9.13 Can Men Truly Write Women? Ft. Rahul Bhattacharya

If you've ever felt the pull of a new city and the desperate need to start over, keep listening.

In this episode, Tara sits down with the award-winning author Rahul Bhattacharya to discuss his latest novel, Railsong.

Writing about the freedom of a woman set in the 1970s, as a male author, is no small task. Rahul talks about Charu, a motherless daughter of a railway worker who flees to Bombay to build a life from scratch, on her own terms, in a country that's also figuring itself out.

Together, Rahul and Tara explore the role of research in fiction to make the audience feel like it's their story. Rahul explains what it was like to navigate this Everywoman story and how the domestic and the political are never really separate, whether it's 1974 or now. 

He talks about why the computer undid his ability to go deep and how Toni Morisson’s method inspired him to write his first draft of 133,000 words by hand. 

Whether you are stuck in the train or traffic, this episode will surely help you escape to another world. 

Books mentioned in this episode:

1. The Rabbit Angstrom series by John Updike
2. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana Bhattacharya
3. Pundits from Pakistan by Rahul Bhattacharya
4. The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms. 

Transcript

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This novel, I went entirely analogue. I wrote the first draft by hand. First draft, the handwritten thing was I think 133,000 words. Hi everyone, so today we're going to talk about Real Song by Rahul Bhattacharya and this so far has been one of my favourite pieces of fiction in the last few years. So, what I really liked about this book is it's a feminist novel according to me. It follows the story of a young woman, she grows up in a small town, her father works for the railways and one day she decides that she is going to leave for Bombay all on her own and you know you see her in the city of Bombay, you see sort of the 60s and the 70s, you see her finding her own way through relationships, she goes on to join the railway's personnel department. It's a story of womanhood, it's a story of railways, it's a story of Bombay and it's a story of India as well and the book has got so much praise, not only me but it's got praise from Volga, Vivek Shanmug, Kamala Shamsi, many many more people. So, I'm very happy to dive into the story behind Charu today, excited for this conversation. Welcome to the show Rahul. Thank you so much Tara, it's such a pleasure being on the show with you. Okay, so let's dive in. One of the major themes in this book is freedom and we start with this character Charu, the book is centred around her and you know we see her from sort of living in a small town to moving to Bombay. So, she's an ordinary girl, she wants agency, she wants control in her life. How did this character come to you? So, Tara, I don't think characters, especially major characters, come to you in the sense that they just fall ready-made on you. You have to make them, they don't drop down on you. You have to almost kind of raise them. This is particularly true in the case of Charu because I was starting almost at the very start. From childhood, we follow her journey right into her middle age. And so, at every step of the way, you're thinking about the various ways in which this character looks at the world and the various ways in which the world impinges itself on this character. By the world, I mean the bigger world of politics, work, etc., as we see Charu negotiate later in her life. And more immediately, the circumstances in which this novel starts, which is a family of six coming to this nascent railway township in sort of the part of India which is now Jharkhand. And in the very first chapter, Charu loses her mother. That is a kind of almost like a formative wound with which the novel begins and out of which Charu must then climb out of and make a life for herself. So, having put such a thing in motion, as a writer, I then have to think, what next, right? And that thing leads you to a next step and a next step. And slowly, in a novel like this, which spans such a long period of time, it's a project of an expanding consciousness. And so, this is how Charu came to me, bit by bit, month by year, month by month, year on year, draft on draft. Okay. So, you didn't have a whole life trajectory sort of, you know, in your head when you started writing. It sort of came, you know, as and when you wrote more and more. But how did the character of Charu and, you know, her life come to you? Especially as a male author, you know, I found it very fascinating that you chose to write about a young woman finding her freedom in India in the 60s and 70s. So, why even this topic and how did that come to you? So much of this, Tara, happens on the page. I didn't set out as a male writer thinking that I would now write a female character and this would be my project. The ideas I had for this book were so fuzzy and very abstract. They were more along the lines of, what happens if I consider a vast project enterprise, like the census, something that gestures at the scale and the complexity of India and place inside that a mere individual, a kind of every man or every woman, as it turned out to be. I didn't even know it was