I feel completely nonplussed if anyone asks me why I write, or why I wrote
this particular novel. I have no intelligent answer to this. It is as good as
asking me why I live. How can I compress into a few words every thought, every
breath, every idea, the moments of satisfaction, those of frustration and then
the apprehensive feeling in your stomach when you look at the finished
manuscript.
The circumstances weren't easy. In the section of society I come from, it is
very irregular to be a young woman who isn't married. It is worse when you are
one who doesn't have a stable, regular job. And if you also don't live with
your family, you are just unacceptable. I was, and still am, all three. It didn't make writing any easier.
My novel is about a twenty-six year old man, Ramchand, who works as an
assistant in a sari shop in the old city of Amritsar. And while I was writing
this novel, he almost lived with me, peering over my shoulder while I boiled
eggs, standing at windows looking out towards the sunshine on cold winter
mornings and walking silently by me whenever I went out. His pain was mine, his
headaches became mine, I was happy and hopeful when he was. Imagination merged
with reality. Time and space shrank in a way I still do not understand. It was
a strange state. And somewhere down the line, it became sheer hard work,
fifteen hours a day (I am a little immodest about this, my teachers always
called me lazy, dreamy and careless).When the final draft was over, I felt
strangely bereft, as if I had lost someone. I miss Ramchand. I can't be more
coherent than this.
Or maybe I can try. When I was writing The Sari Shop, I was trying to
learn and explain—it was a desperate attempt to make sense of the complete
chaos around me, to recognize the complex structure of life as I saw it. I
experienced anger at the society I live in, as well as the undying hope that
keeps us all going. At the same time, I was simply trying to tell a story as
truly and as humbly as I could and to be true to my characters.
My novel will only seem real to me, I think, if any reader, anywhere in the
world, reads it, pauses at any point, and thinks, 'this could be my story' or
'I just know how he is feeling'. The best compliment I have received yet was
from an eighteen-year-old cousin who read the first draft. She said, "I felt
exactly like he did, all the time, happy and bitter and headachy and all." I
think that is the only real success any storyteller can hope to achieve.
An Interview with Rupa Bajwa
Are any of the characters and events in The Sari Shop based on specific individuals you've met?
None of the characters are exact replicas of any of my acquaintances, but yes, I did draw on real people I had known while growing up in Amritsar.
Please elaborate on your writing process. How long did it take you to complete the novel? Did you have an outline of the narrative structure in mind when you began, or did the story take shape in the process of writing?
I wrote short stories when I was twenty and twenty-one. One of these stories was about Ramchand, a shop assistant in a sari shop. The idea, the character, and the story stayed with me and I realized that I would have to work more on it to complete it in my head. As I went on, it became a longer narrative and I realized I was working on a novel. I worked on it off and on, since I had to work and do other things, but I was soon completely obsessed by it. I thought about it in buses, while working, first thing in the morning when I woke up. In the end, I took nine months off from everything to complete this novel.
Did anything take you by surprise about yourself in the writing of The Sari Shop?
Only my pig-headed ability to work very hard.
Describe your decision to use humor to portray issues of social inequality in contemporary Indian society. Did you find it difficult to balance the comic and the tragic elements of the story?
Using humor wasn't a conscious decision I made. That is how I think, that is how I write.
Following up on the last question, it seems that one of your characters, the aspiring novelist Rina Kapoor, is a self-deprecating portrait of sorts. Elaborate on this creative decision.
She is not a self-deprecating portrait exactly, but yes, through her, I do question my own ability to see and write clearly, and deal with the blinkers that a writer often has to some extent or the other while writing about the world he or she knows.
All of your characters are flawed, and often hypocritical. Do you hold an essentially pessimistic view of our capacity for self-knowledge? Do you admire any of your characters?
All of us are flawed, I guess. And I did see amazing hypocrisy in the society I grew up in (still do, as a matter of fact). The idea is not for me to admire or hate my characters, but more to render them as accurately as I can. However, I do have a soft spot for Ramchand.
Many writers who've experienced frustration within their respective societies choose to emigrate and write about their homelands from abroad, including a number of notable Indian novelists. Have you ever considered exile? You are yourself a resident of Amritsar, do you require proximity to your subject matter?
Experiencing frustration here and moving away is not exile; it is choice. I have never been out of India and haven't really ever thought of this.
As a female author, why did you choose to focus on a male protagonist?
He just came into my imagination, and it did not matter much that he was a male, because his hopes and sorrows and losses are those of any individual.
Your novel speaks for your deeply humanitarian interests. How did you come to choose fiction as a means to address social ills? Do you think literature can change the world?
I am not cynical, but I don't think literature can change the world. However, it does help us as individuals and as a society to see ourselves more clearly.
Discussion
Questions
1. What sets Ramchand apart from his coworkers in the sari shop?
2. After his parents' death, as an early adolescent under the guardianship of his uncle, "Ramchand came to know the other being in himself, the secret blue-green shadowy Ramchand, who either thought things that did not make sense, or who sometimes thought things that came so dangerously close to making sense that he backed off from them, the way one does from a slavering mad dog." How is Ramchand's adult self a product of his experiences as an orphaned child?
3. Describe the disparity between Ramchand's public and private selves. When do they merge?
4. Does Ramchand's informal education over the course of the novel improve his life? Would he have been better off never picking up a book or departing from his usual routine in the sari shop?
5. Rina Kapoor's intellectual pretensions and vanity are comical if off-putting to the reader. Is there anything commendable about her character?
6. Why does Ramchand feel sympathy toward Kamla when no one else seems to?
7. Kamla is both victim and perpetrator. What responsibility does she bear for her fate?
8. Should Ramchand be considered a coward? How else might he have acted, and to what end?
9. What does Kamla's secret trunk and its treasures reveal about the slovenly alcoholic the people of Amritsar know her as?
10. Elaborate on the thematic function of alcohol as a motif throughout the novel.
11. Discuss the sari shop workers' treatment of Ramchand at the novel's end. How might they explain his recent uncharacteristic behavior?
12. In her early description of Amritsar, the author writes, "It was if it had been so since the beginning of the world and would continue to be so till the end." Despite the deeply ingrained social attitudes evidenced in the events of the novel, what signs of cultural change can be detected?
13. The Sari Shop is, fundamentally, a comedy of manners. How does the novel compare to others of this genre? How does it depart from their model and bring fresh innovations to the genre?
14. Although the cultural, religious, and economic circumstances in The Sari Shop are specific to Indian society, how do the moral dilemmas portrayed in the novel relate to life in contemporary Western societies?