Geetanjali Shree on the magic of shadows and behind-the-scenes

One such tale of restless rebellion is her 2007 Hindi novel Tirohit. Translated in English by Rahul Soni and titled The Roof Beneath Their Feet, it is the story of how two women brought together by fate and circumstance find support and solace with each other, rejecting labels, seeking refuge on the common roof shared by several houses in their mohallah.

In Tirohit, the roof is as central to the story as the two women Chachho and Lalna, and their son, Bitva. It allows freedoms, carefree caresses, tender loves, and impossible realities to blossom, soar, and fly far away, breaking free from the suffocating frustrations and boundaries of everyday bourgeois domesticity. Shree wields her pen to paint an alternate existence on the roof, the kind that used to be a way of life for countless women and children in northern India not too long ago.

Her inimitable writing style is so poignant, evocative, and unafraid that it makes you revisit your own memories of a similar time. Reading The Roof Beneath Their Feet made me think of Abhishek Chaubey’s 2014 black comedy Dedh Ishqiya and took me back to the summer trips of my childhood to Rajaldesar, a sleepy dusty village in the heart of Rajasthan. My maternal grandfather has a 100-year-old haveli there. Each summer, all of us, scattered in different parts of India, would gather there for a week or two—and it would be all about camel rides, gorging on kulfis sold by hawkers, visiting sand dunes, having dinner before sundown sitting on the kitchen floor, and sleeping on the terrace under the stars, feeling the cool of cotton sheets ruffle against our skin, murmuring to each other inane nothings, and waking up to peacock sounds at the crack of dawn.

This is Shree’s magic. In telling one story, she tells several others, including the ones you once knew but had forgotten. In this exclusive interview, she talks about The Roof Beneath Their Feet, her love for shadows and behind-the-scenes, the potency of memories, her need for solitude, her next novel, and more.

I must yet again repeat what I have said many times before. Very little about my writing – very little – is pre-thought-out. Yes, I let something set me off and then its dynamic and the blossoming of the characters take the narrative along. Surprising me, too, and richly.

Memories constitute much of our consciousness. We grasp so little of a happening in the moment of its happening. It’s only in recall that it begins to acquire meaning and significance, and really makes itself felt. The role memories play in my stories is but a reflection of that. Your observation, that life-altering developments almost always take place outside the frame, is indeed a thought I square with. Perhaps that is why much of my writing is engaging more with backstage and side stage, rather than bang on stage and under the glare of the spotlight. I also remember the magic of shadows and behind-the-scenes, as in shadow puppetry.

It is not an autobiography or biography for sure. So many elements come together to create fiction. They are, to put it simply, an amalgam of real situations and people and the creative imagination.

They are, indeed, dwindling. But you do still come across those neighborhoods with continuing common roofs. Old Delhi is fascinating because of the parallel colorful life going on up on terraces.

Much of my growing up years was in towns of Uttar Pradesh and indeed roofs have played a big role in it. Memories galore. Of papad and badiyan and other food items spread out to dry up there, the feel of diving and running your hand inside wheat and rice, washed and spread out to dry, the grains rolling against and off your fingers.

What we loved as children was to sleep up there, inside a mosquito net bolstered up on four wooden sticks, the lovely night air and sky cooling us and conjuring amazing, even delightfully scary, apparitions. And in our sleep, we would feel the raindrops falling softly and the hurry-scurry around, and then we would wake up, roll up some light bed-sheet and pillow, leaving the rest for the adults to handle, and rush in. A whole time and feel gone and no more.

I never feel very confident answering this question. I am too attached to the original to really judge. But I trust the judgment of many others.  I have heard them praise The Roof Beneath Their Feet and that makes me happy. Rahul is sensitive to language and stories, writes well himself, and we have had rich and fun conversations while he was doing this work.

I should imagine from your need to ask me this question that you have got a feel of how music suffuses my writing. Music affects my writing as an autonomous art form. It is, besides, integral to my writing as the music that inheres language and linguistic composition.

If by muse you mean my inspiring goddess, solitude is not my muse. Inspiration comes in more ways than I can be aware of. And it takes its own time to germinate. But once a particular inspiration is ready to find concrete manifestation, solitude becomes imperative. I have to be alone for my pen to be ready to move. To have my pen move, however, is not my sole reason to crave for solitude.

Writing, I feel, demands both total involvement and absolute detachment. Writers devise their own ways of maintaining the right balance in meeting the two paradoxical demands.

It is ineffable. Some strange urge to unlayer, explore, search something for yourself. In happiness or in pain, but always in restlessness. It includes, incidentally, readiness to fail totally.

I am working on the final draft of a novel – ‘Sah-sa’ – which was close to being sent for publication when the Booker struck.