There’s a mathematics to living in a city. In the Euclidean sense, the sum of all its parts doesn’t make the whole for it involves a complex equation including variables such as class, caste, gender, and language. Therefore, for the marginalised, safety, which is murderously tethered together with crime prevention, is at best a myth. It’s something others possess at their expense. To them, a city is a cold-hearted murder, looking down upon them, frowning at their lack of the instruments needed to navigate it. Something Jean Rhys’ protagonist verbalises in her 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight.
Furthermore, in the modern world, neopatriarchy and hypervigilance add insult to injury, making the notion of safety illusive. When it comes to its representation in contemporary literature, Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2021), Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice (Juggernaut, 2023), and Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women (Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 2023) come to mind.
“Who they were, and what happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind,” notes Faleiro. Her book is based on the 2014 Badayun (a district in Uttar Pradesh) killings of two teenage girls. Finding her choices determined by other people, despite having an array of things on her side, Neda, a journalist in Kapoor’s novel, is still agency-less. Based on American serial killer Ted Bundy, the title of Knoll’s novel is a spin-off from what a judge once noted about Bundy: “You’re a bright young man.”
Though a glimpse of the books noted above offers a limiting view, it’s well-established that violence is gendered. While someone gets to roam scot-free after committing a crime, the wronged are left to attempt to seek justice depending on their location and access to the levers of power. This nuance is often palpable in women’s work. However, in this genre what writers irrespective of their gender hold dear to themselves is an array of adjectives such as pacey, page-turner, and unputdownable, as if dealing with crime is akin to consuming a bar of chocolate for immediate satisfaction. Pause—and hence, reflection—isn’t often considered valuable.
In that sense, Nilanjana S. Roy’s Black River (Context, an imprint of Westland, 2022) is a shapeshifter in genre fiction because it snakes through the murder mystery with deliberate slowness. Unassuming, sensitive, and deeply engrossing, the novel is populated by characters whose inner lives are explored at a principled pace, allowing for an organic unpacking of many themes, ranging from belonging and grief to parenthood and justice. In an interview conducted at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival, Roy shared what rendered authenticity to her work, exploring Delhi neighbourhoods on foot, and more. Edited excerpts:
Could you share why a select few novels get touted as “political” novels, while yours is clearly a political one itself?
The origin of the word political is in the polis (Greek), the people. But I was really writing about the city. Or to a certain extent about citizenship. That’s the question going through Black River: Who belongs, who doesn’t, and who’s told after a certain number of years of belonging that they can’t be part of a particular place? I don’t think I made that conscious linkage in my mind, but it comes back to the hopes the country was based on—liberty, equality, and fraternity. So, if the readers see Black River as a political novel, I’d not disagree but I wouldn’t insist on the label.
As you’ve explored Delhi on foot, especially the low-lying areas near the Yamuna, could you tell us what it’s like to walk around as a woman, accessing a part of reality which may be starkly different from yours, but fundamentally closer to your experiences as a woman. Also, could you share what your conversations with fellow women regarding their relationship with the city were like?
It’s astonishing to explore Delhi as it’s known to be an aggressive city. There exist—as if almost consciously—masculine and feminine spaces. The latter are very few though. But you’re right about one thing: When I go out, I go out with the weight of my privilege almost like a visible cloak around me. The moment I open my mouth, I speak in English. Then, the clothes I wear. Or something simpler than any of it, the confidence. All of it, however, can be a separation and a bridge.
This whole process of walking around Yamuna, which is still a place of wonder for me, started many years ago. I still remember that I had taken a cab. I got out of it and asked the driver to go because I just wanted to see. Within about five minutes of walking, the city dropped away. The city I knew. Standing on clayey banks, feeling the force of the polluted Yamuna, I saw the silvery grey expanse stretching out to God-knows-where and the fishermen with their boats. The women standing there looked at me either with suspicion or welcome. The former came from a doubt: Who’s this freak of nature? What is she doing here with all her freedom? Then, there were others, including a few men, who often helped me map the city, informing me what was safe or unsafe.
The women I met—whether they were labourers, domestic staff, or homeless, their map of the city is very circumscribed. They’ve a fixed bus route. They meet friends at a specific time. Additionally, they’re very resourceful and resilient. They’ve an instinct that allows them to map out a place or a territory quickly. Particularly, the homeless women. The ones I met got into pragmatic relationships often. They’d sleep with some man in exchange for safety, and they’d often say, Even if you’re not homeless and come from a rich, raees family, what are most women marrying for if not for the same safety?
But the conversations that happen when you’re on foot are different from the conversations that happen if you stop the car, and they see you getting out of it.
Then, walking is an art. It’s more equal, and allows you to slow down and live in slow time, as my friend Paul Salopek calls it. Also, conversations don’t work one way. So, if you really want to ask intrusive questions about people’s personal lives, what they think about Delhi, and all of that, then first you’ve to be prepared to be open and vulnerable and get interrogated, too. It’s wonderful that the more vulnerable I became, the less reporting distance I kept between me and everyone I was meeting, the safer I felt. As a result, many different worlds started to open up to me. So, walking alongside being vulnerable, allows you to meet people halfway. However, I wouldn’t encourage women to do this without a thought. I feel the need to say that because it’s unsafe; it’s powerfully unsafe in many areas.
There are distinct markers of heteropatriarchy in your book. For me, one sentence in particular stood out: “Good men make mistakes, Saluja-ji.” I was wondering if you could share how casual sexism is normalised and how people tend to navigate their way around powerful men and often arms of the state like the police.
There are several modes of masculinity in Black River. The police are not as sanitised as they seem to be just because Ombir has a good heart. There’s a lot of violence that he perpetrates, which is part of one’s training and education as a man. But let’s talk about patriarchy. What does it do to men? It puts them in a cage. They don’t even realise how unfree they are. Technically, because they seem to have most of the power, they feel everyone else—women or LGBTQIA+ people are lesser beings, but power isn’t freedom. Suppressing yourself isn’t freedom.
Then, there’s Khalid, Rabia’s husband. His way of being a man is refusing to take any responsibility. He’s true to his own nature and spirit, which is something we don’t talk about. Chand, again, wasn’t based on any such composite traits. While I was often surprised by the fact how stone-hearted some men were about the loss of children (particularly a girl child, brandishing the one-more-burden-off attitude), I also met men whose attitude towards fatherhood started changing, softening as daughters entered their lives. And for Saluja and his associates, up to Jolly Singh, being a man is a simple thing—you can do what you want, and you don’t pay for any consequences.
What advantages do women authors writing crime have over male authors?
Women would never talk to a male reporter the same way they do with women. It takes a while to build up that trust. For a man, it takes to be located in that area and even then, there are prohibitions—how long can you talk, what can you reveal in front of your family, etc. So, on the flip side, we’ve access. But I’m less interested in the classic police procedural. For me, what happens after a crime, the way a society reacts, comes together, or fragments was exciting to explore and with that confidence from Black River, I’m going to have a lot of fun with the next one.
This interview was conducted when the writer was on a sponsored trip to Jaipur by the Deccan Herald to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024.
Unless stated otherwise, all images belong to Saurabh Sharma.