Writers on Reading. Part Twenty One, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm
Collage by Labonie Roy
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm made a quiet debut in 2016 with These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape, an anthology of ten short stories, each braiding a vast, subterranean world—some tales suspended in liminality while some revelling in incongruities. Her recently released novel The Secret of More, set in 20th-century colonial Bombay, outlines a city at the cusp of rapid evolution—from the “clatter of textile mills to the glamour of the silent film industry”— her protagonists finding their feet in the throes of transition.
In this edition of Writers on Reading, we have a freewheeling conversation with the always-on-the-move Tejaswini (she’s currently in Baku, we’re in Bombay) about unlikeable characters, cinematic writing, creating a rich, plausible landscape out of a mountain of historical research and how, for her, the sea can be both discomforting as well as inspiring. She also lets us in on her favourite snacks and a genre-defying list of books to read.
You have lived in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Israel, Myanmar, Serbia and Thailand over the years—a truly itinerant existence. How does the feeling of not being moored to a particular place inflect your writing? Moreover, do you think it also shapes the way you observe people, or are interested in people?
Apart from India, where I grew up, I have lived in most of these countries for no more than a year or two each, but I formed an attachment to all of them, and always felt a sense of sadness and loss upon leaving. But that feeling of affection is quite different from feeling moored to a place, or feeling at one with it—especially given that a lot of time is spent in simply settling in (or packing up to leave again). It takes time for a place to really get under my skin, and for it to then emerge in my writing. I would also be wary of trying to set a story in a place where I don’t fully understand the people, language and culture—it would feel too superficial an undertaking, and so I often tend to focus on people and the human dramas that play out between them. I like to observe people very closely, especially the rhythms of their speech, the group dynamics in a conversation, or thinking about where a thought or phrase is coming from in terms of their political and personal history. I find this endlessly engrossing. My husband is constantly pulling me up for staring at other people, especially in restaurants! It can make me a rather silent dinner companion. As far as setting is concerned, only Mumbai and London live within me—and therefore these are the only two cities I have consciously used as locations.
Given your peripatetic life, how do you develop a relationship with the bookshops or libraries in each of these places?
In many of these countries, I wasn’t able to do so for the simple reason that English was not widely spoken. Usually in such cities there are just one or two small English-language bookshops where the selection can be pretty hit-and-miss—the usual suspects of pulp fiction, cookery books, self-help books and political tomes, and then suddenly you might come across a few gems, or some new stock which has just arrived. Though English is widely spoken in Fiji, its bookshops had a limited range of fiction; what it did have was a brilliant public library in downtown Suva. But just as I discovered it, the lockdown hit—it was a place I would have liked to frequent, an old colonial-style building with high ceilings, large quiet reading rooms and a huge selection of books. Bangkok, being a sprawling cosmopolitan city, was great for book-shopping, especially its Kinokuniya outlets. When I go to India, my favourite bookshops are Kitab Khana in Mumbai and the charming Pagdandi in Pune. Otherwise, I rely—rather unwillingly—on my trusty Kindle.
What are you doing when you aren’t writing? Do any of your preoccupations from other areas of your life feed into your writing, or become a catalyst for your work as a storyteller?
I’m mainly into books, music and movies. I am particularly fascinated by the narrative rhythms of films. I like to observe the way a film is edited, the way one scene cuts to the next, and I try to apply that in my writing. I watch some films over and over again to understand how the writing and editing is drawing me in. When I wrote my novel The Secret of More, I was especially conscious of the visual detailing I put in—I wanted it to be as cinematic as a movie, whether I was focusing on a view of a landscape, or a montage of the city, or the way the interior of a room is lit up. I played each scene in my head as if I was watching a film, as I wrote it down. I wanted each chapter to feel as action-packed, and as crisp and concise, as a series of scenes in a well-crafted film. What you put in and what you leave out depends a lot on the point of view of the character—here, again, a well-made film can give valuable pointers in terms of visual detail, where a scene is presented from a certain character’s point of view. Of course, there are also some books which I read repeatedly, or which I dissect, for similar purposes—to understand their structure and characterisation.
Growing up, what was your relationship to reading like? In addition to books, were there any other ways through which you gleaned and gathered stories?
I was an only child, so books were my constant companions. I read a lot—mainly Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Archie and Amar Chitra Katha, since that was pretty much all that was available in Bombay of the 1980s. Enid Blyton’s boarding school, farm, and adventure stories were a huge influence on me. Her writing style, while recently lampooned for being clichéd and old-fashioned, is actually a masterclass in pacing, characterisation and the precise targeting of her audience. There is a strong moral compass in her stories, about being compassionate, truthful, gentle, loyal and respectful of nature—which greatly appealed to me.
What formative experiences from your childhood have you carried into your writing? Does memory play a source of imagination for you in your fiction?
