In her first novel, “The Wildings,†the literary critic and journalist Nilanjana Roy has imagined a world where the animal kingdom is a vast, interlinked network of species that communicate with each other and follows an inviolate, ancient code of conduct. Humans are known as “Bigfeet†and are just puzzling, oafish creatures that form the backdrop.
Set in Nizamuddin, a Delhi neighborhood where ancient Mughal monuments, narrow alleys, groomed parks and massive homes coexist, the book centers on a pack of telepathic stray cats, a housebound kitten named Mara and the huge battle that ensues when that code of behavior is broken.
Ms. Roy writes a literary column for The Business Standard and for The International Herald Tribune's Female Factor series. In an e-mail interview, Ms. Roy discussed what inspired her novel, which will be released later this month, and how she transitioned from being a reader to becoming a novelist.
Firstly, I have to ask â€" why telepathic cats? Where did this idea come from, and how did it become a book?
The Wildings began in Nizamuddin, when the original Mara - the cat who belonged to my partner and me - was about 4 years old. She was the quintessential inside cat, curious about the outside world and other cats, but reluctant to leave the house and explore. Mara spent her afternoons outside on the balcony, her whiskers extended, listening to something we couldn't hear. She watched the outside cats; I watched her, and gradually, it became apparent that most of feline life happened in the silences. There was a day when two of my cats, Tiglath and Mara, were watching me work. Both had their whiskers out, quivering as they tried to tell me that their food bowls were empty, and I saw them give each other a look. “She can't understand us,†the look said. “Poor whiskerless human.†That moment stayed with me.
I don't know whether cats are or aren't telepathic, but I do know that the spoken word - or meow - is the least part of their communication. Telepathy was an act of translation. It was a way of translating everything that lay outside language: the whisker twitches, the subtle movements of their tails, the invisible but obviously powerful scent networks, and my sense that cats treat time the way they do rooftops, leaping from the present back into ancient clan memories, the way they'd cross from one roof to another.
What are the things you found you needed to unlearn or let go, as a longtime literary critic and journalist, to write fiction and particularly a novel?
If I had said even once to myself, “I am writing fiction; I am writing a novel,†I would have stalled. I had spent my adult life, in publishing and the media, as a reader. That makes you acutely aware of how many books there are, and how little time: will you have room to read 3,000 books in your l ifetime? 2,000? 4,000?
The first thing I had to discard was the idea that you had to be as good as the greats - Atwood, Borges, Coetzee, Desai, Eliot, Fuentes - in order to write at all.
The second thing to go was the idea that spending a lifetime's apprenticeship as a reader will teach you anything at all about writing. Sitting down at the desk teaches you how to write, not reading about writing, not talking about writing.
And the third thing to release was the idea that writing was hard work. Finding the time was very hard work; writing “The Wildings,†and later, editing it with David Davidar and seeing the finished book emerge from the exuberant mess of the first draft, was pure happiness. When part of your job description as an adult is “making stuff up,†you know you've been very lucky in the way you've lived your life.
Can you tell us a little more about the writing process? How and when did you write?
At the dining table, mostly, and when our youngest cat, Bathsheba, will let me, at my desk in the drawing room. Unfortunately, Bathsheba thinks it's her desk, and she has sharper claws than me, so she wins.
The writing had to happen in between everything else - the journalism and the columns are how I make a living, so the fiction writing had to slide in sideways.
Most of “The Wildings†grew over long walks around Nizamuddin and in other parts of Delhi, from Mehrauli to Old Delhi. Once you start to see how many animals live alongside us, their lives parallel to ours, you can't stop seeing them. We excel at editing out the powerless and the voiceless in Delhi and making them invisible, whether they're animals or humans.
The market cats of INA, the friendly stray dogs in Mehrauli, the urban monkeys of Mayur Vihar all have very vivid and real lives, so it was just a question of eavesdropping on them. (Some of them are in the next book, not this one.)
It's a very visual process. The world of “The Wildings†- the cheels, the canal pigs, the complex web of relationships between the feral cats and the other cats in Nizamuddin - was sharp and complete right from the start. But each chapter began with an image: a kitten listening to the sound of barking dogs, a mongoose sated from the night's kills, a cheel remembering old battles. I used strawboards, note cards and very badly sketched maps - I can't draw a straight line - to keep the storyline straight, and otherwise it was a question of letting the imagination out for a long, long walk.
It is very tempting to read the human history of Nizamuddin, and in fact all of India, in “The Wildings.†Different groups coexist, skirmishing yet generally avoiding all-out warfare because they follow inviolate codes of conduct, until a massive battle ensues when nature's code gets perverted. Did you intend this as an allegory?
One of the joys about abandoning criticism for fiction is that it's up to other people to tell you what your book is about, which is such a relief. “The Wildings†was a love letter to Delhi in particular. The animal world mirrors both the savage territoriality of humans and the more tender side, the capacity for coexistence, the ability to do that very Indian thing and “adjust.†There was a darker subtext that I only became aware of once I'd finished writing. At its heart, it's about the tension between freedom and fear.
The worst predators in the book have a very simple reason for being vicious killers: they cannot imagine a world where creatures are not divided into predators and prey, or a world where predators and prey might choose to get along. The worst violence is not caused by the presence of evil; it's caused by a lack of imagination.
There's something medieval about the atmosphere of the book, with its clans, codes and verses, heroic deaths and unlikely heroes. If you had to pick your main influences for the book, what would you say they were?
I used to shoot as a teenager, (target shooting - I never shot people, even when tempted), and I still like battles - the bloody bits about gaffing people in the neck from “The Iliad,†the great set-pieces in Tolkien or George R.R. Martin. I grew up reading a certain kind of fantasy, and you can see the shadow of many of those books behind “The Wildingsâ€: Richard Adams's “Watership Down,†Sukumar Ray's “Abol Tabol,†E.B. White's novels, “The Jungle Book.†And though it doesn't have his breadth, there's a small genuflection to Neil Gaiman's “Sandman.†But the medieval feel to “The Wildings†comes from Nizamuddin itself and the fact that this part of Delhi lives in several centuries at the same time. The cats here behave exactly like Mughal soldiers: brawling, carousing and going to war with great zeal in between hosting nonstop midnight qawwali sessions.
The verses the cats sing, particularly around fights â€" were they inspired by anything in particular?
An early version had ghazals and qawwalis, but those didn't work out; they didn't sound feline enough. This version was inspired by feline behavior. Every cat war I've witnessed begins with a long round of hissed and snarled ballads. I was just the transcriber.
There will be three parts, correct? Are these written? Did you intend to write a trilogy at the outset?
At least two. It was my editor who pointed out to me that I had three books running into one, in that first draft. I knew when I'd finished “The Wildings†that there was much more, and the second book is well under way. It's odd; I finished the first book by very carefully pretending I wasn't writing a novel at all, and I'll probably finish the trilogy by pretending that I'm not actually writing a trilogy.
Would you consider yourself more of an “inside cat†or an “outside cat?â€
Definitely an inside cat, but with very long whi skers.
