I wanted to preserve short story’s power in a novel: Anuradha Roy

NAWAID ANJUM: Your novels — An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth and, now, Sleeping on Jupiter — may traverse different terrains, but all three of them stand out for their remarkable sensitivity. You seem to have tremendous empathy for your characters. How deeply do you inhabit the space of your characters while writing?

ANURADHA ROY: Is it like this for other people who write fiction? I don’t know. But the characters of my book carry on living in my head years after I’ve finished a book. It’s as if they are people I know and they are living the rest of their lives somewhere else, like friends who have gone away, but are not out of contact. The involvement with them is extremely intense while the writing is in progress, but it’s not as if they arrive easily or fully formed. After the book is written, I feel as if they were born the way they are in the book — and it just took me a long time and lot of effort to draw them out — but that isn’t true at all. They come to be who they are as you discover draft after draft what is ringing true or what is not alive on the page. They change as I write.

NAWAID ANJUM: What was the genesis of Sleeping on Jupiter? Like your previous two novels, it’s deeply affecting, deeply haunting and deeply lyrical. How did you zero in on Nomi? And the other sub-plots that seem to fit so well in the overarching themes of the novel?

ANURADHA ROY: Sleeping on Jupiter started as a long short story with three old friends going on a part-pilgrimage, part holiday. I was interested at that time in friendship “and the intensive togetherness of holidays can really test friendships. In that story, the women glimpse a girl on the beach whom they are judgemental about, without knowing her. I found after finishing the story that I kept thinking about that girl. Who was she really? Why was she there? And that was how Nomi came to be. Badal, too, was in that short story — again as a character whom the women encounter — and I felt I wanted to get closer to him too, think about him more, follow his life.

NAWAID ANJUM: Do characters wield enough control and power to change a writer? Do you ever end up writing something that the characters seem to urge you to? How often are you led by your own characters’ voices, going in the directions they choose to take you in?

ANURADHA ROY: There were several times during the writing of Sleeping on Jupiter that I wanted to give Nomi a different past — change everything in the narrative altogether — because I found it extremely difficult and painful to write about her. Also, with Badal, occasionally I wondered: could he love a woman instead? But neither of these options rang true. The characters don’t dictate anything, but once they are compelling and real to me, it is either going to be a different book altogether or the narrative follows their logic. There are only rare, longed-for spells in the writing where the book feels as if it is writing itself and the words are coming from a place you can’t identify — or tap again. Mostly, writing characters is a matter of work and deliberate thinking of the things they might say or do. The point is to do it so that the effort is not visible in the book and it feels as if the character is leading the narrative.

NAWAID ANJUM:  In Sleeping on Jupiter, the narrative keeps going back and forth in time. How important is the structure? Do you tend to fret over it too much?

ANURADHA ROY: Yes, I do fret over it a lot. The structure and voice are crucial. But discovering the right structure for each book involves indirection and discarding. With Sleeping on Jupiter, the structure took a lot of doing because of the multiple stories and shifts in time. The characters had to overlap and yet remain distinct — they are like planets of different orbits that come close and then drift away again. There were also the shifts in time and perspective that had to be done without it turning mechanical or predictable. Plus, the present day narrative was to take place over just five days. I was half-dead by the time I felt satisfied with the structure.

NAWAID ANJUM:  How difficult is it to get the right narrative cadence? How do you achieve the narrative rhythms and tension?

ANURADHA ROY: If you mean the prose, that is entirely by ear. I write something, I read it back the next day and most of the false notes leap out at me and then it’s back to the beginning. If you mean the pacing of a book: I think it needs a lot more nerve and conviction to write a slow, calm narrative than one where something keeps happening. If you read something like Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, for example, or Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or any of Alice Munro’s stories or Kawabata’s Sound of the Mountain: an infinity of seemingly small things build up into a web of meaning. They are beautifully paced, profound, and interesting on every page without any apparent effort to seduce. With Sleeping on Jupiter, I wanted to preserve the elusiveness and concentrated power of the short story in a novel.