I think people often underestimate the powers of intuition and observation of small children. A small child is like a sponge—she absorbs everything, though she may not fully understand it till much later. There are many scenes from my early childhood and also from my teen years that play out like a film reel in my head. I don’t know to what extent these ‘reels’ are accurate but perhaps that is beside the point. I think it matters less as to what exactly happened, as compared to how it made you feel. For example, as a child one of the overriding emotions in me was the feeling that very little was in my control. I suppose it is the same for many children. You are told what to do, when to do it, where to go, what to eat, and even the correct way to feel (e.g “you should not feel bad about this, it is a small thing”). And so you are sort of buoyed along on a current of school timetables, homework and weekends that end before they’ve begun. That changed dramatically as I moved into my teen years and went off to boarding school—as a teenager you have far more agency and self-awareness. I have a feeling that many writerly preoccupations come from deep-rooted childhood emotions that need to be worked through and resolved, sometimes over and over again. Perhaps the act of writing fiction is my way of exercising control over what happens, and to whom.
The life of a character in a short story is almost cursory and bound by a certain timeframe. Is there, then, a temptation to live with the character and take them to other places?
I have not been tempted to follow up any of my short story characters. A short story usually presents a transformative episode in a character’s life, where those moments reverberate far beyond the timeframe of those few pages, and where loose ends may or may not get tied up. The beauty of a well-crafted short story is that it also suggests a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ for that character. The key word here is suggests—it does not tell you but simply waves you in a certain direction. In that sense, each character will have a slightly different before and after, depending on the perception of the reader. I think to demand more than that of a short story character would be to take away from the beauty of the form. It would be like demanding that the song ends on a major chord. I prefer minor chords—they are more beautiful, and have many more stories in them.
I couldn’t help but notice that some of the stories in These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape allude to a sense of being constricted, not just physically or spatially but also the characters feeling trapped in their own heads. For instance, in Thank God for Star Trek, Anshu feels overwhelmed upon spending the whole day alone; in Mili, one of the characters is “claustrophobic in the Sea Lounge” at Mumbai’s Taj Hotel; in The Girl Who Loved Dean Martin, the protagonist feels stifled whilst rummaging through old vinyl records, having created a “terrifying miniature inner-city of black alleyways winding through tower blocks of crumbling paper and cloth,” and also finds Martin’s love for her—in her imagination—as “unbearable” and “suffocating”. How did this trope of confinement or being encumbered come about to be so recurrent in your writing?
The most compelling conflicts come from a sense of wanting to break free from a certain situation. Perhaps the most nightmarish conflict is a feeling of being trapped within your own head—which means that there is no obvious remedy outside of yourself. The horror of that, and what decisions that might lead you to make, is something that can be explored in many different ways. I think we all have a dark part to our minds, and my suspicion is that it takes only one very small step to cross over to that part. My short stories tend to explore that very thin line inside us, which lies between light and dark, between sanity and insanity.
With most of the stories in These Circuses…, the reader feels they’ve reached a climactic moment but there’s something more that unravels. Your characters go about doing normal, routine things and then there emerges something unusual about them—a certain kind of whimsy or an obsessive trait, leading to, more often than not, a sense of despair. They do unpredictable things—a sense of suspension stems through their actions. Do you ever begin to dislike a character while working on developing it?
I dislike many of my short story characters. But I like writing about unlikeable characters, especially when it is a flawed character who nevertheless evokes some amount of sympathy, such as the old architect and his former student in the title story, These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape. I enjoy the challenge of balancing out what they do and say to come up with a uniquely flawed, yet somewhat sympathetic persona. Conversely, with a character who is not really supposed to evoke any sympathy at all, it’s very satisfying to just milk that and have fun with it. In my story Drinks at Seven, none of the four characters are at all likeable—there is not a shred of goodwill or decency in that living room. And yet I think of those characters rather fondly, because their individual personalities made the group dynamics so fascinating to play with.
Do you write in your head? Like say, when you’re in a grocery store or out for a walk or waiting at the airport?
No, but I do sometimes edit in my head. If there is a sentence that I’m not happy with, or a plot point that doesn’t feel right, I will go over it again and again while, say, washing the dishes. I often think I’ve had a eureka moment when I am asleep, but I’ve invariably forgotten it when I wake up. It is incredibly frustrating when that happens. I’ve incorporated that particular sense of frustration in a scene in my novel The Secret of More, when my main character Tatya feels that he has had a revelation overnight, while asleep, and has hit upon the exact architecture of sentences to relate his life-story to his children, but then struggles to remember it when he wakes up, and eventually even forgets what it is he is trying to recall.
Is there a writing habit that you have to perpetually fight against? If so, how do you do it?
I have to fight against sitting too long at my desk—it’s very unhealthy. I can lose track of time when writing, so I sometimes set alarms to go off every hour to remember to get up and take a break. But often I forget to set the alarms!
