Anees Salim has published seven novels in just over a decade after 20 years of getting rejection slips from several publishers. In 2012-13, four of his novels – Vanity Bagh (Picador India), The Blind Lady’s Descendants (Amaryllis), Tales From a Vending Machine and The Vicks Mango Tree (HarperCollins) – were accepted and subsequently published in quick succession.
Over the years, his novels have been translated into several languages and won him several awards, including The Hindu Literary Prize for Best Fiction 2013 for Vanity Bagh, the 2014 Raymond Crossword Book Award for Best Fiction for The Blind Lady’s Descendants, the 2018 Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award, and the 2017 Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for Best Fiction for The Small Town Sea.
One of his latest novels, The Odd Book of Baby Names (Penguin India), explores familial bonds between an eccentric king, one of the last kings of India who is dying, as eight of his 100 rumoured children “trace the savage lies of their father and reckon with the burdens of their lineage.”
Another recently published novel, The Bellboy, which has also been published in the UK by Holland House Books, narrates the life of a 17-year-old Latif on a small island where he is appointed as a bellboy in a hotel where people come to die. After his father’s death, drowned in the waters surrounding their small island, the boy has to provide for his ailing mother and sisters. Latif’s life changes when he finds the corpse of a small-time actor in one of the hotel rooms.
Muslim characters play important roles in all his novels. Anees writes about them, he once told me in an interview, because he has “a decent understanding of their apprehensions, crises and misunderstandings.”
In an interview with Majid Maqbool, Anees Salim talks about the genesis of his recently published novels, the flaws and virtues of families he likes to explore in his fiction, themes of religious polarisation in his work, and why he writes only to please the reader in him.
Below are the excerpts from the interview, which have been slightly edited for style and clarity.
Your recently published novel The Odd Book of Baby Names is very experimental and different from your previous novels in terms of its unique narrative style with multiple voices talking about a king who is at the fag end of his life, dying, and coming to terms with his lost kingdom. Did you intend to capture a certain power dynamic and attendant bitterness and nostalgia of lost power and glory through this novel centred on a king and his many children?
I tend to believe that Indian kings and their descendants lead an embittered life. They could still be unimaginably wealthy, but I assume the idea of democracy has left them rattled forever. But The Odd Book of Baby Names is more about the loss of hope than about the loss of power.
Out of the nine children of the dying monarch, only the two illegitimate sons are affected by the fall of the princely state, others are destined to live lesser lives anyway. My attempt was to celebrate different shades of pain through nine different characters who are strung together, though tenuously, by lineage.
Your novels often explore themes like familial bonds and family dysfunctions in different settings. What is it about families, relations, power equations and family dynamics that make you want to explore these themes in your novels?
Families can be good, bad or ugly. But they are goldmines of stories. If you look closely, every piece of fiction deals with familial bonds in one way or another. Some, like mine, discuss them in detail. For me, families serve as a good springboard, though I often end up writing more about their flaws than their virtues.
You have published novels every few years since 2012. How has the BJP’s victory in 2014 and the subsequent shrinking of dissent, restrictions on free press, and attacks on minorities, including Muslims, affected you as a writer and novelist who also grapples with and writes about contemporary times?
I believe art thrives in the face of adversity; especially, the art of writing. When you feel you are restrained in one way or another, you find newer ways to express yourself.
As a writer, I face the same challenges as I did before 2014. People don’t turn intolerant overnight. It is a slow process.
A writer is probably among the first to see the dark clouds on the horizon and shape a piece of art out of the approaching darkness. In my case, Vanity Bagh, which discusses the religious divide and the air of violence it creates, was written much before the religious polarisation peaked in the country.
Also read: Book Review: Fighting for an India Under Communal Assault
Another novel The Bellboy was recently published. It is described as much “a commentary on how society treats and victimises the intellectually vulnerable as it is about the quiet resentment brewing against religious minorities in India today.” How do you enter and intimately write about the lives of invisibilised characters, the people who live on the margins of our society? Does it stem from your own experiences and memories of growing up in a small town and travelling around the country in your younger days?
Yes, I like to sketch characters out of people I have come across at various stages of life and chronicle their stories. The protagonist of The Bellboy is modeled after a boy who worked as a domestic help in my hometown, though his fate resonates more with another boy I briefly knew. In fact, I stitched two of my childhood acquaintances together to create Latif, the protagonist of this book.
The Bellboy is also getting published in the UK. Does finding international readership put more pressure on you as a writer, making you more conscious of your readership? Does it in any way affect the storyteller in you and the stories you want to tell as you write more novels in the year(s) ahead?
The moment you write for a particular audience you stop being a storyteller and turn into an advertising professional. I work in advertising and when I sit down to write I eschew all strategies and try my best to be a raconteur. I write every passage to please and entertain just one person: the reader in me.
And there is always a conflict of interest between the writer and the reader in me. The writer in me wants to show off whatever little talent I have by crafting long and complicated sentences. The reader in me prefers short, simple sentences. The latter wins, most of the time.
The Bellboy by Anees Salim. (Penguin, August 29, 2022)
In The Bellboy, you delve into and confront questions about death, existence and loss. This is echoed by the symbolism of the novel, too, such as the sinking Manto Island. Why did you choose to explore these particular themes in this novel?
For me, the setting of The Bellboy works in two different ways. One as the prototype of the world we are living in, the other as the mere backdrop of a story which talks about the potential displacement of a group of islanders. Either way, the book is not about a beautiful sunrise, it is about a grim sunset, and I could not have avoided the touch of gloom or the sense of loss.
What drew you to write the book in an island setting? Do you prefer the realism of writing about places as you see them, or of drawing on your imagination to create settings?
I think I have an infatuation with water bodies. But that’s not the reason why I set this book on an island. The island in the book is modelled after a place that exists in the same geographical location as my hometown. The impending death of this island has been written widely about, and I always thought this place had a story to tell.
While the setting was real, I created everything on the island the way I wanted. I could have visited this island before writing this book, but I chose not to. For me, writers are the best architects; words are the best building materials. So I decided to shape the island the way I pleased.
You’ve indicated before your impulse to “be an ambassador of the marginalised people and tell their story” and that with this novel, you are exploring neurodivergence. Do you have any particular themes in mind you would like to explore in other works?
I normally write about people I know, people who have touched me with their pain or plight. To answer your question, I am just beginning to write my next book and I am not sure which way it will go.
