anuradha roy

Cylinders are to ceramics what the alphabet is to writing, and the first thing all potters have to learn is to throw a cylinder. This sounds much, much easier than it is.

I’ve been at potters’ wheels in various places for years but am still a wobbly, faltering potter wonderstruck if I manage to pull something off. I began at university, in the Round Church at Cambridge.

Below the Church, like a secret in the basement, was a little pottery, kiln included, for any student who wanted to come and throw a pot or two. There were no teachers, nobody to tell you a thing. At that time there was no Youtube either, to learn from a vast world of potters out there. You were given a key to enter the ancient grotto -- any time of night or day -- and then, mostly in solitude, you stared at the wheel that was spinning, and tried to figure it out. I have a pot I made then, and wonder how I made it at all.

My first real teacher, Bani de Roy, was a student of the illustrious Shoji Hamada, and she had a studio in Gulmohur Park in Delhi. She was an austere disciplinarian of the old school who believed in practise. And practise, practise, practise. For two months -- or however long it took to get it perfect -- she compelled her students to make nothing but cylinders. You were fired up by visions of gorgeously glazed teapots, bowls and urns; but if she glimpsed you trying out anything but a cylinder, that hot Delhi barsaati turned instantly Arctic.

What is a cylinder, speaking ceramically? It is the most basic shape, a straight-sided tumbler of sorts. Once made, you can billow it out into a bowl or close it up into an urn, or rim it for a lid, go with it wherever your imagination takes you and however far your control of the clay lets you go.

Attempt at a bud vase; by Anuradha Roy

But first you have to get that cylinder right.

Selsbo Keramik cylinder

A breeze.

You prepared your clay (that’s another story), weighed out balls of 500 grams each and then you sweated blood and tears over the wheel. For days you couldn’t centre the clay. Or you could not pull up the walls. If you did pull the walls up to your disbelieving satisfaction, you managed to warp the rim or poke a finger through it just as the damn thing was getting to a magical 5 inches. Or the walls were of uneven thickness. Or there was an airbubble trapped in the clay that popped out as an angry blister as the walls thinned. Or you made it right but cut it off the wheel badly. Or you had made the base too thin (or too thick). In each case, you had to plop your painstakingly-prepared clay into the slop bucket, and go back to the beginning.

At first if you managed to create an object that looked somewhat like a cylinder, you beamed, looked around for appreciation. Bani-di (that is what we called her) frowned and thought about it, then said: Throw it away and start again. She was about seventy then, white-hair in a small bun, tall and already creaky, with spectacles that the light bounced off. If it involved work, she smiled very little in the first few months and when she did, you went home walking on air.

After telling you to throw whatever it was away, she went back to reading her newspaper, or to the giant pot she was throwing effortlessly on another wheel even as you slumped and listened to the sound of your heart shattering.

And this of course, is why making pots and writing books feel so much alike. You throw it away and start again. And again.

A PS
Colonel Rajvijay Rai of the Kumaon Regiment, whom I met in Ranikhet because of my books, emails:
Your article, 'Writing a Cylinder', rekindled memories of my childhood. My brother and I, after school, would walk home through a settlement of potters and I would often watch with amazement the deftness with which the artisans would craft one earthen cup after another out of a seemingly unending loam of clay. The clay itself was sourced from a riverbed, or a pond, and was carted long distances in an improvised wheel barrow. What struck me then about this craft was the relative silence in which the potters worked. Rarely would one find a potter chatting with someone or a radio blaring nearby while he was on the wheel.
Now for some trivia gleaned from my rural upbringing. The potters belong to a caste called Konhaar and are distinct from the Kanhaar (the palanquin bearers). Both of these are supposedly lower castes but are not treated as untouchables. In fact, the Kanhaars along with the Nau or barber, play an important part in the so called upper caste marriages and funerals. The Konhaars would also be employed in laying the tiled roofs of rural houses.

Nizamabad, a small township about 30 km from my hometown Azamgarh, is known for 'black' pottery. The trick, I am told, lies in mixing goat dung with the clay and baking the pieces in a covered clay oven which lends a glossy black sheen.

The pottery is thereafter finished with hand etched designs which are filled with a powder mixed with mercury. Please see the attached photo to get an idea of what I have described."

Ando Mura, Yamato, Japan (about 1939)

Dear L,
How your family and your work getting on?
Nearly everyday we talk about you but it is too far Yamato and St Ives... Here plum blossom and nightingale came, harbinger of spring. I think you remember this best season of Japan.
This year I had five kilns but only five good works (not good, ordinary) and we wish to break up all the others (50) but if we break up all of them we must ask 100 yen each for the five works. Then who will buy? Can they buy? Well if they cannot buy how shall we live? Think! Only five pots out of 100 pots, two months hard work, 150 yen gone.
I will stop. You know well.
Plum blossom, nightingale and the rain of Yamato -- poor, but we enjoy so much. I feel the plum blossom and such kind of flower deeply coming into my mind year by year. Last year I did not feel as I enjoy this year.
I wish to speak to you in the quiet room but I cannot explain well. Bah! English!
Please write to us.
Yours
Kenkichi Tomimoto

Handthrown bowl by Bernard Leach

Extracted from Bernard Leach, A Potter's Book, 1940.
Here, Leach reproduces a letter from a potter friend with whom he had worked for many years in Japan in the 1930s. By 'five kilns' Tomimoto is referring to five kiln loads full of pottery. He means to destroy the 50 pots he considers imperfect. In the present day asking 100 yen would mean roughly 770 USD.
Leach's book was for many years a reliable resource for potters and people interested in pottery. Leach wrote that the perfect pot was one which possessed "that right relationship of parts which gives vitality -- life flowing for a few moments perfectly through the hands of the potter."

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Ranikhet's own traditions and its unique culturehave trumped the charmsof Durga Puja, says Anuradha Roy
(The Telegraph, Sunday 28 September 2014)

Anuradha Roy

Late one October evening, a man in a gilt crown, lush false moustaches and polyester dhoti dashed out from Munir Bux Steam Press and Drycleaners, loped across the road and leaped over the parapet into the space below. His only witness at that hour ought to have been a leopard wandering in search of rashly adventurous dogs. Today was different. Argumentative Indians abounded:
Look, there's Manoj.
Not Manoj, can't you see him, he's still at his shop. No, that's Nandu Dhobi. He's Lakshman this year.
Nandu? That three-foot midget as Lakshman? It's someone else.

Below the parapet was an arrangement of tables held together as a stage with ropes and prayers. It had a gleaming maroon backdrop. A hirsute man cradling a mace sat on a stool at a shop nearby, slurping tea. A thickening audience was exchanging raucous notes. Then the microphone crackled, the stage creaked, and Nandu Dhobi appeared in his crown, wig, and robes. His voice had acquired an unfamiliar gravitas. His audience of neighbours stilled themselves, inexplicably respectful. Those of us who had been sheltering over hot rum in the restaurant next to Munir Bux's hauled ourselves over to the parapet for a look.

October nights in Ranikhet are cold. Silence follows the swift fall of darkness as people shut themselves into the warmth within their homes. Incarcerated in Almora jail, Nehru expressed an understandably jaundiced view of hill nights: "Life hides and protects itself and leaves wild nature to its own! In the semidarkness of the moonlight or starlight the mountains loom up mysterious, threatening, overwhelming, and yet almost insubstantial... there is no breath of wind or other sound, and there is an absolute silence that is oppressive in its intensity. Only the telegraph wires perhaps hum faintly, and the stars seem brighter and nearer than ever."

In the nine days preceding Dussehra, the sun still sets on Ranikhet's hills at the usual time but silence is drummed out. Few stay home. Late in the evening the blackness is broken into clumps by beams from fluorescent torches as people spill out from houses scattered far apart and climb the slopes to converge on Mall Road for the next stage in Ravana's eventual destruction. Dusshera is no homecoming for Durga and her entourage here. Unlike most other towns and cities in India with five Bengalis and a collection box for chanda, Ranikhet has nothing Bengalis would recognise as Puja.

In his essay The Descendants, Arvind K. Mehrotra describes the manner in which the Bengali Diaspora made alien cities its own: "A long migration...brought increasing numbers of Bengalis... to Gangetic upcountry in the second half of the nineteenth century...even today if one goes [to Lukergunj near the station in Allahabad] one gets the feeling that one has come to a different part of the country. The shop signs are in Bengali and banner ads for Ranga-Java Deluxe Sindur hang outside."

My ancestors were part of this nineteenth-century migration and they went first to Agra and then to Jaipur, where they put down roots. Intrepid early settlers of their kind soon enough set up Durga Pujas in different towns. My mother remembers spending all day at the Jaipur Puja-bari through her childhood in the 1950s. There were similar probashi enclaves in towns like Lucknow and Allahabad and Kanpur. My brother and I grew up mostly outside Calcutta, and anywhere in India that we lived, October meant the familiar blend of adda and anjali, overeating, overdressing, and variety-show.

In the hills of Kumaon too the Bengalis arrived, but Durga Puja did not. Grubby, hole-in-the-wall restaurants advertise shukto and maacher jhol for the tourists, but that is all. How is it that the Bengalis did not colonise October in the hills, as they did in other places?

Snapshots of Kumaon till the 1970s bring alive an extraordinary cultural and spiritual efflorescence: from Allaudin Khan, Zohra Sehgal, Ravi Shankar and Bismillah Khan to Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Anandamayi Ma, and Timothy Leary, it is as if, at this time, the world came to Kumaon. Many who passed through or settled here were Bengali: Rabindranath retreated to Ramgarh after the death of his wife and returned to write parts of the Gitanjali; Vivekananda came to the Kasardevi temple in Almora when writing one of the essays published in From Colombo to Almora. Uday Shankar set up his dance academy at Almora, where he performed Ram Lila ballets (on open-air stages surrounded by deodar and chir). Monica Devi, wife of G. N. Chakravarti — the first vice-chancellor of Lucknow University — took sanyas as Yashoda Ma and, with Ronald Henry Nixon, a British fighter pilot turned Cambridge academic turned Vaishnav ascetic, set up a renowned ashram at Mirtola.

When I got to Ranikhet, this blaze of cultural and spiritual activity had died down, but I encountered people deeply influenced by a dogma-free spirituality I attributed to Mirtola. I would sit in Amit Sen's verandah and listen to stories of the ashram, which he and his wife Anjali, as well as writers like Bill Aitken, had been part of in their time. Now the ashram was almost deserted and most disciples had scattered, but it remained a live presence.

Amit's nook in Ranikhet was a cottage perched like a monopoly block on a vast board of a meadow chequered yellow and green with ripe corn. He alone was left of the Basus and Boses of Ranikhet. Amit's wife too had died. From all accounts, she had lived it up before: gin and bitters in picnic flasks and bird-watching walks despite a crippling cancer. Now Amit only had the gin, and in the evenings rum, which he often shared with his cook, Joga Singh, or the next door cowherd Himmat Singh, whose bi-annual bath ensured that his presence lingered in the room for hours after the last drink.

This is the thing about Ranikhet: you might buy your vegetables from Pandeyji in the morning and get your gas stove fixed by Raju in the afternoon, then meet them both at a wedding in the evening and swap friendly insults over a meal about their performances in the Ram Lila the week before. The fortresses of class and hierarchy are less forbidding here. Everyone is addressed with the familiar tum rather than the more formal and distant aap. Gifts are always reciprocated even when you can only afford to give a lauki or a bunch of bananas in return. An acquaintance lurks beyond every loop in the road and, bank manager or goatherd, he must holler out a "Namaste", then demand information about every aspect of your life: why were you at the doctor's that afternoon, is your water supply ok, why are you greying. Gossip is both fundamental right and social glue. This is a small hill town cut off from elsewhere, a world in itself.

