‘The man dies on page one’

The former editor of Mint Lounge talks about her forthcoming novel

Simar Bhasin letters@htlive.com

1Your debut novel, The Illuminated, is out this year. What is it about? It is the story of two women, mother and daughter, who are forced to see the world anew in the wake of a personal tragedy. The husband/father figure, a renowned architect and an all-round giant of a man around whom their lives revolve, dies on page one.

The Illuminated is scheduled to be published in July so I don’t want to give away too much but I’d say it’s a novel about perception. When the light shifts, you see the world differently.

2

In the book, Tara is a Sanskrit scholar while Shashi is immersed in philosophy. Having studied linguistics yourself, did that come into play while shaping these characters? What were the books you imagined your characters would be well acquainted with?

I have a Master’s degree in linguistics but I never studied Sanskrit formally. An interest and immersion in both the poetry and mathematics of language is common to both. Since my characters are rather scholarly in their inclination, I decided to read everything I thought they would be reading. So for Tara, I read a lot of Bhartrihari and Bilhana and Kalidasa in translation — she would be reading them in Sanskrit though. And for Shashi, Hegel and Sri Aurobindo. As a result, I hadn’t caught up on new books in the last few years at all! I’m reading them all now.

3

In what ways has your experience as a journalist and editor helped in developing your fiction?

It hasn’t necessarily helped except that it taught me how to respect deadlines.

In fact, being an editor was often detrimental to drafting because I would constantly self-edit. I frequently fantasized whether it would have been more pleasurable to write fiction had my day job not involved writing and editing. Like, if I was a banker or an architect, would I be welcoming the chance to work with words at the end of the day? Fiction demands an entirely different approach and sometimes the rationality and urgency of journalistic writing can come in the way. I know it’s romantic to say I woke up at 4 am to write but my daytime attention had to be devoted to the jobs I held so I would write from midnight to 2 am whenever I could and through the day most weekends. That way, I had some sense of a shift from one to the other.

I’m quite irritated by the impulses of journalism in the Twitter era, which is so much about a ‘this or that’ culture, so much about virtue signalling and sparring with people who don’t wholly align with you. I feel fiction has the opposite impulse, to inhabit characters without judgement.

4

What are you working on next?

I’m at the starting stages of my next work of fiction and also writing my first screenplay. It is a collaboration with two New York-based writers and an international producer and filming will begin midyear. Yes, I’m looking forward to 2021.