NAWAID ANJUM: The preservation of the concentrated power of the short story can be tremendously challenging. It has its pitfalls and many novelists with similar aims tend to falter. You, however, do it all in deeply evocative prose. How do you plan the details? What do you have to dwell on to build the several rich little fragments in your novels?

ANURADHA ROY: I make lots of notes. I have notebooks and notebooks. I jot down things I overhear. I feel wildly thwarted when I visit a non-English speaking foreign country and can’t eavesdrop. And there are odd little things, details of people, places, conversations, that lodge themselves in my head that pop out and come in handy when I’m writing. As for the prose, I read a lot, all sorts of stuff and I suppose it seeps in and influences the way I write. I think it’s like music: you are born with some ability and then you just need to listen and listen to music and become more musical.

NAWAID ANJUM: In Sleeping on Jupiter, when you set out to write, were you conscious of its various threads — the effect of religion on people’s lives, its many oppressions and misuse and the intrinsic violence of love?

ANURADHA ROY: Not when I set out to write it, no: I mean I don’t settle on certain themes before starting a book. But yes, that’s the way it went, and in the end, the place of faith in people’s lives is quite central to the book. There are so many ways in which the lives of the people in the book are marked by religion, either as trauma or as a source of strength or just indifference. And, yes, the violence of love too. I found it very painful to write the passage where Badal has to face the anguish of Raghu’s rejection.

NAWAID ANJUM:  Was it crucial to contrast the dissonance of your characters against the relative serenity of the temple town, a serenity that is only on the surface?

ANURADHA ROY: I don’t think of temple towns as serene, far from it — but I know what you mean. I’m reading Dostoevsky’s Idiot right now and am reading the section where the characters are in a country cottage in rural Russia, a place called Pavlovsk. Birds, trees, calm and peace — the works — but the passions and hatreds concentrated in that cottage set the pages on fire. In a sense, in The Idiot, the countryside offers the silence these passions can rage in more vividly and audibly. You see this in many of Chekhov’s stories too. I find it quite useful to write with a “small” setting for this reason.

NAWAID ANJUM: The idea of escape is central to the narrative. What kind of escape do you think your characters are looking for?

ANURADHA ROY:  That’s quite true but it is as much search as escape. Each of them, in different ways, is in search of freedom — from fear or from family or from pain and rejection. What they are looking for is a different reality.

NAWAID ANJUM:  How crucial was the choice of locating Jarmuli by the sea? How important is the choice of places to you? 

ANURADHA ROY: It’s vital. Until I know where the novel is going to happen, it doesn’t. After The Folded Earth, I had felt I had to be by the sea for the next novel. I’ve no idea why I resisted that and instead wrote a chunk of a novel, now discarded, which was set in north India. It was dead on arrival, I could see that — though not only because of the place. I need to be able to see, smell, hear the place even if it is an imagined place.

NAWAID ANJUM: With a disturbing theme as child abuse, it was easy to have got carried away. But while writing the scenes you exude the same self-restraint, the same economy of prose as we saw in your other two novels.

ANURADHA ROY: There is that “All my words come back to me with shades of mediocrity” thing that happens somewhere during the repeated re-reading and rewriting and then editing yourself is not difficult. There is a point at which I get ruthless and discard so much that I have to be told not to be stupid. I also give my manuscript to a few people whose judgement I trust and when they tell me something is not working I pay attention.

NAWAID ANJUM: What do you read when you are working on a novel?

ANURADHA ROY: I read a lot of non-fiction. Especially the books of writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski whose journalism uses many of the tools of fiction in non-fiction. I also read poetry and crime fiction when I am writing. I tend not to read serious fiction because I don’t want to be overpowered — emotionally or stylistically — by a different narrative. One of my great pleasures at the end of every draft is a few months or weeks in which I feel free to write whatever fiction I want to. When writing Sleeping on Jupiter, I read the Bible quite a lot, hoping to imbibe some of the strength and beauty of its prose.

NAWAID ANJUM:  Your very first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, put you on the global literary map. How did the novel happen?  Was that the story you were carrying with you till you found out how to tell it? How did Mukunda and Bakul come into being?