The clarity in the air, not just from the mountains but from Mirtola, the ease with which they were absorbed into the daily lives of local people, their minute numbers, their homes scattered across ridges and valleys: perhaps all of this dissolved the need in Ranikhet's Bengali Diaspora for the familiar joys of Puja. Like an aging fax message, Durga Puja faded. It moved to the realm of happy but unlonged-for memories.

It's happened to me too. October and November are among the loveliest months in Kumaon, when the clam-my grip of the monsoon eases, the sun dazzles, flowers bloom, the snow peaks emerge from their summer-long hibernation and the festivities begin. For me now October means loafing around in the tinselled bazaar in search of the latest in clay dolls from Meerut and the diyas and anti-monkey catapults sold only at this time. It means ritually buying a new steel utensil from Kundan Singh's shop, whitewashing our house, painting the flowerpots and stairs with red oxide, stringing up marigold garlands, eating bhang chutney, singhori and puas at Pahari friends' homes. It means fuming at the ceaseless, tuneless droning of bhajans on a megaphone that kills the whistling thrush's song right through the Navratras. It means watching the postman in a sari playing Sita as hundreds of tiny lights sparkle on far-off hills at night.

I haven't been in Calcutta during Durga Puja for 25 years. If it's October, it has to be Ranikhet.

Anuradha Roy is the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth

‘It was noted with envy and admiration that the breakfast in these households consisted of eggs, toast and jam instead of vegetable bhujia with paratha, and that even the women had begun to use spoons, though only little ones, to eat. Guests to tea were served cake and sandwiches instead of samosas and barfi. In the evening there was Scotch whisky and soda….instead of keorasharbat’—Sheila Dhar of her family’s move from Old Delhi to Civil Lines

My name is Manju Arya. I think I am 64 years old. My mother died when I was one and then my father married again and went away. My grandmother, my father’s aunt, brought me up in her house in a village near Kathmandu. She was not rich but she gave me laad-pyaar (affection), and did not make me go to school because I didn’t want to go, and by the time I was older I was too shy to go. I played in the rice fields near the house all day and when the dhaan (paddy)came from the fields I took it to the chakki (flour mill)to get it threshed. That was my work. The rice was enough for us for the year. We ate rice for all our meals. When my grandmother died, those days ended and I had to live with my father and his second wife.

Manju Arya (photograph by Anuradha Roy)

I eloped at sixteen. My husband was the valet to the Ambassador of India in Nepal. He travelled all over the world for his work, to Belgium, to America, to other places, and he says he loves Belgium most and after that, Ranikhet. My husband is from Garhwal and the marriage was frowned upon by my father and stepmother. They didn’t speak to me again for many years. At first when I came here to Ranikhet with my husband—I think it was early in the ’60s—I was quite scared of the jungles around this house and the people whose servant he was. But one day I was doing something and I heard Memsahib shout for me loudly. From the garden of the main house, she was waving towards me with hands glued up with wet flour. I ran up to help her. She had been trying to show the khansama (cook) how to make something out of a book and because he was slow, she got impatient and put her hands into the dough but it was so sticky she couldn’t clean herself. Memsahib could get very agitated very quickly. I cleaned her hands and then kneaded the dough.

No, of course Memsahib didn’t know how to cook and she never cooked. But she had a cookbook in a foreign language and after that day she called me more and more. She would sit on a stool and read from the cookbook to herself and then tell me in Hindi what it meant, what the processes were. In this way I learnt to make tarts, cutluss (cutlets), chicken rosht (roast) and puteen (pudding). Some things I learnt I didn’t like to do: for example putting sharaab (alcohol) into puteen. I can make thin pancakes and also bread. I make soups out of khatta ghaas (wild sorrel) that grows all over the hills and in the monsoon I hunt for junglee tulsi (wild oregano) to put into food. Chicken I cook with rosemary—rosemary bushes work as short hedges around our house. In her salad sometimes I added the leaves of nasturtium, the orange climber-and-creeper which flowers even through cold December. We had no oven and no special pans so I made the tarts on a dekchi (cooking pan)lid and baked them on a chulha (wood stove). For breakfast, when it was in season, I would give Memsahib strawberry—there was a small patch in the flowerbeds in those days—and malai (cream)from the milk. Sometimes we bought cream from the Military Dairy. There were always more strawberries than she could eat, so we also tasted them. Now the patch is dead.

In our own home we eat daal bhaat (dal-rice) in the morning every day. Memsahib, all her life, gave us two kilos of chana daal to cook every month. In those days it was the cheapest daal. In winter we might have rotis made of madua (millet) which is very warming and bhatt kidaal (black soya broth), which is also warming. When it’s cold, the children pluck big lemons from the tree and get maltas (oranges) from the market and then make the pulp into chutney with dahi and chilli and then they eat it all in the sun. It’s too sour for me these days. When it snows my grandchildren run about playing in the cold and pick up lumps of clean snow to mix with gur and eat as ice cream.

If I ever brought leftovers home from Memsahib, nobody would eat them but my husband and me. My children think all that English food is tasteless. They don’t like anything that is not chatpata (tangy). I’ve slowly started to like soups. I also like tuna, and omelettes with cheese, and coffee. My children don’t like any of these things. My youngest grandchild begs his mother each time she goes to the market to get her just one aloo tikki (potato cutlet), on the sly. But her mother says she can’t do that. There are too many children in the house and we can’t afford aloo tikkis for all of them, except occasionally. I tell them I’ll make you tikki at home, but they say it’s not the same thing.

We’ve never eaten out in a restaurant to fill our stomachs—but if we are stuck in the bazaar long past mealtime then we might eat a samosa or a tikki. One day my granddaughter, who has a new job, took me to eat at Rajdeep Hotel in the bazaar. We shared a plate of chowmein. It was expensive, twelve rupees for that plate. But youngsters want these things, like noodles. They always want Maggi noodles in their tiffin. Look at the tea shops in Ranikhet now: they all cook Maggi noodles and sell it as a snack! The children want ice cream, they want cakes with cream. All these things are too expensive for us. But for their birthdays we buy a small cake and I make chhole(chick peas). For some special days we cook mutton or chicken curry. Earlier when we bought mutton the butcher would know from the small amount that it was for our own use and would always give us pieces of scrap and gristle although we were paying the full price. If we bought bread we would always find we had been given a stale loaf, sometimes with fungus. My daughters, who are very smart, began to tell the shopkeepers they were buying for Memsahib and then they got better quality. My daughters will never be servants like I have been all my life. They are all BA pass, they have different ideas.

I have lived in Bombay with Memsahib also. All along the wall in front of our house there were a line of stalls selling dosa and paav bhaji (bread and vegetables). Early each morning the stall owners would start chopping kilos of onions and coriander and peeling potatoes and then cooking. Then, at lunchtime all the office-goers would crowd the stalls. I had never eaten a dosa before. They had great big tavas (griddles) on which they would spread the batter really fast and bake them golden and crisp. I could smell their sambar(spicy lentil curry)from the balcony: it used to make my mouth water then and even now, I love eating sambar. My middle daughter has learned to make it. We pluck curry patta (leaf) that grow wild near Ranibagh, on the way up from Kathgodam, and dry it and store it. We can now buy sambar powder in the market if we want to. I always say, if you have money, you can buy anything in Ranikhet these days!

In those days, in Bombay, I would stand at the balcony and watch them stirring the sambar and turning out heaps of white idlis. Then after the lunch-time rush was over the vendors would clean up, and in late afternoon, go nearby to buy a piece of fish each for themselves. They’d cook it with a lot of masala and in the evening they would have their one meal of the day with great relish--fish curry and rice. The owners of the bungalows near these vendors would be very annoyed by the crowds and cooking smells, and would try to chase them away, but I could not stop watching them from the upstairs balcony everyday.

I have never returned to Nepal. I was not welcome in my father’s house. I don’t even know what happened to my stepmother, but I know my father is dead. One day a Memsahib from Nepal brought bhogta(grapefruit). I had never seen it since I left the country. When I cut it and saw the pink flesh inside and smelled it, my home came back to me--the fields in the village near Kathmandu. I have kept the seeds and planted some of them. They’ll fruit one day.

( By Anuradha Roy, excerpted from the article "Some Pot Boilers", ed. Ira Pande, India Sixty, Delhi, Harper Collins, 2007)

You get the feeling from Murakami’s latest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki, that while the rest of Japan was waiting with champagne on ice for his Nobel, he took a more sardonic view of the circus. "What a strange world we live in,” says a character in the book. “Some people plug away at building railroad stations, while others make tons of money cooking up sophisticated-sounding words.”

A recurrent opposition is set up in the book between those who live by making things and those who live by words or ideas. The word tsukuru, the narrative explains at some length, can mean to “create”, but Tsukuru Tazaki is named after its more basic meaning, to “make or build”. Following the conventional world view, Tsukuru thinks that as a mere builder of railway stations, he is much less interesting than two of his childhood friends who deal in words: one has become a car salesman, stereotypically an occupation defined by smooth talking. Another runs a corporate training company called Beyond that brainwashes middle management employees into following orders. A third is a pianist and the fourth, Kuro, is a potter who makes exquisite though flawed cups and bowls: “It doesn’t bring in much money, but I’m really happy that other people need what I create”; Tsukuru understands this, since “I make things myself”. Just as Kuro etches her name on the undersides of her pottery, Tsukuru writes his into the wet concrete of the stations he builds. They feel the deep sense of kinship that anyone who makes things with their hands will recognise.

There isn’t necessarily an opposition of course: there have always been potters, sculptors, and carpenters who write, and writers who construct bridges or make planes. The author-note in The Small Wild Goose Pagoda describes Allan Sealy as an apprentice to a bricklayer and the book contains detailed passages on building gates and walls. Edmund de Waal is a renowned potter. Murakami, in a recent interview to the Guardian, describes writing itself as manual work: “I guess I am just engineering something. I like to write. I like to choose the right word. I like to write the right sentence. It’s like gardening or something. You put the seed into the soil at the right time and in the right place.”

In August this year, literally by accident, I discovered precisely how manual writing is. My dog was being attacked by a bigger dog and as I tried to drag my charge to safety I toppled, fell on hard concrete, then noticed that everyone around me was staring at my right arm. An hour later, I was on an orthopaedic’s table cradling my deformed elbow. The doctor diverted me with small talk as he tried to set the dislocated joint in place. “What do you do?” he murmured, yanking my dangling forearm. “A potter,” I screamed, almost throwing up with the pain. “I’m a potter.” “Oh, I see, an artist,” he said pulling savagely. I think I passed out at that point and they transferred me to the surgery.

At that crucial moment, when my work flashed before me as one’s life is said to before death, why had I claimed I was a potter? The fiery pain was my moment of truth: suddenly I realised I regarded writing, which is my bread and butter, as a kind of sleight of hand. Writing? All my friends write. Anyone can write. You can do it with half a brain and one arm. But making pots out of clay -- things that other people need -- few can do that and those few are fully-armed. It was my instinct to stick to the pottery story because then, you see, the doctor would truly appreciate that my arms were vital in a way they weren’t for accountants or writers. I am no ceramic artist, my clunky pieces are cherished by kind-hearted family and friends alone. Yet if I never wrote a book again I knew I would make pots; if I never made a pot again I had no idea what I would do.

