BENGALURU : In her latest book, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories Roy compiles a collection of 14 stories about people who suffer from curious ailments.
What was your trigger for writing and combining stories on similar lines? Where did you draw your inspirations from?
I cannot really say where these triggers come from. It might have come from an epiphanic realisation of my own curious ailments. For instance, I can tell you the number of letters in a sentence as you speak to me. I do not know what to do with this tendency – I became aware of it when I was in middle school. I suppose our peculiar ailments make us unique. They are our real secrets. One cannot really say where one draws inspiration from life, I suppose, from the desire to record and understand particular moments in life.
What drew you towards writing fiction? I am fond of most genres, not just fiction. I write from the basic need to understand myself in relation to the world – our complexities that make us who we are. It is a self-indulgent urge, but even the urge to live must count as a self-indulgent one.
Was it always your dream to become a writer? Did you have any other career in your mind that you wanted to pursue?
No, I never dreamt of becoming a writer. The possibility of such a dream did not exist in the middle-class imagination – my parents just wanted me to get a job, any job that would allow me to take care of myself. I came to writing very late in my life, in my early thirties, as I was writing my PhD. I kept it a secret from the world, including my family. I wanted to speak in a private language to myself – that started as a working definition for my writing.
The need for a private language must have come from the need to escape from the very public language in which doctoral dissertations are written. Strange as it might sound, particularly now, in the times we live in, I grew up without any sense of having a ‘career’. Things happened naturally, studying Literature, writing a PhD, getting a job – I did not work actively towards any of these. I taught in Bengal’s government colleges for many years, and now teach at Ashoka University. I feel grateful that I did not have to work towards a ‘career’ in any real sense – I read and write and discuss reading and writing with students, I have been very fortunate in that.
Is there any character in the book that you are particularly fond of ?
I am interested in the mothers and wives in these stories. There’s My Mother’s Lover, from where the book takes its title, but there’s also My Mother’s Head, and there are mothers in a few other stories. I am curious about the hidden lives of mothers – their secret lives, those that they need to hide, and those that we choose to be wilfully indifferent to, because they disturb our selves in a way we do not want to recognise.
Is there any advice that you would like to give? None. I could do with some advice myself. If there’s any I could give myself, it would be – Live.