JULY: SHILPA AGARWAL

India-born author Shilpa Agarwal has received rave reviews for her debut novel Haunting Bombay. Excerpts from the interview by Dhvani writer Shalini S:

Q) Tell us something about yourself? How did you come to writing a novel?
A) I was born in Mumbai and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I had initially studied pre-medicine as an undergraduate, but then decided to study literature as a graduate student. I was studying postcolonial literature and themes of voice and nationhood. I wanted to bring those themes to play in a novel, to look at moments of alienation and awakening, especially during geographic and metaphoric crossings: East meets West, centers meet the peripheries, the living meet the dead.

Q) Was it easy to write the novel since you have done specialization in Asian and African literatures and Women's Studies?
A) My academic studies helped shape the subtext in my novel. In studying literatures of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as well as women’s literature, I was exposed to concepts of gender, race, class, and family in many other cultures.

Q) What made you choose a topic like superstition to be the plot of your book?
A) Haunting Bombay is a literary ghost story set in 1960’s India that tells the tale of three generations of the wealthy Mittal family who have buried a tragic history and the ghosts of the past who rise up to haunt them. It is about a family’s darkest fears and desires, about the struggle to belong, and the ultimate power of voice and truth. The ghosts are metaphors for the dispossessed – those who have little or no power in a family, community, or nation.

Q) Do you think that the 21st Century generation believes in superstitions? How does the younger generation identify with the book?
A) Haunting Bombay has been very well received in general, and it was recently featured as a popular read on Amazon Kindle, which is the electronic version of the book that many younger generation like to use.

Q) Why call it Haunting Bombay?
A) The story is set in 1960’s Mumbai when the city was still Bombay. It is about the moments in our past that continue to haunt our present-day lives.

Q) You have spoken on topics like politics. Does it help you as a writer or is it more of a hindrance?
A) Haunting Bombay is not an overtly political book, but the sub-textual layers are informed by India’s geo-political background. At the moment of India’s Independence in 1947, Late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had talked about how the nation, suppressed by centuries of invasion and colonialism, at long last finding utterance. I wanted to set my novel thirteen years after this moment, as the nation moved into its adolescence to explore this idea of finding utterance – of a national consciousness informed by the voices of the underclass.

Q) What in your opinion is the scope of Indian English literature?
A) Indian writers have been writing in English for a long time, and global readers are increasingly interested in and exposed to Indian culture.

Q) Is it difficult to make a mark as a woman writer?
A) I have always just thought of myself as writer. I think readers want a good story regardless of the gender of the author.

Q) Who are your favourite authors? Why?
A) My writing has been influenced post-colonial writers who trace the impact of colonialism on a culture or nation, and writers who undrape the inner workings of power and gender in a society. I have many favorite authors! Here are three:
*Isabelle Allende, who weaves family stories with magic realism and the mysticism of South America.
*Toni Morrison, who brings the weight of history and the past into her writing but also incorporates supernatural elements.
*Nawal El Saadawi, who writes powerfully about women pushing up against the rigid confines of Egyptian society.

Q) Are you working on any other novel at present? If yes, what is it about?
A) Yes I am. While my first book explores the crossings of centers and peripheries as well as the intersection of the living and the dead, my second explores the crossing of the realms of heaven and earth.

Q)There has been a great response to your book in the US, agreeing on all the genius (and lexical beauty!) of the book, don't you think it reinforces the belief of "Superstitious India". Is this newfound curiosity for India a 26/11 bomb blast effect.
A) All societies have their ghost stories and superstitions, and there is such a rich tradition of the supernatural in India. When I started writing the book almost ten years ago, I discovered fairy legends, mystical traditions, references to ghosts in the Vedas, and a 115-year old English translation of Sanskrit Vampire stories which I have woven into my novel. Even as I bring these aspects into the story, the affluent Mittal family in the center of my novel is very modern, and its matriarch staunchly rejects anything to do with superstitions. So there is a little bit of a tugging between the forces of modernity and supernatural in my story.

Q) How is the experience of revisiting Bombay through the route of words? Is it a way to stay connected or to detach?
A) I spent many childhood summers in Bombay. I even studied one semester in the city when I was in college so I feel very connected to it. It is the city of my roots and over the past decade, I have immersed myself in 1960’s Bombay through family memories, newspaper articles and magazines, historical books, music, and movies such as Mughal-e-Azam that brought that time and place to life for me.

