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In Search of Anjum HasanThere’s Anjum the brave bus driver. There’s Anjum the radical bomber and bank robber.

Then there’s Anjum the writer. From Neruda to Naipaul, from Shillong to Bangalore, the

writer traces her journey so far, all the while facing that distinctly modern imperative – it is

now expected of her to be a recognizable Anjum Hasan.

By Anjum Hasan | Grist Media – 21 hours ago

Anjum Hasan. Photo credit Zac O'Yeah

In early 2012, The Times of India reported on the bravery of a man named Anjum Hasan, a school bus

driver in Kolar, a small town in Karnataka once famous for its gold mines. This 68-year-old man suffered a

heart attack, inevitably ‘massive’, as heart attacks always are in newspapers, while driving the children

home from school. Despite his plight, he managed to steer the bus to safety before keeling over and dying

on the wheel.

At about the same time another Anjum Hasan made the news – the founder of a radical Muslim

organization who’d just been arrested. He had masterminded robberies in banks and jewellery stores

across the country and been involved in a bomb blast in Delhi.

The third Anjum Hasan I encounter in the papers is myself, a writer who works in English and who, by that

token, is occasionally considered newsworthy. Even though I have done nothing approaching the heroism

of Anjum Hasan the bus driver, or the anti-socialism of Anjum Hasan the terrorist, I share newspaper

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space with these namesakes.

As an English language writer, I speak to the tiny minority in the country that reads and thinks in this

language, of which an even tinier fraction might be interested in what I have to say. Indians have been

writing in English for more than two hundred years so one would have thought that anxiety about the

relevance and reach of this literature has by now been put to rest, if not become passé. Perhaps it has,

judging from how many writers are taking to English, and the growth, however modest, of readership that

this implies.

On the other hand, I only have to look out of the window or open a newspaper to be faced again with that

old question: whom am I writing for? I try to take grim comfort from the fact that it is not this or that

writer in this or that language but the very idea of literature in the modern sense – as something one

engages with mostly in private, something that expresses individuality and inner life, asks questions of a

moral nature without necessarily providing the answers, recreates life in a way that makes it ironic and

therefore bearable – is alien to most of my countrymen and women. It is most likely alien to the two

Anjums I’ve read about.

Where then does Anjum Hasan, the writer, feature in the larger scheme of things of which the daily

newspaper might be said to provide a glimpse? Who is Anjum Hasan?

Even as I ask this question, I turn away from it, afraid that the results of an investigation into my identity

will be disappointingly meagre, or that I will prove elusive to myself. Maybe this reluctance is cultural; I

could have inherited the traditional diffidence of Indian English writers and their uncertainty about their

place in the world. Adil Jussawalla’s nearly 40-year-old book of poems,Missing Person,with its cover

image of a man without a face, for instance, reassures me; it articulates the tragedy of my colonized

Indian-Englishness, my fragmented, in-between state. (“Once I was whole, I was all. / Believe, why don’t

you believe.”)

Other writers have already asked and answered this fundamental question about the writer’s identity with

great élan and inventiveness. Jorge Luis Borges does it in his famous and intriguing little story “Borges and

I” in which he talks about two Borges, the celebrated writer and the other one, whose life and experiences

have given rise to the former. VS Naipaul explores it from every angle in his autobiographical

novel The Enigma of Arrival. There is a wonderful, revelatory moment in the book when he leaves

Trinidad for the first time and is on the plane to New York and thence to London, on his way to becoming

a writer. He keeps a diary with him and yet discovers later in life that, intent on discovering his writer’s

identity, he’d ignored all the immediate, human experiences he underwent on that journey. The Belgian-

American writer Luc Sante talks about how we borrow our identities from other writers till we discover

our own; in a moving essay he describes his adolescent love for the poet Rimbaud who was born exactly a

hundred years before him and who Sante therefore felt spiritually connected to as well as, given

Rimbaud’s terrific, precocious brilliance, oppressed by.

If I turn away from these writers and study those closer home it strikes me that each Indian writer is

unique in that each has had to cobble together an identity out of the grab bag of influences that we are

subject to – Indian and Western, present and past. In my own formation, chance encounters and unlikely

locations have counted for so much that I think of my writing as a series of accidents, and my sensibility

formed not through a conscious process of selecting and choosing but by unexpected collisions and

serendipitous discoveries. Like the poet and critic Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, I have tried to make

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headway by “taking my bearings from distant stars”.