going to be an every woman. Now, I didn't have this character and I wanted to discover this character and that's exactly what I set about doing, except that decision was not a premeditated one. It was literally when I sat down early in the morning with my pad and my pencil and I started drafting the first lines. This is how the, this is the kind of time period which suggested itself to me, the opening. This is the family that started taking shape on the page. This is the character I found myself really drawn to. She's the one I brought into the forefront and so like that. Some of this is really mysterious and I know this sounds like, it sounds almost maybe like a little hokey, you know, like, but I feel that is how fiction works. It allows you to dredge out things out of you that you were not necessarily sure existed. This is especially true for the way in which I wrote this book, which is like very early in the morning. That's the time of the day I think you're quite close to your subconscious and you're not really sure why it is that some impulses suggest themselves more strongly than others. But once you have them, as a writer, you have something to work with. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, as you write more and more sort of comes into the folly and you know, obviously a big part of the story is the railways because Charu's father works in the railways. And then, you know, we see Charu getting on a train and going to Bombay. And I actually, one of my favourite scenes was that scene where, you know, she's in the train and passengers are getting on and off. That was just such an evocative scene. I don't think anyone has described being on a train or being on in the railways as well as you have in that scene. And then she gets off, she's in Bombay, she's in the station, she goes out, you know, into the world. So railways is obviously a very important part of the story. And then later she becomes a railway woman. So she joins back the system which her father was in. So why the railways? And what did you want to explore through it? And what kind of research? Because it was very well detailed, like even the bureaucracy, the whole, you know, system of how it works, how did you get into it? So the railways, to me, it's just the most kind of obvious and sort of wholesome representation of something that metaphorically and literally connects this country and all the exchanges and frictions that happen as a result of these exchanges. So in the railways, I thought I had a pretty powerful metaphor for modern India. But how can I make this connection between the life and the larger system intimate? These two things were always kind of working, rubbing up against each other, right? And as a novelist, your heart is with the character and the relationships. And I think this is true for readers as well. This is why people really pursue fiction, in a sense, to see a reflection of themselves. When I say of themselves, not necessarily like how of you, Tara and me, Rahul, finding myself in a character, but finding human nature in those exchanges that we read on the page. So there is that. And along that, I'm trying as a novelist then to animate something which is larger about our society, larger about what makes this place, this place. So once I kind of alighted on this metaphor, it was a question then of pulling them together in a way that feels really intimate. So Charu's, so when we started the novel, we kind of live in a railway township. This is for readers who have not read the book. We started in 1960. This is post-Nehruvin India. It's very much a young country looking to industrialise, become self-sufficient. And an industrial township like this is not a very traditional Indian place. It is a settlement which is congregated around a workshop. People don't live in the traditional patterns of caste or linguistic community. There are few joint families. In some ways, it is a kind of modernising, progressive vision of India. In other ways, it's culturally alienating. But it is, in some ways, the world of the railways. Through the railway township, then Charu finds herself so constrained by her circumstances. This is a township, a township almost exists in a bubble, disconnected from the greater India around it. In itself, it's a very interesting place, but it's slightly insulated from the world around it. Her having lost her mother, having the domestic responsibilities fall on her shoulders at a young age, she now needs to escape, which ironically she does by the railway, using the railways itself. So there is at that state for Charu a kind of, she has a pretty love-hate relationship with the railways. It is at one level, a signifier of the things that keep her bound in. It's also the means by which she emancipates, or tries to emancipate herself, by getting on this train, going across the country on this epic journey, is spat out in the city of Bombay. How does she make a life for herself? We follow all those adventures of hers, and finally she lands back in the railways as an employee. So she's kind of come full circle. And once she becomes a railway employee, we see through the course of the novel, it allows her access to a variety of different lives and circumstances, which kind of, almost kind of overlap against hers. Sometimes it's the idea of a country like