Always, when it is a writer you talk to, you wonder what questions they like and what they are too used to hearing. There is nothing called the right question. But there can be what’s close to heart, the stories one likes to talk about and relive. Anjali Joseph would tell you her stories begin with an image, they did for all three of her books. In her latest — The Living — the image had been of a man making a pair of chappals.
Then, she tells you, there was the detective work of finding out who the characters were, and what the stories were about. An exceptional, unexpected work is what writer and academic Amit Chaudhuri called it in his review for The Guardian. You read all that and yet, when you are a Malayali, you get stuck on that one point about her name — surely, she’s got to have a Kerala connection?
Not the wrong question to ask, you find out. Anjali patiently tells you about her father’s Syrian Christian (Marthoma) family from Maramon. She’s come to Maramon and Thiruvalla, where her paternal grandfather came from. “And some other places in Kerala, but only in my twenties,” says the 30-something author. You can actually figure out her age, she’s put it on her website - a ‘78 born Bombay girl.
Yes, that does deviate a bit from the Kerala connection we have just established. “My grandfather was in government service so my father grew up all over India.” That explains part of it. The other part is that her mother is half Bengali and half Gujarati (please let’s not be reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s book here) and Anjali grew up in Bombay till she was seven. Then the family took off to England, which might explain The Guardian connection.
“Now I live in Assam or spend time in Pune, where my parents stay. It’s difficult to unpack which influences have come from where. I don’t speak Malayalam but was happy that Saraswati Park, my first novel, has been translated and published in Malayalam.” That’s the book that won her the Betty Trask Prize, Desmond Elliott Prize, and Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction in India. The image that got Saraswati Park started was of a middle-aged man. “The letter writer, standing at Flora Fountain in Mumbai and buying a second-hand book with marginal notations at evening rush hour,” she says.
Another Country, her second book too had an image to begin with — of a woman walking down a wide boulevard in Paris as autumn leaves drifted down to the pavement. Then came The Living, with two narrators, Claire and Arun, both of them shoemakers. There could be exceptions here, but mostly, writers love to talk about their characters like new mothers do about their newborns.
Anjali begins with Clair. “She is a 35-year-old single mother living in Norwich. She has a teenage son and works in a shoe factory. During the novel, she has a few relationships, and also thinks about her working life and how her early motherhood led her to the job she does, which is skilled, but a bit anachronistic because Norwich, which used to have many shoe factories, now has just one or two left.”
Arun, the other, is in India. “He’s a chappal maker in Kolhapur. He is in his late 60s and is father to two grown-up sons, and grandfather to three grandsons. Partly because of a prostate problem, he reflects on how his life has shaped itself, including his own childhood, a decade of heavy drinking, and a short extramarital affair many years ago.”
Both stories are about parenthood, regret, mistakes, surprising moments of happiness, and above all, about routine and working life. “It’s a novel that considers that question we all sometimes ask ourselves: How did I get here?” It’s easy to form impressions from the synopsis but unless you read a page or two, you don’t know the joys of language waiting inside a book. Amazon calls Anjali’s writing ‘lyrical and often funny’.
Amit, who wrote ‘her concern is on the narrative’, had taught her once and this had angered one reader. He must be biased, she wrote to The Guardian, being a former teacher. Anjali brushes it off, leaving the reader to judge her book for what it’s worth.