Two days after the surgery, I found myself landed with a writing deadline. It would be difficult typing one-handed, but still, one hand meant five fingers, and the writing would distract me from the pain. I would manage. I opened the book into which I usually scribble notes or sometimes a draft before I start typing into my laptop. I picked up a pen.

Perhaps a thought entered my mind, perhaps it didn’t. At any rate, by the time I got to pinning the thought to paper with my left hand, it had flown off, an unvanquished butterfly. After struggling to write left-handed for many frustrated minutes, I gave up and turned to the computer. I would just type the article straight in. I tapped one word, then another. Attempted a third. But by this time, my mind had swerved off the road, disgusted with the pace. Use a voice recorder, helpful friends suggested, but I could no more think aloud than write one-handed. When I complained in despair to my barber who was chopping away my hair because one hand isn’t enough to tie a ponytail, she whipped out her mobile and said, “Let me show you a video, this man has no arms, no legs, and he manages everything so well!” A close friend was worse: “Wittgenstein’s nephew played Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand after his right arm was amputated.” Luckily I’m not musical, I said, aiming a punch with my left fist.

I could manage quite a lot one-handed -- but not everything, and writing one-handed was one of those things.

“When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down,” says Ferris Jabr in a recent New Yorker essay on “Why Walking Helps Us Think”. This connection between mind and body is felt keenly by even beginner potters who moan that “on some days, nothing works.” It is only over weeks of work at the wheel that you realise those are the days when for some reason the switch that connects your brain with your fingers has short-circuited and you don’t have the power to repair it. Try too hard and you sweat for nothing. Try too little and you get nowhere. Every potter waits for those days when there is a seamless, inexplicable flow of energy uniting body, mind, clay and wheel that results in pots Bernard Leach described as “life flowing for a few moments perfectly through the hands of the potter." This is the “life” that either flows or doesn’t through pieces of writing as well. I was finding out writing was manual work after all: it’s hard enough making words come alive when you are functioning normally, it was impossible one-handed.

Ultimately I did manage to meet my deadline, typing two-handed, clumsily using the flats of the fingernails of my immobilised hand. Once I figured that technique out, it was business as usual: the brain had needed only to be tricked into believing both hands were at work. But a spinning ball of clay on a wheel isn’t fooled by mind games. Two months later, I still haven’t been able to make a pot.

“Talent only functions when it is supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like dew at dawn,” says a pianist who flits through Colourless Tsukuru. In the book’s brilliant finale, Tsukuru sits alone at Tokyo station during rush hour, still and meditative, the distillation of solitude in “an overwhelming crush of humanity”. In Murakami’s world, the unassuming maker of things understands much that others don’t.

(PUBLISHED IN THE TELEGRAPH, 20 OCTOBER 2014)

The most surreal aspect of these last few days has been watching prominent, liberal and highly regarded feminists on the same side as right-wing politicians burning effigies of the BBC as they demanded a ban on a film they had not even seen. There were widespread and passionate protests against a ban, including in Parliament, but the documentary, about an Indian problem on which every Indian has a view, has now been aired everywhere except in India.
Naturally, it went viral in seconds. I had friends posting links, and thousands watched or downloaded swiftly so that they could see it before the State blocked it off the internet. Watching it through, the first feeling was of vindication simply in the act of watching, the sense that the thousands of people in India, outraged by attempts to control them, had personally thwarted State censorship.
It is a harrowing, deeply disturbing film that you need a strong stomach to watch. The image that emerges through the long interviews with the victim's grieving, bereft parents is of an ordinary, happy family destroyed beyond recovery by the savagery of what was done to their daughter. The raped woman's tutor, an articulate young man who tells us about her aspirations and dreams and the determined way in which she set about achieving them, is the absolute opposite of the stereotypical Indian male. The film also records the wife of one of the accused men in her village in Bihar, and the mother of two others, all leading lives of extreme deprivation. Apart from the jailed man and his lawyers, it has interviews with feminists, judges, policemen.
We are used to governments banning films and books and artists in India. The NDTV channel's black lines through sections of Shobhaa De's article were an eerie reminder of censorship during the Indira Gandhi Emergency years (1975-1977). But to see enlightened feminists demanding a ban on a film makes all of us writing and publishing in India wonder if surviving just got a little harder. For writers, publishers and artists it was difficult enough knowing how easily their work could be banned by the State, or bullied into extinction by fundamentalist groups. And now we have to deal with sections of the liberal intelligentsia turning fundamentalist as well.
Some of these feminists - an isolated minority now that people have seen the film - argued that the film is a patronizing, simplistic, white-Western attempt to condemn a country wholesale; that it does not address 'structural problems' (the Left's term for inequality and poverty); that it profiles all poor Indian men as potential rapists. All these are criticisms, and a sign of democratic health is the fact that these criticisms can be heard. It is doubly ironic then that these same activists support xenophobic State censorship against a film for which apparently every legal permission was granted before it was made. They sidetrack us away from the fundamental issue: why not let us decide what to watch? Why prevent us from forming our own opinions? Should Kipling, Naipaul, and Rushdie be banned because they often say things that many Indians dislike?
When I began writing my third novel, I did not know that one of its central concerns would turn out to be systemic violence against women in India. What I had in my book in one of its very early drafts was a girl on a beach who was an incidental character. In that draft, she stood by a stall selling shell necklaces and I could see her only from the back. Characters in fiction do not always arrive by design and deliberation. The writer is as much a stranger to them at first as the reader, and the process of writing is one of coming closer and closer to the characters, of unpeeling them layer by layer until you know them - and even then, not completely. As I tried to follow the girl's story, to work out what brought her to that particular beach on that day, it emerged that she was a young woman with a traumatic and violent past. Whatever I had to read and research to get her character and life clearer in my head made me feel physically sick or tearful at times, to the point that I was not able to write. I don't know why I reacted to my own narrative in this visceral and crippling way. It was not efficient. The book took me forever to finish.
At the final stage I began to worry about its reception. Not only the critical response to a novel, as every novelist worries about, but whether someone would find things in it to object to. Does it show India as a more generally dangerous place for women than it is? Does it end up showing the West as a refuge and thereby 'pander to the first world'? Will every character or incident be generalized into a type? And these questions in my head which will transmute into criticisms in other heads: are these now reason enough for someone wanting my book banned?
My publisher had the manuscript read by a lawyer and said I had no reason to worry. But in this new context -where women I usually agree with and admire support banning a film for reasons that mostly appear to originate in differences of opinion - I feel less certain. This is suddenly a country in which the joke this week no longer seems a joke: "It's Thursday and only five things have been banned so far." Films. Books. TV shows. The head of the censor board even wants the word 'Bombay' to be banned because it is the West's version of Mumbai.
I remember when Rushdie's Satanic Verses was banned. I lived in Calcutta then and vendors would sidle up and offer pirated copies on the sly alongside cheap lipsticks and fly swats. In the same way today, viral downloads of Leslee Udwin's film have defeated the structures of the State as well as the demands of misguided feminists. As a writer and publisher, net pirates depriving me of royalties and sales ought to be my natural enemy. Ironically, I live in a country where I am forced to see them as everyone's best friend.

(Published in The Telegraph, 9 March 2015. Read it here online)

This essay was written in the days after the Indian Government refused to allow the screening in India of Leslee Udwin's BBC film, India's Daughter. It is a response from a writer and publisher about the specific problems of writing in an environment of censorship by the state or by mobs. It is not about the legal ins and outs of the case, concerning which there are many excellent pieces out there.

Before the government ban, several prominent Indian feminists too asked that the film's screening be 'postponed' until the judicial appeals in the case were over. Although this would normally be a reasonable idea, in the Indian legal context, where court decisions can take years, this amounted to putting a lid on the film. Shohini Ghosh explains the complications in this interview.

Shohini Ghosh has also written great incisiveness about the legal aspects of pausing/ banning the film in a post that circulated via an e-list. Several parts of it are reproduced in Nivedita Menon's article on Kafila.org, which you can read here.

An article by Kavita Krishnan, laying out the point of view supporting postponement or alternations is here, in the Daily O.

Shobhaa De's piece with black lines running through banned words/ phrases is here, on the NDTV site.

Published in Scroll.in, April 2015

The other day, my father-in-law was in a reflective mood brought on by looking at his accounts ledgers at the end of the financial year. He concluded with a sigh that he had not made much money from selling books. But he had no regrets, books had brought him riches of a different kind: a full life and good friends. At 93, Ram Advani has been running his own bookshop, Ram Advani Booksellers, for over sixty years. His is the old kind of bookshop where authors from all over the world write to him asking what is new, where customers come back to him to ask what they should read, where friendships begin as conversations about books and then blossom and grow.

Ram Advani (left) in his bookshop

I may be biased of course – but working in the world of books is the best kind of work. It’s certainly one where you get to know interesting people, and do the kind of work together that encourages long friendships (or enmities).

The first real publisher I encountered was Ravi Dayal, who used to head Oxford University Press, Delhi. By the time I joined it as an editorial slave, he had left to start his own imprint, Ravi Dayal Publisher, but he strolled in some days to cast an appraising eye over his old patch. He operated in chaotic solitude from a tree-fringed, wood-panelled study in his bungalow. Out of this room emanated the books on his distinguished list, all edited and proof-read by him, and clothed in jackets he designed with ink and crayon, innocent of technology. He had strong views on type and book design, loving statuesque fonts like Bembo and scorning pallid, sans-serif upstarts such as Arial. I was stunned by the honour when, after years of observing my work, he asked me to design a book jacket for him. This, I thought, was what soldiers felt when medals were pinned to their chests.


Ravi Dayal (2nd from left) with Girish Karnad, Charles Lewis (extreme left) and Neil O' Brien (centre)

My husband Rukun Advani and I run an independent press, Permanent Black. He is the publisher, accountant, and production head; I am designer, publicity manager, and general dogsbody. When we started it fifteen years ago, no accountant thought it would survive, and I wonder still at the courage and friendship of the authors who gave us their precious manuscripts to publish in those first two or three years. These authors had worked editorially with us before -- even so, it was heroic for them to publish with us when there was nothing to Permanent Black but a lovely logo created for free by a designer-friend who wanted to help.

My own books have all been published by Christopher MacLehose, formerly of Harvill and Collins, known for publishing José Saramago, Haruki Murakami, WG Sebald, Claudio Magris and Javier Marías, American authors such as Raymond Carver, Peter Matthiessen and Richard Ford and fiction from Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell. He is also known for going on epic drives across Europe every year with his dog Miska and a bag of manuscripts. He camps in various towns en route meeting authors and agents who have got used to the idea that if they want to talk books with him, they might need to trot across a meadow in wild pursuit of a publisher who is chasing his hound, who is chasing a frisbee.

Christopher and Miska at work on a manuscript

Maclehose Press was in its first year as well when it did my first book, An Atlas of Impossible Longing. At that time Christopher was in the news for taking on Steig Larsson’s Salander trilogy when dozens of other publishers had turned it down. My manuscript too had been turned down by every publisher and agent I had sent it to when Christopher, obviously the patron saint of lost causes, accepted it. The next few months were punctuated by long phonecalls from him, one of which I recall started with him explaining the structure of a symphony and ended with him stating that by now it was surely obvious to me that I needed to rework my opening chapter radically.