Q) A few words for your readers...
A) Haunting Bombay takes place in a bungalow on Malabar Hill, the old elite colonial enclave. It opens on a day that a granddaughter in the wealthy Mittal family is being bathed by her ayah. The ayah is called away and when she returns, she finds that the child has drowned. She of course is immediately banished from the bungalow, but the family’s lives, including the servants, spin out from that unalterable moment in time.

I began to wonder what the child and the ayah would have said about what happened that drowning day. What if we could hear their versions of the truth? In the story, my thirteen year-old protagonist, Pinky Mittal, who has been adopted into the family, must find the courage to seek the truth which is oftentimes repressed by those in power. Pinky becomes haunted by the ghost of the dead child who is communicating outside the mode of human language. My story is an exploration of how the privileged can hear the voices of the dispossessed - about what sacrifices and risks must be taken in order to actually hear. Her journey is one of finding the truth of what happened but also finding the courage to face that truth because oftentimes truth itself can be terrifying.

 

JANUARY 2009: VIJAYDAAN DETHA

Priyanka Mathur talks to Vijaydaan Detha, renowned Rajasthani writer of stories like Duvidha which was later made into a movie called Paheli. Excerpts from the interview:

Q) Tell us something about your latest work?

I have just finished my work on Rajasthan ke saat Premaakhyan. I have written classic love stories from Rajasthan after doing their psychoanalysis. I have rewritten the stories in such a way that the story becomes contemporary but the essence is not lost. I knit fantasy and reality such that the folk tale’s soul remains intact.

Q) How do you choose your subject and what inspires you to write?

I never think about what I have to write. If I think about it I might not write properly. I just open my pen and start writing without a break. I write what I hear and see around me. I first write in Rajasthani and then translate it to Hindi. I had got a project of writing a compilation of love stories of Rajasthan from Bhartiya Gyan Pith.

Q) How did you start writing?

I started with writing poems in 1960. After writing 300 stories and 1300 poems in Hindi I got inspired by Russian writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, to write in my own language. Those are the writers who got famous by writing in their mother tongue.Then I too started writing in Rajasthani

Q) Who do you look up to as your mentors?

My mentors are Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay in Bengali, Jacob and Rabindranath Tagore. I had read their creations (books) many times. I have read Jacob’s Darling and Ward no. 6 about a hundred times but still it seems as if I am reading it for the first time. This is the nature of classic literature.

Q) Films are being made based on literature since years. Many of your stories have been made into films, have you seen them? How close is the depiction to the original stories?

I had always been conscious that my only two centre points would be writing and teaching. I had never approached any filmmaker myself, they came to me. I have not seen all the films being made on my stories. Yes, I have seen Paheli. One should not compare written story and a film because every art form has its own needs and jumps. The things that can be expressed by puppets can not be done through any other means. Everything develops in its own way. No art form is supplementary to other. Neither of TV, film or theatre can destroy an age old folk art like puppetry. Despite technology and newer mediums of entertainment, puppetry will continue to hold its importance.

Q) How do deformities affect art?

Deformity is more artistic. Plays are played since Kalidas’s time but Jacob and others are different at the same time. The difficulties of world and needs of people keep on changing. Emotions are different but media is powerful. Theatre is different from films which is a very modern form of media and scientific development is necessary.

Q) How do you see the relation between literature and films?

The needs and probabilities of different art are different. The probabilities in puppetry are different from that of theatre. The characters are wooden puppets in puppetry whereas there are live characters on stage. Film stage has not ended puppetry but added an art. Films brought literature to small towns and villages. Single person can read book at a time whereas film is viewed by crores of people at the same time.

Q) Why does a bhasha/vernacular writer not get the name, fame and importance as an English writer/author gets at the International level?

Persian was the official language before the British came. The entire advocacy was done in Persian or Urdu. Gradually Hindi became used in judicial courts. When British arrived they translated Indian literary work such as the folk tales, epics like Mahabharata, the Upanishads, or the Holy Quran into English to understand countrymen, the culture and their values.

No one is to be blamed. The regional division of our country is such. A Bengali person would only read Bengali, Telugu reader would read only Telugu. Therefore vernacular writers remain restricted only to a limited readership. As opposed to English which is accessible to more people due to its commercial value at least. Hence a person who reads or speaks Bengali and a person who reads or speaks Telugu both have access to the books written in English.

Q) What efforts are required to boost vernacular literature and writing?

Efforts are done when any language gives a person employment and provides him livelihood. If cow would not graze then she will not give milk, literature is like milk.

 

NOVEMBER: MANJULA PADMANABHAN

Manjula's latest novel, Escape was launched last week. The writer talks to Ashwini Muley Kulkarni about Escape and a few other things.

