Between two cities, a river flows, but people have no memory of what happens on the ‘other’ side, except for the inherent fear that it must be avoided. In the titular story of Geetanjali Shree’s Once Elephants Lived Here, a short story collection translated by Daisy Rockwell, an old woman appears and disappears, a symbol of remembering and forgetting. “I am the mother of the mother of your mother,” she reminds the young man who had been wondering who she is. People have dissociated from the past to such an extent that confronting it becomes a radical act. Shree seems to convey the point in this story and others in the collection too, that our histories, yours and mine, are as much in the rivers, grass, and houses as they are in historical chronicles.
To a certain extent, the collection also explores different degrees of freedom and the effect they bring to life. The End shows the death of a long-reigning patriarchal head of a family and how this will finally release his wife from exhaustion. Whereas March, Ma, and Sakura has a joyous mother who has come to Japan to meet her son and also “wander about without any interference for the first time in her life.” And as long as freedom is owned, it can be as absurd as a woman falling in love with the sky that danced for her and “glowed red in pleasure” in So Much Sky.
The layers of meaning and structural complexity echo the craft exhibited in her International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand. The rich atmosphere in each story gives each character a striking life that readers can relate to. In pushing characters outside their ‘way of living’ and exposing them to a different worldview, Shree depicts how often we need to go beyond what we accept as ‘life.’ Excerpts:
Your stories rarely offer a single, straightforward interpretation. What draws you to writing in this way, and what do you hope the reader discovers by staying with the layers?
We’ve become too easy about the kind of thing we want to give our attention to. We don’t want to make anything which requires a bit of patience, a bit of effort. We want something to immediately satisfy us.
We must realise this about the beauty of art and literature: it needs you to return to it again and again. I’m a small writer belonging to these times. Think of the great writers down the centuries from all parts of the world. Shakespeare, our own epics, all kinds of writers. They’re not all just so easy to read. Sometimes you need to be taught how to read them. We must cultivate in us the capacity to enjoy this.
We have to train ourselves to read layered and difficult things. And I think it also applies to our approach to life. We don’t want just completely singular and superficial experiences. Why do we not want to make the effort to enjoy and see how much there is in those layers? I think we should go into it with a slightly more open mind and a slightly more willingness to also participate, and not just have it spoon-fed to us.
One particular story, Chakkar Ghinni, really stands out in the collection. The structure is so visceral: the thoughts are circling, and the protagonist is also painfully moving in circles too. How do you go about using the structure?
We should remember something about art and literature: play. We are playing. There are serious and tragic things, but at the same time, a lot of it is having fun with our material. My material is words. I’m playing with words, form, and storytelling. It’s not that I had the intention of making myself and the readers’ heads spin. It is something which happens for me as I write. It starts to take shape in front of me. It’s a bit of a discovery and a surprise for me also.
The story started with something quite small and absurd. I used to take a walk around housing societies in Delhi. I would take this morning walk in the neighbourhood. I had this slightly silly idea: when a spinning wheel is set in motion, and you try to stop it, it doesn’t stop immediately. It still goes on with its own dynamic. I imagined that if my legs were not listening to me, the momentum of that round-and-round spin had gotten to them, and I wanted to stop, but they didn’t.
Once that initial idea takes shape, how does the form begin?
When you start writing and build on it—and this is the fascinating thing about literature—it starts showing you many dimensions. It becomes a kind of mirror, in which you see things that are not all just fun. You see the tragic things, traumatic things. You also see the society you are in, the values you are surrounded by. So little things are actually mirrors showing you a reality around. A slightly absurd style, or a slightly unnatural gait, can draw attention to things you may have missed or taken for granted. It becomes one of the powerful strategies in literature to direct your attention in certain ways.
With Tomb of Sand winning the International Booker Prize in 2022 and Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp in 2025, do you think such achievements have an impact on the consumption of vernacular literature in India?
In an immediate sense, absolutely. This world is so much about hype, advertisement, and visibility. If it is an award held in high esteem, it immediately shines the torch on that literature.
People often focus on the lucky person who got it, but they must also realise that the whole language and literature get lit up. There cannot be a single Banu Mushtaq in the Kannada world. If there can be one good writer, there will be others around. You have to know that it talks about a whole piece of Earth which has these worthwhile plants. When I got the prize, I often say, rhetorically, that in one shot people knew there is a language called “Hindi”, and that it is not the same as “Hindu”. Through me, they get curious about everything around and discover that there are many writers and a literature of long lineage.
What do you think readers need to become cognizant of in order to deeply engage with literature?
You have to build a whole reading culture, where people read and discover good things, and not so good things, and so on. The real thing is to start reading, and to read much more and say, “Oh, okay, things are happening in these languages. Let’s find out.” People should start reading much more and reading seriously, and learning to read seriously.