Conversations: Nandini Bhattacharya and Clifford Garstang

Nandini Bhattacharya is an academic and author of the novel Love’s Garden (Aubade Publishing, 2020), a work of historical fiction that tells the stories of Indian women caught up in the two World Wars, the British Raj, the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), Indian Independence, and the Partition of India. She is now working on a second novel about minorities and Hindutva politics in Narendra Modi’s India, and love, racism, xenophobic mentalities and other mysteries in Donald Trump’s America, titled Homeland Blues.

Bhattacharya’s short stories have appeared in Storyscape Journal, Raising Mothers, Ozone Park Journal, Bangalore Review, Bacon Review, and elsewhere. She has held residencies and fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writers’ Workshop, the Southampton Summer Writers’ Conference, The Voices of Our Nation Arts Writing Workshop, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop in Paris, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Clifford Garstang, a former international lawyer, is author of the novel The Shaman of Turtle Valley (2019), the novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, and two story collections, In an Uncharted Country and House of the Ancients and Other Stories. His new novel, Oliver’s Travels, will be published in May 2021.

Garstang’s writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Tampa Review, Los Angeles Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of the 2006 Confluence Fiction Prize, the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among other accolades and honors.

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Clifford Garstang: Let me start by saying how much I enjoyed reading Love’s Garden. It is a sprawling saga that explores many momentous events in 20th Century Indian history but also the personal fortunes of one Calcutta family. I would love to know what the inspiration was for the story of Prem and her family.

Nandini Battacharya: It certainly is an offshoot of what tales told by aunts, grandmothers and so on, but more like several family myths woven into one primal cry, if that makes any sense. It’s a kind of cri de coeur, I think. Maybe every debut novel is a kind of cri de coeur? And maybe everything we write is always from some foundational myth about ourselves, and going back in and through time, about our clans, tribes, volk?

At a more direct level and sort of serendipitously, I suppose, as a little girl I was fascinated by studio photos of people and families I don’t know even now in my mother’s trunk. And I may have populated the stories my aunts and grandmothers told with the (mostly) beautiful, sometimes stately, people in these photos. One of those photos is on the back cover of Love’s Garden. So, overall, the genesis of my story about Prem and her world is a melange, a medley, of scandals, fables, images and the imagination.

What I do want to emphasize, though, is that apart from rootedness in my family history and stories, Love’s Garden and Prem are also of the nervous tissue of twentieth-century India and many unsung women of the time. How about you? Are there autobiographical impulses, stories that run through House of the Ancients? Not only are the linked stories about Nick and Alexis, to me, suggestively redolent of those subterranean quakes called repressed familial dynamics, but other stories like “A Fire in Winter,” “Cousin Barnaby is Dead. “American Marsupial” and even “Lost in Translation” seem to be on the brink of being, or are, about families.

Have you imagined or written any of the stories while under the influence, so to speak, of the concept of family?

CG: Family in the larger sense, I suppose, including friends and coworkers from various phases of my life. All of the stories sprouted from a kernel of reality, whether something I observed or something I experienced, which of course is hardly unusual in fiction.

The international stories are set in places I’ve visited for pleasure or work and the domestic US stories are set where I’ve lived the longest–the Midwest and Virginia–and the latter may more closely reflect some true family dynamics. But the incidents described are almost all external to my actual family. In “Cousin Barnaby is Dead,” for example, the basic story derives from an incident that happened in college in which one friend was killed in an accident but when it was reported to me I was given the name of a different friend, and I unwittingly passed along the wrong information to others.

In Love’s Garden there’s a certain amount of history repeating itself, with three generations of women losing their first loves and then making the best of a bad situation. Is there a suggestion there of some inevitability? That we can’t always get what we want and we can only do the best we can? And because the family saga is interwoven with India’s own struggles, it seems to me there might be a parallel also in the political arena. Can we extrapolate from the family to the nation?

NB: Not only CAN we make that connection, but my nudge to readers is that we MUST. I mean, our bodies are like maps, I think, of everywhere we’ve been, and that includes domestic geographies and political geographies. And women have traditionally only or predominantly  associated with domestic geographies — kitchens, drawing rooms, bedrooms, whatever — but actually their shadows have always fallen on political geographies. And when there is a large-scale social struggle such as a decolonization movement, women have always been brought in, harnessed, or at least used. And then, sadly, usually sent back to bedrooms, kitchens, drawing rooms. That sending back is  getting less and less feasible now, but even in worlds where Feminism was not a word that existed, family has always spilled over onto the palette of the nation and vice versa, and women’s handprints have always been on both.

So Prem is not at all a singular woman of twentieth-century India in my imagination, she is a prominently visible woman in that fictional world because of her social status. She belies the notion that most women lived unreflexive lives then. I know from the witty, wordy and feisty women in my own family that that was not true. And her function in the domestic and political dramas in Love’s Garden is to humanize patriarchy and politics as usual, as well as to resist and re-educate it. This takes a huge toll on her (but that’s also a part of the deal that women are often dealt in the story of the nation doubling as patriarchal family).

How would you describe the power plays that happen in your stories, among your characters? What are they looking for (though I know they are not all looking for the same things)? How do they use or abuse their power over circumstances and people, and to what ends?