Such crises, I have realised after three books, are normal when working with Christopher, and always to the good. There are water diviners who roam the arid stretches of rural India, using no more than rudimentary loops of wire to predict where underground aquifers lie. Christopher has a similar ability to pinpoint those areas of a manuscript where seams of untapped possibility lurk, to which the author needs to return, rethink, rewrite. Years ago, I sent him a long short story and he said it needed either a swifter machete, or I ought to go back to it, think about it, and write some more. I did the latter. Over many drafts, each of which he read and commented on, it turned into my third book, Sleeping on Jupiter. Not one of these editorial discussions took place across a desk in an office. And over the years, envelopes from him came bearing not just proofs or work but more often than not, books, pictures, music, newspaper clippings, coffee, toys for my dog.

Sheila Dhar

I realised just how deep these friendships that grow over books can be when in Delhi, at the OUP, after two numbing years of editorial plodding through scholarly manuscripts, the classical singer Sheila Dhar turned up in my room one day. Her book Raga n’ Joshis unmatched for its rich blend of observation, learning, and story-telling. We met as strangers — author and editor — and in a few months Rukun and I were under the spell of her great wit and intellect, and her infectious sense of fun. She could turn dreary days into carnivals, stealing us from our desks for long lunches where she sang, mimicked, and planned future books.
On some days Bill Aitken would arrive, full of stories and sarcasm, and odd little nuggets of information he had picked up on his travels. The meetings were long and leisurely, much time was spent mulling over the delights of Scotch whisky and the pleasures of cookery classes with Nigella Lawson. Future books were outlined and fantasised about.

Bill Aitken in Ranikhet, October 2010

With both of them, we scribbled deadlines and outlines into diaries, sustaining the pretence that these were working lunches and dinners.

It wasn’t really pretence. This is how books get made: in an alchemical process, through chance collisions of people, places, energies, thoughts, ideas. Some of those books make it to our shelves. And many remain effervescent conversations that led nowhere but to friendships.

On the second page of highly acclaimed Indian novelist Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter, a 7-year-old child witnesses the murder of her father by axe-wielding masked men who have invaded their home. Like much of Roy’s writing, it’s a scene described in visceral detail: the smell of a ripe grapefruit fresh from their garden is contrasted with the sight of the whitewashed wall inside their hut “streamed red” with the father’s blood, and the echoes of his haunting screams as he’s beaten then butchered like an animal. “When the pigs were slaughtered for their meat they shrieked with a sound that made my teeth fall off and this was the sound I heard,” the daughter recalls.

It’s a brutal and jarring beginning, but in the context of the novel – which takes place over five days in the coastal temple town of Jarmuli in contemporary India – it’s the next chapter, less savage but no less disturbing, that unsettles the most.
A young woman, all braided hair, tattoos and piercings, boards a train to Jarmuli. Her skin is the same colour as that of those around her, and she speaks a “halting” Hindi, but her passport bears a Nordic name, Nomita Frederiksen; she’s both Indian and not Indian, something of an enigma to her fellow passengers. She disembarks at a station en route, to buy some bread and tea from a stand on the platform, but within minutes, the three old women sharing her compartment see the girl running for her life after being aggressively accosted by two men. The horror of this apparently unprovoked violence combines with the staging of the panorama – physically separated from the attack by the window, the women’s helpless anguish is palpable – to create something genuinely shocking.
The train continues on its way, Nomita’s fate unknown to her motherly travelling companions, “their holiday high spirits snuffed out by the absence of a girl they knew not at all”; until, that is, they encounter her a few days later in Jarmuli. So begins Roy’s graceful interweaving of a cast of characters thrown together by circumstances in a town where, although it’s populated ostensibly by priests and pilgrims and known as a spiritual sanctuary, evil and brutality appear to trump goodness and innocence at every turn.
The devout travel to Jarmuli to pay homage at the temples for which the town is famous, but Nomita’s pilgrimage, we slowly learn, is an attempt to confront the traumas of her past. Six years of her childhood were spent living here in an ashram under the protective wing of a guru publicly lauded the world over but, when the outside world wasn’t watching, who inflicted emotional, physical and sexual abuse on her and the other children in his care. This story is told in flashbacks, the true barbarity of his crimes gradually revealed until the final picture that emerges is one so inhumane it’s hard to bear.
One of the town’s temples depicts carvings of lovers coupled in a variety of embraces. “In ancient India no barrier between life and love. Erotic is creation itself, so it is celebrated in our temples,” a guide explains to a group of tourists. “Nothing wrong. Please understand.” But juxtaposed with this history of pleasure is the thick vein of sexual violence that runs through the novel.
There’s been a recent call to action against sexual assault in India as rape cases have begun to make international headlines rather than just being accepted as part of everyday female experience in the country. In focusing on this perpetration of violence against women and children, Roy’s book is both incredibly timely and extremely brave.

This book is available on Amazon.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
thereview@thenational.ae

Sleeping on Jupiter was released in April in India (published by Hachette India) and in Britain (published by Maclehose Press).

The formal "launch" was at Asia House London. A complete account, including an audio link here, from the Asia House site.

Spunky, feisty older Indian women are central characters in new book

Indian author Anuradha Roy, left with the Guardian and Observer books editor Claire Armitstead

Indian author Anuradha Roy, left, the Guardian and Observer books
editor Claire Armitstead, right, at the launch of 'Sleeping on Jupiter', which was held at Asia House

01/05/15

By Naomi Canton

A book portraying older Indian women – not the typical centres of Indian fiction – as spunky, strong, rebellious and flirtatious and no longer simply living their lives for others, was launched at Asia House.
Sleeping on Jupiterby Indian author Anuradha Roy, was launched as part of the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival 2015 and was the first pre-Festival event.

In the same way that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) film gave older people a new lease of life as central characters of a popular movie, this book gives older Indian women the unusual role of being the main characters of an Indian fiction book as they set off on holiday together – without any children, or men. Whilst the book also shows a dark side of India by portraying child abuse in ashrams by godmen, through these three women’s feisty spirits and slight rebelliousness, the book also challenges the negative stereotyping of Indian women as oppressed.

“The book is set over five days with flashbacks,” Roy said in conversation with Claire Armitstead, books editor for the Guardian and Observer. “It is essentially about people facing completely unexpected situations in their lives by being in a different setting. Sometimes they have planned to be there and at other times they have found themselves there, but they are at a crossroads in their lives where they have to face things they haven’t before and this often brings them to some form of crisis.”

The book is about people who have reached a point in their lives where they need to find a different reality. One of the characters finds that in another planet that has 16 moons – thus the title of the novel, she explained.

Roy’s third novel is set in an imaginary Hindu pilgrimage town by the sea called Jarmuli: a deeply Hindu town full of temples, some ruined and some still in use. “The town is frequented by pilgrims who are there because they are religious or they are coping with questions of belief and faith; some have been scarred by religion and some enriched by it, but they are all there because of their religion,” she said.

Roy added: “It’s a town which brings together religion and sexuality in a very odd sort of way.”
The three old ladies, all good friends from Kolkata, are sitting together on a train going on a pilgrimage holiday. “They have lived a life of looking after their children and working but never before been on holiday like this as women on their own,” Roy explained. “They know inside themselves this is their first and last chance to have a really good time. A young woman gets off the train and does not get back on,” she added. “If there is any part of the novel that is autobiographical then that is it. I once was on my way to Dehradun to the Mussoorie Writers’ Mountain Festival in Uttarkhand and I got off the train to get something to eat and I saw this train set off before I got back on and it had my luggage on it! So I ran to get on this running train. My heart was exploding my terror,” Roy recalled.

“Older people are often seen as irrelevant in Indian fiction, but in my book the older women are constantly thinking about their relationships with their children and their husbands and lives they have lived,” she said. “They don’t always feel that maternal or good about their children always demanding things from them and one of them still feels tugs of flirtatiousness. I wanted them to be just fully-fledged human,” she said.

Whilst on the one hand these women are quite feisty, at the same time “you feel they have had a lifetime of having to cope and having a hard time in India as every time you take a bus you have to think about how you can protect your front, back and side,” Roy continued.

“There is a hint one of the women is suffering from dementia and by the end of it you don’t know what’s going to happen to them, she added. “There are shadows over their lives,” she said. “I think any book has to have – right to the end and even for years afterwards – some areas of mystery and ‘unknownness’ that make you think about the book,” she added.

This novel started as a ‘long short story’ based on these three older women and Roy’s publisher told her to either cut it in half or expand it. “The short story was their holiday and they have an encounter with a girl on the beach during this holiday that leaves them extremely disturbed,” she explained.
A young refugee child called Nomi is another central character of the book who is searching for where she grew up.

“You don’t start out saying ‘child abuse is really important; I must put it into my novel.’ The character comes first. When I thought about her she turned out like this,” Roy said.

In the same way that the Aamir Khan record-breaking movie PK questions and exposes the practises of a godman (guru or holy men who often claim to have paranormal powers) in a Hindu Temple, the book also questions the practises of some Hindu godmen.

“In the book there are godmen using religion to abuse women or children. All the Brahmin patriarchal Hindu religious infrastructure is bent on crushing all the oppressed which are women, the underclass and Dalits. There are still Hindu temples in India that women are not allowed to enter. It was a very difficult book for me to write because it made me physically sick at times to read about it and write about these things,” she said.

The book is not all darkness; it has moments of comedy. Apart from the comic old Bengali ladies, the chai (Indian tea with spices) vendor who often fills people’s glasses with froth rather than tea is a favourite character of Roy’s.

Roy, a former books editor at The Hindu, now runs a small publishing house with her husband in India.
“Ever since The Satanic Verses both from fatwas to the Hindu right, liberals in India are embattled everywhere and people will always try to silence you. The problem with India is that if someone objects to a book there is no one to defend you and if it gets a stay order in a court in any part of India then you can’t sell it. What we really fear as publishers is that someone somewhere will object and it will go out of circulation,” she said.

She said there was a lot of competitiveness in India between those who write in English and those who write in vernacular languages because the books by the latter do not get translated enough and there is a perception that those who write in English get more readers and money, whilst those who do not may have extraordinary talent but can’t access the same number of readers.
“My Bengali is not good enough. I read Bengali but could not write in Bengali. In a natural way I write in English,” she said.

Sleeping on Jupiter was published in India a week ago, but has not been translated into local languages. “The Indian Government very rarely supports any kind of literary work by giving you grants. So only those novels that are expected to make really big sales will get translated like Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh,” she said. “Publishing is not a rich industry in India. My Indian publisher might do some kind of launch if he can. You do as many festivals as you can. People won’t pay to come and listen to you talking about a book and there are no longer these champagne launches. I am going to some festivals in Bali and Sri Lanka but those are just to see nice places!” she said laughing.

The book switches between the first person and third person depending on what she is describing, she explained. “I feel certain parts of the books work better in the first person and I want the intimacy of the first person in those bits but in the rest of the book I want both, I want to sit and look at everything on high and also have the first person. I also worked very hard on the language the child speaks. My mother is very disturbed by the fact there is an orphan in each of my books,” Roy added laughing.
“All I want is for people to read it and think well of it. I don’t need it to start a social movement,” she said. “There are such huge inequalities that exist in India that it’s almost systematic to ignore the oppressed who are the poor, children and animals. But people in India prefer you to portray a happy picture of India. It happened years ago even when Satyajit Ray made his films. The Hindi movie world found it unpatriotic when he made a film which showed very poor village life,” she added.

