1. When did you know you were going to be a fiction writer? Was there a particular moment or an incident that initiated you into writing? 

 

I would say, the habit of reading. Growing up, our reading was quite eclectic -- Enid Blyton, abridged versions of the classics, beautifully illustrated Russian masters published by Soviet publishers, and comics -- the Classics Illustrated series – I recall Phantom and Mandrake.  In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the printed book was the readily available medium to us, for entertainment and even to get a sense of the world. When you are a child, reading stimulates the imagination and curiosity, and gradually, new vistas open up. Reading prepares you for what the critic James Wood calls “serious noticing” – you observe the world more carefully, your senses expand and you begin to introspect, question things. Fiction invites you to share in new worlds, new people and settings different from your own, and yet there is a commonality because it makes visceral sense to you. On this connection that you form with the world, George Eliot says “Art is the nearest thing to life, it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact to our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

​

And there comes a time when you make that leap, that you too want to make sense of your world, explore your understanding of it, question it, and talk about it. When I read Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence, something clicked – here was a writer writing in English, with a quiet sensibility,  about the world of an urban, middle class woman. It gave me a certain amount of confidence that I too could put my reading of the world out into it.

 

2. As I was researching for this interview, I found and read your short story Sepia Tones which won the 1995 Katha Short Story Award. Do you ever revisit your earlier works? How do you feel you have changed as a writer both in terms of your voice and the themes you have explored in the past three decades?​

 

Writing to me, very broadly, is a process of sense-making, of exploring the world, trying to unravel the way it works. At the same time I am aware that any form of fiction is a stylised rendition of this engagement with the world. Muriel Spark, whose work I first encountered at the British Library and then sought out on the shelves, called her writing an “imaginative extension of the truth” – the emphasis I place is on “imaginative”. There are many themes that I have explored over my novels but what I hope has engaged my approach is a sensitivity to the different aspects of the theme, a nuanced rendering of what my characters face in the world.

 

Of the many concerns, Feminism suggests itself to you very early. Growing up, one of the earliest impressions one forms is the sheer amount of work that is expected of women – to feed and sustain their families. Sepia Tones was in a way an exploration of the Annapurna myth. In college, I recall we were all highly charged by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Later, you realise that things are not as black and white as you may have first imagined them, with a set of perpetrators on one side and victims on the other. On revisiting Sepia Tones, I am glad that it is centred on the very basic necessity of food – someone has to put food on the table! It also touches on the universal issue of loneliness – the elderly RamaRao mama is lost without his wife – the dependence of men is equally a problem. So, those nuances are there.

 

3. We see a focus on the city in several of your works. What draws you to explore the city as a central element in your narratives? For instance, in The Chosen (2003), Nagaratna moves from her village to the semi-squalid Vitthala Colony, a former village now engulfed by the expanding city. It feels like a deep ethnographic account of Bangalore. How did you manage to capture so many nuanced details of urban life and its effects on people in terms of their identity, sense of belonging or displacement?

 

When I start putting together my ideas for a novel and start thinking about the characters, the direction of the story, the main events, the setting too is part of the thought process. I think of the space, its concrete and abstract elements, how my characters will transact with the space, how and to what extent they will be affected by it, the part it will play in the story, and so on. I see it as a living presence. Three of my novels The Chosen, Monkey-man and Boys from Good Families are set in Bangalore. Sojourn, my first novel sees small-town life through the privileged eyes of a woman who moves into it from a city.  I depend to a great extent on my lived experiences of Bangalore, which I have seen grow and change. At the same time, I can view it objectively, as a place with a distinct history, where people stream in and out and have their own unique experiences – I see its potential for fiction. I do my reading not just to gather information but to put the required distance between myself and the space I am writing about to view it objectively. I try to balance out my subjective impressions with my objective reading, often with one feeding into the other.

​

Vitthala Colony in The Chosen and Ammanagudi Street in Monkey-man in many ways capture the footprint of the growth of the city – from undefined spaces into crowded, closely packed localities, where houses, apartments, and shops are stacked together. Vitthala Colony is infested with mosquitoes as it used to be a lake at one time!

​

In The Chosen, which is set in the 1980s and early 90s, the garment industry is a place where many from places like Vitthala Colony, especially women, are employed and a crucial scene, the denouement you could say, is set in a garment factory on the outskirts of the city. The spur for this aspect of the novel came from the women I saw regularly on the bus, who travelled long distances to reach the garment factory where they worked. Much after The Chosen was published, I happened to read a journal article about the garment industry boom in the 1970s and 80s. This was ascribed to the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) that controlled the international trade in garments and textiles from 1974 to 1994 and provided quotas which enabled garment exporters from the developing world to export garments. And this in turn gave a boost to the industry in Bangalore where several garment factories sprang up on the outskirts of the city, employing the plentiful semi-skilled labour, especially women. When I wrote the novel, I was not aware of the MFA; I recalled the animated women on the bus who had created a space of their own on the crowded bus.
 