Of course, I grew up reading the very same Enid Blytons, Agatha Christies and Archie comics that are the

staple of so many Anglophone Indian childhoods. Alongside, the English literature that is taught in our

classrooms – Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy – constitutes an Indian heritage, and this is my heritage as

well. The titles that are, or once were, read for pleasure by Westernized Indians adults seem to have been

shared very widely too. Veena Venugopal describes in her recent collection of essays, Would You Like

Some Bread With That Book?, reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbirdfrom her father’s bookshelf at

the age of ten, finding in it concepts such as rape that she did not understand, and yet returning to the

book repeatedly through childhood. This echoed so powerfully my own childhood experience of

reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and sensing the gravity of the word ‘rape’ without fully knowing what it

meant, that I felt disoriented; it was as if pulling down this book from my own father’s bookshelf was not a

free act but a pre-ordained one, something I was bound to do as a bookish child growing up in a household

where the selection of books was determined by the tastes of a reader interested in the contemporary

currents of Anglo-American literature.

I experienced a similar feeling of déjà vu reading Amitav Ghosh’s essay “The Testimony of my

Grandfather’s Bookcase”. Ghosh wonders about the impulse behind the seemingly random novels in this

beloved bookcase, which was so foundational to his idea of what a ‘proper’ book is, and eventually realizes

that what unites these titles is that they are all works by Nobel Prize winners. Suddenly, several of the

authors on my father’s shelves – Knut Hamsun and Albert Camus, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pearl S Buck –

writers I had imagined as unique to those shelves and to my father’s sensibility, emblematic of his journey

as a student and then a teacher of literature, revealed themselves to share something of the design of

Ghosh’s grandfather’s bookcase.

And yet those two bookshelves are different too. One is the product of a 19th century Bengali humanism

whose center was Calcutta; it is possible to imagine replicas of such a bookcase all over that city. The

other bookcase is influenced by this tradition but has been a roving one rather than that immovable,

venerated thing that is the subject of Ghosh’s essay. My father studied in Allahabad, worked in Agra and

then Delhi, decided to make a life in Shillong, spent a few years in England, and then returned to Shillong

for good. The bookshelf moved and grew with him, some titles in it inscribed with student notes, others

prizes won in college, some bought in once-famous Delhi bookshops like Galgotia, some in British ones,

and others acquired over the years on visits to cities outside Shillong. So my father’s bookshelf is both a

commonplace and a singular one; it shares character with other bookshelves belonging to the educated

middle classes of my father’s generation and the one preceding his, and yet is a bookshelf that has been the

anchor for a unique journey and an itinerant self.

And I, the daughter of the person who made these moves with his books in tow, found them at home in

Shillong. So to me they are part of my life in that city, not an especially bookish city and, unlike the

Calcutta that Ghosh describes in his essay, a city whose middle-class does not consider books an intrinsic

part of its personal wealth. As a child, these books on my father’s shelves seemed to me without

antecedents and peers; I did not see similar books in the houses of friends, classmates or neighbours. My

discovery of this library, therefore, and its becoming a part of my childhood and adolescence, seem to me

one more of those chance happenings that are foundational to my biography.

* * *

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It was chance too that led me to the poet Pablo Neruda – the first writer I admired with an intensity

bordering on self-effacement, someone I wanted to become, write his words as if they were my words, a

poet who was therefore both my hero and my nemesis.

I was introduced to Neruda by the poet Robin Ngangom who taught English literature at the university in

Shillong, the town where I was born and lived till the age of 26. Outside the classroom, Robin mostly read

Latin American, Russian and Middle Eastern poets – as if to neutralize the modernist severity of a TS Eliot

with the fervour of a Mahmoud Darwish. I would go on to study philosophy, so Eliot and the other

modernists remained something of a rumour for me, even as I read Darwish and Neruda without that

slight subversive air that students and teachers of literature like Robin brought to thisact.

