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INTRO (00:04)
From the Godrej DEI Lab, welcome to India Included. In November 2025, we teamed up with the wonderful folks at the Mumbai Lit Life Festival to curate sessions that brought reading, writing, and literature into conversation with our vision for a more inclusive workplace and world. This episode is a recording of the session that I, Supriya Nair, had the privilege of moderating with three incredible authors, Amrita Mahale, Jane Borges, and Pronoti Datta. We discussed the working women in their books, reflecting through their writing, a city built on labour, and we examined their own literary lives, balancing real and imagined worlds.
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Supriya Nair 00:55
Pron just met me in the green room and said, "So like you do this all the time?" I said, "No, actually I do it when my friends are involved, but, or, you know, when it's work." And in this case, I'm sitting here on stage with my friends and this is part of work because I work for the Godrej DEI lab. So never let anyone tell you that you can't have your cake and eat it too. The running theme of what we're going to talk about in my mind is work, which I know sounds extremely general and really broad. But we have these three wonderful writers who all have books out this year or will very soon and who lead really extraordinary and diverse working lives, not only as artists, but also in fields outside literature. And so the somewhat tricky thing that we're going to try and do in this session is tell you a little bit about their new books and celebrate them, because that's what all you wonderful readers are here for. But also really explore how work has shaped their books, their writing lives, and their lives as women. Controversial statements. Pronoti's book, we'll do recency bias, sort of. Pronoti has just brought out a book called In The Beginning There Was Bombay Duck, which is a wonderful history of this city through food. And so it takes you through this beautiful, you know, the story of Bombay and its food sort of through a timeline, interpolated with how its communities have come to live here and work here and eat here. Thank you so much for writing the book. Do you want to give us an introduction to it since I think almost nobody here has read it yet?
Pronoti Datta (02:51)
Hi everyone. So In The Beginning There Was Bombay Duck is really a series of essay style chapters on Bombay's founding communities. And it talks about how people like the Pathare Prabhus and the Gujaratis, Sindhis, Iranians came to the city, set up home in the city and how they brought their foods to the city and also how their foods transformed in Bombay. So it's very much about the Bombay plate. It transformed in Bombay by way of ingredients, for example, that were local to the Konkan coast. I mean, we often forget that Bombay is the North Konkan. You we think of ourselves as this island city in many ways, but we're very rooted in the North Konkan. And so, yeah, so it transformed by way of ingredients, by way of practices, and it sort of became something else and something unique in Bombay. So it's really… It's really the story of the city's founding communities and how they ate and how they created a dining culture in the city.
Supriya Nair (03:56)
And how interesting for a city that has been sometimes burdened and sometimes glorified with the idea of the melting pot, which is actually something you have spent much of your career writing about as a journalist and as an editor. I've loved your features about the city and not a few of them have really engaged with the food culture that we've lived with. Can you kind of give us, you know, the big picture of how we went from there In The Beginning There Was Bombay Duck
Pronoti Datta (04:28)
Well, so I'm from Bombay. I've been born and brought up in Bombay, but I really fell in love with the city when I joined a magazine. My first journalism job was in a magazine called Time Out Mumbai. And Time Out Mumbai was run by a bunch of Bombay deewanas - Naresh Fernandez was my editor. And I had no idea of the history of the city in a meaningful way before I joined Time Out. For example, I didn't know about the Samyukta Maharashtra movement till I joined Time Out. And that's just not something that they taught us in our history books.
Supriya Nair (05:03)
Really indicting the South Bombay upbringing here.
Pronoti Datta (05:05)
Yeah. Yeah. But I learned a lot about the city in Time Out. That's when I sort of developed a love for the city. And Time Out had a... So my beat was theater. I used to write on theater. But I also did a bunch of restaurant reviews and some food features. And that's when sort of the interest really was kindled in me. And then... and Time Out was also about sort of local history. So really sort of going out there, you know, just sussing out these stories. And then after that, I joined the Times of India and that's when I started writing a food column and I started cooking. And that's when my interest really sort of intensified, but Time Out was the crucible of my interest in food writing.
Supriya Nair (05:49)
And now that you mention it, think that sense that every small story has many layers to it is something that a great magazine like Time Out and think many great magazines really do end up giving you successfully.
