‘All stories are about people, their struggle to live, to make sense of life’

Tell us something about your ninth novel, In the Country of Deceit. It is the first love story you have written. Did you start out to write one?
I certainly didn’t set out to write a love story. When the novel began, there was only this young woman, Devayani, who’d featured in an earlier novel (a crime novel) and refused to go away as characters usually do. Now I saw her, back in her own home, fumbling for a new start in life, I saw her family trying to get her married, her resistance, her new friendship with an actress … Through all this, a line from John Donne’s poem kept running through my mind like a refrain: For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love. And then a man, a friend of the actress, entered the story and I knew this would be a love story. It had often seemed to me that everything has been said about love and too much about sex; but this was my story and I had to write it in my way.  

What is it to be possessed by the idea of a book and its characters? Where do you find your stories? How does a novel work itself out from the voices in your head?
You’ve used the right word; one is possessed. For me it is the characters first, then where they live, their families, their histories and so on. Slowly a world comes into being. People come alive, they laugh, they converse, they love, they hate—all this goes on in my mind, a background to routine life.   The story emerges out of this and becomes clearer as I write. Working out the narrative structure —how am I going to tell this story?—requires much conscious thinking, much working and reworking. But most importantly, there is what I can only call the truth, the soul of the novel, something undefinable, which you have to stay faithful to.  

The old charges against women writing about women persists, that their writing is restricted to smaller, “domestic themes” and not bigger, intellectual stuff. How do you react to this?
I don’t think a writer needs to respond to any ‘charge’, or to defend her/his novel. You write what you want to say, you do it the best way you can; the reader has the choice of accepting it or rejecting it. But no one has the right to question the writer: ‘why did you write about this theme or these people’ and so on. What matters is whether the novel says something to the reader, whether it echoes some of her/his thoughts and feelings, whether it stays with the reader. If it does, the novel works. Ultimately, all stories are about people, about their struggle to live, to make sense of life, they are about people’s relationships with others. The stories are framed in different contexts, that’s all. I find human relationships endlessly fascinating; our greatest joys, our deepest sorrows come out of them. As for people who divide literature on the basis of gender, I consider them lazy thinkers, caged into patriarchal corners. To a writer, all experiences are human experiences. I agree with Orhan Pamuk’s words: “All writers write in the belief that one day our writing will be read and understood because people the world over resemble one another.”  

Being a woman and an artist—does that imply a separate degree of difficulty?
An artist is an artist, there’s no such thing as a female or a male artist. When I write, I am a writer, not a woman writer. But, of course, external circumstances do matter. For me, a major problem was lack of time, rather, a continuous stretch of time I could call my own. (I’m sure all women who write can identify with  Sylvia Plath’s line about writing a poem before the milk comes and the baby cries!) Men have this problem too, but it’s harder for women, because the family’s demands are endless, impossible to ignore and inducing guilt when ignored. The other thing is that most women lack the ruthlessness an artist needs; there’s a reluctance to put one’s work above all else. I was able to go on because I believed in my work, not in an arrogant or conceited way, but in the sense that I knew this was my work and it mattered to me.  

When you started writing, Indian writing in English was nothing as it is now. Anita Desai recently said she felt she was writing in isolation when she started out. Did you miss a tradition of writing you could belong to? Who were your literary models?
Yes, I was very isolated. For one thing, I was ‘only a housewife’, working from home. I knew nobody. My only connection to literature was through my writer-father (dramatist Sriranga)—but that was Kannada literature which had nothing to do with English. I’d been brought up and educated in a small town, in a nondescript school and college, had no connections abroad and was not part of any academic, literary or social circle. I did all my writing between cooking three meals a day, taking care of the children and household chores.  And there was my writing—so very woman-centred. I had not read any English writer who wrote that way. Nor did I feel a connection to the English writers of that time. The only book I felt close to was Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day. The writers I had read and admired were the British, American and Russian writers. But I couldn’t write like them, because there was a distance between my language and the life I was writing about. So there were no role models for me to follow. I had to find my own way, forge my own language. My early novels, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) and That Long Silence (1990), came entirely out of my own self.  But if I were to think of a role model, I would name Jane Austen. I admire the clarity, the integrity and the moral vision of her writing enormously.

Who are your favourite writers?
Oh, so many. If I have to name some: Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Sayers, Sara Paretsky, P.D. James and so on and on. I re-read all my favourites over and over again.

The publishing world has grown in size and voice. And so has the publicity machine that follows “big writers” and creates celebrities out of them. How do you look upon this change?
With much discomfort. Of course, books and writers need to be made visible, but the kind of money there is now is rocking the boat. Books are expected to be written for a global market, which is changing the shape of English writing in India. They are judged on the basis of the advance given, on how many copies are sold, on the writer’s profile, etc., which can mislead readers. My main concern is the reader, who is being deprived of choices, books being thrust down her/his throat. I want to say to readers: experiment, try out different authors, find out for yourself what you like. There are so many books waiting for you; go look for them.