What makes novelist Anjum Hasan a writer of poems but not a poet?

“My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;
I could not say all that I thought and thought
till words deserted me.”

Anjum Hasan’s debut poetry collection Street on the Hill (2006) reflected the times she lived while growing up in Shillong – a young poet’s escape from the confinement of the city. Lines like “we know books are like maps that show you/but don’t take you there” and “We climb wet stairs where/no one’s been for days” reflect a void she didn’t know how to fill, the dissatisfaction, limitations. This was her first brush with poetry, and her words and imagery moved readers far beyond her expectations.

Almost immediately, though, prose caught her fancy in a bigger way, and within a year, she published her acclaimed debut novel Lunatic in My Head (2007), an immersive account of life in Shillong. This was swiftly followed by her love letter to Bangalore Neti, Neti (2009), where the protagonist moves to Bangalore from Shillong only to find herself facing a new layer of alienation, modernisation and a yearning for home. In 2012, Hasan published a collection of short fiction, Difficult Pleasures (2012).

While Hasan’s work is not difficult to find, with poems, articles, travelogues and book reviews included in various Indian and foreign anthologies and journals, it is the poet in her – a persona she finds herself relating to less and less over time – that made Scroll.in approach her for this interview.

Growing up on words

Hasan’s love for books and words started at an early age, and she read a lot growing up but in “an unobtrusive kind of way”. Said Hasan, “I wasn’t noticed as a special child or anything, thankfully. And I could be entranced as much by Lucky Jim as by a photo-romance novel –anything that helped to fend off the boredom of reality. Later, I read in Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography The Words that he lived in an upside-down world as a child, imagining that what was in books was real life and real life a paltry fiction.”

The dichotomy of her life between Bangalore and Shillong gave a heightened sense of place in her early works, where she tried to distance herself from the received wisdom about such places and use her own experiences as fodder. “Shillong, for instance, when I was growing up there, was the town where nothing happened, the town one was primed to leave as soon as possible. Bangalore, on the other hand, is the IT city. I found myself trying to resist these generalisations in my writing. It’s about looking and listening before judging, trying to be open to the spirit of a place.”

Smitten by words and constantly looking for poetry in everyday, Hasan founds herself led by ordinary things to explore writing in verse, inspired by, among others, Philip Larkin, Pablo Neruda, Cesare Pavese and closer to home, Arun Kolatkar. “During the years that I was writing poetry almost every day, I was very taken with Cesare Pavese, who could write about ordinary life in a completely muscular, stripped-down style and yet a mysterious lyricism would hold the simple lines together,” Hasan said. “Philip Larkin was another favourite, and then I started looking for that quality in other poets. I’ve always loved Neruda’s poems about ordinary things – like tomatoes and shoes – more than his grand ones. Arun Kolatkar has this ability too – to find music in the experience of waiting at a bus stand or eating breakfast.”

Once upon a poet

Invariably, this search for the ordinary became a pursuit in her own poems too. “I wanted to see if I could take ordinary life and give it another form – unexpected yet recognisable.” But the tryst with poetry was short-lived, and since Street on the Hill, she has only written the occasional poem, Hasan confessed.

“Perhaps I am still a writer of poems but not a poet. I’m not sure that I’ve retained my poetic voice. The form is easy but the voice has to feel significant. This has nothing to do with publishing or even being read – it’s about whether one is convinced that the words are perfectly suited to the historical moment, that they can seize on it and give expression to it. You can see that conviction in the best poets. Rilke, say. Or Ghalib. Or even a contemporary such as Tomas Tranströmer. They know that something of the experience of the age is passing through them. That belief is critical,” she said.

Almost entirely switching to fiction, and with a book of stories underway, she acknowledged that she is content writing prose over poetry. “Poetry is something of a nostalgia for me. I think it’s a nostalgia of the era we live in too – we no longer have either that patience with language or that sense of poetry’s infallibility. We don’t live in the age of poetry,” she declared.

