Author Rijula Das talks to us about her new book "Small Deaths' and gives us an insight into her life and ambtions and her view on fellow author Terry Pratchett
Rijula Das Author
Tell us a little bit about your book, Small Deaths?
Set entirely in the Calcutta’s red light district, Small Deaths is the story of Lalee, a sex worker trafficked into the trade as a child who dreams of trading her precarious life for that of a better-paid escort. Tilu Shau, her loyal client, makes a living writing cheap erotica and dreams of literary fame and Lalee’s love. When a young woman is murdered in Lalee’s brothel, the two of them are drawn into a misadventure that threatens the fragile stability of their lives and forces them to ask what is the price of one’s right to dignity, a future and a life?
The book was originally published as A Death in Shonagachhi – what role does the setting of Shonagachhi play in your novel?
Sonagachi is a neighbourhood in North Kolkata, and the largest red-light district in Asia with several hundred multi-storey brothels where more than 30,000 commercial sex workers live and work. It is rare to find works of fiction set entirely in this area, even though the neighbourhood is one of Calcutta’s oldest. The novel is a product of my doctoral research on the relationship between sexual violence on women in India and public space; I looked at how we ‘allow’ women to access public spaces, and what punishments are meted out to them when they violate the unwritten rules. The red light district in traditional, patriarchal societies is a space of contradictions. They are often the oldest of neighbourhood, well-known and yet, unacknowledged spaces. I wanted to understand the way sex workers access a city where they are invisible citizens –– how they live, die, advocate, organise and make a life that is uniquely their own.
Why was it important to you to tell this story now?
Living in the world we do, it is easy to forget that women’s rights are not actually indelible and unalienable. It is easy to be lulled into a sense of security. But women’s rights, or indeed the rights of vulnerable people, irrespective of gender identity is under siege at all times, many instances of which we are witnessing at present time. The right to bodily autonomy is an unfinished fight for us, as is the constant fight for the recognition and acknowledgement of women’s labour, wherever that may take place. Stories from the margins like that of women like Lalee, because they are real, living women, are a useful and timely reminder of where we are and how easy it is to deny human rights to vulnerable people even in this age.
How do you do your research? Your research specifically looks at the connections between public space and sexual violence – how did this inform your writing of Small Deaths?
There is a wealth of both academic research and case studies and interviews with the sex workers of Shonagachhi. Social welfare organisations are extremely active in the area and have extensive grassroots knowledge. As I wrote Small Deaths over 7 years, the research seeped into the work, informing the fictional narrative, and sometimes changing or adding to the course of events. In creative work research informs the lived experience of the book’s universe, but it should never get in the way of the narrative. It’s often a tight-rope walk.
Tell us more about writing truthfully about sexual violence and why it was important to write on this theme?
We’ve always written about sexual violence, but how we do it, matters. What we decide to show and what we decide to leave unsaid, matters. Very often we see gratuitous, even erotic portrayal of sexual violence in fiction. As someone who has faced sexual and other forms of violence as a woman, it changes the way I could write about it. I had to ask –– at what point does writing a sexual violence scene become voyeurism? How do I write with authenticity, empathy and truth and still reserve dignity for those on whom the violence occurs? Whose eyes and heart does the chapter look through, is it the victim or the abuser? There are certain expectations when a book deals with the life of women trafficked into sex-work, but the greatest satisfaction, for me, came in subverting any pandering to trauma-porn, or a representation of abject and unabated victimhood because that is not consistent with the reality of life on the margins.
Were there news stories that particularly inspired your work?
Small Deaths is inspired by real people and real events, and where reality is shocking, invention is not only unnecessary but a travesty. I wanted the book to cleave as close to reality as possible and as such, a number of real events have inspired the action in the book. The scandal of an ashram called Dera Sacha Sauda where a powerful, self-styled guru held women hostage in a warren of rooms and sexually abused them for years has inspired events in the book. The disappearances and deaths of sex workers, and the migration of women across international borders for sex work in coercive circumstances have inspired both characters and events. It is however not one event, but a landscape and an ecosystem developed over decades that this story has grown from.
Are there any books that you would recommend to explore more about the themes in your novel?
There are a number of academic works that I read and referred to while writing this book. Fictional work set entirely in Shonagachhi is harder to come by.
You have translated a number of books in your work, including Nabarun Bhattacharya’s short fiction. How do you think your translation work helps to inform your writing?
Translation has definitely influenced how I use language. How we use English as Indian writers is evolving as our relationship with English becomes more organic, more intertwined with our multilinguality. Reading in diverse literary traditions, as translation helps us do, also changes my relationship with narrative form and storytelling.
What made you want to become a writer? Why fiction?
I’m not sure we decide to become a writer any more than we decide to become ourselves. It does take a certain amount of practice, showing up for it over decades, a lot of hard work without any promise of reward or even the assurance that one should persevere, but we write because there is no other way to exist. Fiction allows me, personally, the necessary distance from myself to explore places that would feel too exposing to do as autobiography. It is also the sheer joy of being in other people’s heads, creating characters who are entirely different from me, and watching them take-off on their adventures.
Which other writers have informed your work?
It is hard to see my own influences. I often read people whose work I enjoy as a reader but as a writer, we’d be widely different. I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan. His comedic brilliance and timing is so effective and subtle that you almost don’t realise the sheer genius required to pull it off. Jeanette Wintersen, Marguerite Duras and Borges have been abiding influences.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
To stick with it. People often think of talent as the sole variable that makes a writer, and while there is such a thing, another very important variable is the ability to stay the course. It takes time to make even a bad book, a good one can and does take time to see the light of day.
What’s next for you?
I’m finishing a translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel, soon to be published by Seagull Books. After that I hope to focus on my second novel.
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