Nisha Susan recently engaged in a lively online chat with writer Krupa Ge and said that her book was initially meant to focus on the Internet and its good, bad and terrible activities, rather than on women who used it. Then, one of the stories in the book was carried by a newspaper and it saw an outpour of women who wrote in, totally identifying with, empathising with and cheering on the female characters in the story. She then started to see the merits of focussing on women and their Internet practices and thus the decision was made.
Susan flies the banner for the south of the country quite unapologetically, even proudly, and says her use of colloquialisms without a glossary or reference note is deliberate. “I work the explanation into the story, so the reader gets it,” she stated. While on that subject, she rued the fact that so much was happening in the India of many tongues and trying to express that richness in flat English was, to her, like navigating a swamp.
Clarifying that her politics don’t need to necessarily match that of her characters’, Susan said she was both flummoxed and entertained when readers credited both the language and the politics of any given character in her work with her own, thinking they must automatically elide.
Is this book really a fun read, she was asked. As Ge put it, it is about people doing seriously messed-up stuff. Susan fielded that, saying they were admittedly anti-romantic stories written up pretty much how she would tell it to you if she was sitting next to you somewhere, someplace.
Replying to the what’s-next-on-the-anvil question, Susan quipped that she had missed quite a few deadlines already and so was in ‘a black hole of shame, guilt and regret’ regarding that next project. She backed it up with a story of how Sophia Loren was told she could get out of a sticky situation citing her pregnancy. The pregnancy factor parallel here was that Susan had pushed the first deadline of her book as far as it could be pushed because she was pregnant at the time. And then, along came the second deadline and she was pregnant again. “I’ve come to the end of that road, I think,” she laughed.
The piece de resistance of this online conversation was Susan’s account of how a movie producer called her to say he wanted to make a film on the Pink Chaddi movement. Only, he said, it would have to be led by a man, because it wouldn’t be realistic to show a woman leading the movement.