In a previous interview, you’ve mentioned how the springboard for writing a story for you is almost never the location; it is always human dilemmas, as human dilemmas are pretty much the same everywhere. What draws you towards this proclivity?
That was certainly the case for my short story collection, but not for my novel. Perhaps it goes back to my lack of a home-base. Over almost 30 years of living in different countries, I’ve realised that people are gloriously different, and yet the same everywhere. This may sound rather trite, but there is a difference between knowing this theoretically and experiencing it first-hand. This is not to gloss over the huge political and cultural differences that exist across and within countries, but one can acknowledge our common humanity without resorting to a dewy-eyed, Disney-fied view of the world. And so even though most of my stories are specific to an Indian context, I never felt that I was writing only for an Indian audience. Because human dilemmas are the same everywhere—and that is what interested me most when writing my stories. But in the case of my novel, The Secret of More, the location of colonial Bombay was very much a springboard for the writing—it was the vibrancy of the city at that specific historical juncture of the early 20th century that I found thrilling, and the fact that the characters were navigating a rapid transition to modernity. And for the female characters, this was a rather precarious transition—whether in the case of shaven-headed widows or girls who were married off at the age of 12. I found that the female characters’ stories were an especially intriguing strand to develop in my novel.
The sea finds a frequent mention in your writing, especially in The Secret of More, where it becomes a metaphor for aspiration or revival; as a means of attaining something distant or out of immediate reach; and even as a kind of destruction. Is there anything about the sea that particularly draws you towards it?
I grew up in Bombay in a high-rise building with a view of the Arabian Sea, where I could see this huge expanse of water up to the horizon, and in a sweeping arc from Breach Candy to the Queen’s Necklace to Nariman Point. I spent many hours in those years observing the moods and colours of the sea and the sky, and the sounds of the wind that came across the water. I like to be near the sea, it gives me a sense of rootedness and calm. It’s been a presence in my life through many ups and downs. Even later I’ve been lucky to have lived near the sea at various points of time, whether in Singapore, Brighton, Suva or Baku. At the most basic level, I think the sea has the ability to simply reflect your life back at you, in its constantly changing lights and moods and tides, and so it can be both unnerving as well as inspiring. It is primordial and meditative and vast beyond imagining.
Where did you largely write The Secret of More? I reckon a bulk of the writing must have taken shape during the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns? Since writing fiction primarily means being able to extricate yourself from the world and escape into the world you’re creating, how did you go about doing this?
I started writing the novel in Baku, continued writing it in Fiji over two years, including during lockdown, and put the finishing touches back in Baku. Throughout I stuck to my schedule of writing for about three hours every morning, and using the afternoon for reading or research. Fiji was the ideal, quiet location in which to write—my small study overlooked lush green palm trees, papaya trees, low-rise houses, and a misty line of hills in the distance. The more I entered the world of the novel, the more I lived in it even when I wasn’t at my desk. I would often find myself doing some mundane household chore, and wondering what my characters were doing, listening in to imaginary conversations between them, as if they were real people busy living their lives in colonial Bombay. When I finally sent my finished draft to my editor and took a self-imposed break from fiddling with the text any further, I really missed my characters and felt rather forlorn without their company. So rather than me escaping into that world, it was that world which seemed to come forth and encircle me.
In March 2020, American essayist Sloane Crosley wrote about the inevitability of a glut of pandemic novels. In her piece for The New York Times, she says, “But what happens when every writer on the planet starts taking notes on the same subject? Will we all hand in our book reports simultaneously, a year from now?” What are your thoughts on writing about a catastrophe without waiting for enough time to pass?
Perhaps it would be a form of journalistic fiction, like a record of our times. Something like Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year—though even that was written in 1722, almost 60 years after the actual plague and only pretended (brilliantly!) to be an eyewitness account. Perhaps it is cathartic for some writers and readers to delve into the pandemic in a fictional form. But personally, I’d be happy if I never read anything ever again about the pandemic. I can’t imagine going out and buying a novel about it. Not yet, anyway. The pandemic in the news—along with various other catastrophes—has been overwhelming, and I often feel a dire need for escapism.
You have worked as a journalist and an environmental researcher for over ten years. What were your reading habits like back then? Do you have any favourite books wherein an element of the natural world is the protagonist?
Back then I didn’t think too much about what I was reading. I just picked up books that caught my fancy. Now I am more interested in tracking authors and subjects I like. I love novels where nature plays a strong component in the story, with evocative descriptions that transport me into the natural world, like Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, or Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, or The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville. I also love creatively written non-fiction on nature, such as Janaki Lenin’s My Husband and Other Animals, or James Rebanks’ splendid memoir of life on a farm, The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District, or even something that transports me to the prehistoric natural world, like The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury, or Dry Store Room No. 1: A Secret History of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey. I’d love to read creative non-fiction about the prehistoric underwater world, but I haven’t come across anything like that yet.
