Writers on Reading. Part Fourteen, Rehana Munir

Collage by Ananya Broker Parekh

Rehana Munir’s debut novel Paper Moon is set around a bookshop in Bandra. In her charming book, the antiquated bylanes with their Goan nooks become a character. The book is steeped in the cosmopolitan aspect of the suburb, where a movie star and a nariyal paaniwala live streets apart and both make an appearance in the story. 

We asked Rehana to take us on a Paper Moon tour of the neighbourhood, dipping our feet in her fictional world, we went to Good Luck Café for some kheema pao and chai, walked to St. Peter’s church for an authentic experience, had a beer at Yacht as the golden light streamed in through trees, and ended our walk at Trilogy an independent bookstore in Bandra, much like the one Rehana used to run in Santacruz many years ago. We spoke about books, writing, literature, women in literature and Eunice de Souza among other things. 

We started off the interview at Good Luck Café, where Fiza spends a lot of her time and it is also where the book ends. 

What led you to the idea of setting this book in a bookstore? Was it because you used to run one earlier? How did that come about?

 So I had actually written a piece for a magazine, I think it was for GQ about running a bookshop. The piece became a very compact summary of my years at the bookshop and then a little while after that when the book idea came up, that article was still a bit fresh in my head and I had enjoyed writing that, so I thought how about if I make this a fictional sort of thing. Originally I thought about short stories, but I think the publisher Harper Collins said why you don’t write a novel, so they nudged me in that direction. And once I started writing I felt it could be nothing but a novel. 

Rehana at the book store she ran many years ago in Santa Cruz, Mumbai.

 Can you tell us a little bit about your years of running that bookstore? Many of us dream of it but I am sure there’s stuff nobody tells you about…

 The dust! I just remember the dust. Someone is always dusting a book. I mean that is a good metaphor for the problems you actually encounter. The dream is that you will be surrounded by books all day and you will live in this world occupied by lofty romantic thoughts but it is a business like any other, more difficult than any other businesses because it is books that you are trying to sell and not well cupcakes, which seem to sell in Bandra, these days. So yeah what I loved was the obvious things, if you’re a reader it is the dream, it is the idea, it is like being in a book yourself. On the downside, buying books is easy, selling it is hard but the payback is huge. It is very rewarding. 

How much of your experience made it to the book? Would you run a book store again if you had the opportunity?

Wouldn’t do it again at all. For me, it was doing it right through this book in many ways. I was very young when I actually ran the bookshop and with the distance of the years, I managed to correct some of the issues. I think Fiza Khalid runs the bookshop better than I ever did. Simply because she is a character of fiction. She benefits from my experience. 

I remember that first day when I went to the IBD warehouse, their distributors’ office, I went into this large airless basement, kept dropping books into this huge trolley, it was magic. The magic is how they show it in some of these films, it is very cinematic really, that part of it. 

I think I invested a lot of what I have learned in her character, a lot of it comes from me. You know we are sitting in Good Luck right now eating kheema pao, that is me and I have given Fiza those traits, but she is also very different from me. I think I am more impulsive than her. I have made it a key characteristic of hers, that she overthinks. She is all head at the start of the book at least. 

The plot is about a coming of age in the sense that she comes into herself and it is a book about becoming oneself, finding. People look at it and say you have put yourself in the book and I am laughing to myself and thinking, her interactions for example with her mother, or her college boyfriend and everything, it is very different, from the way it really happened. 

My mother is very different from Fiza’s mother, Noor in the book. In fact, my mother read the book and the first thing she said was ‘oh you know she is different’, so I was like you know thank god, someone is giving me some credit for inventing because it is very often, I don’t know whether it happens with male writers too but a lot of women writers get this. As if you’re writing a journal, you know sitting in a rocking chair, looking at the mountains outside and writing in the journal. No, you’re inventing, you’re writing fiction and even when it borrows from life, there is a lot of craft involved.

You have been writing short form for a while now, you write articles, there is a weekly column, there are articles about art, cricket and all sorts of things. What was it like writing long-form for the first time? 

It was my first time writing fiction of any kind. In one word it was liberating. Because I wasn’t writing to a brief, to a deadline. For me, a very freeing, liberating and empowering feeling is the blank page. I love a blank page before me. You give me a brief and I am a little bit lost. But if you just say do something, I am very happy with that.  

What was the writing process like? Did you enjoy writing the book?

 It was a blast. I have been told not to say this in interviews because I sound arrogant. But I was having a blast. It was a treat. It was a reward I gave myself while I was writing this book because I was also writing my bread and butter or my kheema and pao . And this was really a treat.  This was pure fun, I had no idea what will happen and those who have read the book will know on the last page anything could happen after the book ends and that to me is my view of life. 

Since we are at Good Luck Café and it features a lot in your book. Have you been coming here since childhood? 

I am a very Irani café type of person. I think the interest developed in my college years because I studied at  Xavier’s,  there were two Irani cafés Sassanian and Bastani close by. I have a current obsession it's in Mahim called Café Irani Chai. It's excellent- a new Irani with a very nice old-world charm. This place also represents an idea of Bombay that I love. It's the kind of place where different kinds of people mingle. It's an idea that's increasingly sort of disappearing from public life, different kinds of people just sort of sitting together and having a chai. That is Bombay for me that is my idea of a perfect world, becoming now such a radical and endangered idea.  There are pockets in Matunga where I go every weekend for breakfast, which Amrita Mahale writes about so well in Milk Teeth.  Or Jane Borges in her book Bombay Balchao.  So there are Bombay books right now these two in particular that explore an idea of Bombay that defines us and so yes, Good Luck is one of those places. 

