On a cold and rainy evening in London, Janice Pariat was walking with someone she expected to be in a long-term relationship with. Instead, it ended right then. “I found myself asking, ‘How did I get here? How can I map my life through the people I’ve loved, been with, and who have loved me? What are their stories about me?”’she says, while talking about her second novel, The Nine-Chambered Heart (Rs 399, Harper Collins). Pariat, born in Assam, won the Sahitya Akademi Award and Crossword Award for her debut collection of short stories from the northeast, Boats on Land. In 2014, she published Seahorse: A Novel, where she brought Greek mythology into modern-day Delhi and London. The Nine Chambered Heart is her third book. She calls it a fictional biography “told through love” and is about “the multiplicity of reality that we live in”. Set in familiar but nameless cities, the story moves between the East and the West, as nine characters recall their relationship with a young woman, whom they have loved or who has loved them. A compendium of shifting perspectives, the story is about the fragile and fragmented nature of identity. Besides English, it has been published in European languages such as French, German, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Norwegian. It was launched in Delhi recently and Pariat was in conversation with writer Chandrahas Choudhury at Alliance Française. “How many characters are there in the story? According to my calculation, there are 10 or 18,” Choudhury asked. “As many as you want,” replied Pariat, adding, “They are nine technically but, like people in our lives, some characters come back and some never go away because they are ghosts and they haunt us. If you count the one absent character, who is right at the heart of the novel, it makes it a lovely 10.” But the main character seemed inaccessible to the people around her, said Choudhury. To that, she replied, “It was an idea I wanted to keep at the heart of the book. We are not entirely accessible to other people, just like how they remain inaccessible to us, no matter how many decades we’ve spent with them. They can surprise us, hurt us, and they can change.” It didn’t matter how much time each character spent with the woman, be it five days or years. The space to each one of them, in the book, was the same, she said. “The reader, even though they are given slivers of information, has the luxury to piece together the character by the end of the book,” says the Delhi-based author. She adds, “There is so much to choose from and play while telling a story. There are infinite ways to tell the same story. My stories are different, thematically, which is an indication of how I have travelled as a person.”