ours, which has a greater number of people, a greater number of varieties of people, and this huge kind of panorama of social or economic disabilities, opportunities, call it what you will. The railways allows her to kind of plunge into those worlds as an inspector. So for me to have to put an individual through all of this, required, as you said, a great deal of research. I could not get that world wrong. If it felt false on the page, none of this would work. And I wanted it to feel true enough, not just for the lay reader, but for people who are familiar with the world. You know, like if a railway employee reads this novel, they should be able to identify it. So what was the research process? How did you get it so right? So the research happened in phases, because since, as we've already discussed, I did not have a map of the novel, the novel kind of grew. And then, so at various stages where I felt I was stuck and I needed more, I had to like stop and go and find out more, or between drafts, when some parts felt that they were not fully realised enough, I needed to go and find out more. Some of this could be done by reading, and I would read all kinds of things. I look at my bookshelves now, it's full of like railway labour laws and establishment rules and things like that. But a lot of it was actually travel and research on the ground. It was good old-fashioned footwork and speaking to people, you know, making a nuisance of myself so that they'll kind of just tolerate my queries. And then some of them were actually even like, some even feel flattered that jobs which are sort of unglamorous, jobs of that kind might interest somebody enough to, you know, ask them so many questions. So I would meet people, I would kind of get the kinds of details you can't find in books. I would visit places, I would think about them. Also, a particular challenge for me, Tara, was because everything changes in the government and the railways, designations change, rules change, physical spaces change. And I was writing, of course, about the past and not one fixed period in the past, but a span that I had to keep going back to see whether this applied for that period or not. You know, did this rule exist for this period or not? Would this storyline be persuasive? Would it be plausible for that year or not? Etc., etc. So yeah, that was the research. I mean, you know, to give you a lot of a lot of work when just into not only the writing, but the research also was a huge part of it. And tell me a little bit about the kind of people that you met. And, you know, like, are there any stories of any one person that you spoke to in particular? When you actually kind of, as a writer, you go to meet people, you realise how much more you're seeing than when you're just kind of walking around in the world, you know. Their angularities, their prejudices, their little tics, all of those kind of come alive to you. This is something I've always enjoyed, even as a reporter, being out in the field, meeting people. It kind of really triggers a hunger to get it right on the page. When I say right, as a novelist, I don't mean like to accurately pin down a person that I've met, but being able to create a person on the page that feels as persuasive as they would in real life. So writing a novel of this kind, that was very important to me. Welfare inspection is such an interesting job because you are at once somebody who represents the employees, as well as the administration, who kind of, you know, decides the fate of an employee's hands in the sense is through the conduits between themselves and the administration. So clerks, welfare inspectors, they become very important in the world of kind of petty power, right? The small holes that you have on the future of people, whether they get benefits or not, whether increments are kind of passed or not, and so on, whether advances are granted to them or not, whether they're suspended or not, those kinds of things. A welfare inspector has to assess claims. It requires them to become, in a sense, detectives. So if an employee dies, and then a wife comes to claim a job and benefits as a result of that death, while the employee is still in harness, you're indicted to a job. It's called a compassionate grounds appointment. Then a second wife shows up from somewhere. Then a third... Was that a real story? Because I know that Charu deals with the case exactly like what you're saying in the book. There are many like that. Was that a real story that you put into the book? I mean, there are many like that. I heard so that story was not like a real story. The stories that I wrote in the book are not real stories in the sense it's not like one story, but they are kind of, they emerge from the world of stories I've heard. So those multiple wife cases, so then, so where was I? The second wife shows up, a child comes up from another wife, you know, that I, my mother was married to this employee like 30 years ago, et cetera. And then what do you do? So then you have to go and kind of investigate. You look for, you go to a temple to see whether in fact the register shows such a marriage or not. Is someone lying, et cetera? This is one example, but multiple wife cases are kind of the ones that welfare inspectors enjoy talking about because they're at one level, they work, they have the kind of