Devapriya Roy is the author of three novels; the most recent one being Friends from College (2019), a version of which was serialised in The Telegraph from May 2018 to March 2019.
In 2015, she co-wrote The Heat and Dust Project with her husband Saurav Jha – a travel-memoir based on their travels around India on a very tight budget. Then, she collaborated with artist Priya Kuriyan to create Indira (2018), the acclaimed graphic biography of Indira Gandhi.
What is your writing schedule?
When I am in the middle of a book, there are two parts to the process.One is actually writing the book and the other is when I am doing other things, but I am still in the novel’s universe in my head. When I do other chores, a part of my mind is inside the book.
Some are good writing days, when I am semi-happy with the words I have written. Some are bad writing days when it doesn’t go too well, and maybe the next day I delete whatever I had written. It varies. But I write all the time. I don’t have a very fixed writing schedule.
Does writing energise or exhaust you?
In a strange way, it does both. At the end of a good day of writing, you are exhausted. But you are oddly energised too.
Writing advice you’d like to give your younger self?
I would have told my younger self to read a little more diversely. I have always read lots of novels, and I still do the same. When we are younger, we establish our reading patterns, and I invariably crave for fiction most of the time. I feel if I had included non-fiction in my reading list, I would have been a slightly different writer.
Your favourite books?
I would say A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. This massively large, 1,500-page book, also teaches how novels are written. Everytime I finish writing one of my own books – and as it leads to extreme exhaustion – I go back to reading this one. In a strange way, it replenishes me.
There is such a large canvas, there are so many things happening on the pages that you can tell about the perseverance the writer had while writing a book of this magnitude, showing that this can be done, that’s enough for me.
Literary success vs number of copies sold?
Can’t one have both?
Favourite spot/s in Delhi you write at?
When I was writing my first novel, I used to work in Sahitya Akademi as an Assistant Editor, basically a young flunkey, one step up from an intern. I was 23 at that time and it was my first ever job. I was in this government office in a very beautiful part of Delhi, amaltas and gulmohar trees everywhere, Copernicus Marg.
They used to give these green-coloured for notepads for memos, but I used them for writing beginning my first novel, which eventually became The Vague Woman’s Handbook. In that sense, it was my favourite Delhi place to write in. Before COVID-19 changed everything, if I got stuck writing at home, I would go to Khan Market and scout out a little café for a change of scene and give it another try.