Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Neel Kamal Puri, an accomplished Indian author, columnist, and academic who extensively chronicles the cultural and social landscape of Punjab and Chandigarh. An alumna of Panjab University, she served as a long-time professor of English Literature and Media Studies at the Post Graduate Government College for Girls in Chandigarh. As a prominent literary voice, she has authored novels including her debut, The Patiala Quartet, followed by Remember to Forget, and her latest work, I in the Sky: A Chandigarh Chronicle. Her career successfully bridges higher education with impactful contemporary fiction and mainstream cultural journalism.

 

Congratulations on your new book Neel Kamal. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl about ‘I in the Sky.’

 

RS: Your protagonist, Bubbly is unusual- she is dead. But death gives her a rather remarkable vantage point. What made you choose a dead woman to narrate the story of Chandigarh?

 

NKP: Selecting a narrative device is a difficult choice, as is the determining of an entry point into the story. One has to get that initial pacing up to the wicket, or the novel in this case, just right. For instance, Joseph Conrad found his narrative voice in Marlow, through whom he told many of his stories. He is known to have been fumbling a little before that. Or then there is Gunter Grass who entered and tethered his narrative to a photo album that the protagonist is looking at, in his novel ‘The Tin Drum’. Since I was writing the story of a character whose own life is tied up with, and reflected in the history of the city she was born in, the vantage view you have referred to was pivotal. I needed a narrator, an eye, that was not constrained by time or space but could look down at the undulating landscape and see past, present and future. This narrative device also gave me the freedom to play with the timeline. I did not need to keep to the good old format of ‘she was born, she lived and then she died.’ I could jumble up all three. Bubbly, swaddled in clouds like a badly tied sari, trailing a long pallu behind her, having left behind a wardrobe of new clothes, worked for me as a narrative device. In the beginning of the novel she sees herself dead in the waters of Sukhna Lake, and then, later on in the novel, she also sees herself being born, in that upended order. She is both participant and voyeur. ‘Look, look, there you are,’ says a fellow inhabitant in the clouds, as they peer down through a tear in the cloud, at the goings on earth. She can see the city’s struggle with experiment and modernity, as also her own.          

 

RS: Chandigarh was conceived as a city of the future. And yet the birth of this city caused disruption of many lives.  How did you approach the tension between Chandigarh’s utopian vision and the lives that its making disrupted and fractured?

 

NKP: Life is a tight rope walk anyway and in a philosophical sense, transience is the essence of life. But there is that natural antagonism between development and displacement, a schism which has to be navigated with concern and sensitivity and a robust rehabilitation policy in place. And this tension is not new either. That is where the eye in the sky is strategic and useful, because it can see the angst of those who have to leave their homes and relocate, and those others who have already relocated after partition and are now trying to build a home in a city that is being built. ‘Ik bangla bane nyara,’ sings the young engineer who is part of the construction team of the city. Yet the eye can also see the middle aged man grappling with Alzheimer’s disease, who is looking desperately for that mango tree which was on his land and seems to have disappeared, whilst roads are being written into the landscape. He recognises the eyes and arms of his own tree in all the trees that he sees around him subsequently. That eye in the sky can also see the migrant who has arrived with two worlds in his or her head, the one marked by nostalgia and the other by endeavour, determined to put down roots into this new soil. It also allowed me to explore the tension between belongingness and being the outsider.

 

But there is another element that made me understand this dichotomy. My mother and father were both migrants, born in what is now Pakistan, moving to this side of the border in 1947. I grew up on their stories of upheaval and loss, but also of human beings standing up for each other at considerable risk to their own lives, of lifelong friendships. And these sort of narratives can result in one of two things. Either you can perversely learn from them a sense of animosity and hatred for the ‘other’ or then, they can help you understand the ‘other’ and teach you the value of co-existence. Luckily my parents brought away with them the latter. And I just inherited a perspective.                   

 

RS: Bubbly is born in a canvas tent as Chandigarh is taking shape. Her life and the city’s growth become intertwined. Did writing the novel change the way you see Chandigarh—the familiar streets, buildings and spaces you may have known for years?

 

NKP: Chandigarh was a wonder that grew before my eyes. I have run around in the foundation trenches of the very house that I live in now. Then the city grew, expanded and got peopled. Settlers came from everywhere. And as a young person I remember feeling a sense of possessive outrage. ‘Where have all these people come from to crowd these peaceful roads?’ But as the years went by one began to see the city as just another given – as a city that had always been there whilst people came and went. One forgot about ones imagined ownership rights, about the strangeness of its immaculate conception and the differentness of its layout.

 

It was only occasionally that one got jolted into realising that this was not a city like other cities. I remember skirting a roundabout in my car and suddenly recognising a very tall young man who had been my student in the Government Mahendra College Patiala, where I had taught for a few years. He was looking totally lost, as though someone had blindfolded him, spun him around many times and then left him standing there. I stopped to help, and he asked me how anyone could figure where to go, since each place looked like the other like the other.

 

I think that the writing of the novel allowed me to see the many ways of looking at the city. For instance, the lovers in the novel find it very hard to be surreptitious since the geometry of the place makes many things visible at a glance. There are no mysterious gullies and bye-lanes to quickly nip into. But it also made me see the city as a bold experiment that worked in many ways, and yet also remember that there were many who had to relocate, some could press the reset button and make a go of it and others could not.          

