Manjul Bajaj's Blog: WRITE HERE, WRITE NOW

Let me begin with a disclaimer: Winnie the Pooh and I are not childhood friends. Back when I was growing up in the sleepy ’70s, children’s literature came in only two flavours: Classic and Enid Blyton.

Read More at
https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-sty...

Swati Daftuar of The Hindu and I shared a few thoughts on writing over an excellent lunch for The Hindu's regular column feature Table for Two. Here's a link:

http://www.thehindu.com/features/metr...

Popular book blogger Anuradha Goyal asks me a few questions on reading and writing here:
http://www.anureviews.com/manjul-bajaj/


"I love reading Manjul Bajaj and had the pleasure of meeting her a few times when I was living in Gurgaon. Here she talks about her life that revolves around books to an extent."

Thanks Anuradha - these were interesting questions and I enjoyed answering them:

Tell us something about yourself. Where did you grow up, where and what did you study and where do you live now?

I grew up in Lucknow. My extended family lives in a series of large, rambling bungalows in the Cantonment. We were quite feudal and clannish but it was a charmed childhood. There were multiple gardens, scores of different fruit trees, my grandmother kept a few buffaloes, somebody would be growing sugarcane or corn or a gladioli farm even. And there was plenty of wilderness around to explore, a couple of abandoned wells, outhouses and servants’ quarters with a vast promise of playmates. My cousins and I used to cycle, walk, play all kinds of games from badminton and table tennis to kabaddi, pithu and guli-danda. One summer break we built a playhouse with real bricks and cement, another we staged a play – we had enough family to provide director, scriptwriter, cast and audience all. And there were so many varied literary influences – my father was obsessive-compulsive about Ghalib, one aunt was a Hindi and Sanskrit teacher with an evangelistic zeal for her subjects, another wrote lovely poetry, an older cousin had this delightful stash of Georgette Heyers, another of Somerset Maughams.

Lovely as it was I spent my teenage years seething to get away from the limitations of Lucknow. I studied Economics at LSR in Delhi and rural management at IRMA in Anand. Somewhere along the way I also did an MSc in Environmental Management from the University of London. I currently live in Gurgaon with my husband and two sons.

When did you start writing? What pulled you into writing?

As far as I can remember I’ve always been writing – from kindergarten well into my college years. I think I must have edited a magazine at every place I’ve studied at. Where none existed I would start one. For a long while though after I started working the only writing I was doing was field reports and project documents, but every place I worked at sooner or later I’d end up doing the writing part. But writing in the sense of becoming an author only began as I began approaching forty. Suddenly I could hear the clock ticking very loudly in my ears. So I sort of dropped everything else and began to focus on my writing.

What do you read and any favourites that you would recommend?

I grew up reading pretty much everything I could lay my hands on. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch were the staple of my growing years. I’m a diehard fiction reader. I only read the occasional non-fiction title which is making huge waves or whose premise interests me…..for the rest its fiction all the way. So much wonderful writing is happening that I’m constantly in a state of awe. It’s difficult to name favourites but Nadeem Aslam and Tan Twan Eng are definitely right up there in my good books – wisdom, beauty, depth and grace – their writing has everything I aspire to. Among Indian authors if you pushed me to name one (though there are so many I admire) I think it would be Amitav Ghosh – he has an incredible range and I love how he delves into his material and carefully lays it bare for the reader.

How do you manage to capture the nuances of so many communities in India, from Goa to Gujarat to Delhi to Murshidabad and of course your home town Lucknow? Have you spent time in these places or you draw a lot from what you read or people who may hail from these places?

As a rule I try not to write about places I haven’t stayed in for a bit at least. One doesn’t want to get the look and feel of it entirely wrong. But beyond that I allow myself a lot of leeway. I follow whichever community or story that captures my fancy. A fair amount of research goes into it and I usually ask people who know or belong to the area to comb the draft for any obvious errors. Writing to me is about walking a few steps in another person’s shoes – it helps me shine a light on the things that interest or intrigue me about life and the world we live in. Also I spent the first ten-fifteen years of my career as a rural development professional travelling the length and breadth of the country and interacting with different communities – those experiences are where I draw my stories from.