Pronoti Datta (06:01)
Yeah, mean, like the city has so many subcultures. Like I remember a couple of examples. One of my colleagues, Che, who now at... its GQ, he wrote this amazing story about Nigerians living in Bombay. And that's just not something that you, I mean, they're in the papers for all the wrong reasons, but like you don't really read about their culture and the city. And here he was, you know, writing about their food, like a couple of Nigerian restaurants, which no one knew about. We did this fantastic cover story on the Chinese in the city. aside from writing about manchurian and interviewing Nelson Wang, there's some fascinating stories that we uncovered about the community and about their food.
Supriya Nair (06:41)
Yeah, I learned Baba Ling's real name from your book, which is amazing. And on the subject of journalism, I'm going to jump to Jane, not, I mean, you know, she's not clearing pages for the Mumbai Mirror, which she runs today. So we're lucky to have her. We're also lucky that her new book, which is almost out, but not yet, is something that she can talk about. It's called Mog Asundi. Jane, what can you tell us about the book?
Jane Borges (07:13)
Well, thank you. I've told you this before, Supriya, I love to listen to you when you're moderating. You're one of my favorite moderators. And I also love to be on the other side and not to be on this part of the panel. On this part.
Supriya Nair 07:23
Sorry, sorry, on the spot.
Jane Borges 07:25
Well, Mog Asundi. So it's a Konkani title, but it is an English novel. It's not a Konkani novel. I'm just grateful to my editors for having allowed me to keep that name of the title. What does Mog Asundi mean? It's actually a farewell greeting that Goans or even Konkani-speaking people in Karnataka would say when you're saying goodbye, instead of goodbye, which basically means "let love stay between the two of us", which is such a powerful, such two powerful, beautiful words I personally feel. And we don't use the word love so often as I assume you would use in this language in Konkani. How did I come upon the idea? So I think it was an outcome of the love, really, that the reader showed Bombay Balchao. So thank you for that.
Supriya Nair (08:15)
This is Jane's amazing debut novel, takes us through a neighborhood, an actual historical neighborhood in Bombay through fictionalized stories. And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later.
Jane Borges (08:24)
Yes, so it was my neighborhood. I belonged here and it was a story that I really wanted to tell because I noticed that this neighborhood was really was not part of the city's consciousness, but the more I read history books, you know, when I was doing research for my journalism, Cavel, featured very often. And that is how Bombay Balchao happened. And I wasn't really thinking of writing another Bombay novel at that point. And one always fears getting stereotyped as a Bombay novelist. Now I don't think too much about it. But back then, I was already a city journalist. So you don't want to tie everything in. But soon after Bombay Balchao happened, I started getting very, very curious about my community. And I don't talk about it from a very religious space, but community, the Catholic community in Bombay and what they represented, especially in the south of Bombay, because you have so many such churches and so many such neighborhoods that were part of the city's consciousness at some point, and they don't exist in that form anymore. And that is how I started an oral history project called Soboikar, where I was documenting the stories of Catholic inhabitants of these spaces, or who lived here at one point. And the more I researched, and this was in 2021, the more I was kind of interviewing people, and it was done in partnership with the Citizens Archive of India, I was discovering newer stories. And it was surprising how one thing led to another. And I'm really grateful for my stint at Sunday Midday, because it continued to keep me informed about my city. And I remember this one time that I'd gone to Goa for my book launch two years later because my book released in the pandemic. And so I really didn't have any launch after the Mumbai launch. So I went for this two years later and there I met this journalist, Frederick Noronha that many Goans would know of. And he told me, you know, there is this Tiatr, which is a Konkani musical that is being staged in Panjim. It's called Cavelchi Sundari, which means the Belle of Cavel. And it's being staged to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of the father of Tiatr, João Agostinho Fernandes. And so it was the first play he ever wrote, and it elevated him to the stature of the father, as the father of the Tiatr, which also again has its origins in Bombay. I couldn't watch the play then, but I came