ANURADHA ROY: I had no idea I was going to write a novel, had no conscious desire to write one. But one day I wrote a whole chunk about Bakul and her mother without knowing who either of them were. This was one of those magical chunks that happened more or less on its own. I was writing it so fast, in a kind of scrawl into a notebook, I hardly had time to think consciously. After that I put it away for several months and when it didn’t disappear from my head I started structuring a novel that would find a place for them. Later I thought it had something to do with a semi-autobiographical essay I had written about a year earlier, called Cooking Women, which was about a widow in a joint family household in Calcutta. I lived in a joint family for some of my childhood and I suppose that fed into the narrative. In that sense maybe I had been carrying it around in me for a while, but not otherwise. 

NAWAID ANJUM:  Ranikhet, where you live, bristles with life in The Folded Earth. Was it relatively easier to write?

ANURADHA ROY: I began The Folded Earth well before An Atlas of Impossible Longing was published. This time I knew from the start it would be a novel: it was easier only in the sense that I was prepared for the long haul and the dead ends, the miserable days when not a word comes out right: all of that. I knew I had to plan it out, write a rough draft to get the whole thing clear in my head and spare myself many wasted months of work. It did make a difference that I live in Ranikhet. I drew a lot from my own experience of the place.

NAWAID ANJUM: Many of your characters in The Folded Earth — Maya, Diwan Sahib, Ama — seem to have flesh and blood. Is it because you draw them all from lived and shared experiences?

ANURADHA ROY:  Only a few of the characters are actually drawn from life — that is, they started out from people I’ve known — and then of course they invariably change in the writing. Diwan Sahib is the distillation of a few anarchic, deeply knowledgeable, interesting and eccentric old men who were friends and neighbours in Ranikhet. You could set your watch by the hour they settled down with their pre-lunch drink and yet their minds — and tongues — were fantastically sharp. Ama is very like some of the local hill women I know. They graze their cows when I’m out walking and the conversations with them certainly fed into the novel.

NAWAID ANJUM:  How do you approach a novel? Do you have a kernel in mind when you set out and work around it? How often does it happen that you don’t know where you’re going and work it out through several drafts?

ANURADHA ROY: It’s a bit of both. I know roughly where I am headed, but I know also there will be many changes of direction along the way. And, yes, there are innumerable drafts.

NAWAID ANJUM:  The rich tapestry of the landscapes in your novels is very fascinating. Do you have to work on them a lot?

ANURADHA ROY:  It really depends on what I am writing. The Folded Earth was about the natural world and its fragility. It was a very descriptive book with several meditations on landscape. But Sleeping on Jupiter is different: it’s much more urban, despite the presence of the sea. 

NAWAID ANJUM: There is a visual quality to your writing. Do you have to visualise it before you write a scene?

ANURADHA ROY: Yes, I have to be able to see every detail of a scene when I am writing it. Every scene plays in my head like a film. 

NAWAID ANJUM:  How do you decide on the choice of a person? In The Atlas of Impossible Longing, for example, you begin with the third person, but allow Mukunda to narrate his own story in the first person towards the end. You juggle between voices in The Folded Earth and Sleeping on Jupiter, too.

ANURADHA ROY:  The start of the section in Mukunda’s voice came to me so powerfully, I had to interrupt what I was writing to get it down. After that it just seemed right that the power relationship in the household would be turned on its head with a change to Mukunda’s perspective and voice. But I go back and forth a lot between first person and third person and in The Folded Earth and even in Sleeping on Jupiter there are sections in second person as well. It’s interesting to do different voices in the same narrative and make it work.

NAWAID ANJUM:  When you have a story ready, how do you decide on the beginnings and ends? When do you know you have to stop?

ANURADHA ROY:  You stop when there is more to be said: when everyone’s inner lives have been altered by what has taken place yet there are still things that might happen to them. You stop at a point when you feel you can close the door and say, this is as far as I am letting you in, no further. As for beginnings, all beginnings are crucial: thirty pages of dullness or mediocrity would kill most readers. 