Sequence of ordering

As a writer, her goal is to write every day, and she finds that there’s usually a pattern hiding in the ideas or snatches of ideas that come to her. “So writing is often a process of clarifying, teasing them out. I consider this as more important and deeper than the plot when I’m writing fiction. I subscribe to Orhan Pamuk’s view: ‘What matters to a novelist is not the sequence of events but their ordering…’ I suppose the analogies of production do apply to the writer – a certain number of words written, a quantitative goal reached. Yet it’s not just about generating text but living life. At some point, the experience of living becomes so close to the experience of writing. One is writing all the time, in some subliminal sense, even when not at the desk stringing together sentences,” reflected Hasan.

Is there an ideal reader she keeps in mind while writing, a certain reaction she hopes to induce with her words? “Which writer was it who said he writes for himself and strangers? Over the years, some of those strangers have responded to my work and that’s always thrilling. And of course, the opinion of readers matters. One cannot write in an atmosphere of absolute neglect or disapproval as Permual Murugan’s recent experience has shown us.”

Then again, Hasan was never a stranger to the world of opinions and all kinds of readers, considering her job is that of the books editor at Caravan magazine. What is her biggest takeaway from a job that ensures she stays passionate about the written word? “At Caravan, we’ve wanted to cultivate a level of engagement with literature, rather than just books. The written word is everywhere but what we’re after is the well-written word, the well-argued word. We’re trying to create a standard in a culture where there are few standards as far as literary journalism is concerned. Working at Caravan has given me a view on my own writing, its possible relevance or irrelevance in the larger order of things,” concluded Hasan.

Three poems

This Biography

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;
I could not say all that I thought and thought
till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly.
I dreaded how all there was to give was me –
like water, this biography. I unravelled far too easily
then fled to selfish deserts and slept on the hardest rocks.
I couldn’t make what others made and broke and broke
and made, that sweet choreography. I went alone
and missed the world continually. I misread smiles;
I stuttered before open arms, but time passed too fast
for disappointment’s imprint on the glass of memory.
I sought the future even when the blood swirled now,
I let the past decide too greedily. I kept searching out
the window, I tried to stay half hidden by the light.

A Place Like Water

All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming
into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us,
when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped,
dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep
on traffic-less roads with their morning walkers and damp dogs;
still thinking of that other place worked on by the sun,
the casuarina trees and shouts of people on the beach, frayed and
muffled by the heaving of the sea. We climb wet stairs where
no one’s been for days, thinking it ought to be the case that one
returns with screws, a piece of string, some word or turn
of phrase, something to fit somewhere, that click or slide or
resolution that has been wanting. Instead a winter monsoon
blurs the world; we wash our hair, shake out sand from folded clothes,
sleep for a while in the still early morning while vendors shout
the names of flowers, sleep so that our bones at least achieve that
calm alliance with our breathing and take us where we
want to go: a place like water when it lifts us in a magnet wave
to set us down again, and we’re unencumbered, weightless, brave;
our questions turn to images of strangers waving across fields,
pointlessly, insistently, across fields, through falling rain.

Yellow Curtains

What they do best is divide the constricted world.
There: war, traffic fumes, lanes full of hungry bitches.
Here: bedrooms, soup boiling, 3 a.m. dreams.
In the mornings the house is awash with them –
yellow – more colour than cloth, less tangible than light.
The curtains are an act of selfishness.
They turn the house neat, guiltless, middle class;
they correspond to our talk about the family, what to cook.
The colour conspires in this – safe, domestic yellow,
cheaply cheerful plastic smiley yellow.
But I don’t want to leave it at that –
they are cassia yellow, sunny honey, lemon melon,
clichéd Van Gogh yellow. When it rains at dawn,
you open the window so that the milk-light filtering through
them is under our eyelids when we go back to sleep.
I look at them often, thinking
love must do this, must love do this, love must do…
As a child, yellow was my metaphor for happiness
and here we are now with our fantastically yellow curtains,
and now I have the image and I have that
to which it corresponds.