Neruda is not an obscure poet; he won the Nobel Prize in 1971, and volumes of his poetry could be found

in the town’s university library. Yet it struck me as miraculous that his work was thus accessible, and that

it shared shelf space with other modern Latin American and European poets who were also new to me. At

university I slowly became aware of the incomplete and naïve image of Shillong I had thus far carried in

my head. Over and above what I understood to be ordinary life in the town – an ordinary life in which

there was little place for books – there existed a distinct if tiny and subterranean world. This was the

world of poetry (very little of which featured on my father’s shelves), of poets such as Neruda, and of

devoted poet-readers such as Robin.

I began reading Neruda in the young, dumb way in which Neruda himself came into poetry: “…my mouth/

had no way/ with names,/ my eyes were blind,/ and something started in my soul…” I responded to

everything in his poetry that was timeless – the voices of the natural world, indecipherable dreams, the

secret chemistry between things, the unfathomable mystery in the simplest stone. In the poem “Too Many

Names” he talks about how we murder life’s wholeness by our insistence on categories, names and

formalities, and how he intends to mix up things “until all light in the world/ has the oneness of the ocean”.

I loved that sentiment; it enabled me to turn my back on our messy and divided histories in Shillong, a

town made up of the local Khasi community that went to church and lived in neat bungalows; the business

class, largely consisting of traders from the Marwari and Sindhi communities; the Irish Christian

missionaries who ran the schools; old-time Assamese and Bengali families with roots going back to

Shillong’s origins as a colonial town; settlers from elsewhere in the North-east, drawn to the good schools

and colleges of this erstwhile British capital; migrant workers from Nepal and Bangladesh, as well as

Punjab and Bihar; and professionals like my parents who had moved there to get away from frenetic

Indian metropolises, drawn by the university set up in the early 1970s. We all lived together in that pretty

hill town – some families for generations and yet still aloof from their neighbours, others mingling

unrestrainedly, marrying across community and language to give Shillong its uniquely cosmopolitan edge,

while others existed in an amnesiac daze from which episodes of ethnic violence roused them.

At the age of twenty, I saw Shillong less as a historical landscape and more as a natural one. Neruda’s lines

seemed to me self-evidently of a piece with the town; so much about the atmosphere created by its seasons

and gardens, houses and bylanes, rendered his lines tangible and true. Shillong is very far from the sea,

and the sea is a constant presence and inexhaustible metaphor in Neruda’s poetry, but there was much else

in his verse – cherry trees, skies, poppies, rain, hills, winter – that evoked the town for me and in turn

enabled me to describe it in my own poems, overwrought, sprawling, abstract poems that had very little

experience in them but a great deal of Neruda-inspired passion.

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When I read the lines, “This is a story of ports/ where one arrives by chance and climbs the hills/ and so

many things come to pass” I was certain Neruda understood the shadowy way one lived in my town –

being there by accident, taking in only a little, making an impress on even less, and yet all of this somehow

adding up to a life. In Neruda I drowned my anxieties about the smallness of this life. How well he fitted

the nostalgia for beauty that Shillong inspired. I devoured his memoirs, lying in bed over a weekend and

insensate to the everyday bustle of my large family around me, enchanted by his impoverished yet

magical childhood in the frontier Chilean town of Temuco where it rained impossibly hard, like it does in

Shillong. He seemed to be born into poetry – shy, sensitive, bookish, at home in the natural world of

forests, rivers and seas, a persistent “poet of the great outdoors” – yet also part of an urban culture in

which poetry was taken very seriously, and poets cultivated lean and hungry looks and highly eccentric

personas.

Neruda seemed like the quintessential poet to me. I could not think of certain words, ‘lugubrious’ for

instance, without feeling that they were invented by Neruda (“…the word winter is like the sound of a

lugubrious drum…”). I was awed by his world-embracing humanism as well as his awareness of the terrible

limits of being human (“It happens that I am tired of being a man…”). I experienced Neruda in fragments

but these fragments would go on to sum up a whole chapter in my life, a piece of my own biography,

during which I was trying to find myself through poetry: …twenty years old, waiting for death, shrinking

into my language… marine night, white and green statue, I love you: sleep with me… come and see the

blood on the streets… the struggle for the oppressed is a hard vein in my nature… you didn’t come here so

I could tear off a piece of your life… take pity on the poet.

