“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?
A lot of it indeed! Serendipity is my mantra! Because I believe creativity is about activating your intuition where many registers of your consciousness reside, including the subconscious and even the unconscious. It is a very rich intuition fed and honed by so much that we pick up over our life. A great Indian poet Ramanujan wrote in his diary that he does not go in pursuit of a poem but places himself in a quiet place where the poem will find him. I find the retreat where I can be “empty” and receptive and let the characters and stories emerge. It is a wonder what emerges from what hidden recesses, unfurling like smoke and taking on clear and solid shapes bit by bit. This makes writing for me an act of both faith and risk. You may fly or you may crash!
What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?
I come from a culture where orality had a big place and that was a reading method I would like to say. The earliest things I thus “read”, or were read to me, would have been stories from the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana but equally it was folklore from various literary and religious traditions that thrive in India, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, as well as secular regional tales and narratives. But if by reading you want a narrowly defined meaning of reading to be adhered to, then perhaps stories such as Alibaba and the Forty Thieves and Sindbad, the Sailor would be the first things that I read. In children’s magazines that flooded our house, delivered along with the daily newspaper.
And even though you don’t ask, I must say that once formal schooling began it was Enid Blyton!
Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
Yes, an Urdu couplet.
Dayar-e-fan mein jahan manzilen bhi farzi hain
Tamam umr bhatakne ka hausla kije
Roughly translated, it says: In the wilderness of creativity, where even destinations are make-believe, you must have the guts to wander about, lost, all your life.
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?
A child’s sized foot-shaped stone I found on a shingle beach in Surrey, which I am convinced is a fossil. It is sad, evocative, ancient, endearing …
Have you ever regretted publishing something?
A shy-seeming woman journalist once came to interview me for a feature on beautiful writers making their art! It was for a popular but quite serious magazine that was doing a special issue on Hindi writers and which had the idea that two essays should be on beauty and writers, and for it they picked a male and a female writer! I laughed, but out of kindness for the journalist’s nervousness and sympathy for a young girl venturing out in a man’s world, I agreed to speak with her about my home-grown health and beauty regimen alongside my creative endeavours, telling her she must ensure she gave priority to the latter. She didn’t! The interview turned out to be all about home-made face-packs and such that I used, and trivialized everything else. It read like it was for a fashion magazine. And there was no one but myself to blame for imagining it could be otherwise. I felt like, and came across as, some frivolous foolish she-writer! One writer I admired said to me, “I read a very weird interview of yours”. Others laughed and scoffed. I wished the earth would open up and swallow me!
Proust had madeleines. Which foods or meals trigger your memory?
Roasted corn on the cob in the rain. Fenugreek laddoos from relatives from my village. Home-churned white butter and ghee that are the aroma from my childhood homes. The aroma of cumin and asafoetida spluttering in ghee before it is added to home-made lentils.
Have you had any notable experiences meeting authors you admire?
Yes. A meeting with the grand dame of Hindi literature, Krishna Sobti, a most serious and incisive writer whose life and work delves into the volatile times spanning the years of undivided India-Pakistan under British rule as well as the fractured times of post-Independence and Partition. I had just started writing and kept it mostly hidden from the world. I was very young, shy, tongue-tied. One evening, after some literary event, I was with a group of well-known writers in a nearby café. Krishna Sobti was among them. She looked like a resplendent character from her own powerful writings who had walked out of the pages! One by one the group began to disperse and only four of us remained, Krishnaji, two male writers and silent me. That’s when she suggested we move on to her place to continue the party. She said she would pick up some liquor and join us in no time. The two men gallantly insisted they would pick up the liquor and why don’t Krishnaji and I go ahead. We did. At her place, she rushed about setting up for the evening – snacks, napkins, ice, water, glasses, this and that. Me in tow, trying to help. All done and ready, she turned to a dramatic red lamp with a big humpty dumpty type of head atop a thin long neck, which began gyrating when she pressed the switch. She put on some merry music that kept tune with the red figure. Then she stretched out her hand to me, said “let’s dance” and we started dancing!
