Between the covers

Timeri N Murari, Amitabha Bagchi and Janice Pariat talk about what inspired their books

LINE OF THOUGHT Timeri Murari, Amitabha Bagchi and Janice Pariat. Photo: K. Pichumani

Readings are a startling way to discover a book, through the author's own voice. Read the way it was originally written, it is like tasting a variant of a dish you’ve eaten before — and appreciating the nuances.

Timeri N Murari, Amitabha Bagchi and Janice Pariat — writers from three diverse parts of the country, as moderator Ziya Us Salam pointed out, read excerpts from their three newest works, and talked about their books, at the session ‘Book in Focus’ at The Hindu Pavilion.

In Murari’s

Chanakya Returns , he says that the main theme running through the book is a question: What controls our lives? Is it the power of love or the love of power? The political situation in India today is explored through a fictional powerful family in the book, which is narrated by Chanakya. Murari says he wanted to see what Chanakya, the political advisor who played kingmaker to Chandragupta Maurya, would think of modern India.

Amitabha Bagchi, who “writes about the middle- class with relish”, to quote the moderator, read from his book

This Place , set in Baltimore of the late 1990s. It is the story of a neighbourhood, where an Indian immigrant working for a Pakistani couple lives, and his relationship with an African-American neighbour. The first theme, he says, was one of melancholy that he found throughout American culture, and the second was the Narmada River. The two intersect around the time when Medha Patkar speaks at Baltimore on her way to Washington to attend the World Commission on Dams. Taking a political question about who benefits from the changing landscape during the process of gentrification, Bagchi’s book attempts to look at what displacement means.

Shy and petite, author Janice Pariat starts off saying that writers are the worst people to talk about their books. Writers write the stories they want to read, she says, so I did too.

Inspired by one of the lesser-known Greek myths about Poseidon and his affection for a young boy named Pelops,

Seahorse is Pariat’s retelling, set in contemporary London and 1990s Delhi. Referring to her inspirations, she talks about growing up in Shillong with Khasi storytellers whose oral traditions impacted her. Writers are a blend of all their experiences, she says, whether it’s the art they see or the people they meet — we’re fabricating stories in our head all the time.