CG: I think our books are both looking at aspects of power dynamics, and it’s a subject that is very interesting to me. Around the world, disequilibrium is the source of great conflict, between nations, between peoples, and also in the workplace and families. The stories in my book mostly look at men who have attempted to capitalize on their privileged positions, ultimately to their detriment. I’m not saying that this is the message of the stories, only a reflection of what often happens in life–perhaps not often enough.

In the first section of the book, the Nick & Alexis stories, Nick believes he is in control of his life generally, and his girlfriend, Alexis, in particular. He’s like a colonial power in that regard, and it is inevitable that Alexis will declare her independence. So, while I’m not explicitly writing about global matters, I think the same dynamics are often at work. And, by the way, I don’t think I was doing this intentionally. These characters just developed on their own, but reading them together it’s clear that this issue was on my mind. And now, in the novel I’m currently working on, I’m tackling the issue of unequal power relationships head-on.

Your book is populated by many fascinating characters, each of whom might be a compelling subject for a novel on their own. I’m thinking in particular of Lilian Hartfield, the mother of Prem’s bi-racial foster son, Roderick, and Jagat Pandey, the teacher who disappears from Prem’s life when he goes off to war. Lilian is a catalyst who drives a wedge between Prem and her husband, but also in some ways is representative of India’s relationship with England. And Pandey is the former lover Prem can never forget. How did you intend for readers to see these characters?

NB: I intended them to see them as exactly that way, as you suggest. I didn’t want to make my characters figureheads or paper tigers or mouthpieces, but to me the characters are born of the diegetic contexts. When systems interact or clash in certain ways, so do individuals who are the living parts of those systems. However, unlike systems, which are colossi that change very slowly or never, people can and do change faster, and more creatively. I want readers to know that I see hope in all humans, without being naive about how individuals are often cogs in machinery that cares nothing about them.

Along these lines, I wanted to know more about what drives your decision to include certain stories in certain collections. Why did you choose the stories in House of the Ancients that you have? Some of them obviously are in dialogue with others, while others I think challenge us, inspire us, to see not immediately obvious linkages, connections. Power disequilibria are, indeed, foundational to the stories we are both telling.

Could you please say more about this, especially with regard to House of the Ancients? Why did you call the collection that, for instance?

CG: I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer to this question! In my first collection, the stories were all linked by setting, theme, and to a large degree overlapping characters. My second collection, which I also called a novel in stories, was focused on a single family and the residents of the condo building where they lived, and its stories, in addition to being stand-alone stories, created an overall narrative arc.

This book, though, was not conceived as a book from the beginning. Rather, at some point I realized that I had written a lot of un-collected stories that fell into four categories, with linkages within each category, and that suggested to me a four-part structure for a collection. But I also realized that many of the stories across the four parts shared some traits, notably an examination of unsavory behaviors by some of the male characters. These behaviors aren’t all the same, however, and in some cases one could perceive these characters as victims, or at least being on the receiving end of bad behavior, which in many ways readers may find satisfying.

As for the title story, “House of the Ancients,” I saw this piece as something of an introduction, not only to the linked stories that make up the “Nick & Alexis” part of the book, but to the book as a whole (which is why I gave the title to the collection as well). On a visit to Mexico City, where the couple has traveled at Nick’s insistence, Nick abandon’s Alexis, who is ill in their hotel room, to pursue his own goals. His destination on this day is the studio of Diego Rivera, whom he admires, which should tell the reader something about Nick. On his way to the studio, Nick experiences a series of hallucinations that might be messages from the beyond. Whether Nick recognizes the messages and heeds them remains to be seen.

Let me ask you one last question. Your novel is sprawling, covering many decades. As in real life, as time passes much is lost, especially about the experiences and feelings of people, including people we’re close to and think we know well. For example, Prem’s mother experienced great loss, and while Prem eventually learns some of her mother’s story, she never knows it all. Similarly, her knowledge of her first lover ends when he goes off to war, and the rest of his story is lost to her. These gaps in her knowledge go a long way toward shaping her outlook and even her behavior.

Can you comment about your narrative choice to create this knowledge imbalance which, by the way, I believe is a marvelous tool for creating suspense in fiction. 

NB: That’s a great question, and indeed, some of that ‘knowledge imbalance’ you mention was consciously built into Love’s Garden to create a core of mystery. A good ole secret is always so handy, isn’t it?

However, at the level of character psychology and interiority  rather than at the plot or structure level, I leave things unknown to the characters though the reader knows them to suggest the precarity and vulnerability of human lives and the frailty of human beings who are in the hands of forces far bigger than themselves. In Saroj’s case that would be Empire and Patriarchy, and in Prem’s case it would be those things but also Modernity, wherein people wander and scatter from country to city and old communication networks and traditional ways of life are lost. Also in Prem’s case, it would be War, which makes tiny pawns of living people.

Finally, I suppose this is the old device of dramatic irony, which I’ve always enjoyed in literature myself.

Thanks for these questions, a wonderful exchange, and letting me learn so much about the art of the short story, and of your processes in particular. It’s been a great experience.

CG: Thank you for your insights!