‘SFF writers aren’t celebrated enough’
INDRA DAS, AUTHOR, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY NOVELS
1 Kolkata features prominently in your work (in Kolkata Sea and The Devourers). How have the social-cultural vectors of Calcutta-Kolkata defined your writing?
Kolkata will always play a huge role in my writing since I grew up here and live here. And as the city changes that change will also be reflected in my writing, of course, depending on the era I’m writing about. I do find writing to be a lovely way to remember the city’s past, especially as much of the ways in which cities transform is terrible, a diseased side effect of capitalistic “progress” which tears down history and culture to replace it with new and ugly spaces for supposedly maximising commercial returns, or strips away valuable ecological resources to pave it all over and thus endanger the future of the city, as global warming marches on.
2 Do you think Indian fantasy and sci-fi authors (writing in English and in regional languages) are celebrated enough?
No, they’re probably not celebrated enough. Some of the Indian SFF writers whose work I’ve appreciated are Vandana Singh, Anil Menon, Samit Basu, Tashan Mehta, Gautam Bhatia, Vikram Paralkar, Nibedita Sen, Shiv Ramdas, Arula Ratnakar, Rupsa Dey, Amal Singh and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. I haven’t yet read Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual but I’m very much looking forward to doing so.
3 What are you working on?
I don’t like to talk about work in progress because it’s never a sure thing until it is. I am working on a book (much shorter than The Devourers) which, if all goes well, should be in the world, but definitely not this year. I have some short stories in anthologies coming out soon-ish that I can’t talk about because they haven’t been announced yet. I just had a new story out in Gideon Lichfield’s Make Shift (MIT Press), the latest book in the science-fiction anthology series Twelve Tomorrows. My story is called A Necessary Being, and is about a mecha pilot and his daughter in a future Kolkata that is in the process of reforestation after great ecological upheaval and an age of plagues. And there’s a Kolkata-set horror story called You Will Survive This Night.
4 What are the three things about Kolkata that only you know?
In Bowbazar, there is a canteen that serves dragon meat. But if you eat there, you must drink a tea that makes you forget that you ever did.
In the hard-to-find neigbourhood of Aminah, there is a famous skyscraper (the tallest in the city, but invisible from elsewhere), which looks like several different houses stacked like Jenga to the sky. Some say it is made of all the houses demolished in the city.
Walking alone at night, if you encounter a pack of stray dogs alone, you can convince them to allow you to temporarily join their pack, upon which they will describe the political intricacies of relations between stray dogs, cats, jackals, and wild birds in the city. If you show any fear, they will make fun of you relentlessly.