Author Rhumjhum Biswas’s first full length novel Culling Mynahs and Crows, is set in the Bengal of the 1980s, and traces the journey of a young journalist Agnirekha’s assignment to a town called Bisrampur, where she meets a girl with traditional values and a name almost similar to her own, Agnishikha. Then unfolds a complicated story between the two characters with a serial killer lurking in the shadows. Rhumjhum won the Cara Writer’s Retreat Short Story Competition 2012 and was long listed for her poem, Cleavage, in the Bridport Poetry Competition 2006. Her poems have also been featured in Ten, an anthology of poetry edited by Jayanta Mahapatra.
The plot of her latest novel came to her “like a movie in my mind,” she says. “I wrote it as I saw it. Each time I went back to it, I saw details and wrote them down. It’s like observing things in a place you are visiting for the second or the nth time, things you hadn’t noticed before. I write my short fiction the same way, looking at my private screen and watching the whole thing get enacted before me.” Her biggest source of support while writing the novel, she shares, was writer Anuradha Kumar. She says, “Anuradha is a prolific writer, who has penned a book for adults, It Takes a Murder. Her feedback helped me in giving my book its present shape. Another person who has been a source of encouragement for me is the award-winning British writer Vanessa Gebbie.”
The research involved, Rhumjhum says, is as important as the images in her head. “It’s especially important for the setting, for all those background details that make any work of fiction seem alive,” Rhumjhum says. “With Culling Mynahs and Crows, I didn’t have to do much, except look up a map or two and the railway timetable for the names of trains and stations. I had made up the town, Bisrampur, but in order to make it feel real I wanted to give it a background that existed in real time and geography. I was in Kolkata during the 1980’s and the first few years of the 1990’s, and had lived in Mumbai for a few years down the line. I didn’t veer too far away from the places I had been around in these two cities. Memory is an excellent hunting ground, a good place to start one’s research.”
Talking about influences in her writing, she says, “I read a lot of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy among other writers, as a child. I think I was around 12 years when I read Jude the Obscure, and it had a huge impact on me. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea for the first time when I was around 11 and I read it four times at one go. I simply couldn’t let go of that book. So yes, Hemingway too has touched me. But then, so has Jack London, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant, Rabindranath Tagore, Shakespeare, Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, Anton Chekov, as also Enid Blyton and all the children’s classics and Agatha Christie. These were the writers of my childhood. Along with some other names that no one seems to remember now — Nevil Shute, Catherine Gaskin, Ethel Mannin, Warwick Deeping, Monica Dickens, Alister Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Georgette Heyer, Margeurite Young, A.J. Cronin, all the animal book writers with Gerald Durrel topping the list. These were my best friends during my childhood and youth. They still are!”
Inspiration for her came from a newspaper report that she had read about how some political goons were ruining a woman’s life, “The incident remained with me,” she recalls. “The book does have strong feminist themes. I am an angry woman and that anger finds its outlet in my writing. Also, the Delhi gangrape happened when I was giving my book its finishing touches, and it convinced me that I should remain angry and keep on writing what I felt. However, I am neither a protester nor an activist. I have strong ideas about how India should be just like any other middle class Indian,” she says in qualification, “but I don’t visualise changing society. I want to keep on living a principled life, as much as possible, and set a good example for my kids, keep my house clean and tidy, provide a good home and good food to my family and friends. Writing is my parallel world. It never stops for me.”
Rhumjhum’s poems are frequently on nature, she also writes wacky, humorous poems. “Poetry is a more ‘felt-within-my-skin’ kind of experience. One’s experiences are always internal. Even when I am in a place where I have nothing to do, I am never bored. I simply write in my head. When I return home I put it down on my computer. I work directly on my computer, sometimes even write poetry straight on the computer,” says Rhumjhum in parting.