Henry James, in his 1884 essay, The Art of Fiction makes a very pertinent observation on the powers of suggestion, on guessing the unseen from the seen, to capture the whole of a life from a glimpse that is offered. He speaks of an English novelist who was commended for her portrayal of the life of French Protestant young men in one of her works, and it was thought that she had had many opportunities to learn about them. She said that all she had had was a glimpse, as she came up the stairs, through an open door of the house of a pastor in the city of Paris, where a few young Protestant men were seated at the dining table round the remains of their meal – and from the image she had constructed their world. She knew what youth was, she was aware of Protestantism, and she was acquainted with French life – and her imagination had provided the connecting threads. So, that is the connect that writers need to make – they have to rely on their intuition.

 

4. A Girl and a River (2007) is an extraordinary book - it is one of my favourites and I have read it numerous times. A significant portion of the book is set in 1930s Mysore. The story intertwines personal and political histories. What did it take to balance the intimate, personal story of authority, and freedom within Kaveri and Setu’s family with the broader historical context of India’s freedom movement? Were there specific historical events or figures that inspired aspects of your narrative or characters (such as Dr. Lydia, a British doctor)?

 

I am so glad that A Girl and a River continues to resonate with you! I think all writers have the urge to confront the grand narratives of their times, of their societies, in some way or the other. The Freedom Movement is one such theme – I introspected on what it meant in my corner of the world and what the story was that I had to tell. The experience of the movement in South India is very different from that in the north. But I couldn’t find many novels written in English set in the Freedom Movement in Mysore State. One was Raja Rao’s Kanthapura which was published in 1938, before independence; the other well-known novel is R K Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, which was published in the 1950s, and reflects an uncertainty about the movement.  

 

For A Girl and a River I relied a lot on the accounts of immediate and extended family members. Actually, my first stirrings of interest arose over the anecdotes related casually by the older members of my family – it struck me that they were not aware that they were referring to events that were part of the narrative of history, and that they had participated, even in small ways, in what came to be recorded as history. I also referred to historical accounts from books, newspapers, journals, travelogues, memoirs, official gazetteers – the usual sources of “research”. As I created the fictional town in Mysore state where the novel is set, the continuum between personal stories and official accounts came into play, as also on the gaps between the two. 

​

Mahatma Gandhi’s visit and travels over Mysore state in the 1930s as part of his consciousness raising programme against untouchability are part of recorded history.  His visit was a detail I had to work into the novel. During one of our conversations, my aunt recollected that Mahatma Gandhi had visited her town once, when she had been a student, and addressed a public meeting in the school grounds. She spoke of the excitement, the crowd and the dust. When I asked her if she could recollect what he said, she replied that she had not understood his speech – he had spoken in Hindi!  That was my Aha! moment – the gap in which lay my story! 

​

Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, reminds us that when we remember, we don’t reproduce the past, we recreate it. Even with facts considered non-negotiable, the same evidence can be interpreted differently. Evidence is always partial and Facts are not the whole truth. In her words, It (History or historical accounts) “is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.’ So against the background of “facts”, the interior drama of the characters’ lives is what the writer of historical fiction can work with and has freedom to manoeuvre.

 

5. In the book, almost five decades later, the narrator confronts her family’s complex familial history. Was this also an exploration of how memories, legacies and weight of past choices carry forward across generations?

 

When we look back, our family histories and legacies, our memories, are very much part of who we are. To quote from Hilary Mantel’s essay again, on why she became a historical novelist, “We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place.” But fiction, by exercising choice, by sharpening certain memories in the interests of contouring the narrative or the story, tends to heighten the effects of such legacies – we could well dwell on the burdens of the past. Again, it is easy to judge in hindsight, and moreover history itself is changing, we are constantly reassessing facts, events and personalities, on the impersonal world stage or closer home, whether they were as seminal as they were considered at one time. So in A Girl and a River I had to convey the urgency of the tide of history along which the narrator’s family was swept, which affected their destinies, and also allow for my narrator who reflects upon how the events have come to shape her family and herself, to have a ruminative frame of mind, to become more accepting and mellow over time.

 

6. Monkey-man (2010) involves multiple sightings of a mysterious creature that brings misfortune or some sort of calamity. The monkey-man is a mythical character, but the description of the urban landscape of Bangalore, where the story is set, is very real. Multiple book reviews have noted that the creature is a metaphor for the ways in which grotesque urbanisation impacts people’s lives and the fear of the unknown. Tell us more about why and how you came to blend fantasy and reality so evocatively.

 

The city of Bangalore, for various reasons, came to encapsulate the changes set off in the 1990s in the Indian economy – handily abbreviated as LPG -- liberalisation, privatisation, globalization; in particular the city came to be the centre of the information technology (IT) industry. To sum it up, Monkey-man sees the city alchemise from the ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’ of the 60s to the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the new millennium through the changes in the lives of its characters. There are some, like the college professor, who are threatened by the changes and others such as the migrant labourers, the radio jockey and the worker at the call centre whose lives are changed for the better by the new opportunities for growth. The novel could not just be a nostalgic account of the past, it had to reflect the dynamism of the city, as also the tensions that the interface produced, of things bubbling beneath the surface which could get out of hand. And I needed a device to make that transfiguring leap.

