Giriraj: Khali Jagah is perhaps the first Hindi novel set in the backdrop of a bomb explosion. What led you to writing this novel?

Geetanjali: It had been on my mind for a while. As a general observation about the absurd and sinister times we are living in. But the catalyst came with a personal experience of friends who lost a child in a blast. The general acquired specificity. The dislocation and derailing of a so-called ordinary life and its landing in a skewed life, charged through and through with the geo-politics of the region, the loss which was irrevocable and inexcusable, the pain which was to be for the rest of the remaining life of the family, all this I could see now close at hand. What was a shock was how almost any boy of similar age or in a similar act as that of the departed looked actually like the boy now gone! Any moment, round any corner, he would ‘reappear’. Perhaps that became the empty space, the Khali Jagah of my novel, in which another boy, a substitute, landed

Giriraj: Before we talk more of Khali Jagah, let’s rewind to Hamara Shahar Us Baras, another novel set against a specific backdrop. Again some personal experience?

Geetanjali: That novel takes me back a good many years! It is my only avowedly discursive novel. I come from Uttar Pradesh and have grown up in the atmosphere of intimacy as well as animosity between the Hindu and Muslim communities there. The pluralistic culture we, later, as aware adults, began to discourse on, is very ‘naturally’ mine. But people like me were noticing and feeling increasingly disturbed by the growth of a certain brazen communalism in the 80s. Which culminated in the infamous demolition. I wanted to write about that changing atmosphere but it was a subject which had been written about so much, almost too much, and there seemed nothing new left to say. And yet, the old lines seemed completely effete and passé in the aggressive climate building up. I did not know how and what to write but could write nothing else and in that sense of being oppressed, I hit upon the way of recording ‘confusion’ without trying to analyse it, in the novel. To begin with it was not based on anything specific. it was simply trying to grapple with the ‘riots’ under the skins and in the blood, of ‘educated’ people like us, who swore by secularism and were far from the scene of actual killings and violence and who shared a culture even if they were born to different religions. But as is the way of fiction, at some point along the writing of the novel, real events and real people found their way into the tale. The confrontation of the self with his/her hitherto hidden ‘Hinduness’ (whatever that means!), the indignity of the Muslim of being in the spotlight and being suspected, the foisting of communal/religious identity on each one – there were friends and others who had these experiences which became mine.

Giriraj: Besides the personal, what were you feeling when writing a novel on/about Gujarat 2002? Would you agree that there was a kind of scenario in which every writer felt a need to ‘say something’ about what was happening. Silence could have been dangerously misunderstood. Did you feel you need to, had to say something?

Geetanjali: I would not want to categorize it as a novel only or specifically about Gujarat 2002. There was the horror of Gujarat and remember I have lived quite many years in that state and have friends there and have experienced with them the communalization there from up close. But it was also the violence and fundamentalism in so many other parts of the world today which hurt us, horrified us, and goaded me to write the novel.

I don’t know whether to call it a ‘need’ but, yes, something – in this case the pain and horror of stupid/sinister blasts – becomes the ‘air’ one is breathing and then that suffocation has to be expressed, ‘lived out’ in a manner of speaking.

Also I do not think for me, there was a personal and an apart from it, motive. The two are entirely merged in literature and perhaps should be too!

Giriraj: With bombings and serial blasts we have entered a unique phase in human history. We are confronting a ‘new kind of victim’. A victim that is victimized not for his/her color of skin, caste, nationality, identity, ideology, property, wealth or lack of it. It’s a victim that is victimized only because s/he happened to be there at a particular place at a particular time. (I also have in mind that most discourses on terror try to understand the phenomenon from the position of its perpetuators i.e. the terrorist and the state, America and the al Qaida and so on.)

Is the identity of the victims in your novel significant for you?

Geetanjali: I do not think in the language you have set your questions in so I am going to be garbled, I fear! But you do seem to have a point about which way the terror discourse usually proceeds – in terms of terror and counter-terror. And you have pointed out to me that I have touched upon some other angle and another ‘victim’ (there must be others too who have engaged with this though!). Yes, for me the stupidity of violence became the focus, the inability of the bomb to discriminate. And so the victim is anyone who happens to be in a particular place at a particular moment, like you say. the ‘victim’ forever then loses her/his chance of an ‘ordinary’ life of ‘ordinary’ dreams and desires and gets embroiled in causes, in politics, in ‘victimhood’. Loses perhaps even a real life!

That is where the novel got its idiosyncratic and/or unhinged tone.

About the identity of the victim, that is exactly the point that emerges – it just does not matter. Proper names became completely irrelevant – locale, nationality, community, caste, person, all.