SHILLONG, Dec 3: The plush Lachumiere House drawing room was packed as the audience craned their necks and strained their ears to listen to what Janice Pariat had to say at the launch of her novel Everything The Light Touches. The book by Harper Collins was earlier launched in London and Delhi.
Janice begins by saying that the book is a compendium of her thoughts and life’s journey thus far. It is ka jingiathuh khana sawdong ka lyngwiar dpei (tales around the hearth as the Khasis say).
The book is free flowing and does not box or freeze the characters to leave behind a shrill sense of needing to belong to a category, sexuality, gender and all those well-defined prisons that cage the human mind. In the book, Janice’s characters break free of such inhibitions.
Moderating the session, Daiarisa Rumnong, faculty of English, St Mary’s College, raised some very incisive questions which brought out the best in Janice. The first question naturally is what triggered the author to write the book. Janice’s response was insightful yet laced with a natural exuberance. She says, “Every book I write is a journey of a lifetime. It’s not one moment of inspiration or one moment of illumination. It combines all the experiences you have as a person, as a woman, as a writer from the Northeast and from Shillong where one’s roots are. I feel I have been writing all my life but here is this book before you today in a tangible form but in some ways it continues and does not end.”
Asked to pick a moment in the book that becomes its crux, Janice says it would be a moment in a garden – since gardens are situated within the natural world.
Her story was inspired by an episode that happened many years ago in a garden in UK where in a corner of the garden women botanist converged. They seemed to live an unruly life, not a staid, orderly one, traveling where they wanted to and doing what they chose to. The book Janice says is inspired by the spirit of adventure and curiosity. However the origin of the book itself is in a question.
Speaking of the four main characters – Shai, Evelyn, Johann and Carl – Janice says the book is a narrative of the voyages of the four characters who begin their journey at a point of departure. Yet in strange ways their journeys are connected. Their journeys are a quest for knowledge. They are all adventurers and writing and travelling have so much in common. The reason why the book reads like a travel narrative is because book is tussling with many things. There is the tussle of seeing people with a fixity of slotting them into categories of male, female etc. It’s a point of view that calcifies and freezes people. Another view is that humans are ever changing, with no fixed nationality, no fixed sexuality, no fixed ‘you and me,’ of belonging and not belonging etc.
Janice says that travel forces people to deal with the unfamiliar, to constantly shift perspectives. At the heart of the book is also the tussle of having to deal with the climate crises. Janice herself has a huge tussle with the character of the Botanist Carl Linnaeus who at age 25 had given a name to every kind of animal and plant consisting of two Latin words for its genus and species. This was unquestioningly used by biologists all over the world. Hence Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy. For some reason Janice finds Linnaeus dislikable because of his having frozen all creatures into neat categories. Yet at some point she also sees logic in what he did.
At the heart of many stories is the tree – in the case of the Khasis, the Diengiei, which is the origin myth of the Khasis. Trees, Janice says symbolise connectedness, relationships, syncretic collaboration, interdependence among others. The book is largely a tussle between order and unfixity. For instance, while the colonisers try and label and give specific identities to the colonised, the latter are flowing with unfixed stories.
When asked by the moderator whether Science has drawn humans away from nature because it teaches then to use nature and make it subservient to themselves, Janice says that was one reason why she delved into Botany and did extensive research as this was not part of her subject in college and university. “How you see a plant is how you see the world. Botanists tend to see a plant in a mechanistic manner – as an object. That’s probably how you will see the world. That’s the Linnaeus way. The other way is to see plants as a subject that holds each part in a holistic way – as a living thing that constantly comes into being,” Janice cogently replied.
Later the author answered questions from the audience. One question was from a young lady who asked her how long she took to write the book. Janice answered, “Ten years.”
There was a long queue of avid readers and admirers of Janice Pariat the author, to get her to sign on their copy. Quite a few bought more than one copy as the author copiously put her signature on each book.
