A walk through the park

(Published in Hindu Sunday Magazine today)

She sits across the table at the Press Club in Mumbai, in an obviously familiar environment, eyes sparkling, her being concentrated into the surprisingly small space she occupies – she has a big voice, big eyes, big presence, but is a tiny woman. Anjali Joseph had a busy trip to Mumbai, her time filled with interviews, a launch, a reading and those eternal questions, answered over and over again and quoted verbatim in endless write-ups. She commutes between London, where she lives, studies for a PhD and writes, and Pune, where her parents are based, wondering whether the ratio of time she spends in each country should not be skewed somewhat differently. The recent flurry of attention comes from her first novel, Saraswati Park, the story of a letter writer who sits outside the General Post Office in Mumbai (or ‘Bombay’, as she calls it) and dreams of a life he believes cannot be his. And what is her life all about? Who is Anjali Joseph? “God, this is like my crisis every morning before the second cup of coffee!” she laughs.

Born in Bombay, as it was then, to a Malayalee father and a Bengali-Gujarati mother, and with an older brother, Joseph moved with her family to the UK when she was just seven years old. She studied English at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught French in London and English at the Sorbonne in Paris and has worked as a journalist in Mumbai. Along the way, she did a stint as an accountant, thinking that if she trained to be a chartered accountant, she could “get a proper job and write part time or something, but I have always been very bad with numbers, so it was basically a torment. I was going through a really desperate patch at the time! When I left Cambridge, I needed to have the confidence that yes, I could be a writer; I always wanted to write but I felt I needed some life experience.” Adding to that experience she sought was a job as a secretary, another at a small Asian newspaper in London for a while.

Joseph’s parents moved back to India when she was about 19. “I would come and visit for holidays, but I never really spent much time in India for my education or anything else, so I don’t really have that sense of what it means to be an Indian here,” she says. Somewhere along the line, life turned on to the path of authorhood. It began with journalism. “I came to India for a holiday and travelled around South India and met a lot of people who were like me – Israelis, people from the US, all kind of mirroring myself to me, feeling ‘I don’t know what I want to do, what to do with my life’.” Reality bit and “after a week or two of that I found myself wanting a job, so I wrote these letters to lots of people. I did not know where I wanted to be – maybe Mumbai, but then I thought this city was too expensive.” But a job she liked decided things and she became a feature writer with a national publication. “Fate had intervened and said “Bombay!” Within two weeks after initiating the whole process, I remember sitting sleepily on the bus in the late morning thinking I would see London if I looked out, and I would actually see Bombay.” Three years later, Joseph “decided it was time to finally get to work – my 30th birthday was approaching and it was time for me to actually write that novel. I did a course in creative writing in England and started writing. I came back to Bombay and worked at a magazine for a year, as commissioning editor. I had a great time. It was quite literary.”

Saraswati Park is “my revisiting of the Mumbai that I grew up in,” Joseph explains, “the world of my parents and grandparents, bookish and intellectual, the people you see around you on the street, the awareness of the various different kinds of people…There is a very middle class bookish Bombay and that’s not something that I see reflected in what is usually written – what I found was more Bollywood and such, which was not what I knew. So I supposed in a way this is my attempt to find a fictional base for my Bombay, which I think still exists.”

Her main character, Mohan Karekar, is a would-be writer, a man who fills the margins of the books he buys so regularly with thoughts, ideas, inspirations. A man who cannot – or perhaps does not - find the courage to create with those ideas and write more, maybe enough to make a book. According to Joseph, “The block in his head is something that a lot of people actually feel – that your own life is not the stuff of literature, since literature is somehow special, with a linear plot line and a meaning and everything that is interconnected in a way that can be perceived in a work of art. In daily life things are not so clear. Maybe it is the thought that ‘I am a small man in a big city and what do I matter anyway?’ People find it difficult, I think.”

And how much of her is there in the book, since the setting is familiar territory, the people are real and she has actually spent a little time with the letter writers of Mumbai. Joseph smiles, saying, “There are many places that I have been. There are a lot of emotions I have felt at some time or the other in very different circumstances that I have used in the book. In terms of actual life experience, I have not been through most of the things these characters have been through. I think they are all real people, even though I know they are not.” And these are the folk, like any one of us, who live in Saraswati Park.