As far as writers go, who are the influences or voices that matter to you? Does the idea of influence alter for you with the passage of time?
Yes, I think influences wax and wane over time, also depending on what you happen to be writing. When I wrote my short story collection, I was particularly inspired by Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults, for his razor-sharp observation of human flaws, and his concise use of language. For similar reasons, Doris Lessing’s short stories were also an inspiration, especially her story, The Grandmothers, which struck me as exceptionally bold, surprising and unflinching in its approach to its subject. Amit Chaudhuri’s writing is an influence because it fills me with a sense of quietness and calm, and because of the precision of every word and sentence. When I was writing The Secret of More, two inspiring novels were Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser, and Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton. Both encompass the sweep of history in a single man’s life.
With early 20th century Bombay as your setting for The Secret of More, did you, at any point, feel intimidated by a lot of research material that went into the novel? That you perhaps wanted to be truthful to the material to an extent that it might destroy the way you shaped and told your story?
I didn’t feel intimidated by the research material. Rather I felt empowered by it. I’m a researcher at heart—I absolutely love the thrill of finding a strand of enquiry that grips me, and following the trail as far as I can go. Having gathered all that information, it then became possible to create a rich landscape for my novel, and to know how my characters would behave within that landscape, what decisions they would make. Historical research illuminates for a novelist the realm of feasibility—it shows you what is possible or feasible within that historical context, so that you can build your characters’ world within it. You can’t decide on your story in advance and then try to fit it into the historical context—that’s probably when you’ll find that the historical facts are destroying your pre-determined story! Instead, the plot and characters’ motivations must arise out of the history. To write historical fiction and to make it as authentic as possible, I think the circumference of your historical knowledge has to be a little bit wider than the circumference of your actual story.
“Bombay is a cone-shaped city. It is a gulping creature.” You begin the short story Thank God for Star Trek with these lines. In The Secret of More, cinema, in one way or the other, becomes an archive of Bombay—the two are almost inextricable. It is also a propeller for the lead character Tatya; a Bildungsroman of sorts as he thrives and evolves in the world of motion pictures in a new city. What is it that draws you towards the pull that the city offers its people?
In my short story, I describe Bombay as a gulping creature, the sort that can ingest people and shred them, because I think the city has an inherent capacity for destruction due to its pressures and fast-paced volatility. But it is also the ground for a kind of fertility of ideas, connections and inventions, leading to a dynamism that feeds on itself and grows. Early 20th century Bombay was a particularly dynamic period in its growing wealth and entrepreneurship—and pertinent from where we stand, because the textile industry and the film industry were in the process of creating the fabric of the city that we see today. Secondly, Bombay is a city that invites ambition and a hunger for more—this is central not only to the city’s lived experience, but also to its mythology. I find this fascinating; this drive that people in Bombay seem to have, an ambition to constantly do more and gain more. This is, of course, reflected in the title of my novel, The Secret of More.
I absolutely love the phrase “ghost fixer of snacks” that you use in the short story Sandalwood, as the protagonist goes about her day in an empty house. Do you have any favourite snacks that you enjoy eating or preparing?
I’ll go for anything spicy or chocolatey—and most importantly, ready-made so that I don’t have to prepare it. I especially love bhakarwadi and Oreo biscuits, though I try to stay away from both. It would certainly be nice to have my very own “ghost fixer of snacks”; I like the idea of wandering into the kitchen and seeing a plate of pav bhaji, or freshly made mini-pizzas waiting for me!
What is something you read recently that made you feel alive or excited?
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I can barely put into words my admiration for this novel. Its sheer scale of imagination, its absolutely weird yet completely convincing landscape of a sea trapped within a massive building, its creepy sense of mystery, and then the perfect thrilling denouement. It was a book that made me feel that one could write just about anything, as if the horizons of imagination had suddenly widened out in some kind of dazzling cinemascope manner.
What is the first book that comes to mind when you read the following words?
Cinematic: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, for its vivid descriptions of the marshy landscape.
Obsession: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. The image of Heathcliff beating his head against a tree in his obsession for Cathy is unforgettable.
The sea: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke—I don’t think anybody has ever written about the sea in this way before.
Unpredictability: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. The most unnerving novel I’ve ever read, where the same episodes of life repeatedly play out in different and unpredictable ways.
Big little novel: Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton and 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff—both encompass a complex depth of history within a few pages.
Ambition: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser. It is about the heady days of late 19th century New York when the money-making possibilities seemed limitless, tipping into a crazy surrealism; and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte—my all-time favourite, for the heroine’s unwavering desire to do more and be more, to rise above the gender roles and class roles expected of her.
As interviewed by Khorshed Deboo