By Selma Carvalho

Rochelle Potkar is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015), and Charles Wallace Writer’s fellowship (2017). She is the author of The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories (2013), Four Degrees of Separation (2016), and Paper Asylum (2018). Her poem ‘Skirt’ was made into a poetry film by Philippa Collie Cousins for the Visible Poetry Project; ‘To Daraza’ won the 2018 Norton Girault Literary Prize in poetry; ‘War Specials’ won 1st Runner up at The Great Indian Poetry Contest 2018; ‘Amber’ won a place in Hongkong's Proverse Poetry Prize 2018 Anthology. Her short story ‘The Leaves of the deodar’ won the 2016 Open Road Review contest, her story ‘Chit Mahal’ (The Enclave) appeared in The Best of Asian Short Stories published by Kitaab International, and ‘Parfum’ was a notable entry at the Disquiet International Literary prize, Lisbon. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize whose shortlist-listed have included Amitav Ghosh and Jeet Thayil.

Here in conversation with Selma Carvalho, she discusses her short story collection, titled, Bombay Hangovers (Vishwakarma, 2021).

Selma Carvalho: Rochelle thank you for taking the time to discuss your splendid forthcoming collection of short stories, Bombay Hangovers. In the interests of transparency, I’d like to briefly remind our readers that you have been a poetry editor at the JRLJ since its inception in 2017, and your contribution to the journal has been invaluable. Can you tell us the significance of the umbrella title of your collection?

Rochelle Potkar: Thank you Selma, for being a constant source of inspiration and support toward my literary journey.

As these stories organically came about, I gleaned that the common thread was Bombay, later Mumbai.

As one consumes the ebb and flow, sea-breeze, buzz and bustle, march and spring, it puts you into the rhythm of its heartbeat and the city speaks to you.

There is a hum that I have not felt in other cities of the world, rare like Bombay blood group. This hangover is one of memory, in and outside the city then. More so, of the joint march of its citizenry of all classes—industrious as bees and ants.

SC: Unlike most Indian writers, who turn regional when it comes to fiction, you cast a wide canvas incorporating ethnically diverse and layered lives, in these stories. Growing up, what were your formative influences, and how did you came to inhabit so many worlds?

RP: Bombay is a melting pot of every Indian regionality coming in everyday to make bread, butter and ether, that when you fish for stories, it occupies a large canvas. The backstories of dreams, the forward stories of fruition (or not).

I grew up in a catholic community in Kalyan around Hindu neighbours. Our references were of Hindi films, music, stories, and songs that even though I write in English, a Hindi murmur echoes under those words. As children, there was a lot of love between religions, castes, and communities displayed in the everydayness of rituals and festivals. If you feel united in your formative years, divisiveness reads like absurd fiction later on.

My Catholic community was always on either: a Goan-pilgrimage mode or a Bombay-pilgrimage mode. The school holidays of May were to flee to Goa and stay as long as the sun burnt your skin. And September and December for Mount Mary’s Bandra Fair and Christmas shopping at Crawford market and Chira Bazaar.

SC: The stories depict a profound sense of place, the cartography of a city experienced not through maps and place names, but through memory and our sensory perception of it. You ensure we walk through the filthy gullies of dehumanising brothels, (From ‘Mist’: But Ismael believed that one of the five children in the brothel was definitely his. He felt an odd pull from these narrow walls of someone calling out to him – craving his attention, affection, and probably sacrifice…The sun climbed high over the skies, atop the basti, and Ismael got about preparing breakfast, laying them on plates, keeping carrots and onions chopped for an early lunch. The women would be hungry now – their hunger as bottomless as an abyss), the squalor of the cotton mills, (From ‘Fabric’: Kailas played around the dye-houses, engine houses, and workshops. He watched water flowing for the ‘scribbling’, ‘carding’, and ‘spinning’ as his father slowly mouthed these words for him), and the cacophony of the teeming millions, (Also ‘Fabric’: The noise from the roads below swelled with rush hour honking. Its screeching and beeping induced a liminal sonic pentameter in him). I’m wondering perhaps, this is how you as a poet and writer understand cities, through the arteries of their atmospheric detail. How important was it for you to approach your fiction through sensory texturing?

RP: Even before I put pen to paper as a writer, I inhaled the world through its sensorium. Even the office reports I wrote, that were supposed to be mundane, had too much dramatic detailing in them.  