NAWAID ANJUM:  What role does memory play in your writing?

ANURADHA ROY: I’m not sure you mean the play of memory within the narrative or my own memories. 

Let’s say both.

ANURADHA ROY:  All writers draw from both imagination and experiences of course, while writing. And I realised after writing Sleeping on Jupiter that remembering and forgetting and the power of memory is one of its main themes.

NAWAID ANJUM: How do you work on the emotional intricacies between characters — Maya and Diwan sahib in The Folded Earth, Nomi and Suraj in Sleeping on Jupiter?

ANURADHA ROY: I don't know, really. So much of what goes into writing fiction is hard to explain without sounding pompously mystical. But some things do happen by a combination of instinct and thought and are hard to unravel. I can only explain with an analogy from ceramics — “life flowing for a few moments perfectly through the hands of the potter,” was how the renowned potter Bernard Leach described the beautiful pot. When the life flows perfectly as you are writing, the relationships on the page work too. 

NAWAID ANJUM: Many of your characters seem to be buffeted by grief — they are people coping with love and loss and longing, torn between past and present, at the cross-roads of tradition and modernity. Do you think their grief and loss and suffering and wistfulness lend an elegiac touch to your prose?

ANURADHA ROY: That’s true, but I don’t know what it does to the prose. I’m not sure I have the distance to be able to know. 

NAWAID ANJUM:  How much do you subject your writing to self-censorship? How much of that has got to do with your instincts as an editor?

ANURADHA ROY: I don’t think self-censorship and editing are connected because editing has to do with language, structure and so on, and self-censorship is when you stop yourself writing something because you worry about the consequences. I haven’t had to consciously self-censor except in this last book where there was just one sentence I removed because it might have caused legal problems for my publisher in India. 

Although I think it’s pointless to self-censor to avoid this kind of trouble — we’ve repeatedly seen that books don’t have to aim to offend to do so. The other kind of self-censorship, where we don’t write certain things that we know will hurt or outrage people close to us: I am sure I do that to some degree, of course. But in the end I write the book I want to write, and advise sensitive relatives not to read it.

NAWAID ANJUM: Does the role of an editor aid the role of a writer?

ANURADHA ROY: I think a gifted editor can make a fundamental difference to any book, draw out its full potential. The most vital thing for me is to be able to trust the editor’s judgement and to have the sense that we are on the same wavelength. If the editor understands and loves the book and is involved with it as deeply as I am, I’m willing to work endlessly on the manuscript until we are both satisfied and usually this results in a much stronger book. Editing is an extremely generous act — all of the editor’s ink is invisible in the end — so I feel hugely grateful for editorial suggestions from friends who read drafts, and editors who work on the book. What most writers loathe is an editor who combines condescension with ignorance and doles out lofty advice without any notion of the author’s intention in the book. That is a horribly frustrating situation.

NAWAID ANJUM: What are your literary influences? Do they change over a period of time? Is there any specific genre you’re particularly fond of reading?

ANURADHA ROY: Everyone reads a variety of writers, I suppose, and I’m no different. One author or the other takes me over for some months and I can’t read others without feeling dissatisfied; sometimes it remains an enduring love and sometimes I never feel like going back to that writer. I’m addicted to crime fiction, that is the only consistent thing in my reading: I love Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum. I worship Alice Munro with a kind of slave-like adoration and currently I am rediscovering the thrill of reading Dostoevsky whom I hadn’t gone back to since university. Bibhuti Bhushan’s fiction, which I loved in English translation, made me relearn how to read Bengali — I had not been taught Bengali after age 7 or so and had almost forgotten even the script. I felt moved and altered by Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja — in English translation — and Johnny Toppo, the homeless tea-seller in Sleeping on Jupiter, came in a sense from being haunted by the people in that book, whose forests and villages are under threat. Where would they go when their home was taken away from them? Books you read work on you in mysterious ways. I suppose over the years they become the compost from which all writing springs.

NAWAID ANJUM:  Have you ever thought of taking up short stories or poetry? Or are you too committed to novels?