Do you have a favourite bookshop?
I used to have when I was young. Present-day bookshops, at least those in and around Delhi where I live, are too commercial and impersonal for my taste.
How does distraction inform your writing?
It informs me well! It often gives me an unexpected trigger or clue, and my journey branches in a new way. Given my faith in serendipity, with little by way of prior planning or design, my writing owes a great deal to what is seen as distraction. Even in the course of writing, an idea or an image might come to me in a state of distraction and work its way into the text I am writing. The other thing that distractions stir up are memories which, imbued with reality and imagination, enhance the personality of my work.
What are you currently reading or watching?
Old Russian films based on the literature of Chekhov and Dostoevsky.
Who has influenced your writing?
The question does not admit of a definitive answer. Even if I set about identifying all those – not just writers – who have influenced me, there would always remain some whose influence has been so subtle – and the more formative – as to escape my notice.
Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life?
There are at least a dozen pieces that I have listened to again and again. If, hypothetically, I were ever denied that many, I would settle for “raag Jogiya Asavari” by Mallikarjun Mansur, Narsinh Mehta’s “Vaishnav jan to tene kahiye”, and renderings of “raag Darbari” by Amir Khan and Vilayat Khan.
Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page?
On the page, for all practical purposes. Go back to my response to Question 1. What is the fun of writing if you have it all already worked out? Besides, the head and the page are two different things. In the head the collisions of ideas produce their sparks and when those are relayed to pen and paper, two new elements in collision set off another set of sparks. It is like two chemistries, connected but different. The articulations in the head are not replicated on the page but set off a new dynamic and another form evolves.
What is the worst job you ever had?
Teaching history. I was no good, found academics dry, worked like I was the student, and spoke unstimulatingly and over-cautiously.
If you could choose any piece of art to hang above your desk, what would it be?
Bhupen Khakhar’s “Seva”. It did, indeed, hang above my desk for years. But that’s a long story.
What was your favourite text studied at school?
Some stories from the Panchatantra, some by Premchand, Alice in Wonderland and at some point The Old Man and the Sea.
Impossible for me to speak of any single favourite.
Which font do you write in?
With a fountain pen and my own scraggly font.
What does a writing day look like for you?
Waking up early and being quiet in a slow rhythm through morning chores which include a walk and sitting with tea and music and doing nothing much. By 9 or half past I am in my studio, alone with books and paper and pen around me. The rest of the day is there but unstructured – I may write or read or pace up and down. A short lunch break and a catnap thrown in. Until 5 or so.
And then it’s about being with others and doing other things. But mentally I may still be hovering in and out of my studio!
This was, if I may add, my regular writing day when I was unknown. It is being increasingly interrupted with the physical expansion of my writing world. And with new preoccupations that add up as life adds up!
Which other art forms are necessary to your writing?
Any and all art forms inform and inspire and help find the gait, the tone, the visual, the balance for my writing. Visual arts, music, theatre and film in particular affect me. Anyway, art forms have completely porous borders and any attempt to divide them into hermetic compartments is counter-productive. In that every art, ideally, aspires to be all arts, literature seeks to release words from their tyrannous tying to meaning. Harnessing their tonality, their rhythm, their visuality, and their meaninglessness as discrete units. Thereby uniting them with other arts to together make meaning.
Where do you seek refuge?
In life and living. Away from my settled home, in solitary retreats as much as in teeming worlds that confuse and rejuvenate.
Geetanjali Shree is the author of five novels and several short story collections. Her novel Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi in Hindi; translated by Daisy Rockwell) was awarded the 2022 International Booker Prize. The Roof Beneath Their Feet, (Tirohit; translated by Rahul Soni), will be published in the UK, Europe and North America for the first time.
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