back, told my editor about it, and then I ended up writing a story about that for Sunday Midday. And the director of that play asked me if he could bring Cavelchi Sundari to Bombay, to Cavel, because that's where its true roots lie. The writer must have been inspired by this neighborhood to name a play after it. And this is, I'm talking about 130 years ago. So he brought the play to Cavel, very few in the audience. There were more people on the stage than there were in the audience. And that only goes to show how small these neighborhoods have become. But that really got me thinking about Tiatr. That was my first play, Konkani play that I was watching. It was a very different kind of play because it follows the folk theatre format, which is non-linear. You have plot and then you have a subplot which is a comical plot and then you have music in between which is not related to either of these plots that, could be about political, that could be political in nature, social in nature and they're called Kantars or Kantara. And I knew like when I decided to take a sabbatical that this is the story I wanted to write and this was going to be about the Tiatr but it was going to be also about another important neighborhood in the south of Bombay, which is very close to Cavel, and which was at one point part of Cavel, which is called Sonapur in Dhobi Talao. And Sonapur, recently discovered the late Gillian Tindall. Her book, The City of Gold, which is the Bombay biography of the 1970s, it's the bible, got its name from Sonapur. And it is a metaphor for, she used it as a metaphor for Bombay, the city of gold, but Sonapur really is the city of the dead, the land of the dead, because there was a graveyard there, a British graveyard, and it was the graveyard for residents of Cavel. And at some point, the population of Catholics increased to such an extent that they needed space. So you had a settlement over this graveyard. So you have Sonapur. But in the mid-20th century, this place was the nucleus of the social, political, cultural consciousness of Goans. So the Goan liberation movement, you had many freedom fighters coming from this part of town. I was lucky to meet one of them when I went to Panjim. And there were stories that you just opened my own understanding of the city, something I had not known about. And so yeah, Mog Asundi is about that. It's told though the family, a family that lived in the 1970s that's at the cusp of a lot of changes, so Tiatr is big at this point. Goa has just been liberated from a 400-year-old Portuguese rule and how it shapes and influences their lives in old Bombay.
Supriya Nair 13:49
Why is it not in our hands already? When's it coming out?
Jane Borges (13:56)
So the edits just began and one of the reasons why I am free to take…
Supriya Nair 13:57
I withdraw my question.
Jane Borges 14:00
Because this last week I've been working on the edits and one cannot say where it will lead but it is coming out next year for sure.
Supriya Nair 14:08
All right, we're holding you to it.
Jane Borges 14:09
Thank you.
Supriya Nair 14:10
Thanks. Amrita, oh my gosh, we're back again. I had the great good fortune of being in conversation with Amrita earlier when her book, Real Life, released a couple of months ago. An absolutely thorny, complex, arresting novel about how women disappear and how they find themselves and how they find each other. Sorry for the very vague introduction, but I'll let Amrita say more. But since I've already asked you many of the questions I wanted to ask you on that occasion, I'm going to jump into where you are right now. You're at that point, I think, in the life of the book, where you are living, you know, three, like three parts of your writing life. There's a part of you that wrote the book and that there's a second part of you that is working to bring it out to the world and to readers. And then there's the third part, which all of you share as well, which is what you do that's not writing, that's your actual day job.
Amrita Mahale (15:13)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Supriya. It's wonderful to be in conversation again. And I feel like even Jane and I, our literary lives have been very intertwined for the last six years. And this may be the fifth or the sixth panel that Jane and I have done together. At least one has been with Supriya as well. That may have been virtual. So yeah, Real Life came out about three months ago at the end of July. And I'm not joking, in the months since then, there have been just two weekends when I've not had a book event. I have done five book conversations across three cities. There have been three LitFests, about four video interviews, video podcasts. So I'm very exhausted. Next weekend, I think, is the last book event for a long time.
Supriya Nair 15:58
Did I not tell you we're doing....kidding.