energy of gossip almost, you know, do you know what happened to this person? Like, this is what the case was. So in terms of stories, I found those very interesting and I found them also quite surprising at the number of employees who seem to have hidden wives and hidden children. It seemed to be, it's something I hadn't kind of anticipated when I was going into the world of railway research, that I'd be, it'll be full of stories about employees who have hidden spouses and children tucked away here and there. That's very fascinating. I can only imagine the amount of stories that you must've collected enough to write several books, I'm sure. And I also liked the fact that, you know, you went out on the field and you travelled and did all that because oftentimes when one thinks of a novelist, you know, the picture is that you're just sitting at your desk all day long writing, which of course is a part of it. But so much of it is also interacting with the outside world because that is what reflects on the page. I should also say, as you did, that it then takes a lot of work to almost forget that research, especially for writing fiction. Fiction in which the research sits like blocks doesn't really work. It's dull. It's kind of artless. The way I think of it is that once you collect that block or whatever it is, those pieces of research, you kind of almost then have to wait for it to evaporate and get off. It lose its shape and become these kind of little particles, which just pervade the air of the novel, you know, so it's everywhere yet nowhere. That's a great way of articulating how that whole process works actually. But coming back to Charu, you know, because her arrival in Bombay is a real shift in the story. And then as soon as she steps into Bombay, we refer to her as Miss Chitol. It's like a new chapter in her life and she gains independence. She's anonymous here and she's also lonely. She's navigating her life. She goes to live in her aunt and uncle's house and they are strict in their own way. They're conservative. She has a new job that she's finding pressurising. But what I found really interesting is that she left her home without telling anyone. So why do you think it was important for her to make that choice on her own rather than seeking help from her family or friends? As a novelist, I wanted her to escape, to set into motion, fresh drama, fresh adventure. So I got her to. You have to, as a novelist, move people around, move things around in a way that it's almost that their fate is in your hands. But then as you do that, they also start kind of fighting back at times. They also start resisting and they might kind of tell you that this exactly is not my fate or this seems plausible to me. You establish this kind of dialogue almost with the people you're writing about. So with Charu, there is my motivation as a novelist to set into motion further drama and further adventure. But now when I'm looking through Charu's eyes, suppose I decide, I think, no, maybe not. Let me keep her here. But from her perspective, if she's trapped and I'm appealing to the very circumstances that have conspired to trap her, to say that, you know, just reform yourself circumstances, just make a little room for her. It just felt false. It just seemed to me that a person like Charu, who was getting a greater sense of, as I wrote her, a person with a very fierce streak of independence in her, would want to create new circumstances for herself. So running away for her, when I started thinking about it and putting it in motion, seemed like a very extraordinary step for her to be taking. And it is for people who do. As I read more about this, I found it's perhaps not as uncommon as we think. This is especially true for women. And so if you read, say, a book like Shranya Bhattacharya's Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, that gives you a vivid sense of just how many women leave home and for what reasons, in order to be able to love or not be forced into love or to go out and earn your living, to educate yourself. And so women are doing it all the time as a way of, well, all the time is an exaggeration, but they're doing it often enough for me to finally start thinking that while I'm making her take an extraordinary step, it is in some ways also a representative step. Yeah. And the fact that she moves to Bombay, that's quite cinematic. It's very nostalgic also. It feels like one of those coming-of-age movies where people land in the does feel like that. So why did you choose to pick this city for her to change her circumstances? No, I'm glad you said that because I had a slightly cinematic vision of that entry into Bombay myself. Like you said, well, I certainly have grown up with films where the arrival into Bombay was such a significant thing. So many more movies, I think at that point, were set in Bombay. And when you moved the scene to Bombay, the first shot you'd see was the external shot of the Victoria Terminus. It was one of those stock images. Okay, Bombay has arrived and we see VT. And so the 1970s films, which did this a lot, Charu subverts that in a sense that she arrives in that period, it's 1974, it's peak summer, it's the railway, the great railway strike is still going on. And she arrives on an unreserved compartment and comes out into the city of Bombay. But