“This is amazing. It reminds me of Samir’s dreams when he smelled basil in Paris,” says Aanchal Malhotra with a smile, as she takes a sip of a drink, especially created at AMPM Kolkata in keeping with the themes of The Book of Everlasting Things. She thanks the waiters before taking a seat and adding, “We went to the Mullick Ghat Flower Market at dawn to pick up fresh jasmine. It was to commemorate the jasmine fields where Vivek met Ambrette.” Kolkata, seems to agree with the author. The city launch of her new book has just concluded, and Aanchal seems relaxed. “I’m a very different person when I’m here. This city is always great. If I had to move anywhere from Delhi, it would be here.”
She thinks that the slow pace of the city, derided by most, could actually be the reason it appeals to her. For now, she’s just happy to be taking a break. Aanchal has spent the better part of the past decade listening to personal accounts about one of the biggest tragedies in history. “I haven’t read for pleasure in the last 10 years. It has always been for research. I’m finally reading without a pencil in my hand,” she chuckles, adding that reading helps her find inspiration.
Her debut novel, Remnants of a Separation, chronicled the experiences of people during the Partition, through objects that they brought (or couldn’t bring) across the border. While it was published in 2017, the project first took flight in 2013 as her MFA thesis project. “As a young female historian who had just started working, I did things like wearing glasses and saris, because the discipline is largely ageist and has historically been dominated by men. It took everything I had to not constantly be defensive about my age,” she says, adding that when it comes to young female writers, people are just waiting to take them down. “You overcompensate and do more than male writers your age. You become more serious, write with more depth, do more research. Women have to work harder for everything.”
She backs this up by sharing an example from her ‘Kolkata darshan’ the previous day. Her friend was showing her around old parts of the city, and kept offering her drinks to stay hydrated, but she kept declining. “Over years of field work I have realised not to drink anything, because there are no public washrooms for women.”
Another thing that her years of oral history have taught her, is the art of interviewing. For Aanchal, her interviewees are not a means to an end. “I’m not trying to get a byte from the person. I’m trying to understand how they have become the person they are. During interviews, everyone asks me, ‘What are you looking for?’.”
Aanchal emphasises on the importance of listening with an open mind. “If I go in with a clear idea of what I want, I’m never going to see anything else. Deviation always lets you find interesting things. Har conversation se mujhe kuch na kuch mil hi jata hai.” (I get something or the other from every conversation)
True to her words, every experience has a way of weaving itself into Aanchal’s work. She reminisces about an interview from her visit to Lahore in 2014, where someone told her about writing a gravestone for their parents by moving their finger through wet cement. This story translated into a part of her third novel, The Book of Everlasting Things, released in 2022.
Hearing diverse stories also impressed upon her the scale of the work. “I try to take myself out of the equation because most of my interviewees have never had their voices heard. My name is on the cover, but the book isn’t about me. I’m just a catalyst for their stories.” The experience continues to humble her. “Helping voices get heard and experiences read was my greatest joy after I wrote Remnants… I couldn’t have written it without my interviewees. It’s not my book. It’s our book.” The project had a massive ripple effect, pushing the youth to reexamine their family histories.
‘I try to take myself out of the equation, because most of my interviewees have never had their voices heard. My name is on the cover, but the book isn’t about me,’ says Aanchal Malhotra Amit Datta
Engaging with people on such a deep level also made Aanchal aware of the consequences to her work, which aren’t always pleasant. There is a grimness in her voice as she recounts asking her grandmother, whom she interviewed for Remnants…, if she would have spoken to oral historians like herself during the Partition. “My grandmother said, ‘Even now when you ask me, I go back to that time. You get to leave, but I’m still there.’” Aanchal pauses for a bit and sighs, “I don’t think people think enough about what happens after a story is told. I never considered it either till that point. Recounting something like this could take people back to a moment where they have no power over themselves.”
To mitigate this, she stresses on recognising the privilege in having someone open up to you. “I made a clear decision to never interview people multiple times. It was just one day, which could be very long or short. But going back would only lead to them reliving this trauma.” She also feels that over time, people give answers that they think she wants to hear. But she only seeks rawness. “The first time is special, because you’re discovering and they’re rediscovering. It is a nascent and naive retelling.”