Amrita Mahale 16:01
Yeah, so you talked about the three parts of being a writer. Only two of those parts are currently happening. There's no writing happening yet. As for my day job, this didn't come up in my bio, but I am also a technologist. I worked in the AI for social impact, tech for social good space for about seven years now. And currently I work at a non-profit in the maternal and child health space. So this is a non-profit that builds technology-based solutions to reduce maternal and child mortality. And I lead Product and Innovation there. So very different from my creative life, but also in some ways not very different. And we talked about this at the launch as well. But for my work, I spend a lot of time talking to, learning about women whose lives are very different from my own to understand how they access information, how they make decisions about their health, about their family's health, and their general sense of agency, and agency when it comes to their own lives. And what's really struck me in the last few years of doing fieldwork is that a lot of women in this country, especially married women, are not allowed to sustain friendships, female friendships. And there are many barriers that get in the way. Women usually migrate after marriage. They may not have phones that let them keep in touch with friends. When they have phones, there are gatekeepers who may frown upon frivolous things such as keeping in touch with friends. And women who manage to overcome these obstacles and keep up their friendships are also empowered in many other aspects of their lives. And it's easy to say that if you have the sense of agency, if you have the strength to go against the grain and keep in touch with your friends, then you're probably a more empowered person to start with. But that's not so clear to me. It's very hard to say which is cause and which is effect. And our friends, they show us different ways of being in the world. They show us how to take up space, how to challenge power. So I have only realized this in the last three months as I have started talking more about real life, that my work has also informed my writing in ways that I could not really connect before. I am a very intuitive, instinct-driven writer. So there are a lot of subterranean forces that I'm not aware of when I write. So I was so impressed, Jane, that you could talk about your book so beautifully, so eloquently. And you're a few months, hopefully just a few months from launch. I could not speak coherently about my book at all till a few weeks, maybe a few months after it came out because I was drawing these connections myself as I started talking about the book. So the connections between my day job and my creative life have begun to become apparent to me now. And I also have a short story that came out in an anthology that was released earlier today. It's called The Only City. And my short story follows a young woman who's a data annotator. And she's a data annotator for an AI firm. And she's a first generation white collar worker in her family, a high school graduate. Again, this is directly informed by the work I do. And one of my deep interests is the inner lives of women and the inner lives of working women and how their work shapes their relationship with the world. That's been a constant theme since Milk Teeth, and I suppose...
Supriya Nair 19:44
...which was your first novel
Amrita Mahale 19:45
Which was my first novel.
Supriya Nair 19:46
Which brought you into conversation with Jane because it's also now assuming legendary status as a novel about the city.
Amrita Mahale 19:53
Thank you. Thank you. So yeah, so now I've realized that my work with women and children fuels and feeds my curiosity about the lives of women. So I am now beginning to see harmony in both halves of my life.
Supriya Nair 20:06
I think that's so fantastic because the arts and the sciences aren't really as separate as where taught they are, but certainly aitai and I think through real life, you get the sense of how the work we do and the creativity and the originality we bring to it really depends so much on choice, empowerment versus drudgery, obligation. Again, maybe those things aren't really very clearly demarcated as well, but that certainly, I think those are certainly the two parts of every working life that tend to come into conflict constantly. And all three of you have a great deal in common, but one thing all of you do is work for a living so that you can write your books. And I'm sure every young writer who comes up to you and many readers who come up to you at festivals like this want to know how you do it because it seems impossible before you begin to actually be a writer. How do you respond when people ask you, "I want to be a writer, but I'm never going to have the time. I'm never going to have the resources." Amrita, let's stay with you.
Amrita Mahale 21:18
Yeah, I mean, I would say you have to start by paying attention to the world and find your voice and keep finding it over and over again. I also have a more practical answer because I myself was in, you know, at these crossroads about 10 years ago when I wanted to commit myself more fully to writing. That's when Milkteeth was just an idea. And what was really useful for me was to carve aside time. Unfortunately, that could only be on weekends, maybe some evenings. And then I had to guard that time fiercely. And I had a set of rituals around writing. I set targets for myself. So I was very, very goal driven that I had to write a certain number of words every day, a certain number of words every month. So that really helped. I have to remind myself of all those rules now because I want to start working on a third novel and I'm at the idea stage, at the concept stage and this is the most wonderful stage.
Supriya Nair 22:21
But you're also in the festival stage, on the podcast stage.
Amrita Mahale 22:23
Yes, yes. But like I said, there's going to be a short break, I hope. So at this stage, you know, there is just a germ of an idea, just a seed of an idea, and there's a lot of gravitational pull. And everything that you read, everything that you see here seems to be connected to what you want to write. And even yesterday, I was at the LitFest World Day and had so many conversations that I believed were a sign from the universe. I was like, this is exactly what I want to write about. This is exactly what I want to write about. So this is the fun stage. The hard part is the actual writing. It does get easier because you know you've done it once, so you can do it again. But in the here and now, writing is not easy for me. Maybe Jane, who does it much more regularly, may find it easy.
