Excerpt of Janice Pariat’s piece from the book Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves, edited by Manju Kapur and published by Hay House India
IT BEGAN with a bookshelf.
An ordinary bookshelf made of dark wood, devoid of elegant carvings or an elaborately decorated plinth. In my mind it looms far above me. Although, I suspect, if I stood before it now, it would appear quite normal, perhaps even a tad small. Like walking into a house from childhood, and discovering the rooms aren’t as large as you’d always imagined, the ceiling not as high.
When I was a child, my father was posted as manager of various tea estates in Assam. One in particular, Harchurah, was about an hour from the (then) small town of Tezpur. We lived in a bungalow perched on a section of high ground that overlooked a vast spread of paddy fields, visited occasionally by herds of elephants and rhinoceros. I was sent to a school in Shillong, seven hours away, where I lived with my grandparents, and learned how to sing hymns (“God Still Loves the World”) and recite poetry (“The Listeners by Walter de la Mare”) from the Irish nuns at Loreto Convent. The lucky thing about studying in a hill station town were the three-month-long vacations from December to March, when I would head back to Assam, which inarguably has the loveliest winters in the world, speckled with golden-honey sunshine and crisp, chilly nights. My father would pick up my elder sister and me, in a trusty old grey ambassador, or later, a rattling white Gypsy, and we’d begin our descent from the cold grey hills into the warm, sunny plains, where the roads were wide and traffic-free. Along the way, I’d flag the landmarks with mounting excitement – Jorabad, the Kolia Bhomora Setu Bridge across the Brahmaputra, Nagaon, Tezpur, and finally, off the main road through the white gated entrance of Harchurah. On dirt and gravel paths that wound through carpeted sections of tea plantations, shaded by tall oak trees, and stopping at the bungalow porch. Later, after tea, and a bath to wash off the dust, I’d rush to what was called the ‘aina kamra’ – an area of the open veranda closed off by walls of glass. There, in the corner, I’d stand in front of the bookshelf, filled with a beginning-of-holiday joy, and an incredible sense of embarking on an adventure. Each book a raft, a treasure hunt, an exhilarating mystery, a secret room, a set of wings.
The reason behind why I write can be traced, with a magical, long-winded silver thread, to that moment – the seconds before I picked my first holiday read (usually something from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series), when I stood there, all of ten or eleven, looking up at a bookshelf with wonder.
I’d write the stories in school, during lunch time or free classes, and take them home where they would be solemnly scrutinised by my grandparents, and sister, and posted to my parents, who were nothing short of encouraging. On candle-lit, load-shedding evenings, I’d pester my grandfather for stories of his schoolboy days at Goethals in Kurseong, for tales of Mr and Mrs Mouse. While my paternal grandparents, who lived in a gloriously rambling old house in Wahingdoh, would entertain me on sleepover nights with endless card games and stories of ghosts, travel and hunting. The kongs, ladies who came to help with housework, would offer a regular supply of grisly folktales – water spirits and thlen, ‘suidtynjang and nongshohnoh. For the Khasis, a largely oral community until the arrival of Christian missionaries in the mid-1800s when they were ‘given’ an alphabet, the spoken word carries particular poignancy. Their stories and songs serve as a reservoir of history and identity, and are a mode of documenting and making sense of the world. The Khasis are fond of ‘khana’ – telling stories at gatherings, whether celebratory or funereal, indulging in gossip, spreading rumour. ‘Ka ktien’ or the word, in all its musical and narrative forms, is extremely powerful. So even at an age when I wasn’t writing, I was surrounded by storytellers, whose words and images inspired my first book, Boats on Land, published many years later in 2012.
After university, I’d joined a publishing house or two, and eventually a magazine, Time Out Delhi, where I discovered the irrevocable thrill of seeing my name in print every fortnight. My year there as art writer helped sharpen my style, to write lucidly while drawing readers in with imagery. Journalism may be considered the smutty literary sibling yet I found it useful. It was a ‘pruner’, a way of sifting and separating, of focusing on the essentials, and building the skeletal framework around which new life could be imagined.
If home is where all stories come to rest, then the decision to leave Delhi and move back to Shillong was infinitely important. I was weary of the city; it offered no inspiration. And I retreated, like a child, to the hills,. Perhaps this is the reason why my first book is so firmly anchored in the places of my childhood – Shillong, Cherrapunjee, and pockets of Assam. Writing these stories was a form of return, of homage, to all the storytellers in my life. They are also a bridge, a wedge in the gap between the kinds of literature that had been written in English set in Meghalaya – Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends and Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head, Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return and Dhruba Hazarika’s Bowstring Winter. I wanted to fill the space between folkloric and ‘realism’, where various kinds of realities, as I’d always observed, co-existed quite comfortably beside each other. Also, juxtaposing the folkloric and the historical served to satirize the region’s turbulent past. Sometimes political and social events of great and abject violence are as fantastical as the folk stories we tell around the fireplace. It was impossible to escape Shillong’s history but I wanted to avoid making judgements, taking sides, plummeting into cliché.
The response and reception of Boats on Land has been overwhelmingly supportive, yet as it often happens in the literary world, it is quite possible to become confined to a particular label – what booksellers would call a ‘competitive niche’ – that can be a prison as much as home ground. In my case, I have noticed an increasing amount of interest in my writing as an author ‘from the Northeast’ (itself a problematic geographical term), with implicit expectations that my next book, and as many more thereafter, focus on giving narrative expression to this area. Yet labels often say more about the people doing the labelling rather than the one being labelled. What would it mean to be a ‘north-eastern’ writer? Or a ‘north or south Indian’ writer? I’m not sure, really.
When George Orwell set out to answer the question of Why I Write in 1946, in an essay of the same name, he offers us, in his clear-as-a-windowpane prose, four reasons: Sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. While I’m motivated by a blend of all, there is one other reason Orwell failed to include. The instinctive urge to tell stories. In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall’s thesis is that human beings are natural storytellers – that they can’t help telling stories, and they turn things that aren’t really stories into stories because they like narratives so much. Each one of us is involved in the fiction of our own lives, the tales we tell others and ourselves about our day, our relationships, our holidays, our petty travails and tragedies. Our friends and loved ones are characters we have created. In a way, everything is fiction. And we all stand before a bookshelf, wonderstruck, waiting to discover the world.
(Janice Pariat’s latest book is the short story collection Boats on Land. Her novel Seahorse is forthcoming in November 2014)