Your first book Come Before Evening Falls tells a story 100 years back in time, one of the very few love stories based in rural Haryana. How was the seed of that story born?

That’s a tough question to answer. Come, Before Evening Falls was born out of my need to explore the subjects of love and honour and the dynamics of gender equations within families. It’s a character driven story. The setting came later. I chose rural Haryana partly because I live in Haryana now and wanted to understand it better, but mostly because it has this flagrantly patriarchal society. Yet, its women are not weak and self-effacing. They are stubborn, resilient and outspoken. There was a certain fit with the characters in my head. As I was researching the story I came across fascinating material on the region’s military history and the time period chose itself based on that.

In your second book Another Man’s Wife, you explored equations in human relationships and how they may not always be same above and beneath the surface. Your comments.

The stories in Another Man’s Wife were written over seven-eight years. They are primarily about relationships and about the many dimensions of what we call love – romantic love, desire, lust, obsession, infatuation. I have often thought that we give many names to the attraction between human beings depending on our social conditioning – yet in its chemistry all love is pretty much the same. You might call it true love if it ends in a marriage and an infatuation if it doesn’t but in terms of what it does to your brain, heartbeat and the blood racing in your veins in the moment that it is happening it’s the same, isn’t it? As it is also in its essentially transient nature. Whether you build a life around it or a few indelible memories is a matter of character, circumstances and social conditioning. The other major theme underlying my stories is that we are strangers to ourselves – our life’s events reveal us to ourselves. I think this is what you are alluding to when you say things are not always the ‘same above and beneath the surface’ in my stories.

You also looked backwards at a series of events in stories and wondered if a certain small incident had not happened inadvertently, the life would have been different for all those in the story. Where does the genesis of this lie?

To my understanding all of us go through life only vaguely knowing ourselves, making up a picture of a self in our heads on the basis of assumptions, theories and what other people tell us we’re supposed to be. So much of what makes us up – desires, biases, prejudices, insecurities, fears – lie buried deep beneath the surface and it takes a small but critical life event to bring it all bubbling to the top. We are what we do in a crisis, in the moment of choice or irrevocable decision. Life shines a random beam upon us and our morality, our vulnerability, how little or big we are as humans – it all suddenly plays out under that spotlight. This is what I’m trying to get at in some of the stories in Another Man’s Wife.

You know I admire your lyrical language, and we know that you write poetry as well – are you thinking poetically even when you are writing prose? Else, what give this poetic quality to your writing?

I feel very relieved to hear you describe my language as lyrical and poetic. Thank you. To me it seems very prosaic and wanting and I can’t tell you how many productive woman-hours I have wasted wishing I was a better writer. However, to answer your question. When I begin writing a story, I’m entirely focused on getting the plot and characters right. It’s only in subsequent drafts that I focus on the language and try and tease a bit of beauty out of it.

Do we see a poetry book coming from you sometime?

I don’t think so. The little poetry I write is on impulse and while it gives me great pleasure to share it on blogs and social media and to read or perform it before an audience I don’t think there is scope for taking it any further than that. Some things should just be allowed to flow as they will – simply and without strain.

Tell us about your just launched book Elbie’s Quest and the Rangeeli Duniya series?

Elbie’s Quest (and the Rangeeli Duniya series) is in a sense my first book and both my simplest and most ambitious work. I began writing it some twelve years ago. It’s been through many different versions and avatars. It started as a dark, tragic, multi-layered fantasy novel….I’ve been paring it down over the years and what we have now is a light, whimsical and funny series for middle grade readers. The first book is about Elbie the Little Big Tree, who runs a café called The Soul Kitchen in Rangeeli Duniya and who is obsessed with her own little-bigness and yearns to be a lofty tree. The yearning takes her on an adventure that embroils her with the forces that rule Rangeeli Duniya namely Roshni Rani, the Princess of Light and her evil twin Benoor Badshah. There’s a lot of intricate word play and an I-spy game hidden inside the illustrations. I hope to both challenge and engage young readers with it. There is a blogsite where young readers will find cool games and contests they can enter after they are done reading the book – http://elbiepage.blogspot.in/. I’m looking forward to having a lot of fun with this series over the next 3-4 years.

