Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Neera Kashyap, about her book 'Cracks in the Wall' (Niyogi)

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl, talks to Neera Kashyap about her book ‘Cracks in the Wall.’

 

Congratulations on your new book Neera and thank you for talking with The Wise Owl about its various facets.

 

RS: Your stories examine the fissures in personal and social life—gender inequality, addiction, abuse, class conflicts—yet they also carry an undercurrent of healing. How did you balance writing about trauma without letting it overshadow the possibility of hope and renewal?

 

NK: Thank you for reading the book, Cracks in the Wall, and your engagement with it for The Wise Owl journal. The stories we write always pose an issue or problem, be it as you mention – gender inequality, addiction, substance abuse or class conflict. When the issue is at an individual level, for example dealing with a tsunami of suppressed emotions triggered by working with the tsunami-affected or an aging historian’s sudden flashes of memories of her past cruelty towards family members, then the demons are out and can be faced, endured and sublimated through recognition, with or without support. But the issues are harder to resolve when the problem is ingrained in society such as gender inequity or the class divide. Or through a political history such as Maoism or the decade of the Punjab militancy when sons went missing and mothers grieved without a ritual mourning.

 

There is both endurance and struggle required for the healing process, for the problem needs to remain alive and dynamic within one for the situation to open up and be seen for what it is, whether individually, socially or politically. I also believe that personal resolution of trauma or conflict has its repercussion on the family and maybe on society as well. Hence, the need to face one’s own demons as they emerge, to view them gently, dispassionately and put them to rest without guilt or judgement. If this initiative is taken, support will come through a mother, a friend or even a stranger. Most of the characters in these stories struggle, resist, pray, endure – face the pain and use it as some sort of spur for change. Sometimes, however the situations are too overwhelming for resistance and the consequence can be death or despair.    

 

RS:  Many of the women in your stories—be it the working woman in an abusive marriage or the wife facing the loss of motherhood—struggle to reclaim their agency. What drew you towards telling women’s stories of resilience in particular?

 

NK: The situations in the stories you mention are very primal to women. To know domestic violence on a regular basis and to struggle to find a solution is to choose not to be inured to the problem. I read a lot about the struggle for justice sought for women facing domestic violence through NGO-driven village courts. It helped me see that the issue may be better aired in a rural scenario than in an educated middle-class home where shame and stigma were important factors for secrecy, the irony being that violence had to be endured by a woman who worked professionally for this very cause. Yet her struggle to find a way out opened up the situation.

 

Similarly, a woman enduring repeated spontaneous abortions looks for a deeper cause and finds it through intimations given to her by a stranger – a monk - at the ancient site of a fertility goddess, Hariti. The Hariti myth suggests that during her pregnancy in a previous incarnation, she had aborted while dancing before a crowd of men, and so out of vengeance, became a devourer of babies in her subsequent birth as Hariti. As Hariti, she came to be worshipped by women who appealed to her to protect their children. But her killing of children could also symbolise a woman’s quest to seek agency beyond motherhood. Seeking agency can acquire depth and complexity based on each woman’s situation.

 

Seeking agency can cut across classes. Caught in the conflict between the State police-industrial mining nexus on the one hand and the Maoists on the other, a poor tribal woman follows a dim line of hope to save her son from continual violence. An educated woman entrepreneur may venture secretly into lone travel to seek vent from family pressures, only to solicit advice during travel from an unknown doctor for balancing her own needs vis-à-vis the family’s. Seeking agency is pivotal for women for their own sense of identity, for once forged, it is naturally nurtured in others.   

 

RS:  Faith and spirituality surface in your narratives in unexpected ways—sometimes as a gradual transformation, other times as a sudden breakthrough. How do you see the role of faith and dreams in the healing process that your stories explore?

 

NK: The two faith-based healing stories that you are referring to are based on scientific studies. ‘The Presence’ was fictionalised from a study conducted by psychiatrists from NIMHANS, India’s leading institute for mental health sciences, at a healing temple in south India. The temple was built on the site where a sage once lived a century ago, who possessed special powers to heal mental illness. The story narrates the outcomes after the mentally ill have spent residential time in this temple undertaking very simple activities, but in the power of the presence. As a writer, I could take the liberty of healing a young man of a major schizoid illness through the sheer power of this presence and the faith that sucked him in – a sudden transformation.

 

‘A visitation’ is the bewilderment of an oncologist at treating a case of complete cancer remission in a patient who had deep faith in a long-deceased doctor saint and in a revered mythical saint with powers to heal. The oncologist’s long night spent at the shrine of the doctor saint sow the seeds of his gradual transformation, especially because he himself suspects he has colon cancer. This story was fictionalized from a paper published by cultural anthropologist, Jens Kreinath. The story suggests a case of gradual transformation.

 

The book also gives credence to other kinds of faith – the faith of hill women who seek the aid of local shamans to heal spirit possession through special rituals and rhythmic drumming, their recourse to scientific methods of healing being nil and their lives full of harshness and neglect. Heeding intimations is also another kind of faith which can lead to unexpected revelations as in the story, ‘Dual Awakenings.’

 

The dreams we have at night are a map to understand our own psyches and our larger environments. My husband and me are initiates of an ashram in the Kumaon hills wherein dream interpretation was one of the practices undertaken to understand ourselves better, and thereby cleanse those aspects that emerge. Even after decades, I still give cognizance to dreams, though in a less intensive way for dreams are a subtle layer of the mind which we can use to get beyond the tendencies of the mind! In the story ‘Half Life’ I used layers of dreams recorded in a journal and studied by a dedicated flat mate to understand her friend’s childhood trauma and her slow healing process. In ‘Tending tender things’, a mother takes cognizance of her own dreams, even vivid dreams, to draw hope from a painful situation that involves her heroin-addicted adolescent son who goes through recovery and relapse. 

