Books: Why Anita Nair chose Prakash Raj for her audio stories

Anita Nair is an acclaimed writer known for novels such as ‘Ladies Coupe’ and ‘A Better Man’Her work often speaks of women and their experienceApart from fiction, she also writes children's books, poetry and essaysAt the Times Literature Festival 2021, Anita Nair spoke about her inclination towards audio books, and her last novel, ‘Eating Wasps’ Ep 1: ‘My form of fighting is with words and through my stories’In part one of this conversation at the Times Literature Festival 2021, the author Anita Nair had spoken about switching to audiobooks and why most of her books are set in Kerala. She also shared the story behind getting the actor politician Prakash Raj to narrate her audiobook The Little Duck Girl. In the second part, Anita Nair talks about the female characters in her books, patriarchy and more. Apart from audiobooks, is there any other form of digital literature that has intrigued you and caught your attention? Like there are these stories delivered through SMS and stories written for the app. After audiobooks, is there something you'd like to try your hand at? Actually the only thing that I really want to do right now, the only genre that I want to write, is a graphic novel. Because, you know, I think pretty much I've written every form and I know what I like about it and what I don't like about it. So, definitely I am a very hardcore book writer. I love books. I love audio because it's a different medium, but it has nothing else to it. And apart from the words and the voice, two things. Yeah, but I do really want to try and let's say do a graphic novel at some point, maybe an adaptation of one of my own books? I don't know! You've always written books that have complex situations, women fighting for their rights… How much of your books come from a personal space? I think in many ways it comes from a space of not being able to comprehend why this has happened, you know. I grew up in a a fairly liberated household; I had an older brother and everything that my brother did, I also did. There were absolutely no restrictions on what I could do, probably because my brother went with me everywhere. So what happened was that I grew up and studied in a coed school. I had a lot of male friends growing up. I continue to have a lot of male friends and so on, so I grew up never realising that the way the world saw men and women was very different, you know it's a very different perspective. So, it was only when I emerged into my teens and so on. Then I started realising that women are seen differently; because until then, as a child, I did whatever my brother did. The moment I became a woman, you know typically, as they sayI started realising that there were these restrictions that were being imposed even in my household. And that began to bother me because it was like my brother can do this; why can't I do this? And I think that seed of anger, rebellion, all of that was sowed at that point. And then when I started writing, I constantly found how women are treated differently all the time. And it's not just in India, the western world is well. You find that patriarchy has this huge way of… either it's very obviously done like in India, or it's insidiously done like in the rest of the first world. So, I then began thinking that I should start addressing this and start writing about it; because I think somewhere deep inside me there's also this person who's very angry with all the injustice that's happening in the world. But I'm not the kind of person who can get out into the street and raise my fists and say those things 'cause that's not who I am as a personality or character. My form of fighting is with words and through my stories. And one of the things that I've always wanted to do is that whatever I write, I believe that it should leave a residual message, not as a message, but couched as a story. It should make my readers think, make them evaluate their own lives, make them evaluate what is happening around them. Some 10 years ago in an interview you had said that male and female authors are viewed differently. Do you still feel the same? Absolutely, I still tell my editor that when a woman writes, let's say, a dark novel, what happens is it is still considered women's writing, which has to be kind of contained within the, you know, the four cornerstones of grahasta asrama. But when a man writes, it's immediately seen as this very, you know, toned with a lot of gravitas about the condition of the world. I don't think the readers do that. I think it's actually a literary establishment who sits around demarcating these things. And obviously then if that is what is being said via social media, what happens is that unconsciously, the reader also starts seeing it in that way. Of all the books that you have written so far, which has been your quickest work and which took a long time? The quickest book was Alphabet Soup for Lovers because it came with an inbuilt architecture. I knew that it had to have only 26 chapters and each chapter should be like a letter and letter on its own. I could only give it so much space. So, there's an inbuilt architecture to that. The longest time I took to write my historical novel, which is called Idris: Keeper of the Light, because that was like tons and tons and tons of research more than anything. You were in advertising. When did you decide you want to become a full-time writer? I worked in advertising for several years. Sometime in 1996 I decided that I didn't want to work full-time in advertising anymore, but at the same time I didn't want to be a full-time writer. There is this huge block in me that stopped me from just saying that, OK, I'm going to try and live off my writing now. So I continued to work in advertising, but more on a consultancy basis where I did like three mornings a week and that kind of