Her flight is at 5. Anita Nair has only a few hours to go to a press meet, come back to her hotel, pack her stuff and go to the airport. But that doesn't stop her from the polite conversations she picks up, meeting people at the Press Club in Thiruvananthapuram. This is her 48th day in Kerala this year. She has counted. She always counts to later tell her parents. They have always been surprised by her blind love for the state, the way it comes out into her writings.
On Friday, she has come for a quick visit to the capital, away from her hometown in Palakkad, to talk about her new book — Chain of Custody, second in the series of her crime fiction featuring inspector Gowda. Anita doesn’t usually hold press meets to announce her book but this one was triggered by the seriousness of the subject she’s chosen - child trafficking. “According to a study, there are 55 million children in India who are victims of child trafficking. Why is this not given the seriousness it deserves?
“It is an organised crime, like running a multinational company,” Anita says. It’s reading a newspaper report one March day four years ago that put the thought into her head — where do all the missing children go? The thought had first led her into a sort of research. She read, she talked to people, she visited organisations in Bengaluru where she lives. “At the BOSCO child welfare organisation, I came to know that they find about 16 to 17 children from the railway station everyday! Nearly every child has the same story - poverty. The others are trapped, seduced into sex trafficking.”
She had a DGP called Nizamudeen to help her. A man who’d sing Sufi songs and give her leads for more research. It is after a lot of research she decided to put it into writing and chose crime fiction as a genre for social commentary. “That works because I could explore the subject as part of an investigation. I can focus on the condition than the individual, remove myself from it,” she says. But then Inspector Gowda is sort of her male alter ego — 'who is horrified and disgusted by all that he sees the way I would be'. She uses it as a way to address the several things that disturbs her about the society. But, she says her books do not have answers to the problems she writes about. “It can only show there is a problem like this. A reviewer who read my book said the next time he sees a young girl standing alone somewhere, he’d ask her what happened. As a writer, that's the kind of response I hope for,” says she.
Anita feels it is high time people, especially the media, used their energy to address such serious issues, instead of wasting time on trivial matters. “There is so little information available on the net. I came upon a book by PM Nair on child trafficking but that's more for an NGO than a layman,” she says. That’s what her book should hopefully do — take the issue to the laymen. Through her novel, she hopes to start a discussion point somewhere. “I have a voice now to do social commentary (through crime fiction). It was not easy to do that with the kind of writing I have been doing — literary fiction.” She is considering writing a nonfiction book to put out all that she’s found on her research.
Problem is despite touching upon various serious issues in her novels, the author of Ladies Coupe and The Better Man is still labelled by many as a woman writer writing on women's issues. “Readers don't think that, they are the decent lot. It is the literary establishment — the academics and the media and the intellectuals. But in Kerala, it doesn't happen. They respect me as a serious writer. Generally, however, Indian women writers are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts." Anita is tired of the feminist tag that comes to her. Not that she isn't, but she is tired of explaining her writing is that and beyond that. “If you have to tag me, tag me a humanist.” So it is a relief coming to Kerala. “My parents say I am the only person who can’t find a fault with Kerala. But I do understand what's wrong with the state — the dirty politics, corruption, intrusiveness into other people's business. But it's like how you love somebody who’s flawed, there is no logic.”
