Anuradha Kumar in Conversation with Kabir Deb

KD: Hey! It’s so nice to meet you, finally. So, at first, I would like to ask how are you doing? How is life treating you?

AK: Ups and downs, it’s always a rollercoaster. But it’s nice to see how things look whether one is up in a cloud or deep in the doldrums.

KD: As a short story writer and novelist, what, according to you, manifests better in a prose than a poem and vice-versa?

AK: I can’t write a poem to save my life and poets plumb immense depths, and the range they can encompass—from the minutiae of life to its very secrets—is inspiring. The poets I love, I do so because of their sense of style, their wisdom and unexpected humour.

And if you want to step in with your readers into a different world, a different time, prose might work better, as in a work of historical fiction or a detective novel.

KD: In your collection of short stories, Coming Back to the City, you have a story on the mill-workers’ strike of the 1980s. I was reading Narayan Surve’s book of poems on the same theme a few days back. How do you find resonance with the incidents which happen but stay as a footnote in the history books? Also, how does Bombay or Mumbai resist the tremors of politics and the reality of hunger?

AK: That’s interesting. Bombay-Mumbai has always been a political city. I sometimes feel it resonates with the reality and change than most other places. It’s history – for it has always faced ‘outward’, to sea, I mean—has made it adaptable, receptive to new ideas, change, and always welcoming and accommodating (for the most part).

Coming Back to the City is an interlinked collection of stories. The stories cover a period from the upheaval the mills experienced from the 1960s onward to the 2000s, when mill-land increasingly gave way to the high-rises you see now. Not just social scientists but filmmakers, writers and artists have evoked this period in lot of sensitive detail – Arun Kolatkar, Kiran Nagarkar, Shanta Gokhale, Sudhir Patwardhan (his paintings, don’t you think?), Narayan Surve, whom you’ve mentioned, Dilip Chitre, Vilas Sarang, Jerry Pinto—among those I’ve read—and I am sure I’ve missed out many others. These stories have always been there, but somehow and unfortunately, have receded from our consciousness, but then it is such stories which have made Bombay the city it is now. 

KD: It is quite evident that through your prose works, you serve food of every kind to those who believe in restricting their diet. In your recent book, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, the mystery is much more about how cold our existence is before the larger reality. The story is more about stitching many worlds for the readers. India started to find its soul through food and it became one of the markers of diversity. It also became extreme for the existence of a diversity of food. How do you manage to cook many individuals and their lives for the sake of a dish which we know as a novel?

AK: The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is a work that encompasses several genres, or so I feel. It’s a work of a) historical fiction, b) a mystery or detective fiction, c) a Bombay novel and d) even literary work, for the complexity of emotions it tries to explore.

I read once that the mystery novel can be deceptive and all-encompassing. Writers have used the mystery novel to describe society, its ethos and past, and even the divisions and nuances that prevail.

And since Bombay, the city, has mattered to me, and always will, I moved naturally to writing a book like this, with an emphasis on its cosmopolitan past. There have been so many different Bombay novels, diverse and evocative, and I came to writing this particular one in a way to belong to a city I once lived in for a long time. But the writing itself, how I came to do it, happened in a seamless way or so I feel. For I knew about Mark Twain’s visit, the book that he wrote, and I’ve, over the years, read books set in this period in this city and one day the idea came to me, and I decided to write it out. And I hope I could do more along such lines.

KD: You write about the visuals of Mumbai. With time we have imprisoned the sensation of a place where our first cry and smile bloomed. In a world where literature has to do justice to every geographical place to stay relevant and to not stay broke, how important is it to talk about the root or the core more than the branches visible to everyone?

AK: The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is set in Bombay of 1896, and I ‘used’ the central crux— ‘Mark Twain’s disappearance’—to reveal what the city and this period was like in the late 1890s. I wanted to bring the city alive, its streets, the way it looked then, the smells, the colours, and the noise, for the reader. Some reviewers of The Kidnapping of Mark Twain have said that Bombay itself is a character in the novel.

I wanted to make this experience of reading a very visual one, so that it’d stay and remain with the reader for a long time after the very act of reading.

Writing itself is a complex task these days, and writers have to do more to bring readers back from so many other distractions. For example, many writers tie-in their work with a movie deal, which is fine, and I wanted to evoke this experience within the act of reading itself.

Kabir Deb: What are the perks of being a storyteller? Also, could you give us a little insight of the process of the telling you usually follow?

Anuradha Kumar: I like the fact that one can sink into a different world, a different time, to live with a range of characters for days, weeks, months at a time. It’s not that as a writer one becomes omniscient, though this aspect is also there, but that you learn so much of life in the process. In the act of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you experience empathy, heartbreak, despair, envy, all the emotions you can think of. When you come up to the surface, you are transformed in mysterious, indescribable ways.

Since you also ask about the process: I try and ‘see’ the scene and the setting in many a case. Sometimes that has an impact on the characters, right? In The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, it just doesn’t do to say Henry loves Maya, but I wanted to point to the little things that show how she gets under his skin, how every small memory of her niggles him, and here setting matters – the breeze that brushed a strand of hair onto her forehead, the light that plays on her face, things like that. 

KD: It’s a world governed by rules and trigger points. How should a writer write the characters of a story? Also should a writer appropriate the characters of a story for the society, or his/her vision towards all the characters be free of the readers to write a good story?

AK: I think what you say at the end is what should work. There are all kinds of people making up this world of ours and one should write of people in all their complexity, and variations to make the reader, hopefully, understand. One reads, I thought, to understand the world anew, and writing of people different from ‘people like us’ is one way.

One has to start believing in his/her story. The characters take place in the world of the writer. So, it is very important for any writer to put trust in himself/herself. The build-up of a character is the work of the writer’s mind. Almost all the characters have the shade of the one who’s writing it. I have never believed in the fact that any writer will writer a character that s/he has not lived.

KD: In India, many poets are turning towards writing prose. Some prose writers like you still read and love poetry. A country which gave birth to poetry now has got publishers who are helpless but to only publish well-connected poets. What is the reason behind the creation of this trough in the realm of poetry and is prose free from it?

AK: When I was studying for an MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, the writer Sigrid Nunez gave a reading. I remember something she said after the reading: that she began her writing day by reading a poem, and while I have always read poetry, I did so, after this with her words in mind. Poets have a concise, sharp, minute way of looking at the world. They hone into the things that really matter, and the reader can somehow figure out what are mere distractions and what must be heartfelt truths.

I love what brave new independent publishers are doing in India. So many wonderful places giving voice to poets in places across the country – Copper Coin and Red River are publishers that come to mind, and there are magazines like yours that publish these young emerging poets. I am not sure of this ‘trough’ really. This is a period of change, and exploration, and all that we write must reflect and try and explain this. Sometimes, all one can do is act as observer, to notice everything with truth, for posterity’s sake.