Nisha Susan on her short-story collection: 'Women have extremely complicated and satisfying social lives that involve each other'

Collections of short stories are unruly – they resist easy summaries, and run away from neat categorisations. In deft hands like Nisha Susan’s, a single collection can be provocative, disturbing, and darkly funny. Susan’s debut book, The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook, tells 12 very different tales – one minute the reader is inside the head of a sexist editor in a newsroom, and the next, they are witnessing the breakdown of a lifelong friendship between three women. The stories are stamped with Susan’s unmistakable signature – the wry humour and keen observations that readers familiar with her writing will recognise immediately. Susan told Firstpost about the book. Excerpts from the conversation: Can you tell us something about the process of writing this collection? How was the experience of putting it together, especially since the stories were written over several years? For this collection, I spent the second half of last year, editing, polishing old stories, dumping ones I had strange feelings about and writing several brand-new ones. The newest one was written in December 2019. I enjoyed doing it and it’s easy to discard old stories that no longer hit the spot. You do feel detached. You have been a prolific journalist and editor. What do you enjoy about writing fiction, particularly in the short fiction form? Parvati Sharma was asked about the short story form after her first brilliant collection of short stories. And with her typical wit, she said that you could write a story a week and at the end of a year you would have at least some good short stories. She was only half joking, of course. It is fantastic that you can just sit down and finish it. As opposed to my many attempts to write novels which are in computers old and dead. I like the short story as a highly flexible, generous form. Among Indian short story writers the range between writers and within each writer’s work is tremendous. Mridula Koshy, Parvati Sharma or one of my all time favourites, Paul Zachariah. What they can each do with a short story is astonishing. I was struck by the story of the writer-outsider. In trying to align her own questioning, searching identity as a writer with a very different reality – the commercialisation of the writer as a sort of lit fest product – she falters. She sees that she is among people who often engage with books superficially. Is this a gap you’ve experienced yourself? How do you feel about it? Well, I have been a young person in a literary scene in Delhi and been gobsmacked by how little reading and how much more jockeying for power there was. The story of The Gentle Reader is, yes, about resetting your internal compass as an artist and returning to your original enjoyment and cheap thrills. But it is also about being awkward and unsure in any new ‘scene’ and trying to decide which way to jump. Back your ambition full-throatedly or be a purist. Or? Is there an or? It takes a while to figure out if there is, and what is it for you? [caption id=“attachment_8875891” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook, by Nisha Susan[/caption] In several of the stories I was struck by how women’s friendships are transformed by time, by men, and especially by marriage. In one story a woman’s two best friends become unrecognisable to her over time. In another, a retelling of Rebecca, instead of demonising the first wife, the second wife becomes friends with her through reading her secret blog. In a third, a married friend and her partner play a cruel trick on a single woman. Can you talk a little bit about this common thread? I think the truth that women know is that among ourselves we spend much less time thinking about men that literary fiction written by men would indicate. We have extremely complicated and satisfying social lives that involve each other. Sometimes a relationship is kittens, sometimes it’s knives, sometimes it is flowers in a garden. Without these relationships, our emotional and intellectual landscapes would be barren. I didn’t set out to explore this theme in this collection but it is one I have noticed more and more readers have responded to. And that makes me very happy. Technology is an overwhelming presence in the collection – hidden stories and desires become manifest, schemes are hatched, affairs are conducted, fantasy abounds. How do you think this has changed our day-to-day lives? I once asked a shrink who specialised in marriage counselling what cellphones have done in the extramarital affair department. And he said, helped people get caught. His thing was that people always had affairs. Cell phones just provided evidence. Which is true, of course. But there is also the culture and subculture that springs up around a significant piece of technology. The intimacy of the late night phone call/sexting/bathroom selfies… They create frissons, fascination and even boredom black holes of their own. Tech is never neutral. In several stories, women find solace in art when the world disappoints them again and again – they find in their writing and music what they have not been able to find in work, in love, or in friendship. Is this something that was important for you to write about, and why? I think I wrote a bunch of stories with this theme before I realised it. Moral of all my stories was: marriage is bad, work is worship. It was like a dystopian WhatsApp forward. With namaste emojis and flowers. I personally do believe that work is solace for everything. But having realised the theme emerging, it allowed me to see what else was possible in my newer stories. So in The Triangle it is a fully conscious working mind switching off irony for a heated sexual fantasy. Or the protagonist in All Girls Together going to work with the hope of self actualisation and being slowly crushed by her ridiculous internet giant workplace.