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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Writers At Work | Manjula Padmanabhan
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Writers At Work | Manjula Padmanabhan

The writer, cartoonist and playwright on the art of living and creating between different cultures

Padmanabhan’s stories often end up being studies in the clash of civilizations. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Padmanabhan’s stories often end up being studies in the clash of civilizations. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

The enchantments of exile

Writer, cartoonist and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan’s gentle and soft-spoken manner belies the sinister edge of her stories. “Alas, the ideas that arrive at my desktop are all rude, unsightly wretches who belch and pick their noses and expose themselves in public," she writes in the introduction to her latest collection, Three Virgins and Other Stories, comprising a selection of her old and new work. Vampires, monsters, ogres—there is no dearth of creepiness in her tales, which make you giggle with delight, gulp with fury, or gasp with wonder.

A sleazy young man who ekes out his days by molesting women on buses is regally trumped at his own game by a girl (Teaser). In The Other Woman, Mandodari, the demonic queen to Ravana, king of Lanka, descends on earth, seeking revenge for being treated all her life as “the other woman". TV journalist “Basra Dott" vows to fight for her cause before matters take a deadly turn. In Hot Death, Cold Soup An American, married to an Indian man living an obscure town in Uttar Pradesh, is determined to commit “satty" at her husband’s pyre. She does not give two hoots that this is the 21st century.

Like the fantasy fiction of Margaret Atwood or Suniti Namjoshi, Padmanabhan’s stories fill you with an abiding sense of disquiet. If you are amused by a story like Exile—a retelling of the Ramayana from the perspective of Rashmi who has to rescue her husband, Sid, from the clutches of a giantess, Raveena—you are also equally shaken by the source of your amusement. In Stains, an African-American girl starts menstruating while visiting the mother of her Indian boyfriend—which unleashes an outrageous clash of cultures. And in the title story, the first-person narrator recounts three incidents of deflowering, of men and women, with a clinical precision that is at once worldly and witty.

We met Padmanabhan at the India International Centre, New Delhi, recently, and chatted about books, drawing, and her nomadic existence—mainly between Chennai, where her mother lives, and her own “home" in Newport, Rhode Island, in the US—over a cuppa. Edited excerpts:

Three Virgins and Other Stories: Zubaan, 250 pages, Rs 499
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Three Virgins and Other Stories: Zubaan, 250 pages, Rs 499

I believe the real question is: When did I begin to understand that being published is not synonymous with being able to write. Because the issue isn’t about learning to write—it’s about understanding the difference between one’s private world of ideas versus the exterior world of articles and books. It’s kind of a long, slow story but its main feature is that, as a child, I fully expected to write, draw and travel when I grew up. What surprised me was how difficult it was to just do all of that. It continues to be difficult. Every book, every short story is a door and sometimes it opens very briefly before shutting again and I find myself on the outside once more. This isn’t sad or bad, it’s just the way things are.

How did the cartoons and plays happen?

It’s all the same thing. I was always an extremely avid reader of comics and cartoons. I could draw from an early age—both my sisters are very talented so I took it for granted that I would be, too. In fact, it’s quite common in Indian middle class families for the children to be able to sing, draw and write—the only difference between me and most of my peers is that I didn’t go on to become something else. I just remained in that somewhat childish state—of doing what I wanted to do. But specifically, the drawings included in this book began life with the doodles I would make on notepaper during long telephone conversations with friends and family in India.

Your stories are informed by wry humour but also filled with a deep sense of outrage. How important are anger and amusement to your creative life? How do you make the one coexist with the other?

I spent much of my youth—a long period starting in my late teens to perhaps my early-30s— feeling violently depressed. Humour, under these circumstances, is a kind of medication. It doesn’t change reality, but it provides a shield and a distraction. The main source of my unhappiness was the realization that I was a misfit—and the accompanying knowledge that I didn’t want to stop being one!

What drew you to speculative fiction?

Well, if you look at the earlier answer, you’ll realize that I was self-conscious about “not belonging"—being a sort of alien. There’s an irony here: I really only felt this way once my diplomat father had retired and we were living in India full-time. It was the discovery that I didn’t feel at home in my “home-country" that led to an interest in “otherness". In being different: I didn’t speak Hindi, I didn’t want to follow traditional life patterns, I didn’t conform to dress codes for respectable young women, nor was I dazzling beautiful. It was a very easy step, to go from my actual reality to imagining worlds in which being alien is the norm.

Do you still keep up with what’s being written in the genre?

In the last 10 years or so, I haven’t been reading as much as I did before. As a child I read everything—especially books by Enid Blyton and all the Alice books. Even in my 20s and 30s, I was an avid reader, partly because I was also reviewing books at the time. Nowadays, if I am writing, I do not want to read too much, though I do a lot of grazing online. So I am actually inhaling articles all
the time.

What did you think of the Potter books?

I liked the first four books in the Harry Potter series tremendously. But after that, the darkness, the heaviness of the stories, got to me. That’s not to say, I am averse to dark plots; it’s just that I like the sophistication of a writer like J.R.R. Tolkien much more. I feel more engaged with his writing not because a character is going to live or die but because there are much higher principles involved there.

An abiding concern of your writing is the dissonance between the East and the West. Why does it fascinate you so?

Because I grew up living elsewhere. By the time I was old enough to realize that there was no country in which I could actually feel “at home" I had grown accustomed to thinking about the space between these worlds, East/West, North/South as the natural space for me to be in. Nowadays, when people ask me where I live, I say “The airport".

How do you feel about the label women’s writing?

It has its uses. It’s not a term I use for my own work. I don’t call myself a feminist. It’s just one more of many labels that I am not comfortable with.

What effect has your life as a journalist had on your fiction?

My early training to be a journalist powerfully shaped the way I look at reality and then bend it towards an idea I want to follow. I know what it’s like to write a news story—presenting facts in a coherent and readable manner—but I far prefer to open up existing boxes of facts to speculations about their contents. Does that make sense? Being a journalist gave me the tools with which to write fiction more effectively (or so I imagine) than I felt I could write non-fiction.

What is your typical work day like?

I have just finished work on the sequel to Escape, my novel of 2008. The only word I can use to describe my “typical work day" is AAAAARGGHHHH! My friends will tell you that I have come away from these two and half years of struggle still whining about what a hard time I’ve had. It’s no-one’s fault. My publisher has been faultlessly patient. It’s just me. I am impatient with myself if I don’t like what I’ve written or if I find I’ve got to slog through a lot of nonsense in order to say something useful or meaningful. I don’t have any typical work day. There’s no pattern. Sometimes I’m able to establish a 2000-word boundary—meaning, I’ll fill up the tank with at least that many words before I allow myself to stop—and other days it’s a miracle if I can get a paragraph or two to remain on the page after half an hour of just tapping the space bar (I write on my laptop, not on paper). Then a week later even that paragraph disintegrates.

I think of myself as a lazy person who manages to get work done only because I do so little aside from write and draw. I don’t socialize—I don’t go out to parties and I like meeting my friends one-on-one, preferably for lunch, not dinner. I dislike late evenings out because I get a lot of my thinking and writing done at night. I love being completely alone and go to great lengths to organize my life around long periods (i.e. weeks) of solitude.

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Published: 24 Aug 2013, 12:04 AM IST
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