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PERSONALITY

Photo: V.V. Krishnan

Important voice: Poet and novelist Anjum Hasan.

Hers is an important voice. It stretches the canvas of Indian writing in English by including a region (the North East) that seldom gets heard beyond reports of violence.

More importantly, it gives an ‘insider’s’ peek at a society by someone who has always been considered an ‘outsider’. A face of a closed north-eastern society dealing with everyday issues of migration, a facet that has hardly come through in our fictional writing beyond a few books.

Be it that roadside pakorawallah from Bihar in “Neighbourhood”(from her first book of verse, Street in the Hill published by Sahitya Akademi last year) or in Lunatic In My Head (published by Penguin India), the traces of a dhakar (a term locally used to mean an outsider) are well brought out. Both her prose and poetry have surprisingly more of love for the place and a strange sense of longing for acceptance by the ’locals’.

“I don’t want to get into the politics of it but there has always been an invisible line between the insiders and the outsiders in Shillong,” says Anjum about her city of birth. This, she feels, is inevitable. “It is culturally very distinct. And then, most outsiders who settled down in Shillong were either handling the trade or holding government jobs. In a small town, with little opportunities, these things matter.” Her novel is set in the 1990s and Anjum hastens to add, “Thankfully, things are far better in Shillong now. Those days, the ethnic divide was evident on the streets.”

Though Anjum now lives in Bangalore, her parents, originally from Uttar Pradesh, settled down in Shillong in the early 1970s to pursue their respective careers in local academic institutions, and never returned. “I have my connections there. I love the place, the green hills, the waterfalls….,” her voice trails way.

Her winning entry in the 2002 Outlook Picador Non-fiction contest, “Shillong, Bob Dylan and Cowboy Boots” resonates her intimacy with the place.

But more than a migrant’s view, Anjum says her endeavour, through her novel, “was to open a window to life in a small town”. I have three main characters in the book, Aman, Firdaus and Sophie Das. Through them, I have tried to capture the society’s multi-ethnic blend, the different idioms, and to show a small-towner’s fear of a big city, a fantasy of escape, mainly in the youngsters, a strong sense of isolation, the street life, (particularly, the love for music in people and their very urbanised life) etc., “ elaborates the winner of Indian Review of Books Award. “I wanted to paint a portrait of Shillong with words.”

Though novel-writing is a new medium for her, Anjum feels it has taught her a lot. “Poems are too personal, but in a novel, you have to go beyond you and portray characters, their distinct style and their dialogues which will have to take the story forward and at the same time, give away to the readers bits of what is in their life and mind. Also, I have tried to use gossip to give an insight into different characters and also to ’truth’ which I feel is always elusive,” she elaborates. And then, unlike a poem, the canvas of a novel is bigger and is a much longer project.

Having tasted all of these, Anjum is all set to write a sequel to her novel now. “The sequel will be about my character Sophie. From a small girl growing up in a small town, she will go to work in an outsourcing industry in Bangalore.” The essence of the novel will be Sophie’s strong sense of disillusionment with life in a big city, and her pragmatism. “Through Sophie, I want to show how young people now increasingly live the life of a drift,” she says.

And with this, it seems Anjum is creatively trying to break away from the past, to steer into the present.

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