It is not a poem
if it doesn’t smell of the oranges
you peeled in concentric whorls
on winter afternoons
in your mother’s backyard
when you were
a knock-kneed
pigtailed girl
dreaming of John Lennon

It isn’t poetry at all
if it doesn’t paint images
of fleshy flowers
with cavernous
purple mouths
and carry the hint
of secret fluids flowing
or hidden body parts
shifting and heaving

Isn’t a poem
if it doesn’t even hang
loose and limbless
like a pair of jeans
quickly shrugged off
before jumping into
an already crumpled bed
with half a dozen
plump pillows strewn
over white cotton sheets


No, it isn’t a poem
Not a poem at all
if it doesn’t make
a little bit of life
or sex
happen in your head.



© Manjul Bajaj

For much of my book loving life I’ve been happily schizophrenic, resolutely split into two non-intersecting personas – The Manjul Who Reads and The Manjul Who Writes, hardly do the twain meet to form a Manjul who writes about what she reads. The few times in the past when I’ve been asked to review a book for a magazine or a newspaper it hasn’t even taken me a moment’s thought before declining. I always thought I had enough good reasons for not wanting to review books, ever:

The most cogent of these was that being a writer myself (even an aspiring-perspiring, modestly known one) I wouldn’t possess sufficient distance or impartiality to be a fair judge. I didn’t feel I was above being coloured or subconsciously provoked into unnecessary sharpness by another writer’s inordinate success (or even above being overly generous to the underdog). In fact I know I’m not. Should I make it to heaven you can be pretty sure I’m going to fire a volley of questions to God before he can get a word of welcome in edge ways. “Why Dan Brown? Why Paulo Platitudunous Coelho? Why E L James for chrissake? Is THAT what you think deserves to sell more copies than The Bible?”

The second reason was that I’ve never really thought too much of criticism as an activity – even something as high falutin’ as literary criticism. I kind of belong to the old school of thought that believes, “Those who can do, those who can’t review.”

But what really kept me away was the morbid fear of getting co-opted into some sort of a mutual back scratching writers’ club. Writing is a small world, now more so than ever when the internet has collapsed all distances and everyone is a neighbour in the cyber village, just one or two Facebook walls away from one’s own. In a world like that how do you keep objectivity and perspective? People who I knew ten years ago to be the main votaries of letting in new voices are now card bearing members of the back scratchers’ society. That’s life, it happens, cliques get formed, unknowns get shut out unintentionally. Sooner or later it boils down to who you know and who knows you, to rooting for friends and to reciprocal gestures. There is a certain inevitability to it which I wanted to avoid – books I thought were too important to be dragged down into this morass of social hobnobbing.

However, times change and one changes with the times. So last month I very tentatively signed up on Goodreads and began my first foray into the world of reviewing. Fledgling, byte sized opinions, rather than full-fledged reviews -small, baby steps by mankind’s standards but still a big step for reluctant, reclusive Manjulkind.

None of the reasons I discussed above have disappeared but others have begun to weigh in more heavily on the opposing side. Books are an odd creation. Not even the finest of writers can complete a book alone, for it takes a reader to complete a book. And strangely, the more a book is read the more of a book it becomes. That’s where reviewers become important, those first readers who sample and speak about a book, establishing its being-ness in a sense.

In the last 3-4 years good reviews in the traditional print media have begun to be very scarce, at least in India, where I live and write. Leading newspapers have been downsizing and often doing away altogether with their literary pages, even as more and more of us are writing. Add to that the fact that much of the available space is spoken for in a variety of ways. Some of it is paid for. Then known people have first dibs on the rest. That includes celebrities, journalists and their friends and publishing industry insiders turned authors. Whining about it isn’t going to change this any time soon, otherwise I’d whine that much louder.

The little space that is left doesn’t come easy either. All kinds of biases rule the allocation of reviewing space – that non-fiction is intrinsically worthier than fiction, that men write about more important newsworthy matters than women, that Indian authors who live abroad or come to us vetted by a foreign agent or publisher (or even quite, quite irrationally authors of mixed Indo- Western parentage) are qualitatively superior……to name just a few.

