Anjali Joseph: On Writing Shorter Novels, Looking in the Dark Room That Terrifies Us and Her Novel, "Keeping in Touch"
Anjali Joseph’s new novel, Keeping in Touch, follows Keteki and Ved – two late-thirties singles – as they navigate friendship, intimacy and the streets of Assam together. It’s a modern day romance, and invites readers to ask: how do we keep in touch with others, with ourselves, with the world around us? I had the pleasure of asking Anjali a few questions about Keeping in Touch, writing shorter novels, and why it’s important to look into the dark room that terrifies us.
You write so evocatively of Assam in your latest novel, Keeping in Touch. Did the conceit of this novel emerge from this setting, or did it begin with the protagonists, Ved and Keteki?
I’d fallen in love with Assam and wanted to write about it. Keteki was an embodiment of the seduction and elusiveness I experienced living there. As for Ved, I think of him (and myself in that experience) as firmly from a lineage of fools bumbling through paradise: Bottom in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, Botchan in Soseki’s novel, the unnamed protagonist of Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier. You get the picture.
A major through-line of this novel is light. You beautifully describe how light illuminates the valley of Assam and the mountains nearby, how it fills certain rooms. At one point, Keteki even glows brighter when she’s around Ved. What is your relationship to light as an artist, and how do you think about it in your day-to-day life?
Light is a living presence and if you tune into it, it’s communicative. I’ll offer three memories: the pattern of sunlight and latticed shadow in the stairwell of my grandparents’ apartment block in a suburb of Bombay; looking at orange sunlight through closed eyelids as a young child in Bombay, watching what seemed to be tiny creatures wiggle in the brightness, and thinking privately that I must never reveal to my parents how unusually good my vision was, as it’d distress them; walking to school in England in damp winter weather aged about eight, speculating if the Dark Ages were continually deprived of sunlight, as during Daylight Saving Time.
At different points in the story, both protagonists admit their fear of making mistakes. They seem to wish their individual paths were more illuminated, so they could avoid taking missteps. What is your philosophy about this aspect of human nature: that we can’t really see where we’re going, we can only look back at where we’ve been?
Arguably we don’t even look back with that much accuracy. In my twenties I used to live by the mantra that it’s always possible to make the same mistake in a new way. But now I think you have to go look in the dark room that terrifies you before you get to bounce out in the sunlit day, blithe and ready to learn.
A major theme throughout Keeping in Touch seems to be that we can only move through the darker aspects of life by casting light upon them, opening up about them, no longer hiding from them. This really resonated with me, and I wonder if this was something you wanted to explore when you began writing this novel, or did this emerge as you were writing?
I think it’s a realisation of a certain period of life, or it was for me.
Grace Paley is reputed to have said, “You write from what you know, but you write into what you don’t know.” As I was reading this novel, it felt to me as if you were writing into the hidden and half-seen aspects of life, the uncertainties and contradictions. How do you draw on what you don’t know to deepen your writing?
Ah, sweet of you to see that. Well, the unseen and not-yet-happened is suspended all round us, in the astral body if you subscribe to the yogic model. It’s already backstage, shuffling its feet and plotting an ill-timed entry stage right. I guess it’s just having the patience to let it burst out.
I really enjoyed the storyline of the Everlasting Lucifer, and how it was woven throughout the novel. Where did this idea come from, to invent a bulb that “becomes brighter when it is really seen”?
I really don’t know. It just came to me. In fact the original idea and name for the lightbulb came to me when I was about eight, reading a collection of F Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories. I guess it was some sort of answer to ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, but something else too. I knew it had legs, I just didn’t know where they wanted to go but I hung on to the idea somewhere and when I was writing a short story in the summer of 2015 the Everlasting Lucifer popped up to hang out with Keteki and Ved.
I so enjoyed the conversations that Ved has with Keteki’s uncle, Joy mama. One of my favorite lines in the book is on page 160, when Joy mama says, “I’ll tell you the secret, Ved. Let people be who they are and love them as they are.” I feel this is such wise advice, but so hard to follow! Is this something you wanted to explore as you wrote this book?
Somehow, I really think I write a good uncle. I guess it’s a slightly less direct but still intimate relationship that I enjoy. Joy mama is my favourite too, and he’s right, of course, but as he also says of himself, wisdom hasn’t yet descended, or not permanently. But yes, let people be who they are; the struggle to do that and not improve on life is definitely a part of growing up.
I quite enjoyed the shorter length of this novel. I tend to think there is a lot of power in what’s left out, what’s left unsaid. Did you envision this to be a fairly succinct novel from the outset, or did you find yourself cutting a lot after you’d written it?
The kind of art I’m drawn to is dancing out of the shadows and into the light and back again, or stepping out from uninvolvement to entanglement, I guess, so necessarily it’s episodic. I do like a short book. Two hundred pages is a lovely length. Sometimes it takes a little writing into the places that really sing, so there was a bit of cutting. I guess I still dream of being the kind of Chinese brush painter who has practiced so much that each stroke shows a man on a bridge looking down into the river thinking: what’s the point of it all? But in a way embracing the ink blots is a part of that mastery. Life is a mess, let’s love it anyway.
How long did it take you to write this novel? What is your writing process like?
I started thinking about it while finishing the previous novel, The Living. That appeared in 2015 and then I gave myself to reading and thinking about this one. And living. When I was working on my first novel and working at a magazine in Bombay it seemed important to write every day, so that the book continued to grow somewhere in my auric field even as I was at work. Now everything feels like writing, or working on a novel.
Anjali Joseph is an Indian novelist living in Britain. Her first novel, Saraswati Park, won the Betty Trask Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction. Her work illuminates the inner lives of characters: from a Bombay letter writer to a single mother in a Norwich factory, or the sceptical late-thirties protagonists of her latest novel, Keeping in Touch, as they navigate falling in love. Anjali’s gift is to make art that reconnects readers to their sense of magic. She is working on a novel about the Irish naval officer and archaeoastronomer Boyle Somerville.
About the Interviewer
Erin Russ holds a BA in English Literature from University of Washington and has studied with authors Hope Edelman, Lisa Cron and Dani Shapiro. She believes creativity is a calling and is most comfortable dwelling in the space where life meets art. She recently finished writing a memoir about the two years she spent sailing on the high seas. She lives in Ojai, California.