Supriya Nair 23:12
Yeah, Jane is also in that complicated position where she does, like you bring out stories, you bring out a paper for a living, and then you have to go and be in this isolated moment of creation for your fiction.
Jane Borges 23:27
It's so hard.. It's so hard. Yeah. When I did Bombay Balchao, I think the expectations, I didn't have so much expectations of myself with that book. Neither was I expecting too much from the readers. I was covering books in Sunday Midday, one of the beats I was covering and I'd seen good books, great books come and go. And so I knew not to attach too much importance to a book, even if it was precious to me. In a sense, I was not looking at it as great sales and it will be a best-selling book. I wasn't thinking about that. So I really had fun with that book and I did it while I had a full-time job. I had two full-time jobs, think in the sense in two separate places. I started this book in Muscat in Oman because I briefly moved there for two years and I was working in a newspaper there. And I had ample time there because there people take their work-life balance very seriously. The paper doesn't run on two days of the weekend. So you can imagine. The paper doesn't come out for 10 days during Eid and there are two Eid celebrations. So you can imagine I had a great time. So I started a major part of...
Supriya Nair 24:32
A lot of journalists looking up Oman visas.
Jane Borges 24:36
You should go there. You should go there. No, but then I ran away. I came back in two years. That was because it was, it gets boring after a point and a Bombay journalist forever, a Bombay journalist. So I came back, I'd written half the book and then I got involved with Sunday Midday. I'd given the book to some early readers and they didn't think too much of it. So I shelved Bombay Balchao. I focused on my journalism and I did that for a couple of years before I met my agent, Anish Chandy, who wanted me to do another Mafia Queen's kind of book which I was not...
Supriya Nair 25:07
This was the first book that Jane brought out with the great Hussain Zahedi called Mafia Queens of Mumbai, which is exactly about what you think it is, was women in the underworld.
Jane Borges 25:15
Yeah. And I wasn't interested in another Mafia kind of book. I was really by then rooted because I was... the kind of work that I was doing for Sunday Midday, I was very involved in the city and culture. And so I had this book. I asked him if he was interested in reading it. And Anish got back to me in a couple of days and said, :Let's do it." And so I had to start writing again. So there was no option because I'd shown him half my book and then I had to do the rest. And it took me another two years. But I don't know how I managed because I think I was just having so much fun with that book that when that book came out and it just felt so effortless. I think it all started sinking in when I had to start working on a second book and then the pressure, yes, the pressure was really high and so I had to take that sabbatical. I loved my work, I loved my job and I still miss what I did but I'm back in Mirror, different papers represent different things. so Mirror represents something great, Midday represents something. But I left it because I had to work on that book. And because you have a full-time writing job, it becomes very difficult to come back and then write a novel. So it is almost impossible. So I needed to take at least some time off to know what I was doing, because I had all these ideas. I knew I wanted to write. I had all the material available with me. I was just not moving. I tried to put pen to paper and nothing came out. And what came out disappointed me. And I said, before I start disappointing myself more, let me just take this break and focus on the book. So a good one and a half years and I was lucky I got a scholarship, not scholarship, a fellowship to Scotland to complete at least the first draft of the manuscript. So yeah, the book came out at a time when I was, and I was very anxious. It's not easy being a full-time writer working on a novel. You're always trying to find small gigs to keep the money going and coming. So yeah, would not call it romantic at all. It's a very, very anxious phase. You're loving what you're doing. You're getting your freedom. You're able to write, but you also have to figure out where you get your bread and butter. So it is hard. It is definitely hard.
Supriya Nair 27:32
So, so far what I'm hearing is have very clear goals, know, shut life out so that you can work on those goals. Find a great agent, but save up so that you can like...
Jane Borges 27:42
Yeah, you have to save up. I actually planned it.
Supriya Nair 27:44
Save up so you can take time off.
Jane Borges 27:45
Yes, I had to plan that.
Supriya Nair27:46
Got it. Pron, what do you say to people?
Pronoti Datta 27:50
I mean similar things really because you have to be willing to give up a lot of things, you have to be…
Supriya Nair 27:56
Very very good advice, yea.
