BENGALURU: Devapriya Roy is the author of ‘Indira: A Graphic Biography of Indira Gandhi’, The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club and, most recently, The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, co-written with Saurav Jha. She is an alumnus of Presidency College, Kolkata and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she spent nearly a decade in pursuit of a PhD on Bharata’s Natyashastra. She currently teaches creative and academic writing at Ashoka University.
In a conversation with City Express, she talks about her favourite books, characters and her favourite lines from the book by Vikram Seth. Excerpts:
Your favourite book of all time and why? Could you quote a passage?
That’s a really tough one to answer actually. All-time favourites tend to come with qualifiers. For instance, my all-time favourite novella is Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth which opens with “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”
My all-time favourite Hindi memoir in translation is A Life Misspent by Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala” where his young wife tells him about the “Khari Boli speech of Delhi”: “In a single breath, my wife reeled off the names of twenty Khari Boli poets and scholars. I was awed the way a reader is awed by an essay filled with quotations.”My all-time favourite novel is, possibly, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy which opens with the fine, oft-quoted line: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Your favourite fictional character and why?
Right now it is Indira Thapa from Priya Kuriyan and my recent graphic biography of Indira Gandhi. Indira Thapa is so organised and meticulous and does things well before deadlines - I would really like to be her. As you can imagine, I am swamped in work, and am serially missing deadlines!
Few lines you got from a book, which you would never forget?
Vikram Seth’s dedication to his then-lover Philippe Honore was an acrostic that followed the Onegin stanza. These lines have remained with me ever since I read the book in 1999!
Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.
Had our words turned to other things
In the grey park, the rain abated,
Life would have quickened other strings.
I list your gifts in this creation:
Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,
Peace to the heart with touch or word,
Ease to the soul with note and chord.
How did that walk, those winter hours,
Occasion this? No lightning came;
Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,
Our story lit with borrowed powers –
Rather, by what our spirits burned,
Embered in words, to us returned
Five top books released in 2017, according to you
I don’t know about “top” but here are a few books from 2017 that I enjoyed very much.
Aneela Zeb Babar’s We Are All Revolutionaries Here
Janice Pariat’s The Nine-chambered Heart
Victoria Lomasko’s Other Russias
Sadia Dehlvi’s Jasmine and Jinns
Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
Also, because I was researching the life of Indira Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh’s Indira Gandhi: a Life in Nature, was a treasure trove of information and anecdotes.
One book you would want a first edition of and why?
Manmohan Ghosh’s English translation of Bharata’s Natyashastra. I did my PhD on this subject and have been, in fact, looking for the two volumes ever since. Ghosh spent decades on this project and his translation, while seeming archaic now, was path-breaking at the time.
Which author would you like to have tea with and what would you talk about?
I would love to have tea with Priya Kuriyan and talk about the crazy, whirlwind of a year we had working on Indira together!
One advice you would give to your favourite author, and one you would give to terrible writers.
(To Vikram Seth!) Please finish A Suitable Girl already!
(to writers) Read!
Which books would you take with you on a solo holiday?
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels which, I must confess, I am saving for exactly this purpose.
Your one guilty-pleasure read?
Cookbooks and food memoirs!
One fictional character you go to when you need a friend?
Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley
What is one quality of a book you wish people would have?
The ability to surprise with multiple readings.
One book you wish was never written, and why?
No comment!
What is one thing you cannot tolerate when you are reading?
Bad tea
Your favourite reading nook?
Oh, I read everywhere and all the time. If I had to pick a favourite nook it would be a memory actually. Of a corner in the fourth floor, in the library in JNU. I spent a lot of time reading there in my MA days and it was less cold or less hot than my room in the hostel, and one could see Qutub Minar in the distance from behind the shelves.
Do you remember to keep bookmarks?
One of my students at Ashoka, Payal (Nagpal), makes me quirky bookmarks every time I lend her a book, with doodles and dialogue and little play-lets. And I treasure these!
Book shelf
The Snake and
the Lotus
By Appupen
Pages: 144
The fourth book to Appupen’s Halahala universe, this graphic novel adds to the mythical world that was started with Moonward in 2009. The series serves as a mirror for the author, where he explores earthbound issues. It is a surreal setting, where he lets his imagination take control of the story. The narrative voice of the story is not told from a human point of view, a reason why the typography was hand drawn. This is one of the first novels where he uses text.
Girls Burn Brighter
By Shobha Rao
Pages: 320
This is a story about two girls who are poor, ambitous and happen to be the second sex. The two are driven apart by circumstances, but relentlessly search for one another. Poornima and Savitha who have known little kindness in their lives, meet each other in their teens. An act of cruelty drives Savitha away, Poornima leaves everything behind to find her friend. They face obstacles on their jounrey through the darkest corners of India’s underworld-they refusse to lose the hope that burns within them.
Red Clocks
By Leni Zumas
Pages: 368
Set in America, this book centers around the question- What if abortion was illegal again? The novel explores the narratives of 5 different women. Ro is a single high school teacher tries to concieve while writing her biography. Susan is a frustrated mother of two who is trapped in a broken marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents. And Gin is the gifted homeopath who brings all their fates together when she gets arrested. These very different women face their own barriers.
The Heartfulness Way
By Joshua Pollock
Pages: 232
Heartfulness is an approach to life that helps us understand why meditate? It helps integrate our inner world with the outer world peacefully. It is an approach to the Raja Yoga system of meditation called Sahaj Marg, founded at the turn of the 20th century and formalised into an organisation in 1945. More than seventy years later, This book helps one to live beyond the filters of our sensory limitations. It helps us discover unity within ourselves. To practice heartfulness is to seek beyond the form, the reality behind the ritual.
