After close to two decades of brandishing her metaphorical claws on authors, literary critic Nilanjana Roy has decided to get her hands dirty with The Wildings, her first novel about a clan of cats who walk the alleys of Nizamuddin. At Amici, the Italian eatery in Khan Market, over Blue Mushroom pizza and Caffé Mocha, she insisted there was a lot human beings could learn from cats. Excerpts from the interview:
In predator parlance, what took you so long to draw first blood with fiction?
It was because I never saw myself as a writer. As far as I was concerned the job description in my head – whether I was in publishing or journalism – was of somebody who read books and got paid for it. I thought it was the biggest scam ever. In my early 30s, two things happened. One was the tyranny of freelance life. When you are producing column after column on a treadmill, there is no time to think about your own work. The other was that I didn’t feel I had that much to write about. I wrote a small story that was absolutely dire about this family in Kolkata and it was so very stiff and talcum-powdered. When I was 33, I began the chronicles of a cat for my nephew. I was very good at putting my writing away and not looking at it.
Why’ve you chosen a first novel with just animals as protagonists?
They were so much more interesting than humans, they really were. Most of the research was done walking around Delhi and Bombay and other cities. Initially, when I spent time watching the cats and the cheels and the dogs, I thought their worlds were totally separated – the cheels had the skies, the cats had their own world, the dogs had the parks. At some point I realised that they strongly intersect and how humans are fairly irrelevant to their world.
