Dressed in a delicate silk sari, Shinie Antony comes across as dainty and charming, an image belied by the severe themes that one associates with her writing. In the city to launch her new book, Seance on a Sunday Afternoon, Sunday Herald caught up with the Commonwealth Prize winning author for an interview.

Your stories are rarely light reading... do your experiences as a journalist figure in your books?

Let me just draw a parallel between journalism and fiction writing. Your gut feeling matters in both. A good journalist and a good author should both be invisible. Just like I would hate a good news story to be marred by the personal view of the journalist, a good story teller must be part of the upholstery, the technical experience of story telling. A storyteller must be read, not seen...

And I have never been a social journalist so no to your second question.

‘Pregnant and Barefoot’ explores dysfunctional motherhood, ‘Planet Polygamous’ explores betrayal of body and mind, ‘Seance on a Sunday Afternoon’ describes the ways modern man copes with private hells... What would utopia look like to you?

(Laughs) Utopia doesn’t exist.

But if it did...

You know there’s a story in this collection called Pink. It’s about a woman (in jail) who can officially be called ‘of unsound mind’. Utopia is, I think, when you are out of your conscious mind. When you are not aware of pain — external pain, internal pain. When there is that true detachment called nirvana.
In the story, the woman keeps disappearing mentally into the colour pink. When real life is so horrible that it’s unliveable she escapes into this colour in her mind. So to me that is Utopia, when you can get out of what is happening to your body and mind into another dimension.

Are you a method writer?

I’m a very character driven writer rather than a narrative driven writer, which is why I write short stories and not novels. In fact in Barefoot and pregnant it doesn’t say ‘index’, it says ‘cast’... If you go through my stories (the protagonist) is someone at a very internally dramatic moment of his life— in some sort of a dilemma. That dilemma is what I delve into.

Do you immerse yourself in the characters or maintain a level of objectivity?

For any writer, objectivity comes in stringing together certain characteristics of a character, certain situations. Writing, like everything else, is subjective in the sense you are what you write and you write what you are.
How would you describe yourself?

I would like to be more cheerful. I have this really bad habit of lingering on the words of certain people. I get intimidated by articulate people. At the same time I’m obsessed by them. I have to maintain a very difficult balance between my obsession and my feelings of insecurity.

Have you ever felt vulnerable while writing? In the sense that you are putting a piece of yourself out there...
People tell me that my writing is vulnerable; maybe because I’m not afraid (in words) to put myself out there.

A male writer once said writing is like unzipping yourself and saying, “is this enough?” For a female writer also it is like that. You have to be truthful.

Being a woman does carry baggage however much we may aspire towards gender equality. If we understand that the genders are different then we are closer to understanding that gap and maybe closing  it.

How autobiographical are the stories.

I feel all writers are to an extent subjective.  It’s a very personal choice we make, that I will use this word, or this phrase, but autobiographical as in replicating my life, I don’t think so.

In that sense what about your new book ‘Seance on a Sunday Afternoon.’

This book is about loneliness and urban isolation which all of us experience, so it is autobiographical in that at some point, one does feel that sense of insecurity and that sense of being far away from things and people one loves but the situations are not the same... There is a breast cancer patient in Monkey darling, an old man neglected by his daughter in law in Sofa. All these stories are about people under the headlights of social isolation.

Why short stories?

There are some people who sketch, some use charcoal and some use oil. So this medium is natural for me. If you want to blame me for that then I would say it’s because I am lazy. I like to tie up ends faster and these stories are very mood-based. Once I come out of that mood I cannot recapture it. In fact for any writer, writing is like a call of nature, its like ‘peeing’. They cannot (not) write. Whether my stories are good or bad I cannot help myself.

What’s next? 

I’m working on a non-fiction on Indian English...