Annie Zaidi’s latest booK brings alive the world of the dead
Annie Zaidi. (Photo: DC)
Hyderabad: Gulab by
Annie Zaidi
Rs 233, pp, 170 HarperCollins
The graveyard in the book is black and white with little droplets of red. Or perhaps it appears so in the mind of a reader turning the black-and-white cover of Annie Zaidi’s new novella Gulab. Among the leafless trees on the cover, little gray patches appear like ghosts. But the ghost she has written about has colour, a life outside the graveyard, emotions and even a body with stretch marks.
Saira is a spirit that lives very much in this world as in the ‘other’ where she comes from. And Nikunj, the man who loved her from childhood, enters the graveyard, with all his love, fear and guilt, learning about the girl he knew so well from the strangers he meets there. “I have often considered the possibility of another world, a paranormal world inhabited by souls or people, who were once alive as we are. But I am not particularly frightened of it. I find ‘normal’ more frightening,” says Annie.
She had once read in her college magazine, a story written by her friend Smriti Ravindra about a dead woman’s lovers coming face to face for the first time. The “germ of an idea” stayed with her for several years. “I forgot the plot details but I remembered the idea of lovers who were strangers to each other, meeting at a woman’s funeral. And I always wondered what it might be to tell the story of a woman who is so intensely hungry for life that will not let go of it. And that became Gulab, the story of Saira alias Gulab with the men in her life, and the men in her death and her never-ending past.”
In the pages narrating the past of Saira and Nikunj, is the story of a deadly earthquake that separated the lovers, one searching the other months after months, years after years. “If I could find Saira, I would also find a way. It didn’t matter if she was married too or had children” married Nikunj, a father of two children, encounters such thoughts as he finds his way through the large graveyard.
That earthquake was real, the author had read about it and visited tombs and graveyards in and around Ahmedabad. “Those memories may have come together as I wrote. But it was not a conscious decision,” she says. It was also not a conscious decision to write from a female perspective. She could easily be the voice of her male narrator, Nikunj, for she has done it before. And her hero is also not the stereotypical, tough guy indifferent to his past, and the memories it made. “Lots of men are extremely emotional,” she says.
The book also has pictures by Annie’s mother Yasmin Zaidi to illustrate the people and places in black and white. She has given her acknowledgments to her mother and her friend Smriti, with whom she has co-written a collection of stories called The Good Indian Girl.
Annie has earlier written a collection of essays called Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales and another short story collection Love Stories # 1 to 14. She calls herself a hard-working writer, and a curious one. “I like to attempt various genres and experiment with format. What I’m trying to say is always more important to me than how it will be received, or how easily it can be marketed.”
( Source : dc )
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