‘I grew up in America, but I’m haunted by Mumbai’

Like most Indian-American Gen-X brainiacs, Shilpa Agarwal was set to become a doctor. She had enrolled into Duke University’s pre-med study programme, but soon felt a different tug. “I called my parents and told them I wanted to write poetry by the ocean. To their credit, they supported my decision. What they told me was: ‘Try it out for a year, but support yourself with a job’ which I did, by teaching science for a year,” says Los Angeles-based academic Agarwal, who still hasn’t penned her volume of ocean poems.

Instead, she has turned out a remarkably suspenseful debut novel Haunting Bombay. The book touches on tangled memories of a girl child’s blurry watery death. Lives are forever altered, when Pinky Mittal who lives with three generations of her wealthy family in Malabar Hills, unbolts a forbidden door one stifling summer night. She accidentally unleashes the ghost of the girl child who had drowned three years earlier, forcing the Mittal family to face up to its terrible, but inescapable past.

Agarwal, who is on a book tour, talks to Uttara Choudhury in New York about how her novel engages with ideas of social injustice. “As I was writing, I kept remembering a post-colonial essay I had read as a graduate student that explored voices of the dispossessed,” said Agarwal.

Would you describe your book as a snapshot of Mumbai or a ghost story?
It is a ghost story set in 1960s Bombay, so I would say it is both. A reviewer on Amazon said it reminded him of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as it brings the weight of history, the past and supernatural elements into the writing.

Have you lived in Mumbai?
I was born in Mumbai and my parents came to America when I was very little. I’ve spent many summer vacations there with relatives. When I was in Duke’s, I did a study-abroad programme in St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. I feel it is a city of my roots, so it was very natural for me to set my book there. I feel connected to Mumbai, although I have grown up mainly in America.

Is the supernatural in your book a metaphor for the dispossessed?
Yes, absolutely. I have always been intrigued by the idea of utterance — who is empowered to speak and who is not — within a family, a community or a nation. What would happen, I wondered, if we could hear the voice of the child who drowned in Haunting Bombay or the child’s ayah who was banished after she was blamed for the death? Their versions of the truth haunted me, and my story took a supernatural turn.

While writing the ghost story did you get spooked?
Absolutely! It’s funny, because I have always been afraid of ghost stories. I never really realised I was writing one when I started. I have two little girls, so I used to wake up at dawn — 4.30am was the quiet part of the day where I wasn’t ‘mommy’ but just me, the writer. I would be in my office typing away, and I would light this candle near my computer. Sometimes, I would be tapping away and I would glance up at the candle wondering: is it flickering weirdly? I would then do this shoulder-check — turn my head around gingerly.

You are right on trend with a cool film trailer for your book.
So much of the word-of-mouth and attention is on the internet. I think people respond to books in different ways. Some people are intrigued by reading a summary, others by book covers. My husband James is in the digital field so the book trailer was really his idea.

I wanted the trailer to provide an artistic glimpse into the novel, to give not just a narrative arc but set the mood for the world in the story, something that spoke of mystery but could also project the literary quality of Haunting Bombay.

I put together a one-page script, aiming for a 90-second trailer and approached my director-friend Shishir Kurup. We got help from unexpected sources — my sister-in-law who runs a visual effects studio and my brother-in law who designed the sound.

How long did it take to write the book?
I started in January 2000, when I was pregnant with my first child. There was a lot going on in my life, but my novel started coming to me. I have been through many revisions and two children along the way. Through the years and doubts, I knew I would finish my book. I call it my third baby — nine months each for my first two and nine years for my third.