“Partition stories are complicated and often contradictory. Hate and anger can coexist with longing, yearning and even malice in the same conversation”
But not everyone understands the depth of the subject. While writing the first book, Aanchal often shared her research on Instagram, leading to widespread plagiarism. “It became ‘cool’ to interview older people and write about their lives, but I don’t think a lot of people understood the repercussions of what they were doing. That knowledge means something and has to be a part of a greater system, or a desire to hold onto something. It can’t be a whim.” She also mentions the cascade of Instagram pages around Partition history, and urges people to think about what the stories mean to them. “I’ve received DMs asking for the names of my interviewees. Firstly, the joy is in the fieldwork, and even the process of finding interviewees will teach you a lot. Secondly, why would I, already having seen someone relive their emotional trauma, give you their number only so that they can go through it again?”
And yet, for every entitled DM, there has also been an empathetic one. Hundreds of such messages about the inherited weight of Partition across generations are what spawned her second book, In the Language of Remembering. “After reading my first book, many people sent me messages about their grandparents and where they are from. I would always end up taking the conversation to emails. This is how the second book was constructed over years, through emails, skype calls, Instagram and some meetings. Little stories that led to a bigger story.”
Towards the end of 2016, Aanchal began working on The Book of Everlasting Things, and wrote it almost parallelly to her second book. While one would imagine it to be immensely hectic, it had the opposite effect for her. The third book was meant to look at stories of the Partition that echoed messages of love and kindness, and Aanchal confesses that it provided her respite from the other stories. “Partition stories are complicated and often contradictory. Hate and anger can coexist with longing, yearning and even malice in the same conversation,” she says.
These multitudes make her forge real connections, and Aanchal stresses that she doesn’t believe in a transactional exchange with the people she speaks to. “These relationships are real and mean something to me. Everytime I visit Pakistan, I take little packets of Indian soil for the people I know.” She admits that it can also get exhausting. For Aanchal, not listening is not an option.
“These relationships [with interviewees] are real and mean something to me. Everytime I visit Pakistan, I take little packets of Indian soil for the people I know.”
“Years ago, I was at my darzi’s shop, getting pants hemmed. A girl saw me and said, ‘Oh my god, you’re the Partition girl! So nice to see you up and about in daytime doing real stuff. (laughs) It’s quite hilarious, given that we were standing in front of a men’s urinal.” Oblivious in her excitement, the girl started telling Aanchal a story, and she promptly took out her recorder. “I don’t know if she is ever going to tell that story to anyone else. I sometimes wish I could be the person who says ‘thanks’ and ‘bye’.”
This has been a recurring case during the past year, where she had to do extensive press for the two books. “The most anxiety-inducing thing for me is the book-signing line, because I want to listen to what everyone is saying, but I also want to appreciate the memory they’re sharing. But I can’t absorb all the information I’m being given, and I can’t say ‘no’ either.”
The heaviest baggage is the identity of the ‘Partition girl’. Aanchal confesses that she rarely ever gets asked about anything else, except her personal life. “The most Googled thing about me is ‘Aanchal Malhotra husband’, and I don’t have one. People always ask me where my partner is. Ye sawal sirf auraton ko puche jaate hain.” (Only women are asked this question)
But the responsibility to tell stories much bigger than herself weighs even heavier. “It really changed me, and not always for the better. You become very empathetic, but despite being a young person, you’re no longer young. When you spend years talking about these things, you are forced to mature faster. I gave my youth to other people’s sadness.” Aanchal equates it with the compassion fatigue that journalists encounter in warzones. And yet, she finds solace in knowing that her work will help future generations find access to these stories. Despite the personal cost she bears. “After writing about it for a decade, I feel like I don’t even have clarity on the event anymore.”
There is a matter-of-fact tone to her voice, as she recounts how her work left no room for anything else in her life. “I haven’t had any life beyond this in the last 10 years, because I know how timely this work is, given that most survivors of the event won’t be with us for very long. But I also know what I have sacrificed to do this. If I were to go back and do it again, I would do so without missing a beat. But I do wonder at times, how different things would be if I hadn’t.”