 

All these stories point to faith, hope and healing as they allow the inner demons to be cognized and acted upon, often with loving support. The book also deals with other issues that manifest as manic depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Particularly poignant are situations when young children and adolescents have to face these conditions in a parent, using casual suggestions as lifelines for coping.

 

RS:  Several stories highlight conflicts between the urban and rural, the privileged and the marginalized. As a writer, how do you ensure authenticity when representing these social divides without falling into stereotype or over-simplification?

 

NK: Fortunately, in my earlier years as a social science and communications researcher, I had occasion to do a lot of field research that took me into rural areas and urban slums. Some impressions of poverty remain indelible. For example, in Kalahandi district, while trying to promote safe delivery kits to pregnant women, one discovered that all they had was a twist of rough hair with which to cut the umbilical cord. One also attempts authenticity by visiting a site for a story. For ‘Supplication’, I visited the dargah of Ma Sahiba at Mehrauli to absorb its atmosphere in order to understand how a young woman, who feared the return of cancer while pregnant for the first time, would pray to a revered saint of another faith.

 

Living seasonally in the hills has also given me some idea of the villagers’ increased paucity of their once-plentiful resources of water, fuel, fodder and timber caused by the sheer exploitation of urbanites of hill land and its resources. This is captured somewhat in the story, ‘Warnings in the night’ where the analogy is of urban monkeys being dumped on hill villages and the ravages that follow. For the story, ‘Blood, sweat and tears’, I could not re-visit a slum to see the condition of its public toilets, but got a good idea by watching a number of YouTube videos. Fortunately, stored memory often serves as a good springboard for one’s imagination! 

 

RS:  The title Cracks in the Wall suggests both fragility and the possibility of light seeping through. What does the metaphor of the ‘wall’ signify for you, and how did it shape the collection as a whole?

 

NK: The title was agreed upon after some discussion with my publishers, Niyogi Books, as a title is an important lead into the book. As far as this title story goes, the issue of domestic violence cuts across all classes, so there are walls built around it to keep it hidden. Yet, as far as the village courts are concerned, their attempt to bring domestic issues into the public for resolution, does indicate light that penetrates through these cracks in the wall. But, on the whole walls are both protection and barriers. They offer security and a sacred space for withdrawal and reflection. They are also barriers of self-defence against the light from entering and revealing one to oneself. But with cracks, light will enter and we can work with this light to overcome the wall’s resistance to growth, to change, to revelation - so that the interior becomes truly sacred and mirrored in external living.

 

RS: Your narratives probe deeply into the human psyche—fear, shame, desire, and trauma. What kind of research, observation, or lived experience informed your exploration of these difficult psychological terrains?

 

NK: The prompts for each story – dim or concrete – are really prompts of self-exploration. Whether fear, shame, desire or trauma – these dimly belong to one’s own psyche and demand research, the emergence of submerged memory and subliminal observation to etch them out. Sometimes its research that moves a story, other times there is more subliminal memory or stored observation. The story itself usually decides on the tools for use and the pace of its unfoldment, no matter how much one may fret and fume at its slowness! That’s why there is great relief when a story is done, as if a ‘crack in the wall’ has been seen and repaired!

 

RS: Short stories often require a compression of life into a few pages while still leaving space for complexity and resonance. What draws you to the short story form over the novel, and how do you approach crafting such layered worlds within it?

 

NK: The stories in this book have been published in various journals and anthologies over a decade. They were written to conform to submission guidelines which rarely permitted words beyond 3000. So, these stories were naturally compressed. My brush with haikai also helped me with a brevity of expression. But I feel attracted to longer short stories which allow for more complexity and atmosphere. A story such as Nisha da Cunha’s ‘Old Cypress’, published in the early ‘90s, allows for such sustained emotion, atmosphere, impending tragedy and acceptance that it could impact only because of its free unlimited flow. Or Jayant Kaikini’s ‘Opera House’ in his short story collection, ‘No presents please’. Though not too long, it still allows scope for developing a loveable character in all his simplicity juxtaposed against a mystery woman who visits his open-air scrap shop at night, binding his imagination so simply and completely, that one knows that the story must flow to its end in all goodness.

 

I also feel attracted to the novella form, though this will require more patience and adventurousness. Anita Desai’s three novellas in her book, ‘An artist of disappearance’ left a great impact in the way she uses language and gets under the skin of each character distinctly by detailing each life situation and its environment with great authenticity.

 

RS:  Ultimately, your collection does not shy away from the ‘difficult revelations’ that healing demands. What do you hope readers will carry with them after closing the book—about suffering, about resilience, and about the human condition itself?

 

NK: Revelations or breakthroughs will only come when suffering is endured and endured with all its uncertainties. And when revelations come, they can be painful realisations of one’s own role through layers of time or another’s. If we can bear their pain and learn to see them without judgement or bitterness, we let them go. Else, we create yet another knot of guilt or rancour that will create its own toxicity. Though some stories leave these choices for the protagonists to make, most stories indicate hope and healing. This is important. For suffering is a shared experience and each of us would wish to know if it is possible to get past it to find rest and restoration, even if it is for the present moment. Before more suffering follows and more revelations, perhaps – all of which could lead to greater resilience and self-sufficiency! 

 

Thank you Neera for sharing your thoughts about the various aspects of your book. It will certainly add a new dimension and insight to your book. 

 

NK: Thank you for your deeply probing questions. They have helped me understand my own book better!