Q) Tell us something about Escape? The cover page has a flower and bloodspots...
A) ESCAPE is about a little girl called Meiji, who has been kept hidden for sixteen years by her three uncles, Eldest, Middle and Youngest. They live in a country (... it might be India, but it remains unnamed) where an oppressive regime of power-obsessed generals has destroyed all females. Meiji has not only been well protected during this time but  her physical development has been suppressed, so she appears to be a child. However, her uncles realize that the situation cannot last forever. So Youngest and Meiji set out on a dangerous journey in the hope of finding a better future for her. The book is about that journey.

Q) Did you always want to write Harvest as a play? I mean such props for a play would be unthinkable, like the ones (dustbin) in Endgame. It was easily translated into a film.
A) Oh yes -- HARVEST was conceived entirely as a play. The gadgets used in the story are really not that difficult! Think of the magical effects used in plays such as A Midsummer Nights Dream or even mythological Indian dramas -- there's very little difference between magic and science fiction when it comes to staging special effects. A good director and set designer can easily convey the necessary effects -- and I don't mean in an extremely expensive, technological way: it just takes imagination.

Q) Being also an artist, children's book author, what's your take on graphic novels, do they have the same charm as "traditional" novel forms?
A) Like any other literary/artistic form, a graphic novel is only as good as the novelist can make it! However, it's very easy for the line between a "comic" and a "graphic novel" to be blurred. I haven't yet been tempted to produce a graphic novel (though I am very often asked if I'm planning one) because none of my current ideas are suited to that treatment.

Q) Writing about Hidden Fires, you had said, 

"The despair I felt in 2002 was no different to what I had felt during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 or while reading about the pogroms against the Jews in Hitler's Germany. There is a sameness about violent mobs that transcends nations, communities, religions, politics. We go to war because of imagined differences between ourselves and our enemies but we are all much more the same than we are different. It was in the name of that sameness that I wrote these pieces."

Don't you think we are a relatively shameless species and we do not feel that guilty or rather we don't learn our lessons? Consider this, all our riots have been due to religious constraints, none like a civil rights movement.
A) Well, that (i.e., the statement "Don't you think we are a relatively shameless species and we do not feel that guilty or rather we don't learn our lessons? Consider this, all our riots have been due to religious constraints, none like a civil rights movement") is not MY statement, though I understand why many people feel that way. At this moment, with Barack Obama's extraordinary victory behind us, it becomes possible to see more clearly the point I was trying to make -- that hope isn't an empty fantasy, that sometimes it's possible to fashion reality out of dreams.

Q) When most women writers, especially Indian, are writing in the safer (expected?) feminist arena, most of your writings are about current socio-political scenario. Comment. (Jaya's character though has feminist undertones)
A) I don't set out to write ideological rants. I don't make either-or choices based on a pre-determined set of beliefs. It's the other way around: a story-idea begins to form in my mind and as it forms, I look for ways to bring it out of my head and into the world as a short story, a novel, or a play. I look for the truth of a situation/idea and try to fashion it into something honest and believable. If it attracts idealists from one camp or the other, that doesn't surprise me or sadden me. When I'm writing -- or painting/drawing -- I don't think of myself as a "woman" -- I don't believe in small, tight boxes labeled "male" or "female" into which all of us must force ourselves to fit -- so it's difficult for me to answer questions which depend on tight definitions.

Q) You have written across genres, you write SF and also write Children's Literature, any favourites?
A) I think I like SF best -- but I often wish I could just write quiet, friendly stories about ordinary people in ordinary worlds! For some reason, I just don't have ideas of that kind. Nowadays, editors will approach writers with an invitation to write a story within a particular "theme" -- and the first ideas that pop up in my head are usually utterly bizarre.

Q) Who are your favourite authors?
A) I like a very large variety of books -- I like specific books rather than specific authors. I am often asked this question and I usually give the same answers: THE MAGUS by John Fowles, THE SEA OF FERTILITY by Yukio Mishima, CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller, ALICE IN WONDERLAND/THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Lewis Carroll, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS by Kenneth Grahame -- and so many others that it becomes very difficult to control the list! The most recent book that I hugely enjoyed was THE ART OF MURDER by Jose Somoza.

Q) What next?
A) Perhaps a sequel to Escape ...

 

 

 

OCTOBER: SUMANA ROY

Author Sumana Roy's Love in The Chicken's Neck has been nominated for Man Asian Award Longlist in conversation with Ashwini Muley Kulkarni, she ponders about how love has stopped being the subject of novels anymore...