“I don’t feel like a woman writer, I just feel like a writer. The joys of being a writer are if someone read it and likes it,” she said.

She denies the book portrays men in a negative light. “There are women in the book aiding and abetting the godmen in the ashram who know what’s going on and that is quite a normal scenario,” she said, adding she was fond of the male “temple guide and the tea seller” characters. “People might find it surprising I deal with religion as it’s not usually a topic in Indian fiction. Religion often enters Indian fiction by our mythology.”

But she insists the book is not anti-Hindu. “It has characters who are believers and looks at their problems of belief but does not, at all, run down the religion. But it sees this religious feeling as something that gives their life meaning.

“This is really about the feeling inside people of devotion, how it might make some people feel fulfilled and is a release them or for others it might oppress them. It is about religious feeling than a particular religion,” she said.

The book also shows there are many kinds of realities for women in India and they are not all suffering and repressed. She points out even in Indian villages women are becoming more independent. “Even very poor village women in the hills are talking outside more than the men and young people from the hinterland are making their way in the cities in the workplace,” she said.

(For the audio link, please click on the hyperlink at the start of this piece and go to the end of the page that opens)

"The themes of innocence stolen, the refuge of the imagination, and the inclination to look away are handled with sensitivity and subtlety in some of the best prose of recent years encountered by this reader. Roy brings a painterly eye, her choice of detail bringing scenes to sensual life, while eschewing floridness: a masterclass rather in the art of restraint, the pared-back style enabling violence close to the surface to glint of its own accord."
Rebecca K. Morrison, The Independent

"Anuradha Roy’s brilliant new novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, is a riveting and poignant read...There’s a whole tapestry out there: lost innocence, displacement, violence, friendship, survival, unconventional love, rejection, and pain...all penned with excellent craft. The opening chapters are violent but etched in delicate, detached prose."
Suneetha Balakrishnana, The Hindu

"Both incredibly timely and extremely brave."
Lucy Scholes, The National

"Playing hopscotch with narrative energy and moving with pointed fingers like one does in a whodunit, Sleeping on Jupiter is that nearly utopian beast – a literary page-turner....If you’ve ever lost something, you must read this novel. If you’ve ever found something you lost, you must read this novel too."
Sumana Roy, Scroll.in

"Took my breath away ... Magnificently disturbing storytelling"Jaya Bhattacharjee Rose

Yesterday Suman, a friend who lives down the stairs, handed me a mango. It was one of the few she in turn had been gifted by her brother who in turn had been gifted by…. Well, this was no ordinary mango: it was an Alphonso, and therefore it was an act of real generosity for her to part with one. I had never tasted the fabled Alphonso, could hardly believe I had one in my hand. She shrugged that she thought it overrated, but ok, an Alphonso, is an Alphonso, she said, why not taste it and decide.

I realised, going up the stairs holding my precious Alphonso, that I had actually tasted one, not a month ago, in London. Only, I had clean forgotten it. To those of us used to the Benishaan, the Chausa, the Langra and the Sindoori, the vital thing is that lovely tangy twist that gives mangoes character. Their tastes unroll on the tongue layer by layer. I had forgotten eating the Alphonso because it was merely nice: sweet, pleasant, uncomplicated.

photo courtesy: enjoyingindia.com

Yet Bombaywallas regard every other mango with contempt. My view is that the international fame the Alphonso has grabbed is no more than a marketing coup, maybe in-product selling via Bollywood. Why is it almost the only Indian mango known by name outside India?

At the London shop where my friend Munni was buying the Alphonsos I ate last month, a polite, very Angrez disagreement took place because the chit of a till-girl, hardly twenty and not even desi, flicked her blonde hair and informed us that she thought Pakistani mangoes were better. My friend smiled and corrected her. The young woman stood by her views, she even sneered a bit. My blood frothed immediately with what Shivam Vij calls mango nationalism: how dare she!

He’s written about it so entertainingly I won’t even try:

“I am telling nothing but the truth when I tell you that Indian mangoes are better than Pakistani mangoes. It infuriates me when Pakistanis don't agree. That makes mangoes an India-Pakistan dispute just like Kashmir. … What annoys me further is that there are Pakistanis who claimed to have tasted Indian mangoes and still think Pakistani mangoes are better. The problem with such Pakistani mango lovers is that they are Pakistanis first and mango lovers second. Which is not to say I have tasted Pakistani mangoes. Why would I do that when I get to eat the world's best mangoes? India has over 1,200 varieties of mangoes, Pakistan only 400.” (Read the rest here)

The sudden Indo-Pak rivalry via a Western mediator at a London grocery reminded me of Maulvi Sahab, protagonist of Joginder Paul’s, Khwabrau [The Sleepwalkers, transl. Sukrita Paul Kumar]. Exiled to Karachi at Partition, Maulvi Sahab is haunted by all he has lost, and decides he still lives in Lucknow, not Karachi. One of his greatest griefs in his makebelieve world is that he can no longer eat Lucknow’s Malihabadi mangoes: “Don’t you find it strange that we eat the mangoes grown here but our hearts can be satisfied only by the clay imitations of Malihabadi mangoes?” Hakim Sahab, another character in this novel is obsessed with creating a chemically engineered replica of the Malihabadi mango in Karachi. It doesn’t work of course. Lucknow’s mangoes can grow only in Lucknow.

I feel helpless outrage abroad as Europeans eating giant, shapeless, tasteless pretenders from South America inform me that they think mangoes are overrated, Indians needlessly rhapsodise over them. What do they know of mangoes who have never been in India in summer and allowed a chilled mouthful to slide down their throats when the air is shimmering outside at 45 degrees and the hot wind is crisping up leaves into papad? You can only pity them.

There is a reason why Mirza Ghalib (1797 – 1869) mourned at 60 that he could no longer eat “more than ten or twelve at a sitting... and if they are large ones, then a mere six or seven. Alas, the days of youth have come to an end, indeed, the days of life itself have come to an end." (Read the article from which this quote is taken.)

He was talking about Indian mangoes. Probably not Alphonsos though, since he lived in north India and there was no DHL mango-post then.

At nine-thirty on a weekday morning in the monsoon, Delhi’s Defence Colony flyover is a noisy, semi-immobilecaterpillar. The rain always makes the traffic inexplicably denser. Nothing’s moving, there is no likelihood that it will any time soon. Through car windows you can see men and women in corporate uniforms glaring into mobiles. If their fingers stop tapping the keypad, they begin tapping the steering wheel, a steady drumbeat of rage: delayed meetings, lost opportunities, money down the drain.

Underneath the flyover, a young man with a single silver earring and an improbable beret on his head is murmuring to a bird on his wrist. The bird is large, and it has a hooked beak. For a moment I think it’s a falcon, because I’ve heard of trained falcons. When I ask the man, he says with an adoring smile: “She’s a kite. She is mine. I love her.”

The Frendicoes animal shelter and clinic has the Defence Colony flyover as its ceiling. The flyover is made of joined up prefab blocks of concrete. Gaps between the blocks let in a drip-drip of dirty rainwater on to parts of our waiting area even as the cars and buses above -- when they finally move -- make the clinic shudder with their vibrations. The space outside the clinic is a dimly litpassageway and its two coolers struggle to shift the sultry heat. Impatient dogs, cats in carriers, hamsters and birds, all wait their turn here, sometimes one hour, more often two. The vets are furiously overworked, two of them treating five animals at a time, charging from one patient on a drip to another with a gaping wound.

The man with the kite has come because his bird has fractured a wing. Three years ago, the kite had fallen out of its nest as a chick. The man had put the chick back in the nest, but it fell out again. This time he took it home and she has lived with him ever since. “We have a dog too. They are good friends. This bird is a member of my family.” As if to prove this, the bird kisses the man’s lips with its beak, which looks lethal enough to slice faces in half. Its talons quiver on the man’s bandaged hand.

Wait long enough at an animal shelter and you will see all of human life. If this isn’t an ancient proverb, it should be.

We’ve seen ramshackle drunks bring in a wounded bitch for treatment -- complete with her litter of suckling puppies, their eyes as yet blind to the world; injured pigeons, and kittens hardly bigger than mice, wrapped in hankies or aanchals; we’ve seen labourers, motor mechanics, women in patched saris, come long distances with strays, sometimes tied with no more than a rope because leashes and collars are unaffordable. These are animals they happened to see knocked down by a passing car or wounded in a fight. “How could we leave them to die?” is a common refrain. One woman said, “I had to look after her because she was wounded, but then it became love (phirpyaarhogaya).” Some say environmentalism is a “full stomach” phenomenon: by that logic, peoplewill care most for trees and animals when they can afford a 4x4 to drive to wildlife resorts. But under the flyover is compassion, not entertainment.

There are other kinds of people too: I saw a well-dressed trio come in with a Saint Barnard they claimed belonged to a neighbour. The ‘neighbour’ didn’t want the dog any more, they said. After a few formalities in the office, they patted the dog with a “Bye Bye, Bruno” before walking away, freed of their fifty-kilo charge. The huge, furry dog, as out of place in Delhi as a polar bear might be, gazed at his new surroundings unaware his family had gone forever.

In one experiment, when Konrad Lorenz hand-reared goslings as soon as they had been hatched, he discovered that the process of recognizing parents is not instinctive in birds: it is learned. The goslings followed him around exactly as they would their mother goose, and paid no attention to their biological mother. This is known as filial imprinting, and many animals imprint on to more than one other species, provided they meet them early enough in friendly encounters. The biologist John Bradshaw describes how puppies, between the fifth and twelfth week of their lives, can extend this filial attachment to several species. That is why puppies who encounter friendly humans or cats early in life adopt these aliens as extensions of their own family. Cats and dogs can be the best of friends.

What about humans? Is affinity to animals instinctive or learned? Why do some humans develop a deep sense of kinship with animals -- most commonly dogs? Is it because they have had dogs as children or is it an innate, unlearnable capacity like an ear for music or an eye for colour?

In the West this affinity is valorized: there is a whole publishing and film industry built on its foundations. It is considered good manners -- actually just plain normal -- to greet people’s dogs. Dogs are allowed to travel on trains and go to cafes. I’ve been to expensive restaurants where the immaculate head waiter presents the dog with a bowl of water before he turns to the humans with a menu card.

In our country, it is usually the opposite. Meet someone with your dog and the distrust is immediate: “Does it bite?” This may have complex social causes, and there are exceptions of course, but the bottomline is that most of us in India are indifferent to animalsand often cruel. There are other countries where animals are savagely treated as well, but here, the venerated cow is an abstraction. Bull calves, always unwanted, are commonly left to starve to death; boiling water and even acid is flung on stray animals. Most animals, especially dogs, are seen as dangerous and dirty. It is no accident that the Frendicoes shelter is hidden away in a dark corner under a leaky flyover. Another shelter I have been to, the NOIDA SPCA, is set in a wasteland near a cremation ground and a graveyard. This is a country in which its National Human Rights Commission has issued a statement against stray dogs, calling it a “'Human Rights' versus 'Animal Rights' battle.”

For much of the middle class in India, with two jobs, two children, a small flat and dreams of second or third cars, every minute and square metre is apportioned. This does not allow for the genial anarchy of animals, the care and sacrifices they require. Few people have pets at homeor feel the need for them. Some want pets, but worry about time, money, space. Their children, who never encounter animals,are usually rigid with ignorance and fear when confronted by so much as a playful puppy. I once saw a boy wash his cricket ball, which had recently rolled several times into a drain, after my dog picked it up. In his head the drain was hygiene compared to a pet dog’s mouth. In his head, as in that of far too many Indians, the species hierarchy was as immutable as the caste system, with humans at the top.