The tenets of ‘show, don’t tell’ or screenwriting’s visual writing, now have pushed me to the edge of sensory perception with even memory — the 6th sense — as the Japanese would say, with layers of meaning, history, reality, subterfuge, philosophy and mythology becoming colours of story thread.

Once I wrote poetry, the rhythm of words stayed on for fiction.

I am still obsessing about tapestries, that weave many layers of story. I wonder how that is done.

SC: There are two stories which draw on your own cultural heritage, that of the dispossessed Joe Pereira and the wandering Jon. Here the warm and familiar sights and smells of Byculla, Mahim, Bandra come into view, but there is a general sense of abandonment to these small lives, a fading away into insignificance. What are your thoughts on the dwindling Christian communities of Bombay?

RP: In Bombay, the Catholics in Santacruz or Mahim whose houses I frequented lived lonely lives — unlike in Kalyan — away from colonies and communities on the brink of old-age. I saw their lives against the harshness of a bustling city, the wrinkling of time over their skins. I have watched a Joe Pereira and a Mrs. D’souza long enough for them to seep into me.

But to be fair, everything is dwindling into the age of a new world, not just a community but an old way of living, moors, traditions, our relationship with time, how much and how deep we communicate, even how much we laugh. If feels like light escaping under the bolted door. Old time.

SC: Women thickly populate your fiction—humiliated, brutalised and traumatised, nonetheless most of them are redeemed and restored by sheer resilience. In the story, ‘Morning,’ a woman suffering from the trauma of rape uses the past as balm. (She followed the ritual. Get out of bed, recall a good day: maybe her family around her, Ma frying pakoras, it raining outside, Papa on his tablas – singing in a tuneless voice, the rain prattling on roofs, the TV drowning out the noises from the kitchen.) In ‘Parfum,’ a man who is obsessed by scents becomes enamoured by Stella, shy, reclusive, she has learnt to survive by making herself invisible. (She was the colour of glazed clay. She had been an orphan from the time she could remember. She had survived years, occupying the least space). India continues to be a patriarchal society, grappling with issues of crimes against women. How do you see the lives of women when writing them into fiction?

RP: As a romantic, incorrigible optimist, I suffer from Aristotelian comedic-endings. The graph has to curve upward, no matter the sine waves in the beginning or centre of a story.

I see women in India either in the know or not of their agency. Once they know it, a silent rebellion activates in them.

If a woman hasn’t come in touch with her own power, no one from outside can trigger that.

I think women by now know how to swim in the waters of patriarchy and make her own waves. This ocean is to stay at least for the next 10-20 years, but can be seen dwindling one lap at a time.

There is suffering - violence against young girls that can be curbed by stringent enforceable laws and severe punishment. We are beginning to talk of rape as an unfortunate accident and survivors are moving past their trauma. This is a very courageous and encouraging change from the past, when women thought of ending their lives, as if their whole lives were to be defined by one unfortunate incident.

The more we talk, less we judge – the more we heal, as a society. Articulating trauma is healing.

SC: I noticed in your stories your exquisite use of catalogue. How much is your prose writing influenced by poetry? What challenges does the poet face when writing prose?

RP: I came to a writing career through short stories and accidentally digressed into poetry. So I had plot and structure in my head and heart. The move from poetry to story was hence organic.

The rhythm that comes from poetry now has a tight rope walk against mood and tone of plot.

I am guilty of slipping into listicles. It probably has to do with observing too much and not pruning, so as to populate the scene. I am trying to curtail this impulse, but to no avail.

SC: How long was this collection in the making?

RP: These 16 stories have taken long because they weren’t part of a conscious book project. I wrote the first story in the collection in 2007 and the last one in 2015, before realizing they had common threads, one being the city.

SC: What are you currently working on, and what can we anticipate from your pen, next?

RP: There is a novel-in-progress, but this year will be spent backing the spines of two books. Bombay Hangovers and The Coordinates of Us/ सर्व अंशातून आपण - a book of cross-translated poems in English and Marathi, with poet Sanket Mhatre.

Banner image is by Tulsi and has been downloaded from Unsplash.com

Bombay Hangovers can be purchased on Amazon Kindle, Amazon UK and Amazon India. To purchase paperback, click here.