 

Q) Why ‘love’ in the Chicken’s Neck?
A) The “Chicken’s Neck”, as you might be aware, is a nickname for Siliguri, a small town in Bengal where I live and where the novel is primarily based.
Why “love”? Will it be too lazy to say that I liked the sound of Love in the Chicken’s Neck? Why “love”? Well, this is not really a “love story” in the way we usually understand a love story. I’m bad at paraphrasing stories, so I won’t even try to tell you what the novel is about. Only one thing: have you noticed that no love stories are written these days? If you look at Indian Writing in English, you will perhaps be hard-pressed to name a few love stories. No, I don’t think that this is a deficiency of any literature, but yes, it is something that caught my attention. In my novel, Tirna, the young girl is looking for love without knowing it; does she find love at the end of the novel? I won’t tell you that. Just this: I wanted to explore how the idea of love has changed over time, in life and in literature.

Q) Your story ‘My Mother’s Lover’ touched us.
How much courage does it require of a writer to bring the archetypal mother down the pedestal and make her a human?
http://pratilipi.in/2008/08/my-mothers-lover-sumana-roy/
A) For this I didn’t require courage: this was partly because my mother, with all her fumbling and failings, never claimed a seat on the pedestal!
But seriously, what made me write this story? This was written about two years ago but I can remember two primary impulses. The first was personal: I found that I had too little time to write. The cook or the maid or the postman or the salesman or the insurance agent would always claim a share in my time, never my husband’s who, being an academic, also spent a large part of the day at home. I would be in the middle of writing a sentence and the cook would come and ask me about the seasoning for moong dal! I didn’t like that. My husband is a writer too and everyone thought that he could not be “disturbed” while it was assumed that I was available. If you ask me about the difficulty of being a woman writer, this is what it is, at least for me!
The other thing that forced itself into the idea of the story came from an interview of Anita Desai that I read at the time; there she spoke of writing almost surreptitiously, hiding her writing self behind the chopping board, as it were. I had also heard about the Bengali writer Ashapurna Debi hiding her writing from her family for a long time.
I began to feel – and this might have been because I was alone and living abroad and hiding my writing life from my family lest they thought that I was wasting time on this instead of being more responsible and writing my doctoral dissertation – that I was scared of revealing this other life to people who knew me socially. My husband would often tell his friends that I was working on a “novel” and I would immediately annotate that piece of secret information with some awkward defence. I still don’t know why I did that or continue to do that.
I also think that My Mother’s Lover comes from a different space – a space that is the writer’s own, a writer’s secret life that is energetic and pleasurable by dint of being secret. At least I like to think of it that way. So when the wonderful Rahul Soni, editor of Pratilipi, asked me for a story, I sent this one, almost like a secret. It is part of a planned collection of stories about writing and writers – lost manuscripts, translator-murderers, plagiarism, mis-readings, and more.

Q) Do you believe that writing is a political act?
A) Depends on how you define politics. All acts, and for that matter, all our gestures are political because they entail questions of choice. If I were to turn the question in a reverse direction, I think I’d be able to answer it better. Yes, politics affects my writing. But I’m not a pamphleteer-writer; in my writing, the political events that affect our lives happen elsewhere. I wouldn’t show you the reading on a Richter scale; I’ll show the black and white photograph of your parents falling to the ground because of the tremor.

Q) Co-incidentally, all our past ‘Author-of-the-month’ have been women,
and I can’t help asking this question.
How easy or difficult is it being a writer in India?
A) I think being a writer anywhere is not easy. You must realise that every sentence – at least for a pathologically slow writer like me – is like a stroke on the canvas. As you write, you are moving from sentence to sentence but also, at the same time, you are moving towards a structure. For me it is difficult because I am never quite satisfied with my ‘translations’, the translation of what’s in my mind into what’s on the screen in front of me. But in this aesthetic discontent, in this Platonic tussle lies the writer’s pleasure. This pleasure I wouldn’t exchange for anything in the world.
If you are asking me whether being a writer in India is more difficult than being a writer somewhere else, I’m not sure whether I’m competent enough to answer that question. I am still an unpublished writer, and every morning I look at the bookshelves in my study and hope that some day one of those spines will carry my name!
Being a woman writer: Again, I don’t know how to answer this. I’m married, I teach in a college, I write review essays, I write academic essays – I’ve been told that all these ‘activities’ subtract from “writing time”. But I’d like to believe that all these experiences add something to my writing too! I also think that the “full time writer” is a mythical beast! Or that half-belief is my consolation perhaps?!

