Mridula Koshy, author, is our writer of the month. In an interesting interview to Spark, she gets talking about writing, her book, and exploring relationships in writing. Read on. Interview by Anupama Krishnakumar.
Mridula Koshy is the author of If It Is Sweet, a collection of short stories released in May 2009 by Tranquebar Press. The book won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Prize. She lives in New Delhi with her poet-schoolteacher partner and three exceptionally wonderful children.
Your bio says that you were many other things before you became a writer, including a backstage dresser, a waitress and a community organizer, among others. Very interesting indeed. :). Tell us how you discovered the writing instinct in you and what is it about writing that makes you enjoy it?
The various jobs I have held are hardly unusual in the American context but both in India and in the U.S., ‘the writer’ or ‘the writing life’ is a bit of an overblown identity and idea. I mention the various jobs I have done to situate the present work of writing in the same plane. Writing is only as much inspired drudgery as any other job in which I was curious and alive to the world.
I think I am not alone in spending much of my life recording my impressions of the world and then sifting through them for meaning. This work of thinking is what drives most of us. In that sense, we are all blessed with the writing instinct. The work of the writer is to reduce this instinct to the scope of the page. We gain something significant in the process – an audience and conversations we would not otherwise enjoy; we lose a lot in the process – a sense of the infinity that is our own minds.
A writer derives inspiration from varied sources. Who are Mridula Koshy’s inspirations?
I feel alive when I see the world is inhabited. I am little able to write without the sights and sounds of people going about the business of living.
Tell us a bit about how ‘If it is Sweet’ came about. What are some of the things that you had in mind when you began writing this collection?
I wrote with little sense of the possibility of a collection. But after about the eighth story, even I had to see that I was mining the same 
ground, i.e., asking myself the same question over and over: how and when can we know ourselves as real. Although in some stories I approach this by looking at what happens when we sometimes demarcate some people as real and others as not, some people as possessed of emotions and complexity and others as not, my question was still about the self. The variations on the question, particularly in the variations in structure I attempted from one story to another were more in the lines of an experiment. I found the outcome was always consistent – loneliness bordering on insanity and even non-existence is the inevitable result when people are cut off from one another. I know this is embarrassingly obvious and I need not have written a book to figure it out. I suppose I sat with the question and took to fiction to answer it because we keep forgetting the obvious, the oft told.
I notice that you have a layered way of storytelling and the characters become clearer as the story unfurls. Is there a particular reason for choosing this style of writing?
That’s how I experience seeing – a mist, a web of confusion and slow dawning of intelligence. You stare at the dark long enough and you can make something appear out of it.
Talking of your stories, you have chosen to focus on some interesting relationships in them. For example, the relationship between the two women in ‘The Large Girl’ (in 21 under 40), or between different people in the story ‘Same Day’ (Excess, Tehelka), or the one in ‘The Good Mother’ (in ‘If it is sweet’). How do you decide on the people and the framework for any story or in other words, what inspires these characters and relationships you choose to talk about in your stories?
My method is to be struck dumb by a scene, an image, a turn of conversation that I am witness to in life. I work backward from it to a story that explains the wonder it aroused in me. The Large Girl is very much about my being struck by the crippling pain of knowing I would never see a person again though I live in the same part of the world that she inhabits. She is a real person I knew in my childhood. I had to have a story then to understand how it is that a person can come to inhabit the idea of such a separation. It is not an autobiographical story; I am both interested in myself, and not. I am interested in the pain of being apart from someone I care for but, I know the story of my life leading to that moment and that decision not to look my friend up and, I don’t need to relive its tedium and its evidence of my own weakness. I need fiction to explore the idea of love and leaving in a more interesting way than I can explore it in my life.
Is there one human relationship that you have really wanted to write about and haven’t done still?
I think you are asking about being afraid to write and the answer is ‘No, I am not afraid’, although writing is definitely a way to address fear. My fear of losing my children is what I work out for myself in The Good Mother. I don’t want to sound arrogant but I will say that I don’t believe in writing fearfully. I believe in nervousness and lunacy and the possibility that I might lose everything I care for, but fearing writing makes little sense. It is in writing that I am permitted everything.
What according to you is the most important aspect of any relationship?
I believe in keeping faith. This is what I strive for in my relationships. Forgiveness is a second and important part of relationship. The rest then is tertiary.
Going back to your writing, I understand that you have been working on a novel. Give us a teaser!
A woman relinquishes her four year old son to tourists passing through town; along with him, she loses the future she had hoped to inhabit. He is a grown man, living half way across the world on the day she draws her last breath. His concern is to make sense of a life lived without a past. I am interested in looking at how narrative is constructed from both what happens and doesn’t happen in one’s life. Of course I am also interested in the locations and cultures the woman and her son inhabit – Kerala and the Midwestern U.S.. How do we do ‘it’ in different parts of the world: loving, leaving and living?
Now on to your relationship with words. Which form of writing do you enjoy the most? Poetry, non-fiction, short stories or essays?
I used to only read fiction and fairly blindly. Often enough I would have no recollection of the title of the book, the name of the author or even the story. I don’t think this was because the book wasn’t worth remembering. Often enough I found myself in the library groping to find another book by the author with the forgotten name, who wrote so brilliantly the book with the forgotten title which was all about…. I think I tend to store my memories in an emotion bank and not a word bank. The conversion of experiences to emotions is easier than their re-conversion to the original currency. I hope I am making sense.
I am forcing myself to read poetry and am even starting to enjoy non-fiction. As memory encoded in words is necessary for a writer to decipher the technical and craft aspects of her work, these days, I am trying to study what I read and bypass the whole emotional circuitry. It does make reading altogether more tedious.
Finally, what is it that you wish to explore through your writing in the coming years? And in what forms?
I would like to explore the business of writing fiction as if it were non-fiction and vice versa. I don’t subscribe to realism as a trope though I am more schooled in it than in anything else and my writing reflects this. Artifice is a compelling idea, especially in that it is an admission of the truth that we are constructed beings. I am very conscious of how behind the times I am in terms of coming to these insights. But I can’t deny myself the excitement of my life and my realizations since all I have is what I am.
Mridula Koshy’s Facebook Fan Page
