Gargi Harithakam’s men and women are burdened by the lamps in their chest. If lamps glow and brighten, here they smoulder in unhappy, dark confines. Lamps of envy, resignation, defeat and lovelessness quietly scald and burn out its bearers. Gargi, whose debut novel Land of the Lamp Bearers published by Grapevine India is now out, says the imagery of the lamp evolved with each draft of the book. “We always think of a lamp in the positive context,” says the heavily pregnant author, looking out of the arched window from the first floor of her house in Kozhikode. The long room, the computer at the corner and the spiral stairway — all play their roles in the novel. The link between Gargi’s milieu and that of the novel may be too striking to overlook, but she vehemently denies it being autobiographical. She accepts she is a character in the book as many others, but the experiences of her character are in no way hers.
Set in Kozhikode, Gargi tells two stories in one. One is of the fourteen-year-old protagonist Rasika who is called a truncated, unsure “err” rather than her name. Through “err” unfolds the second story — of sights, sounds, smell; the past and the present; gossip, news and real story; violations and love; and cultural habits that make the Malabar. Observations meet imagination well in Gargi’s prose. Everyday sights acquire back stories. Of the familiar sight of movie posters on street walls peeled off at particular body parts, she writes, “…all such posters looked like collages of amputated women. Those who did this probably had a collection somewhere — heaps of torn breasts, navels and wombs…”
Though Gargi’s “err” remains comfortably anonymous in the first couple of chapters, when the author chooses to flesh out the mother’s character, call her “Vijaya, the one who won’t be defeated”, and traces her early life as a revolutionary and her present as one who runs a women’s help cell here christened “Prerana” the semblance with Gargi’s mother, social activist Ajitha becomes stark. “Of course, it was a conscious choice to write about amma. I was reading her autobiography and I wanted to give another version of the story,” says Gargi.
The Land of the Lamp Bearers was born and nurtured through Gargi’s two years at the Brown University in the United States where she pursued creative writing. It was also the time she pursued her real interests unabashedly. A civil engineering graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Gargi stumbled through many vocations before arriving at creative writing. “I think it is a generation thing, considering engineering the best thing you can do. I worked as a software engineer in Pune and began to get depressed. I took up a civil engineer’s job in Kochi. Though the job was good, I realised I couldn’t design a house, only build it. To design, I had to be architect which I hadn’t studied. For a while I learnt script writing myself, worked in advertising firms and did copywriting. But I soon I realised it is not a space to explore myself but create what the client wanted. Advertising was also about ugly amounts of money which I found scary,” recounts Gargi.
After many trials, Gargi arrived where she considered she could explore and let herself bloom — writing.
She says she was pretty clear in head about writing before she reached Brown and the university only bolstered her resolve. It let her learn and grow. “It was a liberal space and one could be lazy if one chooses to be that. But I met teachers who had different approaches to writing. I not only read a lot but also found the kind of literature I identify with.”
Gargi says creative writing for her is a collective effort — one where feedbacks and inputs to her drafts help. “When I began there was no story in my head. But I had imagined a structure and the exercise was also about allowing that structure to be broken. That happen with feedbacks,” she says. Now at home with writing, Gargi says has things in her head. “I even began a novel.” But with the baby due, she says, the long-term commitment a novel expects may be tough. The meanwhile is taken up by short stories.