The other day there wasthe rare middle class child at the shelter: a five-year-old who waited for two hours in the heat with her father, grandfather, and Golden Retriever -- incongruously named Silver. She patted our dog with complete confidence and was unfazed by the dozens of lame and mangled strays who ambled around the waiting area. She’s going to be the odd-girl-out among troops of self-absorbed children growing up unaware of the needs of any species but their own.

Read it here in The Telegraph

Sometime in August last year, Manisha and I went through a series of one-line messages to each other to find a date when we were both free to meet for lunch. Two days before we were to meet though, I had to cancel. I had dislocated my elbow. My right arm, I wailed to her. What if it never worked normally again? How would I make pots? “I am paranoid about my hands & legs,” she wrote back “…jodi kichu hoye jaaye taholey kaaj ki kore korbo!!! [How will I work if something happens to them?] That December, we were sitting in the sun outside her barsaati studio, and I was gazing with distaste at my hands, which were rough and knobbly with being constantly in cold water and clay. She noticed and said, “We don’t have beautiful hands, but they make beautiful things.”

She knew the place of beauty in art is a tricky one. It is easy to be dismissive of works that are beautiful as being not sufficientlydeep. In the world of high art, if a work did not come with an incomprehensible paragraph describing what it was trying to do, it was not serious. To be the maker of beautiful things was not enough. The equivalent in the world of fiction, which I inhabited, was to be labelled a “good storyteller”. So we exchanged a fair number of rueful, heartfelt notes on this subject.

The first half of last year, Manisha was thinking constantly and feverishly about what she wanted to do. She was getting ready for a major exhibition with former students of the Golden Bridge Studio, Pondicherry, where she too had learned much of her ceramics. Like any student worth her salt (or clay), she had grown away from her training and created a language of her own. She worried about how her work would sit beside those of her peers and teachers.

Around this time, she was alone in her studio throwing porcelain bowls, when a friend of hers called, attacking someone else’s ceramics as “merely attractive”. It shattered the peace of her morning, but immediately replaced her diffidence with certainty. “Deep in one's heart one is not apologetic,” she wrote. “Alone in my studio, throwing those porcelain bowls....trying to achieve the delicate lip......I was lost in a world of my own…at this point of time I am joyous just making a beautiful thing.....damn the meaning! I am sure it also has a validity, a reason for being.....even without a meaning.”

Two of Manisha’s ceramic installations are on the covers of books published by Permanent Black. Although artists are extremely protective about their work, she did nothing to dominate the designing of the covers. She knew how suffocating it is to have anyone breathing down your neck when you’re trying to make something. “You have complete freedom,” she wrote, reminding me only that “There is the plug and wire showing on the left side of the image, can you Photoshop it out?” As we looked at photographs of her works, she remembered how deeply she had been involved in photography, like her oldest brother. It made her dream up a new kind of installation, combining ceramics and photographs. That was what she would do next, she said.

It was when I was working on those book covers that I realised how complex and intriguing her ceramics were. They were, in fact, full of meaning. They spoke without words of the themes in those books. If Manisha was aware of this she did not say so. She was an outlier in many ways and her lack of pretentiousness, so unusual in the world of art, is embodied in these works. They remind me of Sheila Dhar quoting the Queen of Tonga’s profound words: “I just Be-s.” Manisha’s exquisite seed-pod bowls and her folds of porcelain that look like shells or waves: they just Be-s.

It was such happiness to Just Be with Munu. To sit in her studio and watch her forcing her students to think -- harder! To drink the dark, strong coffee her brother made, and eat her home-baked cakes. To absorb all the learning she had picked up over years of work and yet was so generous about sharing. To think up hairbrained schemes, mostly deep in the night, to do things and go places. The last such plan was an expedition to Tamil Nadu to see their gigantic terracotta horses. I was all fired up about them, having just read an article in Ceramics Monthly. “Been there, been there, seen it,” she messaged back. “These are the Ayyanar horses. Look awesome in real life. Can go again!”

REMEMBERING MANISHA BHATTACHARYA, Potter

(died 1 September 2015)

The Train to Jarmuli

Kate Webb

"Roy does not adjudicate between these positions. She holds her story in a fine balance, scrupulously turning from one perspective to another in order to show the often yawning gap between how we imagine ourselves and how others see us... Roy writes in a lucid, realist manner, contrasting her restraint with the violence of her subject (the colour red is everywhere, page after page has images of blood). But this not a conventional novel, because it is to freighted with ambiguity and impotence."

The theme of child abuse is becoming ever more prevalent in fiction. In the recently Man Booker-shortlisted A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara explores the subject as the ultimate experience of pain, and therefore the ultimate marker of uniqueness, among a group of contemporary New Yorkers much preoccupied with their individualism. In Sleeping on Jupiter, Anuradha Roy frames her story of a young girl’s abuse as part of a broader malaise in India, describing a town caught between ancient superstitions (“The die for God is what we live for”) and an economy built on selling the past, trapping its workers in a nightmare of regression an frustration. Both novels have religious men as their principal villains, but in Sleeping on Jupiter the ashram where the abuse takes place is not isolated or unusual, and Nomi, the child at the heart of the story, is not unique, being just one of twelve refugee girls who are abducted and cruelly maltreated. Lying on the outskirts of Jarmuli, a (fictional) coastal town of medieval temples, the ashram is part of a tourist industry and, it is implied more broadly, of a society “transfixed” by powerful gods and godlike humans.

Complicating this scenario are the attitudes of Western visitors who respond to the temples’ erotic carvings in ways that humiliate the people working in them, pushing them into defensiveness. “Is that a child?” one woman asks, “accusingly”. “Not a child, Madam”, the guide responds, “Not in Indian culture”. Native visitors, on the other had, simply ignore the mix of religion and sex in these images, refusing to entertain what they might once have signified, or how their legacy could live on in the present. Roy does not adjudicate between these positions. She holds her story in a fine balance, scrupulously turning from one perspective to another in order to show the often yawning gap between how we imagine ourselves and how others see us.

This is not to say Roy is not partisan. She pointedly gives the authority of a first-person testimony to Nomi, while the rest of her third-person narrative focuses on others in India’s excluded majority—the many outliers who feel shadowy figures of power at their backs (there is a particularly sinister monk skirting the edges of the story), but whom they rarely catch sight of, much less are able to confront. Nomi has returned to India with a vague idea of doing just this, having persuaded the Norwegian film company she works for that the town would make a scenic location. On the train to Jarmuli she encounters Gouri, Latika and Vidya, three elderly women—supporting and snapping at one another as old friends do—holidaying before dementia and aching bones confine them at home. Then there are the town’s workers: Badal, the women’s tour guide; Raghu, the boy he lusts after who is an assistant at Johnny Toppo’s tea stand on the beach; and Suraj, employed to help Nomi with reconnaissance work.

Roy writes in a lucid, realist manner, contrasting her restraint with the violence of her subject (the colour red is everywhere, page after page has images of blood). But this not a conventional novel, because it is to freighted with ambiguity and impotence. The beach where Toppo serves his sizzling ginger tea suffers a Ballardian entropy. It is a liminal place suggesting something beyond—the possibility of a different life and, with this, fantasies of escape, of dropping off the edge of the world or flying it Jupiter. Many of Roy’s characters, trapped by poverty or tradition, experience some kind of vertigo: the women find the ground beneath their feet falling away, while Suraj starts to down, dropping down through the sea.

If the physical world lacks solidity and seems constantly liable to give way, incapable of supporting the people who roam it, the language available to them is equally treacherous and difficult to navigate. It is not just that Nomi remembers all the things from her childhood “that we could not talk about”, and into adulthood remains unable to discuss what happened to her; nor that Latika reflexively puts her hands over her mouth to stop words that might cause disapproval, nor even that Badal, Suraj and Toppo are all forced by their work to fawn and perform, but a more general sense that language is unauthentic, a system of deceit produced by a patriarchal and colonial past that leaves its speakers adrift.

The inheritance of this unexamined history, of being forbidden to talk, is that men like Badal and Suraj are unequipped to understand their sexual feelings, forcing themselves on unwilling partners with disastrous consequences. For Nomi it means a constant wish to disown herself: “Like stepping out of your own life. Like leaving your own story”. In Yanagihara’s novel, an inability to endure the legacy of abuse leads to suicide. Here, too, there is no escape for Nomi other than to abandon her life and return to the “North”, to a silent lake in Norway where she casts off the relics of her Indian past. As in much contemporary fiction gloomy about the possibility of political change, where speech is registered as debased or prohibited, Roy suggests that the only response lies in writing. Nomi recounts how after she escaped from the ashram she wrote down what happened to the kidnapped girls, posting her fragile words in a homemade envelope to a newspaper. It is not clear if she is the source years later of articles about child abuse in Jarmuli, and their publication comes too late to rescue any part of life she abandons, but the story, finally is out.

Image: Madhu Kapparath

he characters in Sleeping on Jupiter are like ghosts. They are persistent in their haunting and linger long after you read the final line of the novel. Even their creator Anuradha Roy does not quite know their future but, she tells ForbesLife India, imagining their fate, the ‘what ifs’ of their lives, is a “pleasant private parlour game”.

Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Sleeping on Jupiter is Roy’s third novel. It is set in Jarmuli, a fictional temple town by the sea, where, over the span of five days, the lives of the protagonist Nomi, three elderly friends, a poetry-spouting tea vendor and his assistant, a temple guide and a fixer collide.

The impact is not pretty, especially because Roy reveals how relationships can turn violent. In a narrative which, much like the sea, alternates from gentle to choppy, Roy writes about faith, religion, rape, abuse, old age and homosexuality. At the centre of the story is Nomi, who is born in India and adopted by a family in Norway. Almost ethereal, she belongs neither to the land she was born in nor the one that adopted her. She is looking for answers in Jarmuli, home to an ashram where, as a child, she was sexually abused by a famous god-man.

The common thread, says Roy, is friendship: “Between the three women, between two little orphaned girls, between the main character and the gardener, between the temple guide and the tea boy.” In an email interview with ForbesLife India, she talks about her novel, life in Delhi, the stories she writes, the books she reads, and Permanent Black, the publishing house she runs with her husband.
Excerpts:

Q. Do you have a writing process?
I wish there was a process. It’s just the usual slog work a lot of the time, writing passages that I delete the next day, making more notes than I can keep track of and so on. When I am working on a book, I work very methodically and regularly, but at other times, I don’t write every day. I don’t show novels in progress to anyone, not until a full draft is done.

Q. Can you explain the title of your book, Sleeping on Jupiter? Is it a play on Jupiter as the god of sky and thunder?
The ‘Jupiter’ of the title is literally, as well as metaphorically, another planet. One of the characters who wants to find a different world for himself thinks of it as the farthest he can go to, a place removed from where he is, where everything is altered, including its sky, which has 16 moons.

