‘Ships that
pass’, Shashi Deshpande’s latest novel took me back in time, with its mood, the
characters and the situation to the summers when I perched on the stairs of my
grandparents’ house and devoured magazines after my aunts finished reading
them.
Shashi is
pleased when I tell her this; “The story was first published in Eve’s Weekly
and yes, it is set in the 80s.” Reconstructing the story from fragments of
carbon copies that she had typed on her Olivetti, she chose to keep it true to its
time and not contemporise it, though she has changed the ending slightly.
Having
published over 10 novels, four books of children’s stories, two collections of
short stories, two translations and a book of essays, she has another crime
story coming out in August, ‘If I die today’ and a novel next April.
“I started off
writing short stories and have written about 80 of them. There are some that
stayed with me and ‘Ships that pass’ and ‘If I die today’ are a couple of them
that I wanted to publish as novels. When writers get old and have nothing new
to say, they bring out rubbish from the past. I wanted to publish these before
I get older and while I am still active as a writer.”
As we chat, I am
moving around picking through my bookshelf for her books and find her first
crime novel was ‘Come up & be dead’. It is a find indeed - published in
1983 and sold for Rs 15, it is out of print and much in demand among students
writing about her for their PhD theses.
Shashi says she
has always been interested in mystery novels as crime happens when human nature
is pushed to the extreme. She gave up writing crime fiction as the plotting was
getting entangled. “I bump them off (the victims) quite easily but I never know
how to end the stories,” she says laughingly.
Crime fiction
was an enjoyable experiment for her, inspired over time by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, PD James, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. “I love
their books because they are specific to where the authors live. I don’t like
people who write for the world market,” she says, dismissing the Dan Browns of
the world and sadly, my own favourite Alexander Mccall Smith.
She regrets
that writers like Sayers have not got their due for their writing ability;
having been slotted as crime writers, while the works could easily fit into
literary fiction, she says.
One of the
reasons that she felt compelled to rework her crime stories into novels is the
claim that language does not matter anymore. “Young writers are hailed for
dumbing down their writing for their readers. This upset me very much. As a
writer your first loyalty is to the language that has developed over centuries.
Why should someone centre a book around words like crap, shit and fuck?”
Shashi was
determined to answer this claim by bringing out a book that is easy to read and
has good language. She has.
Sandhya Mendonca writes a weekly column for Oheraldo
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