Q) In the world of Flash Fiction, SMS poetry and Graphic Novels, where do you see the traditional novel form going?
A) I am – I must admit – a bit uncomfortable with the idea of the “traditional novel”. For that matter, I’m uncomfortable with anything that carries that glorified epithet “traditional”. The word “novel”, we seem to have forgotten, means “new”.
Your examples – flash fiction and sms poetry – seem to suggest the reign of brevity. Does that mean that the novel will lose girth? I don’t know. I think it is the subject that decides the leanness (or lack of it) of a narrative just as content decides form.
In Love in the Chicken’s Neck, one of the central protagonists is Bhaskar Sen, an Indian English writer. While talking about the “new” novel, for example, this is what he says: “…. I think the novel needs to become more accommodative. That is why I tell my friends, “Just open the backdoor and let all that you have hidden for so long come out. Open economy: that is my word for the new novel. Give everything some space in your novel but at the same time you must be a tough housekeeper.
…. Sometimes you have to talk a little more than necessary; it is like being alone in a very cold country. You have to watch your words form at your mouth, see the icy smoke develop into sounds on its outward journey to feel that you still have the child’s ability to surprise and be surprised. That is what the novelist sometimes needs to do too, to scream, to know that his ears can gather what his lips have thrown into the world.
…. If you ask me to supply you with another architectural metaphor, I would say it would be something like those medieval churches, raided repeatedly, burnt or broken by hostile neighbours and an uncompromising nature into ruins and then reconstructed, never really ‘restored’ as historians would have us believe, changing from baroque to gothic or even semi-Renaissance after a stung revolution, so that the old continues to survive within the new, and the new, often treated like an outcaste, is accepted with a sprinkling of holy water.
…. I have never really been interested in writers who use their writing with the sincerity of a vacuum cleaner; I have always been more interested in the dirt that remains trapped in its middle, like unformed stories, stories with no rights for passage in either direction, backward or forward. Writers, after all, are not cooks tweaking dough of flour into three ears and storing a mixture of their stories like a samosa.
…. I think, by now, you know what I am getting at. Yes, I am suggesting a celebration of the impure. Other genres are too strict with forms; they demand arrangements like dates on a calendar. Only the novel will encourage indiscipline and disorder but isn’t it only great art which tolerates chaos on a canvas by framing it in bronze for display in a museum? Disorderliness, Incompleteness, Fragmentariness, even wiped out pencil marks and eraser traces – this is the aesthetic for the new novel.”
I do not, necessarily, agree with everything that Bhaskar Sen asks of the “new novel” but yes, I am a bit tired of linear narratives; and manicured neatness.

Q) What next?
A) I am re-writing the first section of Love in the Chicken’s Neck and editing parts of it everyday. Also, I have been working on a collection of short stories titled SML for almost a year now. These are, as the title suggests (Small, Medium, Large), stories about clothes. At the moment, I’m working on a story called Tendulkar’s Pyjamas.

Sumana Roy's Love in the Chicken’s Neck has been nominated for the Man Asian Awards longlist. Her short story "Award-winning Writer" was selected for the anthology 21 Under 40 (Zubaan, 2007); her poems and essays have won prizes in India and British Columbia. A few of her poems have been published by Biblio and Tate Etc while her review essays have appeared in Himal Southasian, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Tehelka, Marie Claire and The Book Review. Her short essay won the second prize at the Kala Ghoda Essay Contest 2008.

 

SEPTEMBER 2008: SARAYU SRIVATSA

Sarayu Srivatsa’s The Last Pretence has been longlisted for the Man Asian Award, she talks to Ashwini Muley Kulkarni

Q) You studied to become an architect when did you realise that you actually loved studying structures of words?
A) Actually it didn’t strike all of a sudden. When I was studying in I was writing in magazines on architecture. When I came back to India I was editing magazines on architecture, I wrote my first non-fiction book called Streets Of India. It seemed like an accident then but I later realised that I always wanted to write.

Q) You have written books that are very socio-political in context like Out Of God’s Oven…
A) Actually Out Of God’s Oven happened because of the timings. It was a very topical book. India was celebrating its 50th Anniversary of Independence so it was about rediscovering an India that was changing. The Long Strider was a period book. There was variety in the topics.

Q) The Last Pretence is fiction and seems to handle an entirely different array of emotions.
A) The Last Pretence began when I was writing this book on streets. And you know, in non-fiction the structure doesn’t allow you to explore, especially when you are writing history. And I had always wanted to write about history in a more interesting and imaginative way. So when I was writing this particular chapter on Udaipur, I wrote it out like a dream sequence. I wrote out the event as if I had dreamt it. Of course the publisher edited it out. He had a good laugh and said you can’t do that with non-fiction. That is what triggered off the possibility of exploring fiction in itself.

