As her latest short-story collection ‘Bombay Hangovers’ hits the stands, author Rochelle Potkar chats with NT BUZZ
ANNA FERNANDES | NT BUZZ
Award-winning author and poet, Rochelle Potkar, known for her titles ‘The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories’, ‘Four Degrees of Separation’, and ‘Paper Asylum’, among others, is now out with a collection of short stories titled ‘Bombay Hangovers’.
In ‘Bombay Hangovers’, Potkar, who was born in Kalyan to Goan parents and moved to the city of dreams in 1998, writes about stories of struggle and survival, love and frustration, cultural conflicts and pitiable adjustments, family equations and social complications, against the ever-alluring backdrop of Bombay.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q. What’s the significance of the title ‘Bombay Hangovers’?
I have lived in Bombay for 25 years. Even though I live in this city – unless I am travelling to other cities – I watch it like an amused outsider. Even though I call it home, I feel like a tourist or a guest. I know it as much as I don’t, and my experiences have been of nostalgia and memory of all the people I have met from different walks of life, coming in from different regions of the country, world and worldviews. So, my hangovers are within the realms of intoxication, and not in its
aftermath.
Q. Tell us about your connection to the titular metropolis. What is it that draws you to this city? And how has this been reflected on page?
Living in any place puts a rhythm into you. When I am in Goa, it’s a languorous cadence. In Bombay it’s industrious enough that I can skip heartbeats. The city is one of bees and ants – buzzing with anxiety, effort and redemption. Its sunset landscapes are pause buttons, hung screensavers, freeze panes before the next exhalation and exaltation, the next marching of feet forward. I was born and bred in Kalyan – a satellite town, but Bombay was my attainable illusion. And now that I am living in it, I still haven’t reached it. Moving destination. Is a city its past, present or future? Its people? Or geography?
Q. How long was ‘Bombay Hangovers’ in the making? Do you have a favourite story from the collection?
These 16 stories have taken long because they weren’t part of a conscious book project. I wrote the first story in 2007 and the last one in 2015, before realising they have common threads. Each day I have a new favourite story from the book. So, I would leave that to you, the reader. You tell me.
Q. Growing up in Bombay in what was the golden age of Anglophone poets, did this have an impact on your writing?
I was a storyteller more than a poet, always, so my engagements with poetry were random and accidental. I found a bit of my own poetic voice in the process to reach an approximation of my worldview and its expression, and I still enjoy Kolatkar, De souza, Chitre, Dhasal and Ezekiel, before reaching a glut of international English poetry.
Q. As a writer of prose and poetry, has how you write changed over time?
It has evolved. Writing in the forms of haiku, haibun, short stories, novellas, novels and screenplays has mirrored my evolution of atom, person, woman, human, existentialist.
A new thought wilts over an old one on a new day, until the whole tree of philosophy shades under a new sun, a new moon.
Q. You do a lot of readings of your work. How does your speaking voice interact with your writing voice?
My endeavour has been to edit and refine the approximation of thoughts on the page, until I am satisfied, through intervals of editing.
The speaking voice is just an amplification. Now that I am also a scriptwriter, I see that the departments of amplification when refracted from the page into spatiality, sound, voice, presentation, fashion, and emotiveness can enhance elements that come between the five senses of audience to
performer.
It would have been a different way of living if I were a writer in a cave, throwing off crumpled balls of stories out into the daylight. But being a visual and virtual being, I am cognizant of the performing frame, but not before being satisfied with the words on the page.
Q. Have you felt limitations as a female? For example, in the choice of words, your subjects, and characters, does gender play a role?
I have felt liberated to write whatever I have wished too. My obsessions are on social issues more than political ones. Though they say the personal is the political, I am talking of hard-lined political commentary that I have never understood because it appears contrived, comedic and circus-like. Political parties change over one’s lifetime, but the social health of the land I live in is what concerns and fixates me. And yet politics affects social health. Social health is far wider and vast a gamut to announce a trickledown effect all the time. We are more liberated than we think we are. Limitation is a notion. Tyranny is a notion. Can freewill truly be caged?
Q. What are you currently working on? Any new projects in the pipeline?
I am working on a novel that is nearing completion. I have also a ripe third book of unpublished poetry that was nominated for two international prizes and is currently stuffed into a drawer. Also, a screenplay and a web series. But I have no idea on the sequence of fruition.
The chronology of production is not synchronous with the chronology of creation – so I’ve heard. So, the tenth work can be the first one that gets published or produced. That’s an interesting thought that liberates me from anxiety.
(There will be two virtual book launches of ‘Bombay Hangovers’ on March 27
and April 11. Details:
https://rochellepotkar.com/my-blog/)