Pronoti Datta27:57
You have to be willing to give up your social life. You can't watch every new show that comes out or every new movie. So you're not going to be on top of things. You're not going to be on top of, I don't know, reels or social media trends. So you won't know what your friends are talking about and you have to be okay with that because otherwise there's simply no way to get any writing done if you're working full time. And it really helps when you take sabbaticals and when you have bit of time to devote entirely to your writing. But I do think that having a full-time job instills a certain discipline in you. I mean, it makes it harder. It makes writing a book harder. But I feel that because there's so much pressure on you to get the book out, pressure that you're putting on yourself, I think you… You're just sort of wiser with your time in a sense. You're wiser with your weekends and with your evenings. You want to say something?
Supriya Nair 28:52
It reminds me of the character in your first book, Half Blood, who doesn't need to work and is a trust fund baby...
Pronoti Datta 29:01
She's…
Supriya Nair 29:02
...who then becomes a trust fund grandpa, who has been writing a book about rogue Parsis for about 40 years.
Pronoti Datta 29:10
Right, right, right. Yea exactly.
Supriya Nair29:11
and then... But it still isn't out by the end of the book. So I see what you're saying about some discipline..
Pronoti Datta 29:16
Yea, absolutely. You have to be...
Supriya Nair 29:18
...being necessary.
Pronoti Datta 29:18
Yeah, you know, it's like, we know when we were in class 10, there's so much such a premium that's placed on your ICSE exams that you really study for your class 10 exams. After that, it doesn't matter what you get. But that's the attitude that you have to have when you're writing a book.
Supriya Nair 29:34
Shut the years of the school children in this.
Pronoti Datta 29:38
You know, have to have a timetable, you have to have a schedule that really helps. It's sort of, it's harder, but at the same time, the most meaningful things are the hardest things to do and the most painful things to do, I mean, you know, like climbing a mountain, for example, or just sort of, I don't know, doing CrossFit. It's really hard, but at the same time, pleasurable, you know, in a sense.
Supriya Nair 30:01
Yea. Well, you know, ladies, Gabriel Garcia Marquez just got himself a wife who would work while he wrote. So, you're all really taking the hard route over here. As you were speaking, I was reminded of how many feminists say that they hate when people ask questions about what is your work-life balance like? Possibly because I think, you know, when, when it's asked in a magazine, i feels like, you're taking away from someone's professional accomplishments and moving this into the realm of the personal. Why do you care? But I also think that that is for those of you who are writing or engaged in creative work, your work-life balance is really the only thing you think about because it is so essential for you to have time and resources to put into something whose output is not, I mean, you know, it's not a number at the end of a balance sheet. And so I think credit to the objections to this. I do think that more men should be asked about their work-life balance so that we know, you I don't know how many hours they spend parenting or whatever. But is this a question that you've been asked a lot about how you manage things? Or was this the first time?
Jane Borges 31:19
No, I get asked that. And especially...
Supriya Nair 31:20
You do. Do you hate it?
Jane Borges 31:22
No, I don't think too much about it, but I feel that I got asked this a lot when I came out with Bombay Balchao because I had a full time working job at that point when I came out with that book. But I feel as women, we are always working and a lot of the work that we do is unpaid.
Supriya Nair 31:40
Absolutely
Jane Borges31:41
And this is as working mothers, working wives, working daughters, working sisters. It's just... constant work and balancing that with a job, with a writing career is difficult, but we somehow manage these different working lives. And I give ourselves a lot of credit for that because it takes a lot of work. Working takes a lot of work and working in these different, for most part, we don't get paid for that, right? So yeah.
Supriya Nair 32:13
That's right.
Pronoti Datta 32:14
So you know, Rebecca Solnit, she was asked how she was so prolific. You know, how did she put out all those books and essays? And she said, "You know, this is the reason that I've never really been in a relationship or stayed away from relationships. It's just easier when you're single." And I mean, this is a bit of a provocative thing to say, but it's kind of true.
Supriya Nair 32:34
It is true.
Pronoti Datta 32:39
It is true. So like Half Blood, I single when I wrote Half Blood. And for the bulk of Bombay Daak, I was single. So it was, you're really just responsible for yourself and your time and no one else's. So even with a job, the pressures of a job, et cetera, I gotta say, it makes things easier.
Amrita Mahale 32:59
Yeah, and I…
Supriya Nair 33:00
Not putting you on this part.