we're seeing the scene from the inside. We don't see the exterior shot of the VT. We follow the train, this hot rake crowded with thousands of people into the city and then Charu trying to find a way out, which direction do you exit? So you're watching the Victoria Terminus from the inside and then she stands at the threshold and she's kind of looking out of the city. So you would then see maybe the Times of India building, the BMC building. So why Bombay? These are scenes that I am familiar with, not just from films, of course, but because a lot of my own growing up was in Bombay. I moved there with my family at the age of... I was born there, first of all, because my mother is Bombay born and bred, Gujarati actually. My father was Bengali. And so I was born in Bombay because my mother came home for the birth of her children, as mothers often do. And when I came, we moved permanently. We moved to Bombay, not permanently, but from Secunderabad when I was eight or nine years old. And then I stayed there till about 26. So I did have a sense of that city and I had a sense of, in very different circumstances and in a different era, I had a sense of what it is to arrive into a city like that and how overwhelming it feels and how exciting it feels at the same time, how strange it feels. Those are things I could perhaps tap into, but I had to look into all of this through my characters, through her eyes, through a 16-year-old runaway in 1974. And I say this often, to me, the idea of the word that the film aspirants... that's used for film aspirants who come to Bombay to make their living is the word struggler. And I kind of like that word very much because I feel so many people who come to Bombay are strugglers. And whether or not it's in the movies or elsewhere, they are trying to emerge from the struggle and become stars in their own lives. And Charu is a struggler. She does come to Bombay like that. And Bombay is a city which in some ways crushes dreams, in some ways rewards them. But in the Indian imagination, certainly it is the place that you go to to make your life. I felt it was appropriate. Absolutely. There's something about Bombay that just captures your imagination. And what I liked about Charu's character is that I think of her as like this boss lady. You know, she's very strong, but not in a trope-y kind of way. You know, she's a strong, independent woman, but not in that trope that you kind of assume. She has this quiet conviction, quiet determination. She has a head on her shoulders. She wants to carve her own life. And she's figuring it out bit by bit by bit. It's not that, you know, she herself has a complete vision of what she wants to be, but she knows she doesn't want to be controlled. And she's just looking for some sort of agency. And that also comes out in her relationships, which I found very fascinating. So in the book, you explore different relationships she has with these characters on her name. There's N, S, B, J, P, you know, we have different equations. Sometimes she has the upper hand, sometimes they have the upper hand, but she never loses herself ever in any of these relationships. Spoiler alert is that finally, she does get married. And I really didn't expect a character like hers to get married. So when she got married, and she moved in with her in-laws, that too, you know, I was like, okay, like, finally, she's sort of conforming and doing what all the other women in her time are doing. And maybe she's, you know, she is still a woman of her time. So it does make sense in a way. And then we see what happens later on, how actually that situation isn't the best situation for her and what she wants in her life. So can you please talk about the relationships and that decision to get married and what happens and what you wanted to show through that? You're right about Charu's becoming being a thing that you have to almost do every day, right? The struggle to become something to find yourself, to give yourself agency is something that doesn't happen because of one thing, it doesn't happen because of a single decision that you take. It's something that you almost have to work on every day, sometimes without even knowing it. And sometimes you let the forces kind of push you back, and then you're backed into a corner and then you have to kind of start again. You're always, especially as a single woman working in the big city, think about all the things that are arrayed against you and all the different ways that you need to protect yourself as well as advance yourself. What are the solidarities that you need to find? What are the ways in which you get your guard up? It's probably a really, really complex process. And you'd know this much better than me, Tara. For me, it's kind of observed and imagined and then rendered through the character. I have, of course, not lived the experience of what it is to be a woman fighting for a life, to make something of herself on her own terms. I feel she has a really fairly large emotional scape to her life. She is not in the kind of structure of the novel defined by that origin drama that we spoke about. That is something that we see a lot of in our contemporary culture, whether it's film or literature or even RL, trauma, the centering of the trauma. But I feel trauma often exists with a whole lot of other emotions and