ANURADHA ROY: No, I am not a poet although I read quite a lot of poetry. And if I could write a good short story I would, but so far I haven’t been able to.

NAWAID ANJUM: While researching Sleeping on Jupiter, you mention in the acknowledgments, you went on a trip with your mother and aunt. Could you tell us something about that trip and how it fed into the narrative of the three ladies?

ANURADHA ROY: I went on this trip with them some way into writing a rough draft of the story. We got ourselves rooms in a nice hotel, and they were so spirited about everything, there wasn’t a dull moment. I saw things from a different perspective because of them, it was a very happy time. But some years after that my aunt was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and then I found myself going back to the trip to work out if there had been signs of it and we just hadn’t noticed anything unusual. So, yes, the trip did cast both light and shadow on the novel. 

NAWAID ANJUM: You dedicate Sleeping on Jupiter to Rukun, Biscoot and Christopher. Could you share their centrality in your life?

ANURADHA ROY: This question would need a whole memoir. The book is dedicated to the three of them because it wouldn’t have got written without them.

NAWAID ANJUM: Please tell us something about the research for the Nordic bits in Sleeping on Jupiter. What kind of association did you have with Per Bangsund?

ANURADHA ROY: I’ve been to Norway twice, but only for the releases of my other books. I did not go on any special research trip, there was simply not enough money for that. I had to double check details with friends and read up, that’s all. Per Bangsund was my Norwegian publisher and the Norwegian translations of An Atlas of Impossible Longing and then The Folded Earth were the very first of the translations to come out. He infused publication-time with huge excitement, got me across to Norway twice for the books and was already making plans for Sleeping on Jupiter when he died of cancer.

NAWAID ANJUM: Do you read the reviews of your novels? Do they affect your creative process?

ANURADHA ROY: Yes, I read the reviews. I admire the ones that see things about my book which I didn’t, especially if they are also positive about the book. The obtusely bad ones are infuriating because of their incompetence more than anything else. But all of it is exciting immediately after a book has come out: when I start other work, I lose interest in reviews, and no, they don’t affect how I write.

NAWAID ANJUM: What is your writing regimen like? Do you have to go offline when you write since Internet can be very distracting? 

ANURADHA ROY: When I’m writing, I start early so I’ve done a solid amount of work in the morning, and I go for lots of long walks. I don’t feel like meeting too many people if I am focused on finishing something so I tend to get quite unsociable. If I am interested in what I am writing, I don’t remember to go on the Internet for long stretches, and when I do, it feels like a form of relaxation.

NAWAID ANJUM: What do you do when you take a break from writing, editing?

ANURADHA ROY: I don’t edit, but have lots of design work for Permanent Black, since I do all our book covers, and because that is a different kind of work it feels like a break. I do pottery — I have a wheel at home and an all-consuming regime of preparing clay, making glazes, throwing pots and finishing them. I also paint: on furniture, on kettles, on plates and bowls: basically any surface I can find. And there are dogs: many strays whom we are attached to and care for, plus two at home. They don’t care at all for books or writing, which is wonderful.

NAWAID ANJUM: What kind of music are you into? Is there any specific genre you listen to while working on a novel?

ANURADHA ROY:  There are sections of Glassworks (by Philip Glass) that I was listening to a lot while writing An Atlas of Impossible Longing, along with a particular song from Bizet’s Pearl Fishers. I remember this for some reason — maybe because it was the first book. But on the whole, I listen to music only when taking a break; while writing it can feel quite distracting, or I have it on and find I haven’t heard a single note, which is a real waste.

NAWAID ANJUM: Do you think your novels would have a different texture if you were living in a city? Does Ranikhet offer relative quietness?

ANURADHA ROY: Ranikhet has much more solitude so it’s easier to get chunks of work done. But I can write anywhere.

NAWAID ANJUM: What are you currently working on?

ANURADHA ROY: My pottery. I’m trying to get work ready for the Delhi Blue’s pottery haat in December: I’ve never been able to have pieces ready for it in time before, but am hoping to this time.