After chai and kheema we made our way to Yacht (also featured heavily in Paper Moon) a place where Rehana says she and her sisters stopped by for Biryani after school. Some of the teachers from their school were often found enjoying biryani at Yacht too. We spoke about writers who influenced her over glasses of beer, as group nearby celebrated a birthday and afternoon light poured in through a tiny window- a very Bandra moment. 

Your book has a very heartwarming aspect to it, a nourishing, restorative zone.  Some books have a way of coming into your life when you need to feel cosy and light. Do you have a memory with such a book?

Many books. But one in particular which I've mentioned in this book is 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. The book was gifted to me by a friend.  That was a very heartwarming book and it’s related to a bookshop.

Since your book has a female protagonist can we talk about writers who write about women? Are there any books that have captured the female gaze that you like?

Yeah, there are some of my favourite writers and most of them I think are women. So Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark whose characters generally tend to be weird women, which is always a good category. They are not synonymous, that would be sexist (laughs). Of course, writers like Arundhati Roy, bring to the fore, whether it was a first novel or even the second one, not just the feminine, not just the female gaze or the women's experience but also the marginalized in various forms. Marginalized on account of gender or caste or community, or orientation all of that. So, yes, these are some of the women who I find treat the woman as the subject in a way that I enjoy. 

If we go back in time that was Jane Austen and later Virginia Woolf came. Virginia Woolf, I think is the one person who turned the whole idea on its head. Not just about a woman's role in fiction, but the woman who's writing the fiction, the woman who is reading the fiction, the women who are in fiction, the stream of consciousness technique, is sort of direct contrast to a kind of literature that is very male in its preoccupations, and in its style also, where you talk about wars, and we talk about social ills or whatever. I mean there is Charles Dickens, no one will say that you don't need that, but it can’t be the only way there has to be. So then what she does is turn the camera inward. It goes into your head rather than outside. She gives so many writers, male and female, a way to talk about the interior life of a character. I think in this book again, to a certain extent, there are bits where Fiza is introspecting. It is an interior monologue and that's fun, because, that's how we experience life, right? And to convert that to the page with some semblance of authenticity is thrilling, and I think Virginia Woolf more than anyone else gives us that. 

Your sister is also a writer, lyricist. How has that influenced you? Were your parents also writers? Did you grow up in a reading household?

 My grandma, my paternal grandmother, who I didn’t live with was a writer, an Urdu satirical writer, so was her father. But she used to write in Urdu and I didn’t share a language with her. But when it comes to reading in a language that I actually understand. There is my older sister, Kausar. We are three sisters, my youngest sister is one year younger. Since the time she was in school or college, Kausar would come back and tell us about all that she learned, infect us with the excitement that she felt. I have been inspired by Kausar’s reading, her outlook, her life in many ways. She is infinitely more talented and interesting. One of the big reasons is that she is also bilingual. She writes in Hindustani, I don’t do that. I can’t do that. She finds it equally easy to write in both languages. So yes my older sister would be a very direct inspiration. And then, of course, Eunice in college. Which is why the book has been dedicated to her as well as Eunice de Souza.

What was it like being in author/poet and renowned teacher Eunice de Souza’s class? How did it affect your reading life?

She taught me when I was 17 or 18, it was just a couple of years because she retired when I was in the final year. Those two years were definitive in many ways. It was not so much just the texts but her way of seeing the world through books, through literature.

I was in her last class before she retired and I think it gave me a way to look at the world which is imprinted in my mind, some words from the lectures are just imprinted in my brain. I’ll never forget them.  I later developed a friendship with her, which was one of the formative experiences of my life. What I discovered in her over the years that we had this friendship, when I was privileged to have her attention was that she was so human, so compassionate till her last days. For many years she cared for an old aunt who lived in the same building as her, she cared for stray animals, few dogs started living in her house. She also had two parrots, Tot and Toti.

I think one of the great rewards of the book for me was to bring her to life in the book, in the character of Frances. 

Did you read any books while you were writing Paper Moon?

No, I stopped reading fiction, but I read non-fiction. Adam Phillips, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Gene and the Emperor of All Maladies. Oliver Sacks was a big favourite. I love Oliver Sacks. So yeah, I did read a lot. But the one exception was that I was stuck somewhere and I didn't have anything else to read. So I had to read fiction, it was E.M Forster’s A Passage to India. That's the one book of fiction read while writing. 

What is the best piece of writing advice you received and is there any advice you would like to give anyone attempting to write a novel?

The best piece of writing advice I received was from an old friend, Arghya Lahiri, a very talented writer himself. Drawing from his own experience, he suggested that I see the first draft of my novel through from start to finish, without going back to chop and change too many things -- unless they had a bearing on the plot. This was a very useful rule for a first-time novelist; the tendency is to overthink things and second-guess yourself and tie yourself in all kinds of knots. Though I’m wary of offering other writers advice, I can vouch for the fact that this approach worked well for me. Another piece of advice, more general in its sweep, came from a dear uncle. During a discussion on my writing long ago, he once quoted Voltaire, who in turn quoted ‘a wise Italian’ as saying: ‘The best is the enemy of the good.’ That helped me get over my first-timer’s anxiety to a great extent.

As interviewed by Yashasvi Vachhani