Interview | Fantasy is part of my DNA as a writer and a reader: Nilanjana Roy

In the village of Teetarpur, a few hours from the capital city of Delhi, Chand’s peaceful life is shattered as he is forced into a dangerous quest for justice.At the station house, the jurisdiction of which extends to Teetarpur and the neighbouring villages, Sub-inspector Ombir Singh, who has known Chand’s daughter Munia since she was born, wrestles with his conscience and the vagaries of his personal life as the increasingly murky case unfolds under the watchful eyes of the ‘Delhi boy’, SSP Pilania.

Meanwhile, in the rough by lanes of Bright Dairy Colony, Chand’s old companions Rabia and Badshah Miyan fight for their right to home and country as the politics of religion threaten to overwhelm their lives.

Framed as a police procedural, Black River (published by Context, Westland Books) is fast-paced and relentless, yet tender and reflective, in its exploration of friendship, love and grief. In a freewheeling interview, Nilanjana Roy shares her inspiration behind the book and the story of Black River. Excerpts:

What was the inspiration behind the book? Was it based on a real-life incident or is it a fictional story?

Chand, his daughter Munia, his friends Rabia and Khalid, the policeman Ombir and other characters in Black River are entirely fictional. But from 2009 to roughly 2013, I covered the gender beat for The New York Times. Travelling through parts of UP, Haryana and Delhi, I found myself in a landscape of violent absences. Too many women, and girls have lost their lives, through multiple acts of murder, rape, caste and religious violence. The first seed for Black River was this — writing into and about the painful absences left once the news cycle moves on, and families are left alone to grapple with their grief after a tragedy. The other part of it, because we seem to live in perpetual amnesia, was an attempt to write about and remember Delhi from roughly the 1990s to 2017, as it appears to the multitudes who come to the capital in search of a better life. The city we all live in is built, staffed, nurtured by the energy of migrants — and sometimes, despite the many small and large brutalities of life here, they find more friendship and belonging than you might expect.

You have previously written about cats, but this book is a big shift from that. How did that change happen?

Slowly! Fantasy is part of my DNA as a writer and a reader, and I wrote The Wildings and The Hundred Names of Darkness out of that love. But my first books of fantasy are also, in part, about what it is like to live in a megapolis as a reject, a barely tolerated outsider who must find friendship in the company of other strays, and that emotion runs through much of Black River too.

Has your journalistic background influenced your writing style?

Journalism makes research a natural reflex — I’d already spent time in the slaughterhouses of Ghazipur, for instance, and I knew what to look for when I walked along the banks of the Yamuna, where to search for experts on the Aravallis or on 1990s Delhi or the finer details of rural policing. Though all of my characters came to me, in the mysterious but also perfectly normal way that happens with fiction, I spent a lot of time having conversations with domestic workers, the homeless, butchers, fisher-folk because I wanted to do justice to their often complex and layered worlds. But at some point, you have to let go of the research and let the imagination take full flight. By the time I finished Black River, I felt I had exchanged one home for another, moved across the border and settled into fiction. Time will tell.

Apart from the obvious indication of black waters of Yamuna, is there more to the title, ‘Black River’?

It can signal an absence of light, a plunge into murkiness, as happens with the ruthless act of murder, but there’s also a hint of the depth and richness of swirling waters, and of all the beauty and warmth that runs under the surface of the lives of apparently ordinary people. The human heart is never as simple as it seems, and ‘Black River’, I hope, suggests both the profundity that people are capable of, and the abyss that can swallow even the most promising of lives.

Where do you see the future of publishing lies in India?

This is intimately tied to the fate of our democracy, and the recovery of freedoms of all kinds — literature can only flourish if writers and other creative minds can breathe freely, can live without fear. But I’m glad to see that translations between Indian languages as well as into English are thriving and have a receptive audience of readers. I think there’s a growing confidence, among writers who work in English, but also across all Indian languages, a surer sense that we can write for one another, tell our own stories, and not worry too much about whether our books are export-quality or export-reject.

What is your next project? When can we expect it?

I’m working on a companion novel to Black River — not a sequel, featuring a different set of characters, but set in 2018-2019 in Delhi and a few other places — that explores the tremendous allure and power of evil, more than a specific crime. I began writing Black River in 2013, and had to discard about 350 pages, which has become the sourdough starter for the next book. I hope I’ll be done by early summer 2023, but that’s me being an eternal optimist!

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