Daughter of a geologist, Anuradha Roy spent her early childhood in tents deep
inside forests, and in small towns of mofussil India. The impact of this
experience on her psyche is evident in her latest novel, The Folded Earth, which is informed by a deep sensitivity about India’s disappearing forests and their denizens. In town for the Delhi event of the Kovalam Literary Festival, 2011, she talks to Deputy Copy Editor Bodhisattwa Maity about her life
as a publisher (she is one half of Permanent Black), literary inspirations, and Ranikhet.
How and why did you become a writer?
I’ve written ever since I could read. My first short story was published when I was 14 in the Indian Express, for which I got Rs 40 per story.
Who were your idols?
In Bengali, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhya—the sense of the rural world and
nature in Aranyak and Pather Panchali, for example, are sublime. I like Anton Chekhov, Yasunari Kawabata, Virginia Woolf, Vikram Seth and Geoff Dyer. I also like reading crime fiction. As for those I’ve published—Bill Aitken and Sheila Dhar were brilliant authors to work with.
Was writing a natural progression from publishing?
They are two different jobs. As a publisher, it’s the joy of making a book, and the intensity and involvement in the work of other authors. Writing is completely
different, very solitary.
About your first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing.
I felt a sense of loss about a disappearing world—a world that I knew partly through living in it and partly through stories, and felt the need to write about it —to remember it in a way—in fiction.
Why Ranikhet as setting for The Folded Earth.
I grew up all over India, travelling with my father, a field geologist, then went to (Presidency) college in Kolkata, went to Cambridge for a degree, returned to work for a while in Delhi—but until I began to live in Ranikhet, I never felt I belonged anywhere. Now I feel as if I’ve come home. As a hilly, remote place, it felt like the natural setting for The Folded Earth, which is centrally concerned with the ravaging of forests and animals.
Is nostalgia then your literary inspiration?
I wouldn’t call it nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a sentimental idealisation of the past. In my case, it is more a sense of tragedy, loss, pain. The tragedy in the lives of the characters radiates out into a larger sense of tragic loss or waste.
Describe your process of writing?
I am quite obsessive about language, and although I hate rereading what I have written, I still go back to it again and again, till I feel I have got the right words and managed to bring out the nuances perfectly. I’m also quite strict about deadlines—even self-imposed ones—it’s something I picked up during my short stint as a journalist.