OF DREAMS, SPACES & THE CITY OF JOY
If someone asks me what I would like to be if I am reborn, I would want to be a writer again,” said Usha Ananda Krishna without an iota of doubt in her mellow voice as she sipped her coffee. Sharing about her experience with writing she explains, “Writing is a lot like building a house; you have to have a plan. You might not have the physical places but you have the moral spaces around which you frame. Like you have characters which you begin layering just how you begin designing a house. There are many aspects to think about while you are designing and writing.”
To draw parallels between these two varied creative fields comes organically to Usha being the architect- turnedwriter that she is even though neither of the two has ever been in isolation for her. Books have been the integral constants in her life for as long as she can remember. Born in Bengaluru to Tamil speaking parents, Usha went for her graduation from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi before she plunged into the world of buildings, cities and the spaces they took her to. But to scoop out time for books was never a challenge for Usha who pursued her love for reading and eventually started writing, mingling both her worlds even if it was at a slow pace.
After her graduation, she worked as an architect in New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata before she committed herself to full- time writing around 2000.
It was in 1995 that her first novel, A Turbulent Passage was published, followed in 2009 by Fallout. While the first one was slightly biographical, the second one was set in Bengaluru and Delhi, and now her third book, The Escapists of J. Mullick Road, which is just out, is set in the communist Calcutta during the 1980s. But that’s just the setting, says Usha, “The theme is universal; the issues that are dealt with are universal. There has been a lot of emphasis on the Kolkatabit but it really is just a set up in the end. The book is beyond the city, it’s about human beings and their manifold facets. A set up is just like a driver that the plot needs,” said Usha who also collects abstract art and likes to read serious fiction.
It’s a usual morning in the late 1980s when a naive Pinaki Bose, a middle- class clerk, looks down from the window of his customary home on Kolkata’s J Mullick Road and catches the glimpse of a street hustler, Kalol Mondal, bathing in a courtyard. And this ordinary moment becomes the moment of reckoning when an outraged Pinaki takes a lifechanging decision to move out and build his own house. While that might come as a highly ordinary decision to most, it wasn’t so in the Kolkata Pinaki lived in. The culturally confined city was defined by a very similar pattern of mansions and was largely controlled by land mafias. For anyone at that time to think about building a house was out of character. For Pinaki it is almost out of his reach but he is determined. “For him this house, having his own place where he can be who he wants and not deal with something he doesn’t want, became a metaphor for self- worth,” said Usha as she ensures how all of these characters are not one- dimensional which unravel as the story proceeds through an expedition of self- discovery.