A NATION ON PAUSE: CORONAVIRUS IN INDIA

Mall Road, Ranikhet | Anuradha Roy

It is the middle of April and weeks into lockdown, limbo is a jittery place.

In today’s newspaper, gunshots during a game of Ludo: “Jai accused Prashant of coughing with the intention of giving coronavirus to other people. He shot him in the thigh.” Rumours whine like mosquitoes. A strident voice wafts across from next door: “Is this futuristic Chinese bioterrorism or a Muslim conspiracy?” Some say our hellish sanitation and tropical fevers have given us a carapace of immunity. We breathe calmer for a moment. Then the bad news closes in again: lost jobs, suffering, starvation and no end in sight.

I chanced upon a tweet yesterday from Christina Lamb, a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. “For the first time in my life I find myself wishing I lived in the country with a dog and a breadmaker and maybe a lemon tree.” That’s been us the past 20 years, in a corner of the Himalayas with three dogs and two lemon trees. No breadmaker though. We’ve always made bread the old-fashioned way, massaging dough like a lover’s limbs, not as a hobby but because it’s the only way we can have passable bread. Now friends at a loose end write for tips on starters and crusts and send sweetly proud images of fresh loaves. I’m a specialist agony aunt with time on her hands. In my past life I wrote fiction, my spouse ran an independent press. Now printing presses are closed and books locked in storage.

For the moment we have sky, forests, bread. And a series of unpredictable problems. Last week someone’s cow keeled over in the nearby forest. We could see it from our house: an immense, immobile mound. Since there are no municipal services for such things the owner gathered four friends who dug a pit big enough to house a lorry, then rolled the carcass into it. Social distancing remained a hopeless aspiration during this exercise.

Read the rest here in the Economist, where I wrote on the experience of lockdown in Ranikhet alongside Nilanjana Roy and Rahul Bhattacharya, who wrote in from Delhi.

Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...

Begum Anees Khan

Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea. Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter. (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...

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