Q) How easy or difficult is it for a woman in India to be a writer?
A) It is not easy or difficult, I think women have made a position and status for themselves. But I know what you are saying because even abroad if you remember J K Rowling wrote with her initials because she thought the publishers might not be interested if they know she’s a woman. There’s this feeling that if a woman writes crime fiction the men are not going to buy it. I was writing a book on underworld of Bombay which I had come to know so well due to my previous book. In fact, when I was in Japan I was writing as Mr. Sarayu, so somewhere I think it is embedded in our minds, our upbringing, those disappointments we have had during the process. But I do think there are so many women who have made a position and who made positions open for other women. It is true that where publishers are concerned they do think there’s a smaller market for women.

Q) It seems that although women do write non-fiction, when it comes to writing books, they tend to choose feminine topics like motherhood, domestic life.
A) Yes, simply because they are more comfortable. When you write fiction you have to very instinctive. You belong to the society, you cannot say I am liberated, I emancipated so I’ll write anything. I have grown in this society so it comes like a reflex to write about women’s topics. But I prefer to write about women and men’s problem

Q) It is impossible to be talking to Sarayu Srivatsa and not mention the legendary Dom Moraes. You have co-authored two books (Out of God’s Oven and The Long Strider) with how has the experience helped you?
A) We were working on our third book when he died. First of all we were two different individuals, him being a man, a very famous writer and disciplined writer and not only has he travelled a great deal but has immense exposure, so he was worldly-wise which I wasn’t. To things that I would get excited about he used to say, “Oh, this has been done before.” There was a certain amount of guidance.

But in spite of the differences of him being a man, me being a woman, of different age groups and coming from different social and cultural backgrounds, as an individual I was as obstinate as he was. If we were to write a book together the very fact that he was famous and established was undoing. The fact that he was established stopped him from exploring, experimenting or trying various topics.

Q) How did Dom react when this book was proposed?
A) When I had proposed this India-travel book he was unwilling as he had never co-authored with anyone before. Also it would have cost a lot of money. So then I raised the money with help of some friends and some sponsors. When the money part was over he was worried how we would manage the creative process. He was worried about what his readers and reviewers would think about writing with a lesser known writer. He also warned me that the media was going to focus on him and totally neglect me or be over-critical. But I said that was okay.

But when the entire buzz was about Dom and hardly any mention about me, it was really heartening that Khushwant Singh said that Dom was the best writer on this side of Asia, and he had finally met his match for the first time. Even Hindu had praised so it was worth the effort. It was Dom who called me and showed me those articles. So that sort of fostered me.

Q) A lot has changed since you co-authored Out Of God’s Oven in 2003 if the book was to be written now, would the India still be a fractured land?
A) I couldn’t say that it is healing and not fractured but it probably changing direction. It is still fractured but not in physicality but in people’s mind. As a nation we got invaded so many times that in the process we lost a lot that was ours. All that we are calling change is really a consumerist culture emerging only in the urban part of India. There is also an increase in the number of strikes, farmer suicides and terrorist attacks. All this is just economic change and not social change. When we began writing, liberalisation had just begun and we could see the rawness of the country.

The frightening thing about writing about this India is that it is a very superficial, economic face of India. Yes, we are marching ahead in terms of having new airports, malls etc. but what has it done for the poor? But I do accept that when any developing nation like India moves toward capitalism, this is bound to happen.

And one mistake we did in the process was, we tried to educate the women about the importance of education and family planning instead we should have educated the men because you need the pragmatism to realise that that section of society is still male-dominated. But good things are happening gradually.

Q) I am sure lots of people want to know why it took you so long to come up with this book.
It isn’t really so, because fiction takes time and I just intended to explore it to find out how imaginative I could be. I had sent the book with a friend of mine to an editor who liked it a lot. But for on the personal front I didn’t feel I was ready so I took the book back. I wasn’t sure if I had the focus and attention required for the book. It was an entirely different book dealing with the underworld and builders of Bombay. But I was not quite content.

But since I knew this life (builders, underworld) so well there was no point in calling it fiction. Subconsciously you will pick up people you know and make them characters. After working on it for four years I decided to leave it and picked up this totally fictitious character from this novel and decided to write about him.

And I am glad about this because now if I decide to write about the earlier story, my writing has become more structured and I feel I have more control over myself.