​

Around the year 2000 or the beginning of the new millennium, when Monkey-man is set, there were several newspaper reports of sightings of a creature, half-man half-beast, from several cities in the country. Nobody got to the bottom of the mystery and people lost interest in it after it played itself out. 

​

And this suggested a connection. This could just be an instance of mass hysteria or it could be read as the propulsion of the fears of a society of things changing too quickly for their comfort and comprehension. These possibilities lying between the mundane and the fantastic provided the links, the transfiguring element, and the framing device of the novel.

 

7. Your most recent book, Boys from Good Families (2020) is about a young man who leaves for America and returns to Bengaluru 25 years later. When you were writing this story set across different time horizons in the same city, what was more challenging to depict - the physical space or the emotion that your characters felt about the place? What did you rely on more - research or experience?

 

Even as I was working on my other novels, the seed of the novel that eventually became Boys from Good Families was there in my mind and I had been thinking about it. I started speaking to people who had grown up in Bangalore between the 1960s and 80s, and also people who had been students in US Midwestern universities in the same period – my protagonist goes to the US to study and lives in Chicago for a period of time. He returns to Bangalore after 25 years, and along with the physical changes to the city, he also had to register the changes in attitude and perceptions, even values, and there his young niece and nephew came in handy. 

​

By the time I came to write BFGF, the Internet with all its globe spanning devices and tools had become available, and people were not fighting shy of sharing their experiences on the Web. So, other than the conventional research material I also had access to blogs, vlogs, YouTube videos, amateur films, and a lot of official documents too, which provided the immediacy of experience in some ways.

​

BFGF was a take on another grand theme – the immigrant story, closely woven with the questions of individual freedom, perceptions of success – the antithesis of the conquering hero.

 

8. In addition to writing fiction, you also serve as the editor of a magazine at an academic institution. What are your strategies for actively engaging with both academic and fiction writing, which I assume are different in structure and creative processes, and perhaps require varied skill sets? How do you make time for writing fiction? (this last question is also for aspiring writers juggling a day job).​

 

Till recently, I managed an academic journal, which involved among other things, reading research articles and editing copy. While the creativity of writing fiction does not come into play here – in fact it should be held severely in check – what is common is that all writing needs to be structured, there has to be coherence and logic in the narrative, and you find that those skills are actually primed and developed in such a role. 

​

It might help if aspiring writers could get jobs in contiguous spaces but without tapping into the same creative energies. As writers of fiction we know that our stories or characters or ideas are always with us, unobtrusively, whatever else we do. I think it’s necessary to do something connected with your fiction project every day – even if it is to read of jot down rough notes, and once the idea comes to a head, to write every day, even if you edit it out the next day – but not obsess over it if it isn’t happening.

 

9. For a young reader exploring your diverse body of work, which book would you recommend they start with? Do you have a personal favourite among your works, and what makes that special to you?

 

It’s difficult to say – depends on what the reader is looking for. If you like neat, structured plots, it would be Monkey-man. For readers who want character-driven books with messy plots, a lot of back and forth, it would be A Girl and a River and Boys from Good Families. For those who dwell on details, it would be The Chosen and Monkey-man, and for a taste of small-town life, my first novel, Sojourn.

 

10. What is your earliest memory of cities in fiction? Are there any favourite books about Bangalore or other cities that you would recommend to our readers?

 

One of the earliest descriptions of city life that I encountered was in the Sangam era poem Maduraikanchi – it captures the bustling city and describes the setting and activities of ancient Madurai so vividly. My most recent engagement was with New York, the setting of Breakfast at Tiffany’s which I re-read while writing BFGF. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy comes to mind. I recently “listened” to Mrs. Dalloway, an old favourite, set in London – which was very different from reading it. Cities have been host to so much fiction and movies – there are so many to recount. Bangalore is fertile ground for legends of its own, and there are writers working on different genres – crime, science fiction, fantasy -- experimenting with different modes. I am familiar with some of the writing and hope to read more. There is Vivek Shanbagh’s Ghachar Ghochar, Anjum Hasan’s work, Anita Nair has a Bangalore-based detective and Harini Nagendra has the Bangalore Detectives Club series. Recently, I was intrigued by Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Analog/ Virtual, a dark, futuristic projection of Bangalore.

 

11. Before you go, I remember the orange gojju recipe you published in Mint Lounge—I tried it, and I must tell the readers, it was spectacular! Does a writer carry that creativity into the kitchen?

 

Happy to know the orange peel gojju turned out well! It is not something from a gourmet cookbook – more a homely recipe that is improvised upon in the family kitchen and handed down through word of mouth. I can’t say about creativity, but in this case, it was the urge to share something authentic with readers, with others who would care to try, something that you have enjoyed and which one can’t get off the shelf or as a ready mix.