 

RS: Your novel brings together a large cast of characters, from family members to migrants, officials, protestors and the displaced. Each character carries a different version of the city. How did you meld so many voices together and how did you decide whose stories needed to be heard?

 

NKP: Of my three novels, this is the one that sort of wrote itself, grew organically. I had set out to tell the story of a character and a city that grow up in sync, events in the growth of one reflecting in the life of the other. In the telling of that story, events and characters kept presenting themselves to my mind, almost came and stood in my way, and that is how I took forward the narrative. I had no pre-planned storyline. In a sense, the city’s biography dictated the structure and story. For instance, since there have been three claimants to the ownership of the city, the protagonist has three care givers and then three lovers. The number then takes on a life of its own, showing up in her life in numerous permutations and combinations. However, since life is not after all a mathematical equation, so the play of numbers also brings in questions about displacement, migration and rootedness, the violence of terrorism, the toxicity of bigotry. And of course, there is the protagonist’s own struggle with her femininity, her sexuality and the desire to be equal to men.  

 

There are other characters who are peripheral to the main story but embody the collateral, the price that life extracts from the imposition of any change. And since I had broken with the chronological structure in my narrative, I could take the liberty of pursuing stories up to a point and then leaving them there.        

 

RS: There is an irreverent wit in the very premise of I in the Sky, and the novel moves between humour, grief, memory and history. How did you strike the balance between making readers laugh and making them confront uncomfortable truths?

 

NKP: Humour is serious business. Sugar coating for a bitter pill. Humour can carry with it the weight of emotions without dragging the reader down into the maudlin, at the same time leaving open a window in the mind for intellectual processing. I am saying this for the reader, but I am perhaps also saying this about my own process of writing. I do have a funny bone and cannot do without it. My narrative voice is what I have lent to the protagonist as she navigates her own emotional morass and describes the emotional duality of those that people her world. For instance, Gajjan may be funny when he is trapped in his own machismo but he is equally tragic in his inability to give free rein to the emotions that haunt him and the tears he cannot shed. Or there is Randy whose occasional peccadilloes with women are comic, but the readers can sense ominous signs of a looming tragedy because they can see that which the characters cannot. He too carries memories that lacerate and also heal.

 

The pell mell of events and emotions add up to a funny and yet sad world, a world which is not picture perfect, which does not feature papa bear, mama bear and baby bear eating hot porridge. And when the protagonist finally looks down from the skies at the kitchen in her house she can see an unlikely mix of people in it, bringing home to her the bitter sweet truths of life.    

 

RS: Chandigarh is known for its carefully planned sectors, wide roads and distinctive architecture. But a city is also shaped by the people who live in it, their memories, relationships and everyday struggles. In writing I in the Sky, you were clearly drawn to the stories of the people who call it home. Tell us a little about your interest in the stories of the people of the city.

 

NKP: My parents had lots of stories to tell, not only about 1947 and partition, but also about the infant years of Chandigarh. My father was an engineer and posted here when the city was being built. They told me fascinating stories about the magic of watching structures rise from the ground all around them and then become a working reality. My father told me of the roads that were built with gentle inclines so that they automatically drained rain water. Consequently, the roads were clear within hours of a heavy downpour. I have poached on their stories and I am sure they will forgive me from wherever that they are. But let me begin with a disclaimer. Just because they told me stories, does not mean that these are their own stories, just as my novel is not my story. The craft of fiction has to be recognised as just that. And then the reader has to allow me the liberty of cooking up stories too. Of course, life around is your clay, which then you shape into a pot. A novel does recreate a sociological reality. But to read it only as biography can be a bit reductionist. It also puts constraints on the writer, who is then at pains to make her characters do no wrong.         

 

RS: Memory is a strange thing. There is nothing rarely orderly about it. It circles back, digresses, contradicts itself and sometimes turns ordinary incidents into defining moments. Your novel’s many-voiced, digressive narrative seems to embrace this quality. Was it a conscious decision to shape the novel around the workings of memory or did it happen organically?

 

NKP: I think the digressive voice sort of crept up on me. Henry James has described the novel as a ‘loose, baggy monster’. And maybe that is what ‘I in the Sky’ became. As I wrote of one thing, other related thoughts crowded into it, and I ended up giving space to each digressive thought, first a little guardedly and then more and more indulgently, till that became the style and structure of the novel. Of course, in the process of editing I had to delete a few of those digressions that had gone rogue. At other times, when I was uncertain about a particular digression my editor insisted I keep it, because that was the tone of the novel. So in the main, the wayward ways of the narrative voice remained. And when there is structural freedom to hark back to long forgotten memories, they begin to cast their spell or shadow on the present. I had certainly not envisioned the novel in its present form when I started writing, but as I wrote I began to enjoy the indulgence of free association.

 

RS: When Bubbly looks down on Chandigarh from the sky, she can see what its living inhabitants cannot—or would rather not. After writing this fictional biography of Chandigarh, what do you hope readers will see differently when they next walk through the city?

 

NKP: That Rome was not built in a day! In all three of my novels, the city in which they are located also becomes a character. But finally everyone has to find their own equation with the city that they live in.   

 

Thank you so much for speaking with The Wise Owl about your latest book and sharing insights into your creative process. We are sure our readers will find these insights enriching and enjoy the book all the more. We wish you and your book every success!