Q) I was reading some old articles where you have mentioned this episode, about two Japanese women, who questioned your being Asian, how does it feel to be longlisted for the ‘Man Asian Awards’?
A) Oh you have completely taken me by surprise. It definitely feels good to be nominated with other Asian contestants. And you know there are 11 Indians. They feel we are not Asians. I think they will notice. Our cultural and psychological make-up is very similar. We all have a string of commonality running in our rituals, customs, and the superstitions.

Q) Tell us something about The Last Pretence.
A) The Last Pretence is about Mallika whose firstborn daughter Tara dies at birth, finds herself incapable of loving Siva, except when she believes him to be Tara. Siva, eager for his mother’s love becomes increasingly confused about his gender, and his sexuality, and he is pushed into a terrible psychological condition and a tragedy unfolds.

This happens in Machilipatnam, a small town on the Coromandel Coast. A publisher friend of mine was surprised to know that I had actually never been there but only knew a few general things about the place. But in fact, has helped me weave magic into it.

Sarayu Srivatsa has written extensively on the evolution and growth of cities in newspapers and journals. Her book Where the Streets Lead (1997) won the JIIA Award. She won the Picador-Outlook non-fiction writing award (2002), and has co-authored two books with Dom Moraes: Out of God's Oven, nominated for the Kiriyama Prize, and The Long Strider. The Last Pretence is Sarayu Srivatsa’s< first work of fiction.

 

AUGUST 2008: FARZANA VERSEY

In an email interview to Dhvani, Farzana Versey talks about her book A Journey Interrupted: Being Indian In Pakistan

Q: I think your book in ways tries to say that, "Yes we have our differences but let's leave out the politicians and begin the peace process." Comment.

A: The 'leave the politicians out' bit is right, but I don't see why we need to start the peace process. Such processes are in fact a political agenda. Socially, we do not 'need' peace. We just have to get rid of this anguish about a lost land. No one asks us to start the peace process with Nepal or Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh. And we do have political turbulence with these nations? So, why Pakistan?

Q: How was the response to this book in Pakistan?

A: They are still waiting for it! But after reading my interviews and a couple of extracts, some Pakistanis have written to me to say that I have rubbished their country. It is not true and a rather simplistic reading; it is like saying that when I critique a poem, I dislike poetry. Yes, a few expat Pakistanis have read the book. Some have picked holes and asked why I did not have paan at a landmark place and someone else wants to know why I am obsessed with Gandhi when I don't even like Gandhi....There was an unusual opposite reaction another Pakistani who said, "Why do you not like that poor man?" I could only say, "It is because I do not like poor people!"

You haven't asked me about the response in India. I find that curious. It is written from an Indian perspective, in fact, far too much at times. I shall answer the unasked question anyway. I have got letters from small towns even before the book was formally launched. These are not just letters congratulating me. They have take the pains to point out page numbers and what those words there meant to them or in some cases did to mean. This is immensely gratifying for what people would call non-fiction. It reads like fiction, I am told, and it only buffers the cliche that truth is stranger than fiction.

Q: In A Journey Interrupted, is there a hint of a nation interrupted? Does your being an Indian take the taste out of the peanut butter?

A: If we use the Charles M. Schulz quote, "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love", then let us just say that which was 'unrequited' was mutually so! To talk about the 'nation interrupted' would mean having epic ideas. I prefer the minutiae. It is true that Pakistan is in denial just as much as India is. But Pakistani denial is more obvious.

Q: Do you think the Indo-Pak conflict has begun to lose relevance when so many singers, actors and models are making a mark in the Indian Film Industry?

A: How many? Where is Meera? And I do have strong reservations about why they can make it here - at least the singers - and we cannot. How many of our singers have performed there? It seems like we let them participate in our music shows, it is entirely possible that it is a strategy for TRPs. Do we realise that it makes Pakistan, our neighbour and supposedly close to us in cultural terms, seem like Mogadishu. This is weird.

Q: You write blogs too, does it give a sense of freedom, to be easily politically incorrect.

A: I have always exercised my ability to be politically incorrect, whichever forum I choose to express myself in. I don't think we should have different standards for writing. A doctor uses the same instruments whether s/he is performing a surgery at a private or public hospital, right? A writer should follow the same principle. The technique for an article may differ, but in my case that too applies rarely.  Blogs only give me an opportunity to indulge my vanity a bit more.

Q: Do you have feeling that in India there's a double identity conflict? One is that of the faith and the other is class? Consider this statement by Shah Rukh Khan, "My success is a biggest proof that India is secular."
A: India has multiple identity crises, but if we restrict it to one community then faith and class do come into play. A Shahrukh Khan can talk about his success being the proof of secularism because that is the yardstick - achievement. If Shahrukh Khan did not live in a mansion and was resident of Behrampada doing odd jobs then he would be just a number (and I do not mean Number One). I find it odd that we still have to talk about proof for secularism. This is a sign of insecurity.

