Writing A Feminist Thriller On Female Foeticide: Interview With Deepanjana Pal
By Shreya Ila Anasuya:
Journalist and author Deepanjana Pal’s debut novel, Hush a Bye Baby, is a tightly paced thriller with complex questions about gender and politics at its core. Its premise is the arrest of a high profile gynaecologist (who is seen as a feminist) for female foeticide. The Reader spoke to Pal to get a glimpse into why and how she wrote the book, and about her writing in general. Excerpts from the conversation are below.
You are a prolific culture writer, and have been the managing editor of a digital media house. You have also written two books — a non-fiction work on Raja Ravi Varma, and a children’s book. Your fiction debut is a noir thriller and a police procedural. What drew you to writing in this space, as opposed to a straight up ‘litfic’ novel?
‘Prolific’ makes me sound much more accomplished than I actually am, I suspect. For a lot of us, writing books (particularly fiction) is something we can’t afford to do full time, so we do other things. In my case, I was fortunate to find my way into journalism.
Hush A Bye Baby doesn’t really fit into any genre neatly — it’s about a crime, but it doesn’t have the tropes of conventional crime fiction. It’s a police procedural, but there aren’t any car chases or fights. No guns go off, there aren’t even any dead bodies. But neither is it literary fiction (which is in any case a curious category that defies definition). Like most people, I love good crime fiction, whether it’s a book or a podcast or a serial.
I’m sure the years I’ve spent devouring detective novels and shows like Broadchurch, Law & Order and Serial stirred the pot. I’ve grown up with a lot of Bengali pop fiction, and in Bengal, we love noir and mysteries. I didn’t think of it while I was working on it, but looking at Hush A Bye Baby now, I actually think it does tip its figurative hat to the Byomkesh stories by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay.
But I didn’t sit down to write with any preconceived conviction of the genre in which I wanted this story to fit. What I knew was that I wanted to write about female foeticide and I wanted to write about it in a way that wouldn’t feel predictable.
Ultimately, I think the story decided the genre.
Speaking of writing about female foeticide in an unpredictable way — do you feel it is important for writers to write of gender, to centre gender in their work? Particularly since gender norms themselves are so tightly policed and enforced?
No, not necessarily. For me, a writer’s first priority must be the story and doing justice to it by telling it as well as they can. When you’re writing fiction, you have the freedom of writing something that articulates your own convictions in addition to telling a story. With that freedom comes the responsibility of balancing politics with storytelling. The politics could refer to gender, caste, sexuality, race, religion — unfortunately, inequality comes in far too many flavours. I don’t think there’s a hierarchy that makes gender more centre-worthy.
The fact is that the values in which we ground ourselves as individuals tend to be reflected in our creative work.
[But] too often, when politics take precedence over the story itself, the final work becomes polemic and that is rarely engaging for a reader. I doubt it’s much fun for the fiction author too. I know it wouldn’t be for me. Focus on telling your chosen story, be authentic to the characters and the social setting; then look at what politics are being reflected and how. If the politics are more important to you, write an essay.
You’re commenting on politics, elitism, corruption, misogyny, structural violence of many kinds — the writing is taut and almost deceptively light. But it must have taken a lot of research to be able to make this happen, everything from gynaecology in India to the workings of the police force. Can you walk us through this process?
One thing you quickly learn as a journalist is that there are stories nestled in the everyday. So while I did my share of reading medical papers and looking up articles, the real research came from mundane things like eavesdropping while in the waiting room at a gynaecologist’s office and talking to the policeman helping you file a report or complaint. There’s a lot of everyday sexism that I describe and discuss in Hush A Bye Baby (hopefully in a way that isn’t preachy) and this comes from what I’ve seen and heard around me. We don’t realize how ingrained it is in what we consider ‘normal’.
A large chunk of my research was listening to women who wanted to talk, but not in the sense of being “subjects” or sources. I think it was more of a ‘ships that pass in the night’ situation. It still amazes me how much we share with strangers, because they nodded at the right point or because there was something in their face that made you realize they know the feeling you’re struggling to describe; or because they’re as angry and frustrated as you are.
For instance, I don’t think I would have thought there’s enough drama surrounding female foeticide had I not met women who didn’t want daughters because they knew what it was like to be a girl and a woman, and they didn’t want this for their children. I think when I was listening to those women, I knew I wanted to write this story.
The cast of characters is in remarkable shades of grey — but there is one stand-out character, perhaps the only ‘hero’ of the story — Reshma Gabuji, the resourceful but awkward police officer who cracks the case. And what’s wonderful about the setting is that it lets her be herself. Can you tell us more about writing this character?
You have no idea how relieved I am that Reshma has made an impression upon readers. I gave her all sorts of social privilege but in terms of story, she has it difficult. She comes in relatively late, she doesn’t get to do any obvious heroics and by the end, she isn’t the one getting the standing ovation even though she does crack the case. I knew I wanted a woman protagonist (particularly since I had a woman antagonist).
Reshma and Nandita (the gynaecologist) have a lot in common — they’re both privileged, powerful and committed to using their social capital to do something for the greater good. It’s just that they have radically different ways of doing this. It’s through Reshma that I showed a lot of the everyday sexism because I wanted to make the point that even super privilege like hers doesn’t insulate her.
I didn’t want Reshma to be like one of those baton-wielding, goon-thumping stereotypes that Bollywood has given us. I wanted her to grow on the reader and for the reader to become curious about her. I didn’t want a reader to be able to slot her in a neat category of hero/ heroine/ sidekick. I didn’t want that for anyone, but particularly in case of Reshma, I wanted her to be a little mysterious. That’s also why I gave her the surname Gabuji — it’s not a very common surname so it becomes difficult to slot her.
Can you tell us more about your writing process? How do you balance having a day job with writing full-length books?
I’m not sure there’s much of a balance. Something’s got to give and that’s usually social engagements or sleep (occasionally, both). My day job is as important to me as my writing is, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to properly balance everything. When I wrote my first book (a biography of the artist Raja Ravi Varma), I ran on about two hours of sleep in a day for a year. Eight-ish years later, I discovered I can’t do that anymore.
So I started getting up early and beginning my day with writing. That way, no matter what madness lay in wait for me in the office, at least I had inched a little bit closer to finishing the novel. The down side was that if I was unhappy with what I’d written, then I spent the rest of the day even more crotchety than I usually am. Writerly frustration is like prickly heat — it just does not go away.
For this book in particular, can you tell us if the story went in a particular direction you did not expect it to? How different was the last draft from the first one?
I tend to spend a lot of time working out the structure of what I’m writing and I do this in a fair amount of detail. The structure is a roadmap for me. Before I started writing Hush A Bye Baby, I bought chart paper and drew out the structure as a diagram. I initially stuck that on the ceiling — it’s very low — above my writing desk.
That way, each time I slumped in my chair and threw my head back in frustration, I’d see the structure and not feel as overwhelmed. I also started scribbling down details, ideas and questions that came to mind on post-its that I would stick on that chart paper. Of course, I’m the only one who found that chart paper comforting. Most people who saw it were thoroughly freaked out by it because to them it looked a wall of crazy.
Ultimately, there wasn’t much of a difference between the first draft and the last one. The changes were mostly cosmetic.
The end of the book teases at a possible sequel. Is there one in the offing?
Inshallah.
About the interviewer: Shreya Ila Anasuya is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is a freelance journalist on gender and culture, and the managing editor of Skin Stories, a publication on sexuality and disability at the non-profit Point of View.
