Debutant author Anjali Joseph discusses her new novel’s success; says it takes inspiration from her childhood.
Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park has been described by author Amit Chaudhuri as “the best debut novel I have read in a long time”, it has been selected as one of four short listed titles for the third round of Rising Stars promotion for 2010 and it also landed the young author on Telegraph’s list of Britain’s top 20 authors under 40. In her debut novel, Joseph offers the reader with a piece of Mumbai that has slowly trickled away to oblivion.
She says that Saraswati Park was written in a flurry of homesickness, “I’m a nostalgic person. The house in the novel resembles my grandparents’ house in Mumbai, where I spent most of my childhood.” She recounts fondly, “We weren’t a very athletic family. Everybody read a lot. I was fascinated by this when I was four and couldn’t wait to start reading. Every time books diverted their attention away from me, I thought to myself, “even I want to do that!”
Anjali believes that her book portrays Mumbai as it really is, without the gloss, “For the average Mumbai-kar, his daily life takes precedence over shopping arcades. His life revolves around his early morning train ride to work and back. It is as simple as that.”
And it is this simplicity that she infuses into her characters. She says, “The main protagonist — Mohan — leads his life observing people. In the end, he forgets to attend to his own life. You realise that he is disappointed with the cards life has dealt him, but he is still kind. And I have met people like him; I admire them greatly because no matter how unkind life may have been to them, they are still compassionate human beings. Ashish, Mohan’s nephew, on the other hand is young. His life is not even half over yet and he has a different way of dealing with it than Mohan. He needs to succeed and at the same time, battle with his insecurities.”
Joseph, who has spent her life shuttling across the India and Europe also did a brief stint at teaching in Sorbonne in Paris. She says,“The system of education in France is such that, here I was, barely 21 — teaching a class of people much older than I was. When at the end of a class I asked if they had any questions and realised what a big mistake that was until they asked me, ‘So how old are you?’”
When she is not busy playing journalist, novelist, or teacher, Joseph admits to indulging in a few guilty pleasures. “I swore to myself I would never join Twitter and share my quotes on the most absurd things I do in my day-to-day life and yet, weirdly, that’s exactly what I have been doing recently I have
become my own worst nightmare.”
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