Q. The effect of age on the human brain is a gentle but insistent theme in Sleeping on Jupiter. The character Gouri has what could well be the early onset of Alzheimer’s. And as the story progresses, her friend Vidya feels her mind beginning to unravel as if it were “an undone skein of wool”. In your first book, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Amulya Babu’s wife has an unnamed mental disorder. Both she and Gouri lead less than full lives. What was going on in your mind when you chose these very real age-related illnesses for your characters?
I very often find myself saying ‘I don’t know’ to these questions. It’s not possible for me to work out why certain themes and character traits came into a novel; I can’t fully analyse how the narrative took the shape it did. With Gouri, I think I know the route, a bit: Some way into working on the book, I went on a trip with my aunt and mother. We got ourselves rooms in a nice hotel, and they were so delighted about everything, it was great fun. But some years after that, my aunt was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I found myself going back to the trip to work out if there had been signs of it and if we just hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Maybe that influenced the way I thought of Gouri, though she isn’t remotely like my aunt in any other way.

Q. This is a story about abuse, paedophilia, misogyny, rape… and Nomi is at the centre of the storm, having been sexually abused by a renowned god-man in her childhood. Is your book an indictment of blind faith and god-men?
The character who turned out to be Nomi was an incidental figure. She appeared in one scene in a short story (I had written) out of which this novel came. Afterwards, I found myself thinking about her—and about Badal (the tea vendor), who was also a walk-on character—long after I had put away that story. When I thought of her past, I instinctively felt it was one which had great suffering, but also that she had come out of it fighting. As for faith, the characters have a whole range of approaches to religion, from the commercial and exploitative to the devout and deeply spiritual.

Image: Madhu Kapparath

HONOUR ROLL: Anuradha Roy published her first work of fiction, An Atlas of Impossible Longing,in 2008 to excellent reviews, both locally and globally. Her second novel, The Folded Earth (2011), won The Economist Crossword Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize

Q. There’s a point in the story when Nomi thinks of the Sargasso Sea. Was that a deliberate reference to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that was framed as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre?
It’s nice when someone catches these little things inserted into a book. For example, only one of the reviewers pointed out that the action takes place over 18 days, the period of the war in the Mahabharata.

Q. In your earlier novel, The Folded Earth, the town of Ranikhet looks to the Himalayas in the way that Jarmuli is embraced by the sea. How important is backdrop to you as a writer? When you choose a motif or theme, is there a process you go through?
The backdrop is vital. Until I can feel and see every bit of the setting, I can’t get the novel clear in my head. I don’t choose a theme ever: It’s always character- and place-driven for me. Both Atlas and Folded Earth started from images. One was of a house which had a river lapping at its verandah, the other of the lake at Roopkund with skulls floating in it. Sleeping on Jupiter began as a short story and if I was thinking of any themes at all, it was friendship. A lot of the book is about friendships—between the three women, between two little orphaned girls, between the main character and the gardener, between the temple guide and the tea boy.

Q. By the end of the novel, everything unravels. The scenes are almost disjointed. You could have extended it, and allowed events to run their course. Instead you give us fragments…beautifully written, but still fragments. Why?
I wanted the compressed elusiveness of the short story in a novel, for it to end when things could still have happened. I know I could have followed many of the strands further, but did not want to. I wanted a sense of disintegration towards the end and structured it accordingly.

Q. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s an average day like? I read that you have a dog.
I’ve had dogs since I was a child and right now we have three, one of whom is a very little puppy we found a month ago wandering lost on the hill highway.

For the greater part of the year, we live in Ranikhet, a small hill town in Uttarakhand, and my husband Rukun Advani and I run a press called Permanent Black, which publishes history and politics. Most days are a combination of long walks, designing, writing, cooking or pottery, which I’ve done, not very well, for many years.

Q. What kind of work do you do at Permanent Black. Why did you start it?
We started Permanent Black in 2000. We were both at the OUP (Oxford University Press India) and it seemed a natural progression to start our own press. I used to acquire and edit books, but found that difficult once I started writing. Now I only design our covers. I love design work partly because I feel I am using a totally different part of my brain.

Q. What are you reading now? Do you have a poem or a poet you go back to often?
I’m reading In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, and a manuscript on Maoists, which is very good. I do read quite a lot of poetry and have favourites such as Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Stevenson whom I go back to. For Sleeping on Jupiter, I read a lot of Bhakti poetry in translation.

Q. What do you think of the state of Indian writing in English? What do you like or dislike about it?
From what publishers and distributors say, all the buzz around new titles and lit-fests is not reflected in sales. Only a few titles in English sell in large numbers and, on the whole, reading is not a priority in this country. There was one writer in English—I can’t remember who—who claimed he had never read a book in his life. There are lots of interesting writers and a brilliant new wave of translations, but writing in English can’t be in a great state if there is so little reading.

The year is in its last week and most of the annual Best Books lists are out. Sleeping on Jupiter is in several of them and in great company.

THE NATIONAL, UAE: Top Ten International Titles of the Year
"Not one of the easiest reads of the year, but it certainly felt like one of the most-important. The Indian novelist lifted the lid on the hypocrisies of her country against a backdrop of abuse, brutality and painful memories as a 25-year-old film-maker’s assistant returned to the temple town of Jarmuli to confront the demons of her past. Only a courageous and talented novelist is able to coalesce such weighty, unsettling and yet topical issues into a compulsively readable book"
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/books/the-top-10-books-that-flew-off-the-shelves-in-2015---in-pictures#8

THE ASIAN WRITER, UK
"This is not a book I highlight because it shares the entertaining qualities of my previous choices, but because it signals a departure from the stereotypes that can often characterise fiction from the subcontinent. Here Roy says what has previously been almost unsayable about violence towards women. It feels like a sea change in what we expect from South Asian literature – a topical story reimagined, a hard message, beautifully written."
http://theasianwriter.co.uk/2015/12/writers-pick-the-best-books-of-2015/

THE TELEGRAPH, Kolkata
"The novel lays bare the many forms of violence against women in India. Yet Roy’s women seem to be unbeaten: they are hardy, spirited and eager for life. Each violent moment is acutely imagined and presented with precision in Roy’s chiselled prose."
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1151225/jsp/opinion/story_60172.jsp#.VnzRPnt5yHI

DECCAN HERALD, Chennai
"With no power, phone signals or places to go during the recent Madras flood, reading was an option. When there was light, I read a book. When light failed, I lit a candle, and later, my Kindle. Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping On Jupiter kept me going through the night with its sharp prose and vivid descriptions..."
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/519706/flowers-flood.html

ASIA HOUSE, LONDON

"Then there was Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter, another Man Booker nominee. Despite its ethereal name, this is a book looking at harsh realities – sexual abuse of women and children in India – and a conversation on the book at Asia House was framed around that very topic. Read about that here. Also take a look at our interview with Roy that was published ahead of this talk. Neither Sahota’s nor Roy’s books were light reads, but with their well-executed characters and moments of humour, they were certainly good reads."

http://asiahouse.org/best-asian-books-2015/

BIBLIO, Delhi

"Sleeping on Jupiter gleams quietly in the smog. Thank God, our godmen didn’t hear of it or they would have got it banned! Searing and lyrical but most significant to me because of hopes raised by the writer’s name! When she wins a major international award there could be some global publicist zeroing in on Anuradha as the next buzzword in books"

-- academic and novelist Anuradha Marwah

HINDUSTAN TIMES, Delhi "The books that defined 2015"

http://www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/the-books-that-defined-2015/story-MMIBKFZd0pZAGShHswlkQI.html

IDIVA, Mumbai: 11 Books to read before 2015 ends

http://www.idiva.com/news-entertainment/11-books-to-read-before-2015-ends/15120265

DESI BLITZ: AMAZING BOOKS TO READ THIS WINTER

http://www.desiblitz.com/content/amazing-books-read-winter-2015

I've found lots to read from these lists, and what I plan to get first is Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Not because I know very much about the book except for its rave reviews, but because it made me rack my brains for a couple of days until I remembered where the title came from: one of my favourite poets, Emily Dickinson. I'll leave you with the original poem and with wishes for a new year of hopes fulfilled.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Emily Dickinson

One of the best things about literary festivals is meeting another writer with whom you feel a sense of immediate fellowship. Tishani Doshi (writer, dancer, poet) and I met in Galle and then saw each other for several days over the Galle and Jaipur festivals this year. Eventually our conversations led to this.

Writing is always known as a lonely activity. But, even when in a house on the hills of Ranikhet, you're never alone when writing fiction. And especially when you have canine company. Here's what we talked about — obsession for dogs, living in the boonies, sea versus mountain, painting, pots, pine cones, and daring to climb trees…. Anything but books, really.

TD: We share a somewhat similarish lifestyle, Anuradha, in that we both live in back of beyond places—you the mountains, me the ocean, our spouses are involved in the making of books, and we have three dogs each. It’s the dogs I want to talk about first, because I know for me, living in an isolated place makes the presence of the dogs that much more integral. We begin to narrativise their lives, talk about them as if they were children. Sometimes they are the only other beings we converse with for days. They mark the hours—meal times, walk times etc. So I want to ask you to talk about what it is about these dogs, about the essential dogginess of dogs, that begins to obsess you. Were you always a dog person? How did this come about, and how has this relationship with these canines affected your life as a writer?

Barauni (left) and Piku

AR: Have been mulling over your question, trying to type out a reply, interrupted each time by the demands of Piku, who is the youngest of our trio of dogs. She's still a puppy who believes that play is the only thing that matters. She appears holding something delectable in her mouth -- a torn sock, a pine cone -- and looks at me as if to say, Is that computer a patch on this? And then I am forced to stop work and play a demented game with her. My first dog came when I was seven. After that it has always been this way. No human relationship brings this combination of happy absurdity and endless love and this sense that every single day is crowded with new things to find and toss joyfully in the air.

This is really the centre of it for me -- in relation to work and the dogs. They have such a different notion of things that matter. We tend to view dogs as four-legged-humans but when my old dog Biscoot used to join the forest's foxes howling, her head vertical towards the sky just like their's, we remembered she had a whole universe inside her that we could only guess at. Their sense of what is important is so different from the hierarchies of the human world. Their needs have changed the things I value as well. If I have to choose between work and playing with a pine cone, I invariably end up choosing the pine cone.

TD: I’ve been fixating on the idea of pine cone, I can almost smell it. It feels quite removed and foreign here where I am on this stretch of the Bay of Bengal. Tell me a bit about what you see out of the windows of your house. Do you have a room with a view when you work? What are the challenges of living in a place like Ranikhet, and what do you miss most about it (other than the dogs) when you’re away?

Pine Cones, 1925, by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

AR: There's a lovely study of pine cones by Charles Rennie Mackintosh of which I have a print on my wall, deceptively simple looking watercolour. I tried drawing pine cones too and realised via many clumsy attempts that the tree's structure mirrors the tightly nested, pointed structure of the cone. Nothing like drawing (even inept) to make you look at things more closely.

Our house is surrounded by forests of chir pine, oak, cypress, and deodar (cedar). There are 3 village huts down the slope from us and then forest and hills and finally a long, unbroken arc of snow peaks. What I miss when I am away is this sense of huge space and the silence -- as well as the sounds this silence carries. The sound of rain on our tin roof, the roosters next door, foxes and owls at night, the bells on grazing cows. And the wind in the trees -- which can sound much like the waves in your Bay of Bengal, actually. I miss walking in the woods and the possibility of climbing trees -- though I've not dared to climb one for years. When I see an intrepid village woman high up on a swaying tree, I feel very incompetent.