experiences. Your relationship with the various wounds in your life changes over time. You acquire new ones. You shed some. I think Charu's open enough for all of that. The kind of hole that her mother's departure and other deaths in her life, they don't completely go, but she finds other ways to fill them in. She's open to love, but she's also susceptible to heartbreak. She's wary of friendship in the sense, she's wary of friendship in what it requires of her, say, economically. Can she be part of a group, you know, as a single woman who doesn't have so much money to spend, who doesn't have a family to fall back on? These are all small things which shape your experience of the social world. So how do you negotiate all of that? It was really meaningful for me to be able to think about that. There's one thing I'd say is through all of this, just going back to the loss of a mother, is the one thing that happens is that she is perhaps not able to trust relationships or the fear of them disappearing. She is so committed to being independent because she knows that this may not last and that kind of, that hurt, that pain is quite profound. So rather than expose yourself to those situations, it's better that you learn to stand on your own feet. So when she puts herself in those situations which demand vulnerability and she kind of lets her guard down, when her emotions are then assaulted as a result, she needs to kind of get up and move on again. So her escaping, her fleeing, her moving on becomes a kind of recurring theme in the book. And interestingly, there are many novels of this kind, mostly featuring men. The Updike series, Rabbit Run or whatever, it just gets you to know. But it was, I mean, how would a woman do that if she had to? Can you talk more about the marriage because I found that very fascinating. She's at that stage of her life, almost open to the idea of negotiations, which is true for all our lives. For her, it's at some level against the grain of her nature, but at another level, also natural that somebody with so little to fall back on will obviously then seek out negotiations in a way to kind of stabilise herself. And coming off a heartbreak or two, she's more willing to meet the world on its own terms halfway. But when she does that, she finds that the world starts closing up on you again. So you mentioned the fact that she moves in with her in-laws. Now, what is it like to live in a chawl in Bombay, where you literally have two tiny rooms which act as both your bedroom, as well as your in-laws' bedroom, as well as the kitchen, as well as the dining room and the living room, et cetera, where you're one of the few people in that chawl who doesn't know the language, where the idea of an earning woman is tolerated, even encouraged, but would ideally be of the type that you wouldn't want her to leave the house. So you could maybe teach, give tuitions or make things in the kitchen which can be sold in Snack Smart, et cetera. A lot of women in that chawl do work like that. When all of the, when, and especially if you're now married into a conservative family, when politics kind of, when political events of the day enter these spaces, the domestic spaces, then what are the tensions? Like we know for instance, how families in India now or in the Modi regime or in the Trump regime in the US, how those tensions play out, because they pit almost kind of your vision of life and the world against somebody else's. And then, and sometimes they diverge, start diverging so dramatically, how do you reconcile them? So this marriage brings together like so many of the other themes in the novel, quite apart from the personal negotiation between Charu and her husband, who's a kind of well-meaning fellow, but not entirely. He's, I mean, I'll let the reader discover the character for themselves and see what they think of it. But it also puts into, apart from the frictions of in-laws and being a wife making a new home for herself under their command and the closed space of the chawl, there is also the idea of the wider world coming into this tight space, the political ideas of the day and how those play out. I didn't want to ignore that. I feel that the domestic and the political are not as separate as we think in our days, in our world. We talk about all of these things and we think about all of these things and we fight or argue or get annoyed with each other about all of these things. You know, it's about both, whether did you buy the vegetables or not, as well as how could you vote for that? I love how in the book, you know, because it is a story of an every woman, it's a very domestic space that she occupies with her own father in the railway town or the in-laws or at her aunt and uncle's house. And she does have her own space as well. But through that sort of, you know, micro, you've spoken about so many bigger things through that one person's life and exactly what you said, it brought the whole world into that small domestic space, whether it's politics or whether it's, you know, the history of the time, what it means like to be a woman of the time. So many themes come in. So I also want to talk about your writing style, because honestly, when I was reading the book, I just kept marvelling at the word choice. I just kept marvelling at how the sentences were put together. And I thought