Frontlist: There are no tidy resolutions in the novel, only moments of recognition and pause. Why was it important for you to resist neat endings?
Mayank: The lack of tidy resolutions in the novel is very intentional. I wanted to create moments of pause rather than provide answers, because there are experiences that language cannot fully capture. Silence often communicates more than explanation ever could. When two people sit together without speaking, something real can still pass between them. Everything does not always need to be stated, but it could be felt. As our knowledge grows, so does our awareness of how much remains unknown. This is especially true for high-achieving physicians, people who are expected to have answers at all times. Yet not everything in life requires resolution. Some failures need to be acknowledged rather than fixed, and at times humor becomes the most honest response to our limits. In that sense, laughter can be a way of recognizing helplessness without denial.

Many high-functioning individuals feel a strong need to solve, repair, and control. This book intentionally resists that impulse. It asks whether some struggles are not problems to be solved but realities to be lived with. Sometimes the demand for closure becomes a way of avoiding deeper reflection.

For me, the book is not about endings, because life rarely offers them. It is about paying attention to what remains unlived. It invites readers to slow down, to be present, and to question the narratives and expectations that pull us away from ourselves. What happens when we allow the unedited self to act honestly and without performance?

Most of the characters already have what they need. What they are searching for is what they want (not the needs), and that difference matters. The unresolved spaces in the story are deliberate. They create room to think, feel, and reflect, especially in a world defined by speed, noise, and constant stimulation.

We live in a time of extraordinary connection and growing loneliness. If the book offers anything, it is an invitation to learn how to be alone without feeling lonely and to rediscover through stillness, presence, and genuine human connection.

Frontlist: Objects and memories like the bangle carry deep emotional weight in the story. How do such symbols help you explore the inner lives of your characters?
Mayank: Human beings have a complex relationship with objects. Early in life, certain objects become deeply internalized. They may be physical items or relationships, but they help create a sense of continuity, comfort, and meaning. Over time, these objects become tied to memory and identity. In adult life, there is a paradox at the center of this relationship. Once we obtain what we long for, it often loses its emotional charge. Much of human desire is directed toward what is missing rather than what is present.

This longing is usually connected to a lost object. When that object is finally recovered or replaced, it rarely fills the space we imagined it would. The emptiness remains. This tension sits at the heart of the human condition and helps explain why achievement, accumulation, and success so often fail to bring lasting fulfilment. High-functioning individuals, in particular, can become caught in cycles of acquiring and striving, mistaking attainment for emotional resolution.

The more important question, then, is not how to eliminate the void, but how to live alongside it with awareness. In the novel, the bangle serves as a symbol of that missing object. It is not important because of its material value but because of what it holds emotionally. It carries memory, loss, and unresolved longing. The characters are capable, accomplished people who can obtain what they need, yet they repeatedly encounter the same realization that fulfillment remains just out of reach. What is missing cannot be bought, fixed, or replaced.

The bangle represents more than absence. It holds unfinished histories, unintegrated parts of the past, and aspects of the self that cannot be repaired, only acknowledged. It explores how people come to terms with what cannot be restored, and how meaning emerges not through possession, but through acceptance and recognition.

Frontlist: As a debut novelist, what do you hope readers will feel or reflect on after closing Voices in the Waiting Room?
Mayank: As a psychiatrist, my work extends beyond solutions. I see myself as working at the intersection of many fraternities. The book involves individuals who appear high-functioning on the surface, yet whose suffering remains largely invisible. These are people who achieve, perform, and adapt while quietly struggling. Engaging with them requires skills more closely aligned with art than science. It is less about instruction and more about reflection, less about providing answers and more about inviting inquiry.

Many never seek at all, as there is a mounting burden of widespread suffering, made worse by misinformation and an overwhelming number of prescribed solutions. In this context, I came to fiction not as an escape, but as a deliberate submission to art. As a debut novelist, I feel storytelling can create small but meaningful disruptions, moments that provoke questioning, discomfort, and deeper thought. When held carefully, discomfort is often the starting point for lasting change.

This book allows itself to unsettle the reader. It is written for those who long for something beyond the surface, particularly individuals who have reached many external milestones yet continue to feel unsatisfied. Even when conventional or traditional paths offer answers, fulfillment often remains elusive. There is no final arrival.

At the same time, the book also speaks to a younger generation raised amid constant information and ready-made explanations. When questions are poorly framed, even curated answers can mislead. In an era of increasing stress and psychological strain, this story offers a pause, a space to reflect, make more conscious choices, and move beyond compulsive pleasure seeking. Pleasure is part of being human, but satisfaction and transcendence follow different paths, requiring depth, inquiry, and acceptance.

Ultimately, this journey cannot be handed over to someone else. No object, person, or system can resolve an existential struggle on our behalf. At a certain point, both the search and the responsibility belong to the individual.

This book is not a conclusion. It is an opening, as I intend to remain in this space, continuing to offer alternative pathways for those willing to question, reflect, and engage with life by celebrating our subjective failures.