But of course I, a middle-class Indian woman in a small Indian city, couldn’t be Neruda. I understood only

much later that the goal of abandoning oneself to life could not be achieved by writing effusive poems. I

used his poems as a shield against the world, so I never noticed how deeply embedded they were in the

world. To someone whose context was university life and family, who lived comfortably with a babel of

languages, who hardly every strayed beyond the borders of the town, Neruda could not be so much an

influence as an exotic other, the very image of poetic glamour. All writers, especially all young writers,

need glamorous models. And these models come from far away or near. Neruda himself loved the Russian

novelists as a boy – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – and he talks in his memoirs about how the nihilistic

character Sacha Yegulev, from a story by Leonid Andreyev, was a hero for him and other young Latin

Americans.

I think I discovered my own biography – the surprising, even exhilarating fact that I had one – when I

realized that what mattered was not that I had wanted to be Neruda, and the futility of that longing, but

the fact that I had read him, and tried to see the world through the verbal kaleidoscope of his poems. I had

pored over the work of someone remote from my world, his experiences often difficult to imagine, and yet

someone who, because I read him, had in some way become part of me and my writing. In the scene

from The Enigma of Arrival I’ve mentioned earlier, Naipaul talks about how despite his writer’s diary, he

failed to attach any significance to the most important things happening to him as he left home. There is

no mention of the leave-taking from his extended family that had come to see him off at the airport.

Neither did he record his own emotions at the start of this momentous journey. The person who was

writing in the diary was not the man who was undergoing the journey. “Man and writer were the same

person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time – and how much writing! – to arrive at that

synthesis”.

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The writer’s greatest discovery is that her ordinary, human, limited experiences make up the fulcrum on

which her writing turns. What takes time, and can only be achieved through writing, is arriving at the point

where one is able to value these experiences. How in an outpost like Trinidad or Shillong or Temuco does

one do that? Neruda – a colonial too, after all – writes about how, in the imagination of Latin American

writers of the 1920s, Europe was the center of the literary world, so that as soon as one acquired a little

distinction as a poet, the question everyone asked was: When are you moving to Paris? Perhaps it was

something of the same impulse – the longing to find a center, the restlessness with the periphery – that led

me, largely on a whim, to leave Shillong and move to Bangalore.

* * *

I go for a walk in the small, suburban Bangalore colony where I have lived for the last ten years, a colony

built in the 1960s by a cooperative of Posts and Telegraphs Department employees.

A woman has put together three sheets of corrugated tin to fashion a shelter and set up a pushcart under it:

a mobile ironing stand. Her daughter, barefooted like her, watches intently as she heaves the heavy coal

iron over men’s shirts and trousers. She puts insistent questions in Tamil to her mother, which her mother

ignores. A group of boys are playing cricket in the lane and a woman with glasses and graying hair comes

out to explain to them in English why their being careful is not enough, why they could be careful all they

want and yet their ball could still shatter her panes. Opposite her small house – typical of this colony in its

elegant and functional modernism, its curvy walls and porthole windows – is a new apartment block. Its

windows are already muffled with curtains when just a couple of months ago there was only a cavernous

shell there, home to a large family of construction workers. They built in the day and at night the site

became the setting of an extended family feud, complete with men threatening murder and women

wailing. Now they are gone and no human trace left on this apartment of their having made it, of the

smoke of their cooking fires, or their nightly tears and yelling.

A boy thunders past on his motorbike with ‘Andaman and Nicobar’ on his T-shirt and I wonder if he has

vacationed there. I meet an ever-smiling neighbour who tells me that he and his wife will be travelling

abroad for the first time, to Melbourne to visit their son and his family. He says he is putting together a

large collection of Kannada films and plans to spend all his time in Melbourne indoors, watching them.

Another group of smaller, louder boys are playing football. ‘Dude, what happened?’ they say, and ‘Come

on man, pass the ball!’ Their mothers talk to each other in Kannada over their gates about the new car puja

taking place in the choultry. At the Sri Raghavendra Swamy math there is a puja too and people are on

their feet, singing a bhajan.