TD: There’s an old debate about sea versus mountain… I suppose much of it depends on personality type and what you’re used to. I grew up by the sea, and so, I sometimes find being in the mountains beautiful but isolating. There’s a fear of getting lost in them, of losing myself and my connection with the world (I once spent three weeks in a cottage in Kodaikannal by myself—not exactly mountains, I know, but still, by day 3 I was having long monologues in an effort to fill the silence) By the sea, I don’t feel that same quality of loneliness, although it does remind me that I’m a smidgen, and with every newly rusted hinge in the house, ushers me towards a heightened sense of mortality. Do you have a dichotomy about sea/mountain? And what’s your equation with loneliness visavis writing?

AR: Right now, thunder is rolling over the hills and although the wind has fallen, there's still rain on the roof. That's all that is audible -- and tomorrow will be the same! I know people who go nuts in places like this. We started living here 15 years ago, and at first the isolation did feel unsettling at times. It was a slow process by which I began to actually long for this solitude and feel irritable when I did not have it for a length of time.

I think I could live by the ocean just as happily, though I never have and maybe you're right, maybe mountains are more isolating. But I don't feel lonely when I am writing, I feel intensely alive, sometimes so much that I can't sleep at all -- but also very, very unsociable, reluctant to meet people, cook meals etc. I don't believe you are ever alone if you are writing fiction. I know that physically it's a lonely job: you don't have coffee breaks with colleagues. But there's so much going on in your head. I am a mess only when I am not writing, or painting or making pots. Whether in a city or in the hills.

TD: Ah, the pots. I wanted to get to the pots. And the painting. What kind of paintings? What kind of pots? When did you begin? When you’re writing, do the pots and paintings take a backseat?

AR: It's nothing very serious, I just like messing around, making things. The painting is particularly frivolous -- I just paint things for fun. Doors, windows, cupboards, walls, nothing is safe. But the pottery means something more -- and I've been doing it for years, since I was a student. Everyone who works with clay will tell you there's something addictive about it: despite long breaks when I didn't touch clay at all, I keep going back to it. It absorbs every molecule of your attention while you're doing it and even when you're not. When I am in the middle of testing out glazes, I can't think of anything but colours and chemicals and minerals. So I don't go near my wheel when I'm writing.

Blue Jug, by Anuradha Roy. (Stoneware clay fired at 1200 c with oil spot glaze)

TD: And are you writing now? Are there periods when you are not creating either books or pots? How are those days filled?

And finally: I’m curious to know how you felt when you finished Sleeping on Jupiter…. Eudora Welty said of endings: "Proofs don’t shock me any longer, yet there’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.” Do you have a similar journey of moving from writer to reader?

AR: I don't have this "sunburnt" feeling about what I write, though I can understand it. I am neurotic and thin-skinned about the book right till the end -- but once it's out I feel a sense of detachment very quickly, as if it's not mine any longer. Maybe this is just a survival mechanism.

With anything I make, if it somehow turns out roughly the way I wanted it to be--that makes me feel calm about it out there. I found the writing of Sleeping on Jupiter a thing of turmoil, difficulty, anxieties -- and I was unbearable bore to family and publisher through the writing of it. But when I finished it, I felt as I do with a few of my pots: that nothing that anyone says about it will make a difference to me. (I don't know how long this feeling will last.)

As for writing now -- yes and no. At least I'm past the huge empty space that comes after finishing a book when everyone other than me appears to have a life, a real job, a reason to wake up. You know what I mean.

(Copyright Tishani Doshi; read it here in The Hindu)

A magazine somewhere asked me for pictures of my work space, they publish a regular feature about writers’ work rooms they said. As an example of what they meant, they sent me links to previous such photo essays about the work spaces of writers. The pictures showed weathered wooden desks cluttered with pens, paper, Mexican pottery, moleskin notebooks. Windows looking out on to vistas of green. Walls lined floor to ceiling with shelves full of books. The shelves somehow appeared vastly better engineered than any of my bookshelves.

The rooms they sent were bathed in the kind of light I never have in my life - a pale, new-washed silver-gold that made everything glow, including the antique typewriter that presided over one of the pictured desks. The magazine wanted a few specimen pictures from me to see if my workspace would ‘work’ for them. I had no idea what that meant. What kind of room ought I have to please such an important magazine? What would appear writerly enough? Should it be bare or artfully cluttered? White-walled or covered with interesting photographs and posters picked up on book tours in Reykjavik, Mauritius and Cuba?

I turned from my email and cast a newly critical eye over my dog-eared room -- dog-eared because rooms shared with two large dogs and two smalls puppies have a tendency to look less than impressive.

The two puppies discover that a ball can bounce

I tidied up, hid away the heaped blankets and towels, pushed collars, leashes, tick powder, chew sticks, mangled toys, muddy shoes and gnawed bones out of sight, and arranged myself a desk with books, paper, pens scattered around as if they had accumulated over days of inspired writing. Writers are meant to drink a lot of coffee. Maybe a coffee mug would not be out of place. (Which one, though? Golden Bridge or one of my own creations? Full or empty?) Perhaps a cigarette in an ash tray? But no, this was for an American publication, they might then have to preface the article with a health warning.

photo by anuradha roy

What complicated matters was that this time the monsoon in the mountains where I live is nothing less than a Tennysonian (or is it Wordsworthian?) thundering cataract. The sky burst open about five days ago and has not been stitched back since. The drumming of rain on the roof is ceaseless, the trees are whited out by cloud and rain. Our road to the plains is blocked by landslides, the power collapses for half a day at a time.

Yesterday walking in the forested roads during a ten minute intermission in the rain, I heard a creak. I looked up as the creak turned into a groan and then leaped for cover: a green, many-branched oak was swaying dangerously on the slope a few metres above. I saw it dip, then tilt and then it came crashing down the hillside, flattening other trees in its path. It happened in slow motion, every stage in the sequence a separate one.

As if things were not bad enough, we woke this morning to the sound of someone airdropping a gunny bag full of stones onto our roof. It was dawn, we were still half asleep. We lunged for cover and the dogs went berserk barking. It took a few minutes to work out that the massive sound had been made by a langur who had jumped onto our tin roof from a deodar branch above. Langurs are human-sized monkeys and a leaping langur is like a six-foot tall man on the move. Elegant when airborne, all black and silver with curving tails that fly as they go from branch to branch, beautiful to admire at a distance. The rest of the langur’s tribe had gathered for breakfast at our mulberry tree, and as if to prove how quickly monkeys learn new tricks, each one of them left the tree with a mouthful of leaves and landed on our roof by turn, replicating the first one's thundering impact. They ran down the length of the roof and on to a tree nearby. Then they repeated the whole thing. We could tell they were having fun.

Langur outside my window/ by anuradha roy

A calming coffee later, I discovered that my laptop, left to charge on a desk in the back room we ambitiously call ‘The Study’, was wet. The plugs near the charger were spattered with water. The desk had pools of water on it. A bookshelf beside it was dripping, and my precious, hardbound old copy of The Valley of Flowers was soaked at the spine as were the five books on either side of it. When we spotted small drips a few days ago we had sealed them with M-seal, but the monkey business must have shifted the tin sheets on our roof, created new gaps and fresh, large cracks. These cannot be repaired until the rain stops. The rain shows no signs of stopping. All we can do is drape towels and plastic sheets and position tubs and bins where the drip is not a fine spray but a stream.

By some miracle, my loyal Macbook is soldiering on despite its soaking. I've decided this laptop is my workroom. It goes wherever I go and turns every bedroom, train, bus, café, hotel room, garden and hilltop into a study. I think I’ll just send the magazine a picture of my notebook and my laptop and title it My Workspace. They can crop out the plastic rainwater tubs if they want to.

MY WORKSPACE/ anuradha roy

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter.

(Read it here in Catapult)

After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to look again at the whole of the book, not only its ending. I could refuse to make changes, of course; Christopher MacLehose, his phrasing and voice modulated by several centuries of Scottish civility, had taken pains to emphasize I needn’t pay him the slightest bit of attention, etc., etc.

Christopher MacLehose and Miska. photo by Anuradha Roy

I’ve never done a creative writing program, nor had I been edited before. In fact, the boot was usually on the other foot for me: I wrote when I managed to prise time away from my editorial work at the publishing house I ran with my husband. I had just about got used to acerbic marginalia from him. But criticism from a relative stranger, even if disguised as suggestion: The turmoil made me powerless to do anything for the next few days but choose a hill and walk.

I panted up brambly hillsides, remembering my first pottery teacher, Bani de Roy. When I joined her classes, she was around seventy, straight-backed and big-boned, white hair in a small bun. She was a disciplinarian of the old school who believed in relentless practice. I had gone to her with dreams of spinning out exquisite bowls and jugs, but for weeks—however long it took us to get it perfect—she would allow us to try nothing but cylinders.

Cylinders are to ceramics what the alphabet is to writing: It is where creating begins. It is a straight-sided pot, neither bulging nor tapering as it grows taller. It sounds easy enough—until you try to make one. After many clumsy attempts, when I managed something that appeared respectable, I beamed around in self-congratulation. But Bani frowned.

“No. Won’t do. Throw it out and start again.” She returned to her own work without further explanation.

Gradually, as the hillsides fell away under my feet, it became clear that Christopher had a point. If my first chapter had been a pot, Bani de Roy too would have said, “Throw it out and start again.” The experience transformed my view of writing. I now see fiction—my own and that of others—as work paused but never finished. I look at published novels as if they are photographs of flowing water, stilled. The image might have been quite different if the picture were taken one minute, an hour, a month later.

Three books and ten years on, I know that nth-hour crises are normal when working with Christopher: I might start to feel uneasy if there weren’t several. They occur because he thinks of a book as a constantly evolving entity right until it starts printing. He comes up with editorial ideas when you least expect them—you might have gone for a walk with him, or to a museum, and a particular painting or tree might remind him of some aspect of your book. The experience can be nerve-racking because Christopher treats your work as a garden of his own into which he is free to scatter seeds—he assumes some will take, some won’t, and the book will grow in new directions.

I know there are many writers who wince when offered editorial ideas. I have met far too many editors who combine ignorance with condescension and self-importance. Christopher and his kind are rare, almost extinct. He inhabits the world of a book in the making, responding to it with deep empathy and profound intelligence. From the moment he has read a typescript, there is a steady stream of surprises from him. These continue right up to publication. The difficulty for me now is to write without wondering which symphony he’s going to come up with next.

Potters learn through hard experience that nothing they make will please them. When the kiln is opened, what you thought would be a flawless teapot looks like a warped watering can. The disappointment can be crushing. You swear you will never make anything again. And yet time passes, ideas begin to crowd your head, your muscles remember the movements at the wheel. You prepare your clay. You prepare for imperfection, criticism, a hundred visions and revisions. This is how it is with making anything: pots, plots, pictures.

(published in Catapult)

By the Missisippi river in Minneapolis

Loud-voiced Woman:
"This is a purebred dog, Ah paid 2,500 dollars for that dog."

Mumbling Man:
"I'd -a given ya a baby. I'd-a given ya a baby."

Loud-voiced Woman:
"Fuck you, Doug, I don'want yer baby. I wanted Jim's baby."

Wall, Chicago Public Library
photo by anuradha roy

Gangsta Hip hop dog, SF
"I'm just living the life, trying to make it on my own"
photo by anuradha roy

Ray Ban dogs, San Francisco.
photo by anuradha roy

About to board. Minneapolis airport.

photo by anuradha roy

Wayside man, Chicago:

"You want to know where Trump Towers is? You don't want to go there. It's an evil place."

Taxi Driver, Chicago:

"You going to Trump Towers? I'll take you. Though you shouldn't go there. But what difference does it make? Hillary. Trump. None of them gonna do nuthin."