JULY 2008: GAURI DANGE

 

On a telephoner from Pune, Gouri Dange, debutante author of 3, Zakia Mansion, in an exclusive interview to Ashwini Muley Kulkarni talks about the novel and lets out on the good news that the second one is already on the way, (pun clearly intended)

Q: Which is the question you are tired of answering by now?
A: Oh actually no such thing. Unless it is something  generalised like, “So what’s your novel about?” That is such a broad term. Just those otherwise you are welcome to ask anything.

Q: Your book is being called a Neo-Cinderella story. Comment
A: (Laughs)Yes I know. Love story is just a part of it. It is injustice to reduce anybody’s novel to one line. If may be someone was forced to reduce it to one line due to space constraints then ok. But that it was in the hot picks recommendations so it's justified in a way.

Q: You have written both fiction and non-fiction which one is more interesting?
A: Both are interesting. Non-fiction comes easier because I have been doing these columns. I have written in these weekly. It is just expressing your opinion. It is easier to articulate and formulate your thought. With fiction there is so much crafting to be done. You can’t just ‘say’ what you want to say. It is situations to be made, characters, dialogues, different voices. People ask me, “How could you write in so many voices?” Fiction is difficult but definitely more interesting.

Q: Tell me have you been able to write a single word post book launch?
A: Yes, yes, since the time in April when the publishers were planning the book launch to be in June, which I thought is going to be a tough job with Bombay rains. But I rather left it to the publishers to market it and all…I didn’t try to micromanage. I just did the essential and started on the second book.

Q: That’s good news!
A: (Laughs)Yes, I mean, I am sure there might be a revision but I am working very intensively and I expect my first draft to be ready by September…ready enough to be shown to editors.

Q: Who are your favourite authors?
A: Ummm…I like Graham Greene very much. He writes in this way that…it is a study of dark side of human nature. I particularly like one of his books called Travels with My Aunt. I liked reading Alexander McCall Smith's writing with his understated humour. Actually what I like to read is not specific era, or a specific author, the common thread running through all the books of my choice is the study of human nature. I have been reading Naipaul and…among contemporary writers I like Vikram Seth very much. Among young authors I like who…let me recollect her name…Kanika Gahlot both of us have contributed in the Penguin anthology …I like Nick Hornby.

Q: And do they influence your writing in any way?
A: No, actually you see this very morning, I wrote for a while then I decided to relax and read the book that I was reading. But I do it constantly it tends to interfere with my writing process or editing. Actually people write in their own voices and create a whole new world full of characters. So really I need to distance myself a bit. My friend Tanvi Azmi, who did the reading during to Pune launch said to me that, “It must be so great because you are so content in your head, for you it must be like what not to put rather than what to put…”

Q: In fact, that is my next question, has there been a moment when you felt that the novel is going to be never ending?
A: No actually if you see it’s a very thin novel. People have asked about why it is so, that they wanted to know more about this person or that they were wondering what happened after that. But no it was clear in my head.

Q: So you blog too, is there an urge to be blunt or say be politically incorrect at times?
A: Yes, as a person I am very direct. I am not blunt in the sense that I don’t have a ‘don’t care’ attitude. My bluntness is I’ll say what I believe in without worrying how others will react to it. It’s like calling a spade, a spade.

Q: Your protagonist is a Muslim…
A: No, no particular reason for her being a Muslim, she just happens to be. She is a typical westernised, English-speaking, Bombay person. But I could easily set her in a Pune, Prabhat Road bungalow family. It’s not a treatise on Islam or anything it is just a setting. I have neither played up or played down her being a Muslim, it’s just by-the-way. Her problems have nothing to do with her being a Muslim, it’s just a backdro; just like Bombay is a backdrop.

Q:What do you think is the future of Indian English Writing? When will books written by people living in India make waves like the ones by writers of Indian origin?
A: Yes that’s true, most books that made waves are mostly by authors of Indian origin. But look at Arundhati Roy, her book has a universal appeal and she stays in India. Or look at Chetan Bhagat, his success is commendable, he writes about common people’s lives, nothing exotic. And he is showing fantastic circulation figures. There are all kind of readers and there are all kind of writers. People who like to write high brow kind of writing have their following and people who write racy time-killers have theirs. So yes, there is no dearth of either writers or readers.