So as I see it, the future belongs to sites like Goodreads which are directly driven by reader opinions and recommendations, which are not constrained for space and are open to new genres, new imprints and new voices. It is here that one might hope to find a thriving, independent and vibrant book culture. I’m happy to pitch in and contribute my two cents worth of opinion. Of course, a part of me rues the fact that it will no longer be sunny side up – the white and yolk, the reader and writer of me distinctly and separately presented, one quiet, the other smiling freely. Once you scramble an egg there’s no unscrambling it. All I can say is if you don’t like what’s being served here reach out for that pinch of salt, will you.

Musing dolefully
inside of your head
you might be forgiven
for sometimes thinking
that reading is dead
That books are breathing their last
That the world has given up
the reading habit and is sitting,
bolstered with many pillows instead
watching sitcoms in its bed
And as for the new generation
why it’s all digital
and things are changing so fast
that there is no place for books
at all!

However, if you care to look
The written word has survived
much in the past and the book
through its many avatars
has always managed to last
We’ve come a long way really
since the early mnemonic symbols
and pictographs. Past etching on stone
Past wooden, clay or wax tablets
All the way past to the discovery
of the alphabet. Past the use of
the calamus, the brush and the stylus.
Past books written on dried palm leaves
and on silk and amatyl.

Once upon a time
the book was a continuous roll
in fact a papyrus scroll
Ten, twenty or even forty meters long
when held out to be read
like the Egyptian Book of The Dead
And then the book became a fan
Folded in concertina style
And then at last it went codex.
Became a compilation of sheets
and the world marveled
at the miracle of going straight
to the page you wanted
Instead of having a few good men
hold it aloft as you walked across
reading it from end to end.

And if you think reading is declining
Then do look again
at all those folks with books
on their faces and bellies
on beach chairs reclining
In the good old days, you know,
monks locked up inside
distant mountain monasteries
with nothing else to do read
and perhaps a king or two.
And that was that for readership all told
and all that was known of the writerly tribe
Was the pharaoh or king’s official scribe.

Ever since The Guttenberg Bible in 1455
The book is ever more kicking and alive
It’s been marching onward and on
Into more and more and more
More countries, more languages,
More places, more races
Into bookstores and bookchains
Into stations, airports, grocery store
And cyberspaces
No sirree, the book ain’t vegetating
It’s out there and proliferating
And I really, really don’t say this in mirth
Even as you read this, half a dozen
new genres may have taken birth
Magical Tweeny Lit is oh so yesterday
Anyone for some Frenemy Fantasy Fiction
today?

© Manjul Bajaj

If your vision of a writer involves sitting in a cafe, sipping an aperitif with one's fellow geniuses, become a drunk. It's easier and far less exhausting. - William Hefferman

Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler

The point these two quotes above make is that for most of us the writing life isn’t easy. As the author of two published books I too felt I had a bit of something to dish out to the starting out writer or writing enthusiast. So here it is, my advice to those who might be wondering what it’s like, neatly packaged in three stages (incidentally it’s an axiom – anything that can be described at all can be better described in three or five stages):

The Slush Pile:

We all start out the same way – with dreams in our eyes, a song on our lips, our talent tied up jauntily in a knapsack on our backs. We’ve been warned that the road ahead is long and tedious, sometimes treacherous. But not for us, we think. We’ve got a knapsack full of what it takes, for us pay dirt is just around the next corner. And then whoosh! We’ve walked headlong into The Slush Pile. We’re neck deep in the filthy slush, getting our noses rubbed in for good measure. And god knows where the knapsack is, did we remember to get it even? Ah there it is – a pathetic, soiled little bundle of something, lying next to hundreds of other such ones. Should we even bother to grovel through the slush pile and claim it as our own? Is it worth anything at all?

If you’re serious you’ll grovel through and grab that little bundle and hug it to your chest and remind yourselves of what it contains. Congratulations you’ve crossed the first milestone on the way to becoming a writer.

