“I write, so I can join the conversation,” she says. A tête-à-tête with author Mridula Koshy

Noor is a 13-year-old girl who lives in a oneroom house in Delhi’s slum. She dreams of getting a green bicycle and become India’s first kabaadiwali, or scrap dealer. We witness through her eyes, a year in life, her trials, tribulations, and sorrows.

Mridula Koshy’s new book ‘Bicycle Dreaming’, inspired by young girls dwelling in slums and the challenges they face, is not just another narrative that depicts the life of the underprivileged in our society. She narrates the story as read from a diary of a little girl, to express her innermost thoughts, and thereby her own personality.

What was your inspiration behind Bicycle Dreaming?

I live in Delhi, and the neighbourhood in which I set my story is close to my home. It is a poor neighbourhood, with some homes that don’t have indoor plumbing and bathrooms are communal. When I walk through this community I cannot help but experience the way in which people in Delhi are both simultaneously visible and invisible to one another. Its residents work and do odd jobs in our neighbourhood. I know the kabadiwalla who collects my recyclable trash. I often see his children in the library of my school, that I run nearby. The more I see this neighborhood, the more obscure it becomes to me.

The issues of gender, colour, everyday lives, relations, sorrow of the urban poor – these are all depicted in your writings. Do you feel that social concerns of people living n the can be addressed through literature, or could it bring changes in the outlook of people?

I am not sure that literature can address social problems. However, literature does allow us to enter the lives of others. This act of imagination is a powerful step toward empathising with others. But certainly, a lot depends on what the writer is asking the reader to empathise with. A poor person who enters Indian writing in English is often enough exceptionally poor while the protagonist might be exceptionally noble or sensitive or beautiful or even brutal. What we are asked to empathise with, is the exceptional nature of the character and not so much the character’s humanity.

I wanted to see if it would be possible to write a story in which the reader is asked not to empathise with the exceptional characters, but rather with their humanity. Noor, my 13-year old protagonist, couldn’t be a more unexceptional, more average person.

Do you see success in using such shadowed characters?

Writers have to rely on readers to judge the success of their writing.

While writing the story, did you ever feel like you were one of those characters?

At different times I heard the voices of the different characters in the story, and yes, sometimes they argued with me and, failing to win the argument, have even pleaded with me to have their way.

But I have to be honest; writing is not a mystical or even magical experience of transcribing voices I hear. It is work, and most of the time, it is not my characters and their dilemmas that interest me enough to keep working, but instead the exploration of an idea I need to figure out. I needed to figure out if was possible for me to write an unexceptional character who was yet capable of eliciting empathy in a reader.

In my earlier novel, ‘Not Only the Things That Have Happened’, I tried to figure out how a woman could survive the loss, not only of her son, but also survive knowing she was the one who gave him up. But over the course of writing this book set in Kerala and  the United States, I became more interested in the question of what might have led her to give him up, and even more interested in question of how he would survive never meeting her. It was only a small step from there to the decision to kill my main character off in the first pages so the story would not be about the more banal one of achieving a the reunion between the mother and her lost son.

Tell us about your experiences while writing Bicycle Dreaming.

My eye in writing is most often the narrative eye, very close to the object / scene. It’s as if I am a camera mounted on my character’s shoulder. I do not often write from the first person perspective, but it is even more rare for me to employ the godlike omniscient third person. This is a craft question but it also a question of what best aids me in thinking about the questions that animate my writing. I find the first person perspective, limiting because there is very little question for the reader of not identifying with whatever is happening in a story. That overidentification is not only cloying, it can be manipulative.

The far remove of the purely third person is useful in action packed plot driven works that set out to answer more banal questions like what happened and what happened next. But for me, the idea that matters most is the idea of a reader who is present, but not manipulated, and removed enough to question, but not so removed as to be driven along by a plot.

What is your favourite aspect about writing, and your favourite subjects?

There is a conversation going on at all times, one in which we try to understand our experience at life. Writing is a very powerful way to participate in that conversation. This is why I write, so I can join the conversation.

If not a writer, what would you be?

I used to think I wanted to be a radio reader. But these days I read aloud to children in the library and that has taken care of my hunger to broadcast my voice.

I run a community library that works to provide books to those who would not otherwise have access to any. I don’t however think of myself as librarian, but as a community organiser. Our library is run on democratic principles
which go beyond ownership of the library by its young members (children) but actually strives to equip them with the leadership skills necessary to build a library movement. Our work is political both because it addresses an injustice – the lack of access – but also because it works for wider change.

Then I am left with another unfulfilled ambition – to dress other people. I loved to dress my dolls and I often dress my friends. I love the idea of costume, of telling a story with clothes, of maybe meeting someone and of there being a mutual recognition through our outfit, of a story perhaps that we want to share with each other.

Words by Vishnudas Nandan       Photographs from Various Sources