Literary Event #2: Words on Water, Urban Narratives

On June 1^st, I attended Words on Water, a literary panel event that aimed to engage “India and America in conversation.” It opened with a Talk on Visual Arts by Dr. Dan Herwitz, who spoke on his parents’ expansive, avant-garde collection of modern Indian art: it’d grown to over six thousand pieces by the end of their lives. The works included paintings inspired by Picasso, and I especially liked the work of Bikash Bhattacharya.

The talk then transitioned into Urban Narratives, a literary panel featuring three Indian-American authors, Vikram Chandra, Sonia Faleiro, and Saikat Majumdar (one of my current professors), moderated by filmmaker Laleh Khadivi. Chandra’s and Majumdar’s fiction novels, Sacred Heart and Silverfish, as well as Faleiro’s nonfiction book Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, all take place in Bombay, and required the writers to travel back to their home country as part of the writing process.

The discussion began with Khadivi asking why the writers chose to use Bombay for their book’s setting. Chandra, who wrote a crime novel, said that Bombay was “fit” for large-scale crimes and corruption. Majumdar had depressing memories of 80s Calcutta—a city he deemed similar to Bombay—and wanted to write about “what happens when a city is left behind, when nothing happens to it.” Faleiro was intrigued by Bombay residents’ ideas of success: what is considered “success” and growth under extreme pressure and poverty? Is it pushing off your daughter’s marriage until her teenage years, as opposed to toddler years? After all, first-world countries would still consider that unwise and inappropriate.

The panel’s second half made me think about the research stage of the writing process, particularly for the story’s setting: how much time do you need to spend in a city to portray it as accurately as possible? How do you “get into your city,” but keep a balanced perspective? Faleiro admitted that she tried to live the same life as her subjects to fulfill her “obsession with the most correct representation,” but would always remain an outsider. After five years of immersive research, however, she realized that Bombay life was becoming, quite dangerously, “everyday life” to her. Eventual distance, all three writers stressed, is what actually sharpens one’s focus on a specific setting. You need purposeful alienation from your city, or things that would stand out to the stranger’s eye might become invisible to yours. I thought that the idea of “purposeful alienation” was very helpful advice for my own writing—not only does it apply to settings, but to characters and events as well.