it was a masterclass in prose writing. I love the writing of the book. So how do you approach writing at that level? Is it something you're very conscious of? Thank you, Saira. That was really lovely to hear. I've always been kind of, I like working on sentences and paragraphs. At one level, that's a way of defining thought or giving things the precision or giving things the nuance that one aspires to do. I feel the arrangement of sentences and words and how the sentences play off against another and the rhythm they create are so important to creating the mood of your reading. How it kind of, it literally, I mean, what we're doing here, we're just putting basically with squiggles on the page, whether handwritten or on the computer, you're making a reader conjure an entire world. And how delicate that process is then. Just think about all the different levels of experience that one can generate through that. But I'll also say that, I mean, my process for writing Railsong was very different from my previous two books. I had never written anything in sequence before. This is my habit, even from my earliest days of journalism when I was writing articles. I would not normally start at the start and end at the finish. I would have like two or three or four different things going on at a time. And so when I wrote my first book, Pundits from Pakistan, and then again for Sly Company, I'd had different parts of the book going at the same time. Within the document, I'd have different paragraphs going on, starting off at the same time. And some of this, I think, was also the function of having learned writing, having become a writer on the computer, which allows you this kind of flexibility. So if I have to think of a metaphor for this very digital age writing, the metaphor I reach out for is the torrents, the bit torrents. I don't know if they're still around, but there's a time that's how we used to download even songs. And you would see this bar and you have different parts of the bars getting filled at the same time. And where is the energy coming from? You go to that part. I mean, as a writer, you kind of fill that bit and then put something else in. And somehow together at the end, you have a full bar. This novel, I went entirely analogue. I wrote the first draft by hand. All, I mean, the first draft, the handwritten thing was, I think, 133,000 words. And because of this, I also wrote it start to finish in sequence. There was a lot of revisions and drafts on the computer afterwards. So there must be a quality to this novel which is different from my previous books. That's, of course, because of a host of things, because of the subject matter, because of where I am as a writer. But I think some of it also must have to do with how I wrote this book. And why did you choose to write in analogue style? I actually found that very, I find that very interesting that, you know, because as a writer or trained at the computer, yeah, you would have a different process versus someone who's writing longhand. I never thought of it that way. Because that process actually undid my mind. It almost took away my ability to sit still and focus and descend into a space of creation. This awful permanently connected computers that we now have, which is very different from when I started, where you had to kind of dial up on the modem and wait for that kind of extraterrestrial screech, which tells you that you're connected to the internet and then you look up what you need to quickly and then you log off, because the phone line is blocked. Broadband came a little later, then Wi-Fi came a little later. And now suddenly you're always connected. And of course, I'm talking about the pre-smartphone era. Now, instead of the computer, I opened a document and I just found that I was endlessly fiddling with my font and my zoom size. Then I had these anxieties of all the things that I didn't know, because as we've discussed, there was a lot for me to kind of learn at the level and discover. But you can't let, you can't be led by those anxieties when you're writing a novel. There is, the core of a novel is an emotional project almost. You know, you're trying, for which you really have to go deep inside yourself. All the other research that I spoke about, all of that kind of will be without any power. If as a novelist, you can't go into that space of creating emotion. So I found I could just look up Google search engine, anything, all my anxieties of, I don't know anything about this. Let me look it up. Let me look it up, look it up. And like in half an hour, I've just gone so far away from what I was trying to do. So I thought, why not just go back the other way? Just go analogue, go to pencil and paper, go to the tools of childhood, go to the space of maybe our earliest creations. You know, when you were asked to write an essay yesterday, my wife asked our younger daughter, who's six, to just write a short essay on everything she sees around her. She said, today, so and so, my father's wearing a blue shirt, my mother's wearing a red kaftan, I'm wearing this PR. Sometimes my sister makes me laugh. She poops every day. It became quite funny and she started enjoying it, etc. So and that is the pencil and paper is all you kind of need. I read Toni Morrison in an interview saying that she wrote her first draft by hand