thing. My first novel, The Better Man, came out and I was still working in advertising. I remember that I had already started work on Ladies Coupe at that time and almost finished it. The Better Man had come out and there were these really very flattering reviews. There was this one particular morning at work where I had a client meeting. I remember that so distinctly. The New York Times Review of Books had carried a really massive review of The Better Man. And then I go for this meeting, and this is a public sector client who sits there and says, Anita I don't like this comma here. And I was like, why am I doing this to myself? You know, I mean, this is like punishing myself. So I made this decision at that point, that I was going to quit. I had saved enough money to live off while writing for a year. So then I said that let me try and do this. I remember coming home when my parents were visiting at that time. I told my dad, I'm gonna quit. I put in my papers and I have like a month's notice now to finish. And he said what will you do now? And I remember my mother saying from the kitchen, oh, she's married, you know, there's a husband; he’ll look after her. And I said no, I've never done that. I said I'm going to try. I have enough money saved for a year to try and live off my writing. If it doesn't happen, I'll go find myself another job. But I am not going back into advertising. And by the time I'm sick and tired of it I think. And I think also, my ego was bruised with all these various altercations with clients. I remember telling my dad, I said, look, I'm gonna go to a saree shop and ask them to give me a job. I just want to be a saree sales girl because I don't need to advertise. You just take the saree and hold it up. They like it, they take it. If they don't like it, they just leave it and go. I can remember the horror on my father's face because in a typical middle class family, he thinks his daughter should have a proper job and not be sent, you know, be a salesgirl and all. So I did this and May 1st, 2001 was the day I quit advertising. April 30th was my last day. I always found it funny that on Labour Day I was unemployed. And then Ladies Coupe came out like a couple of weeks later and that book just kind of changed my life. In the way it was accepted, the way it was published. To this day it continues to be talked and discussed and reviewed. And it also, I think more than anything else, it gave me that confidence and that strength of conviction that yes, this is what I should be doing and that's what I will do. So what is that one reader review or anything that really touched your heart and made your resolve to be a full-time writer, stronger? When I finished writing the book and the first copy reached me, my mother was at home at that point. So my mom read it and then she said, I like it, but it's going to be published abroad. What will they understand? And then the next year I was traveling in Europe and I was doing a reading tour and stuff like that. So there would be somebody reading in Spanish or French or Italian or whatever. And what I discovered was at the end of every event, there would be like three or four women waiting very patiently… then one of them would come and say inevitably: This is my story. But how did you know it? And it would hit me that in some strange way that I've managed to transcend all barriers of nationality, culture, everything. It was just one human being speaking to another human being, and that was all that was connecting me to millions of readers. And that kind of made me realise that yes, there is a certain power that is vested with the writer, and I need to use it consciously and carefully. So you can see that the journey leading to this state of the nation stories began there. With Ladies Coupe I started looking at the world and the impact it has on its various people. So thereafter I think in my head I became very certain that what I wanted to write about, no matter what genre or form it takes, is definitely the human condition. 108405965 Ep 2: Books: Why Anita Nair chose Prakash Raj for her audio storiesAnita Nair is counted amongst the most prominent figures in the Indian literary circle, especially for her bestselling novel Ladies Coupe. She has won global acclaim with her books such as A Better Man, Mistress and Lessons in Forgetting. A recipient of the Arch Excellence Award by the All India Achievers Conference New Delhi for Literature, Anita was also appointed as a high-profile supporter by the UNHCR in 2020. Her work often speaks of women and their experiences. Her books are a mirror of the treatment meted out to women throughout the world. Apart from fiction, she also writes children's books, poetry and essays. Hailing from Kerala, most of Anita’s books are set in God's Own Country. At the Times Literature Festival 2021, Anita shared glimpses into her life, her inclination towards audio books, dark stories, and her last novel, Eating Wasps. She shared how she thought Prakash Raj would be a good voice for her audiobook, the Little Duck Girl. Kalpana Sharma: Eating Wasps was your last physical novel, but you've been working on audio originals. So please tell us how you got started on the very idea of writing an audio book? Anita Nair: When I started, it came to me as a commissioned project. I was asked if I would do an audio story for him and for me everything is a challenge. There is a very famous saying that says you should try everything once except incest and morris dancing. So I said, OK, what I will do is I will try. Because I've never done audio stories, but I like the medium very much because, you know, you can conjure up images, you can conjure up so many things just by the strength of the spoken word more than anything. So I said, let me give it a shot and I did this first story we just called Twin Beds. And this was about a couple that