The Rejection Slip:

“Where am I?” you ask of the winds of ignominy howling around you. No answers, the wind doesn’t hear you, it only howls as it is meant to and you can read into it whatever miserable answer comes into your sorry head. “Why am I here?” No answer from the wind – it’s simply here to do its job, to snatch your words and drown them forever into its own howling decibels. “Who am I?” you scream in desperation. No answer at all. The howling wind doesn’t know who you are and why you are there and worse still it doesn’t care. But maybe you care, maybe you can even bring yourself to remember that whistling girl or lad you once were, and how you set out with dreams in your eyes and a little something in your knapsack. If you care enough to straighten your chin up and keep on going, you’ve made it. Past the second milestone on the road to being a writer, that is. Welcome then to the joy of rejection slips.

It’s a beautiful thing really, an author’s first rejection slip. A real paper and ink acknowledgment of your existence as a writer. Someone wrote back to you, ergo you must exist! A rejection slip is a confirmation that your piece/ poem/ essay/ manuscript actually went somewhere and came back with a stamp of its being-ness. Yahoo! Yippee! Ya…addda…adda…da! Not everything goes into the Big Black Hole of lost submissions. Perhaps the Great Shredder At The Entrance where the diabolic winds deposit all posts from unknown writers was only a figment of your imagination, after all.

Rejection slips are great teachers, they help you hone your skills. They help you cook up that half-baked story into a steamy potboiler. They tell you to stop telling your tales. Show us, they say. They take your flat, cardboard characters and knock them into shape, well rounded and a bit bruised. They give you those unexpected gashes and little wounds through which your heart can bleed real poetry – raw and hurting.

But after a bit it’s time to move on.

Arriving At Last

So you’ve been there, done that apprentice-ship in the land of rejection slips-learnt your lessons humbly and with care? You are ready to graduate. The problem is that no one knows – not even you, who has stopped being sure of anything anymore, long, long ago. It’s cruel, but it’s the truth. Ms. Editor-On-Her-High-Horse doesn’t necessarily know her genius-in-the-making from her ordinary garden variety of struggling wordsmith. The editor is not God. Heck, she’s not even a close approximation. She doesn’t even really like sitting on that High Horse – it’s an occupational requirement, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to keep her nose out of that slush of ever-coming-in manuscripts. She’s just another fallible human promoted up to her level of incompetence. She’s got too much to do in too little time, she’s possibly overworked and definitely short-staffed and has the same grubby one-size-fits-all business maxim – the consumer is king, which she tries to interpret as best as she can. So editors can and do make mistakes.

Therefore at this stage of the journey you need serious ammunition. You need your Louise Hay or whichever self-help book that has been chosen to rescue you, right there by your bedside every day. You need to resolutely shut out the images of all the delusional folk you know who imagine that they are the next big thing about to happen to the world of writing and stop asking yourself if you’re not just one of them after all. Instead, however corny and far fetched it might seem, you need to remind yourself what you have in common with Rudyard Kipling and Stephen King and Dr Seuss and JK Rowling – they all got rejected to start with. You need to whisper softly to your manuscript – War and Peace, To Kill A Mockingbird, Catch 22, The Fountainhead, The Good Earth, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Watership Down, Lust for Life- and any other names you know of books which almost never made it past some hapless editor having a judgment-impaired moment. You have to whisper them again and again till your manuscript starts believing in itself and in one enormous act of faith-versus-all-else it rips past the remaining barriers and makes it to acceptance.

Once you’re published I suspect that you might find out that it isn’t quite what it’s chuffed up to be. The flash bulbs won’t look as if they’re about to explode any time soon, someone will have forgotten to turn on the applause button, and the literary critics (the ones you’ve lived in eager dread of being torn apart by) may not even notice you’re there, they have their hands so full with that latest Rowling or Rushdie. Maybe, just maybe, the memories of the slush pile and rejection slip terrain will come back to haunt you and you’ll be so scared of being found out for an imposter that you won’t be able to breath properly. Or else it will all have taken so long to happen you’ll just be past caring –one way or the other. And that’s really not such a bad place to be.

And as I sign off here’s a last bit of advice to chew upon for the rest of your journey. It’s from Doris Lessing, no less, and this is what she says: “It does no harm to repeat as often as you can: ‘without me the literary industry would not exist. The publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and under-paid person.’ ”