“When I was three my father, who was in the army, was posted to a non-family station. My mother wrote letters to him every day. As I sat next to my mother and watched her, I thought that writing meant putting a series of squiggles on paper. So, I too would “write” to him. That’s my first memory of writing. Those happy days, no one taught three-year-olds their alphabet!” reminisces Anjana Appachana. Over the course of her journey as a writer, her relationship with it now “is like meditation. When I write, I enter another realm where I access a whole different way of being. Like meditation, it also keeps me wonderfully in the present. On a more practical note, it is only now, after many, many years that I finally have the time, space, and circumstances that allow writing. As a result, my relationship with writing is intense and all consuming. I don’t talk on the phone, socialise, answer emails, do housework or seek entertainment during my writing hours — this time is sacrosanct.”
After twenty years since her previous book, she’s returned with Fear and Lovely, a book akin to a character study of a young woman and the various people who surround her. “There is love and silence, mental health and silence, sexuality and silence, sex and silence, incomprehension and silence, guilt and silence, and fear and silence, to name a few. Yet, these silences don’t negate the fact that this is a story about very close and rich relationships. These relationships are as crucial as the silences, and also constitute the core of the book,” she tells us of the recently released book.
Read more from our conversation with the writer below:
After all these years, how has your craft as a writer evolved?
Perhaps it’s that I tend to explore multiple points of view and go deep into my characters’ internal landscapes? I’m not sure – I’m too close to my writing to see it clearly. Readers who know my work will be able to answer this better than me.
What inspired Fear and Lovely?
One - my characters. They constantly talked to me. I was and am totally entangled in their relationships and their silences. After writing Listening Now (which was about Mallika’s two mothers, two friends, father and grandmother) I kept wondering how life would unfold for Mallika and her friends. So, Fear and Lovely was born.
Two - anger. If you can harness your anger and transform it into a creative work, then anger can be wonderfully inspiring!
Could you give us some insight into your creative process behind this book?
In the creative process there is a lot you must take on trust. It reminds me of how people say, “Don’t worry about the future, stay in the present.” That was my experience with this book. If I tried to think about how the novel would take shape, or what would happen to the characters, or how, it became overwhelming and impossible. I had to stay with what I was writing each day, with little knowledge of how the future would unfold for my characters. The story revealed itself to me little by little as I wrote.
I first wrote the novel from the point of view of one character - Mallika. But I found that she couldn’t carry the weight of the stories surrounding her. Five years ago, I put that novel aside and began another novel from scratch. That’s Fear and Lovely, which is written from eight points of view – Mallika, her two mothers, her three childhood friends and the two men in her life. I began by writing a few pages from each character’s point of view, because before anything, I needed to discover their voices. I had to let go of preconceived notions and allow them to lead me. Often the way I thought I was going ended up being closed to me. I had to trust that the eight voices would lead me to the secret places they inhabited. My trust was rewarded.
Were there any challenges you faced while writing this book?
Plenty. It was a gruelling exercise in patience. Discovering eight different voices took a great deal of time. I made copious notes. Things kept changing as I wrote, so an enormous amount of re-writing went into the novel. When something changed for one character, it changed for all the others. Decisions about whose point of view a particular incident would first be related from, kept changing too. As various characters revisited the same incidents, I had to be consistent about time. In addition, each character’s story was elliptical, not chronological. On top of that, all their stories were intertwined. When I began writing I had no idea I’d end up with thirty-seven elliptical chapters in the voices of eight people! Sometimes I was so overwhelmed that I felt I could never do it.
At the same time, I deeply loved my characters, and the prospect of getting to know them and exploring their stories was very exciting. That’s what got me through the hurdles. I’d get up in the morning thinking, “I wonder what’s going to happen today?” I couldn’t wait to find out.
What do you hope the readers take away from this book?
My hope is that readers will feel a deep connection with the characters and have a sense of inhabiting the lives of breathing, living people. That, as they do so, they will live some of the characters’ experiences.
Words Nidhi Verma
Date 07-04-2023