"The train journey brought back the hopeful, depressing trips to Kalina to see Narayan, and he felt melancholic; finally he'd understood what life was like, the meetings and partings it entailed. It was a thought that only made him more attached to his life and the people in it. From his window seat he looked with hungry eyes at the dirty worlds next to the tracks: the brightly painted shacks, the grubby faced children, the ugly concrete tower blocks, the smells. It was his city, his world; it might be imperfect, but it was home."
From Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph
Anjali Joseph (*1978)
From the well-established Poet Laureate let's turn to a first-time novelist: Anjali Joseph, born in Bombay/Mumbai. At the age of seven, her family moved to England on behalf of her father's work as a research scientist. She went to Trinity School in Leamington Spa and read at Trinity College in Cambridge. Whereas her family returned to India, she stayed in England and moved on to Paris to teach English at the Sorbonne. "Living in France unexpectedly gave me new affection for England; I felt more English", she explains in an interview with The Indepedent (24/10/2011). Nevertheless, while between jobs, she moves back to India and gets a job at The Times of India in Bombay and later becomes Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). Four years later, she returns to England to do her Master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, graduating with distinction in 2008. Her first novel Saraswati Park was published in 2010 and already has won her various prizes: the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction and the Betty Trask Prize for first novel written by authors under the age of 35. She was additionally nominated for the Newton First Book Award, reading at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where I met her. Her novel is about young Ashish, repeating his final year at college, his life with his uncle and aunt around the fictional place 'Saraswati Park' in Bombay and his sexual awakening. It is a quiet book, with seemingly quiet lives in a quiet part of Bombay. As she mentioned herself, the book had been dismissed mainly by many of the Indian critiques because of it's "everyday crab". But don't be mistaken - the inner lives are roaring, often struggling invisibly with their dreams, hopes and losses. When being interviewed by Namita Gokhale, director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, at the Edbookfest she mentioned Samuel Beckett as a major influence on her writing as well as Indian authors like Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya and the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai. And still, she finds it strange to 'represent' a national literature, in her case, Indian, while she lives and writes in England. Her second novel, at which she is currently working, will focus precisely on the subject of the 'definition of self' when having lived in various places. Her protagonist will follow a similar route as she had, living in London, Paris and Bombay. It will be interesting how she will handle this issue and I hope that I will be able to mention her in my blog some more times.
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