I walk on and am soon near the enormous peepul tree in the middle of a large, empty, enclosed plot; I feel

calm as I always do seeing this tree: larger than any house in the colony, its existence is a miracle in this

neighbourhood of carefully demarcated spaces and in this city that is suffocating with too many people.

For ten years this environment has been the background against which I’ve written my books. I became a

writer over my years here; before that I wrote intermittently and dreamed of writing. The view from my

desk – washing drying on terraces and the tangled leaves of a dozen trees – has been the peaceful curtain

drawn over the world which allows me to step back into a world of my own. Crucial to my writing life in the

colony has been this luxury of withdrawing from it, of being incognito; living here, I’ve been able to both

write and keep under wraps my identity as a writer and the second life that I live in and through writing.

Over my long stay here, through my occasional chats with my neighbours, my curiosity about them and

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their acceptance of me, I have in some ways become part of the colony. Yet in other ways I stick out in

this temple-going, Kannadiga neighbourhood, given my irreligious tendencies, my North Indian, ‘Hindi’

identity, an identity further complicated by my tendency to speak mostly English and my roots in

Shillong, a city which most, if not all, of my neighbours would be unable to point to on a map.

Yet in many ways my difference from my neighbours has been enabling for me. Unlike the women around

me, my life does not center on child rearing, puja, house construction and maintenance, TV watching and

newspaper reading, rangoli drawing, cooking and gardening, and at the center of all this, the planet around

which these other satellites revolve, the difficult and never-ending business of making money. But I like

the dependable rhythm of these activities, their timelessness and immutability; the perseverance that

drives them, cocoons and comforts me. Inside my rooms, at my desk, listening to my neighbours going

about their daily rounds, I start to feel that the world is orderly and graspable, and that it is possible for

me to make sense of it. Or that it is simple and innocuous and I can, anchored in it, vicariously live the

very different lives of characters I am writing about.

I took to writing seriously in Bangalore, enforcing on myself the physical discipline of sitting down at a

desk every day. I moved to the city the year following the publication of Arundhati Roy’s The God of

Small Things (1997), which I had read with a sense of exhilaration in Shillong; in Bangalore I discovered

the work of other Indian novelists then coming into their own – particularly Amitav Ghosh, Amit

Chaudhuri and Pankaj Mishra – whose books opened out to me the possibilities of writing about

contemporary Indian life. Additionally, I was able to write because the move away from my hometown

revealed to me that I had a past. This past and its contrast with my present was the seed of my early work.

For a long time I was not conscious of myself as a writer, but merely someone who’d found that she had a

specific story, something of her own, to tell. I did not think about what this act of writing might mean in

creating or sustaining an identity as a writer.

It took a few years and the publication of my first two books for me to realize that I was perhaps a writer

but outwardly my life in the colony remained the same, and to my neighbours I was the same somewhat

aloof and puzzling person, but one they had nevertheless grown used to. The years over which I was

developing as a writer were also the years when opportunities and demands for public appearances by

writers started to grow. I enjoyed these events but I enjoyed much more returning to my safe anonymity

in the colony where I could be no-one again and therefore a writer.

It was only about a year ago that these two parts of my life – my public life as a writer and the private life

in which I lived in a book-filled house, doing my writing in an undercover way – came together. I was

reading from my just-published book of stories for the staff of a large software company located some

30km away from home. After the reading a young employee came up to me and introduced himself as my

neighbour, someone who lived around the corner from my house. I had never seen him before and yet he

knew me, had seen me walking in the neighbourhood, knew which paths I favoured. And not just this, he

also knew that I was a writer, had read some of my articles and made the connection. I was flattered to talk

to him, as I always am to meet a reader of my work, but also discomfited.

Walking around in the colony for some weeks after, I was self-conscious: my cover had been blown. I

started to wonder if I had misunderstood my neighbours; I’d put together, through the glimpses I caught

of their lives and by imagining the rest, a picture of them in which there was no room for books. I was

quite certain that literature did not have a place in their value system; not only did they not read, they

would not be able to appreciate a life lived around writing and reading. Yet here was a boy who lived a

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Shaping the World, edited by Manju

Kapur. Hay House India

stone’s throw away from my house who had read me, which suggested that reading figured in his life, a life

lived as much in this small, and in many ways still traditional locality, as in the large, global software

company where he worked. But if this conversation after my reading at the company made me feel that I

could no longer conduct myself in the old way, perhaps this was because my environment itself was

changing and the coming of that change and its touching my life were inevitable.