goes away on a holiday and they just do this because they have to do an annual vacation. And they really have had a long and tedious marriage and they get there and the hotel room in Bhutan is beautiful, but it has twin beds. And it suddenly changes the dynamics of their relationship. So when I started working on that, it flowed seamlessly – the way the dialogue came in, the descriptions, the characters and all of that. And unlike saving your writing or a story which is there, where the reader has the ability to go back and read again if they want to, you know, clarify something for themselves, in an audio story, you really can't do that because the momentum is lost. So it was very challenging, but I like challenges and so they're very exciting for me. I've heard the two of your audio stories, A Field of Flowers and The Little Duck Girl, and I must say, they're both very dark and really hard-hitting stories that touch upon very important topics. How did the idea germinate? I've been writing literary fiction, I have been writing children's fiction, and I have been writing crime fiction. So, I think there's a slow development over the period where literary fiction is all about seeking the within, you know, pretty much, and understanding the dynamics of human relationships and so on. The children's fiction, I started finding that it was nice to be able to share stories and information, or where the children imbibe something. And then I came to crime fiction, where I discovered that it's a splendid medium for social commentary, where I can talk about the external world and how it has an impact on the internal world of characters. So when it came to audio stories, I think it was a natural progression where I thought what I want to do is look at the state of the nation, what is around us, and write about that. I think I'm trying to create this genre which is I think called state of the nation because it pretty much draws on things that are happening in our country around us and the kind of impact it has on individual characters. So, I think it's a natural progression. While listening to The Little Duck Girl, that entire scene where they're talking about dosas, the breakfast, it's so rich and it's so vivid. In your books also you give that vivid imagery, but here for audiobooks, how do you treat both of them differently? I think there are striking differences between writing fiction that is to be read and fiction that is to be listened to. You need to be very careful with the choice of words – something as simple as using too many syllables. So I need to kind of understand the musicality of each word before I put it in. But otherwise in terms of approaching character, in terms of approaching the plot, the setting, the descriptions – all of that is pretty much the same. It's just that I need to be much more careful about what I put in there and remember that the listener is listening and we don't want anything else coming into their mind at that moment. So I need to be very sure that every sentence is hard hitting and it registers and there's no ambiguity at all. Prakash Raj has infused so much life and strength in the entire story. How did it really come across? When you approached him, what was his reaction? Had he read your books previously? Prakash and I have known each other for a while now, because there was at some point that discussion about him working on one of my books where it's going to be filmed and stuff like that. That project fell through. But we continue to stay in touch and on and off; we would say hello to each other. And then I was working on The Little Duck Girl and somewhere towards halfway through the book Prakash had messaged me something and I was responding to it. And then it just occurred to me to ask him if he would like to do this. Because in my mind, he was perfect as the person to read it, and I couldn't think of anybody else for a moment. So I just messaged him and I said that I'm working on this story and would you consider reading it? He wanted to read the story, of course, because, you know, he has very strong political views and it should kind of go with what his political views are. So he loved the story. And so we worked on that first story, and then when I was working on the second one, there I had absolutely no doubt or right from the beginning. I knew that there was only one person who could do this and that was Prakash. Most of your stories are set in Kerala. Is that a conscious decision? Actually with the audio stories, interestingly, only one story is set in Kerala. One is set in Bhutan, one is set in Chennai. Yeah, but in my books, because there's a reason for that one, of course. I believe that I should be able to write from an insider's POV with certain authority of understanding that culture, the people and how their minds work, you know, so many levels of understanding go in so since I am originally from Kerala and I have very strong connection with Kerala and I grew up in Chennai and now I live in Bangalore. Initially, when I started writing, I knew that my first novel would definitely have to come from Kerala, because that was the world that I was most familiar with, in terms of the language, culture and food. So it began with Kerala. But then I started writing my crime fiction, which has this character called Inspector Gowda. It's a very Kannadiga surname and because of that I had to set it in Bangalore. He couldn't be anywhere else because Bangalore is a city I know. Again, I can only write about the part of Bangalore that I live in because I know that very well. Now, if I were to write about south Bangalore, I wouldn't be able to because I'd lived in northeast Bangalore and that's what I like to write. So it's pretty much about writing about the places. I mean, I think the only departure I made was with A Field of Flowers. Audio production: Basant Singhal