before dawn, starting off writing before dawn on yellow legal pads with 2B pencils. I admire her immensely. I thought this is exactly what I'm going to do. Yeah, I think all of us sort of, I mean, I don't know about kids today, but all of us started writing out in our first stories and creations of pen and paper. So quite interesting, I think. Do you think you... That's even better, Tara, because there's something in the act of sharpening the pencil, which is extremely comforting. And it, and something metaphorically also, it's quite good. You know, you're actually sharpening, you're sharpening your core. I liked it. I like to see those pencils whittled down to size. You know, I had like a case of them, a few dozen of them, along with the stack of the yellow legal pads. Those pencils have kind of now got scattered everywhere because the kids, when they were young, they would start using them because with their small hands, they were still able, it was still big enough for them. And do you think you'll write your next book like this as well? Analogue? I'm not sure. Actually, I'm not sure about that. Because I mean, as I'm trying to now scratch into something new, it's something I'm also kind of moving both ways on. You know, I'm trying a bit of this and a bit of that. I don't know how it's going to work out for me. So yeah, I would love to know because I know, you know, how many years it took you to write this book and the effort that it has taken shows. I mean, the book reads effortlessly, but you can tell the amount of work that has gone into making it what it is. And I think that's why doing so well as well. And I know I've recommended it to many people. So what's next for you? Now that you're moving away from Charu's world, you said you're getting back into normal life. What does that look like? What is next? Recovering my world from Charu's world. It's a period between books, and especially the period just after you've published a book, it's a very strange and frazzling and disorienting one. There's a whole process of going out and travelling with your book and talking about it, which in a sense changes your relationship with the work. What was between you and the page was something very different from then what starts occurring between you and how you talk about the book to others. And you almost have to learn how to speak about it. And then you kind of come away from all of that. And at least for me, it's a slightly frazzling process. I feel like I've lost my bearings. I'm in a very different space from where I was when I was working on this book. And a part of it is also then you're kind of done with the book. Its world, its characters, they start fading away. They start feeling less urgent. And you feel the desire to put it behind you because you also feel the more you stay there, the more you're kind of held back. I mean, it's like Charu's need to kind of move, to move. The momentum of things gets impeded the more you kind of stay in the past. So there is this, there is the kind of attachment to the work. There is your responsibility towards the work against the impulse of kind of leaving it behind and kind of finding yourself, which is again, now then the other really disorienting period of a writer's life, I think is actually trying to scratch into the new project. And I know it took me years to get started on Real Song. I also maybe took it a little bit for granted that the new project would, you know, suggest itself and it would just happen. But with the novel especially, I think you have to sit down and make it happen. So it was about, it was a few years after Sly Company that I actually started writing Real Song. And then it took me a full decade to do. I had, yeah, I mean, some of it is because of the ambition of the project. I had, we had two kids in that period and I'm a work from home father. There's that. I also had a job as an editor with the Cricket Monthly. So in order to be able to write this novel, you know, to have something steady. So there was all of that. And now there's this whole kind of this, this emptiness and this desire to scratch into something new. And you, again, that whole feeling of not knowing enough, like having these impulses on the page and then you really have to kind of discipline yourself and get it out of yourself. I can't wait to see what you have next. And I hope that, you know, I know these things take time, but I hope we see it sooner than later as readers. Thank you. Yeah. I'd, I mean, I certainly would like to advise myself to, as my publishers have to kind of not take 14 years between books. Well, thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation. I loved sort of, you know, how this book was the idea of building a life in such a raw and honest manner, and also your writing process and how you think about it was extremely, extremely fascinating. So yeah, if my listeners have a question for you, if you could step away from your current life, even for a little while, where would you go? Tell me in the comments. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Books and Beyond with Bound. This podcast is created by Bound, a company that helps you grow through stories. Find us at Bound India on all social media platforms. Tune in every Wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from India and South Asia.