Some of those who came together in the 1960s to build themselves homes in the colony have remained

here; others have sold off their houses, which are in turn renovated in ways that makes them

unrecognizable, or torn down to make way for new houses or high-rise apartments. Perhaps the

neighbourly milieu of these streets will eventually fall apart like it has in so many other colonies in the

city. And in the large apartment blocks people will live their lives in the new, separate, urban way. Greater

wealth will be the cause of this rupture but not it alone.

Alongside, there is the coming together, but not commingling, of people from different backgrounds,

speaking different languages, which too leads to an altered sense of what it is to be a person in the city and

how to live in it. In this conception of the self, books could have a place because there is more space

around each person, a greater awareness of human singularity. Literature could be a component of this

new life in a way it wasn’t of the old – books might be read by those who traditionally did not read even as

those who traditionally read lament the increasing puerility of what goes in the name of culture.

Having first been drawn to literature in a city which did not place

any great value on it, and then becoming a writer covertly, in a

once modern and now, paradoxically, old world neighbourhood, I

must today face the challenge of existing in this changed world.

This world is at once more anonymous – in it neighbours might not

really care about each other’s lives – yet completely public. In this

world I might be read more widely than my Indian English

predecessors but the value of my work will be judged not just

through the words on the page but also bywhat I say and do off it. It

is now expected of me that I be a recognizable Anjum Hasan,

someone who can be matched with the feelings and thoughts

expressed in my books.

* * *

Much before he had seen Europe, even before he travelled to the

Chilean cities of Santiago and Valparaiso and left the tumbledown

town of his origins behind, Pablo Neruda was a child in Temuco. I

remember vividly from his memoirs an image of him hiding in a

tree and eating too many sour plums with salt (to me an

immediately familiar experience), his mind not on his surroundings but on the book he’d been reading – a

novel by the Italian writer of adventure stories, Emilio Salgari, author of a popular series set in Malaysia.

“I can’t forget what I read last night: in faraway Malaysia, Sandokan and his friends survived on

breadfruit,” writes Neruda, recalling that childhood moment. I read these lines in Shillong, thinking of

Neruda in Chile who was in turn dreaming of this imagined character, this Malaysian fictional hero.

This moment, this memory of reading within a memory of reading, is minor, one among thousands that we

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collect over decades of living through books. It cannot feature in my biography in any obvious way and

yet it is a secret and important part of it. And perhaps in this moment lies an answer to that Borges-

inspired question that bothers me: what is my essence? The answer is – perhaps none.

Over the years since I first read Neruda with such single-mindedness, I have discovered many other poets

and novelists who slowly diluted and fractured my Nerudean bedazzlement. With regard to Neruda

himself, I realized that I had more or less blanked out the fact that he wrote in Spanish, that he could not

have authored the word ‘lugubrious’ because in his own language it is ‘lúgubre’. I learnt with

disappointment about the great poet’s love for Stalin. And I silently reprimanded him for abandoning his

wife and their sick daughter. And yet these later iterations regarding the things we have once loved don’t

fully wrench them from us. This is still part of me: an image of Neruda eating sour plums alone in a tree,

thinking of a book, nestling within the experience of me on a bed, reading about Neruda eating sour plums

while I occasionally turn to watch, through a large open skylight, cloud puffs sail across a brilliant blue

Shillong sky.

A marginal moment and an ordinary memory and yet the only sort of thing that leaps to mind when I try

to define Anjum Hasan. Out of that image and so many other apparently meaningless ones like it, I forge

my writerly consciousness. Perhaps it is only our microscopic but unique life experiences that enable us

to see the bigger picture. Maybe only by going on trying to fashion something durable from the ether of

small, remembered things that is my life can I speak to that larger entity called literature.

This is an edited excerpt from the book Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves, edited by

Manju Kapur and published by Hay House India.

Anjum Hasan’s latest book is the short story collection Difficult Pleasures. She is books editor at The

Caravan.