Amrita Mahale 33:03
No, I have a child, my five year old is in the audience. So of the 10-12 events I've done so far, this is the first one he's attending.
Supriya Nair 33:13
Huge honor to have him here. And he's not watching Paw Patrol.
Amrita Mahale 33:20
And yeah, so he was born about a year and a half into real life. And that's when things got real. And there was very little writing that happened for the next year and a half. And no, I think this question is really a great question. And I had a WhatsApp group with a few writer friends, two of whom I've actually never met, but we all had books that came out around the same time. and all of us had young children under the age of one or two. So much of what we talked about on that WhatsApp group was, "I'm struggling, this is really hard for me, is it like this for you too?" And that was such a tremendous source of support for me to know that there were others in the same boat. So think this is an important conversation. And I have male peers as well who have young children. It didn't occur to me at all to… ask them to join this group. It's not the same at all. So I'm very glad to have this conversation. I'm happy to have this conversation. So if there are new parents, new mothers in the audience who have creative aspirations, I do want to tell them it is difficult. It's difficult for everyone. And what you can do is do your best, ask for help, and give yourself time, right? It is a phase. It passes. And you will emerge a a stronger person at the end of it. You will be a more creative person. I feel like I lost my capacity for language for a good year after my son was born. My brain just didn't work in the same way did before. But now I say it with pride - My brain doesn't work the same way it did before. It's very different. It's magical. It's a new way of thinking. So yeah, it's hard, but I think I'm also a better writer for it.
Supriya Nair 35:09
Yeah, you have the advantage of having both real life and this wonderful family. I think those are all really good and pointed forms of approaching something that is very hard for everyone. You know, being alone in a cabin and banging out a book is also very hard. But I think one of the things that I hope that what you've all said helps us take away is the sense of how little structural support exists for those of us who want to bring art into the world. And that has always been the case. But if we want to work towards a better future, I think one of the things we should think and talk about and maybe demand is ways in which we can make this easier ⁓ for us to bring art and creativity into the world and literature. I can't ignore the elephant in the room, which is this city, which some of you have already started talking about. And which I studiously avoided asking Amrita about because I know that she spent a long time talking about the city and how it figures in her work in her first novel, Milk Teeth. And real life is not about that and is not set in Bombay. Nonetheless, I think this, I'm going to bring it up so that we can expand from there because this is among other things, a city of working women. There is Shilpa Phadke and Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade's book in which I think they did a study of the gender breakdown at Churchgate station, I may be misremembering this, and they found that maybe about 28% of the crowd that you see at a train station like Churchgate is women, which doesn't feel like a lot. And yet, whether relative to other parts of India or even, you know, for those of us who step out, step out of a train, it is. It feels like there are other people like you out there in the crowd. The session after this is going to be about Rahul Bhattacharya's wonderful novel, Real Song. And there's a crucial scene in it where a woman steps out at VT station after having spent her life, you know, elsewhere in rural, suburban India. And that feeling of liberation that comes upon her because she's like, "I'm here and this is a city of women. There are so many women around me." It's very real. Help me understand how you're threading these things together - gender, work, the city that you all live in and inhabit and write about. How does it come together for you?
Jane Borges 37:39
Okay, I will. Since you spoke about the physical presence of women on the street, I grew up in Muscat and I had a very sheltered life. So my life was from the school bus to the home and then in a car. I never saw the city on my feet is what is and you know, and when I say it, it's hard to put it in words, but I remember when I came back as a 16 year old and there was this time, there was this day once, when my brothers were staying in Andheri, I was staying in South Bombay because my parents were still in Oman and we were living with our aunts. And so my aunts had come over to Andheri and meet your brothers this weekend. And so that was the first time I was taking a train on my own. And I took the train from Marine Lines and to Andheri and then figured my way on the bus. And for me, that was the most liberating feeling that I'd experienced in my life, just to be able to do this on my own. And it's so vivid. I was 16, and I can still feel how exhilarating that feeling was for me. And that is the day I felt like I belonged to the city because of how it made me feel, how liberated it made me feel. And I feel that for a lot of women here, we are very, very lucky. Because I remember going back again to work for two years in Oman, I said, in 2013. And you go with the same. It's muscle memory, right? You assume you can walk around in the streets, and it's just something that you could do. And I would take these tea breaks between work, and I would go just loiter. You talk about Sameera - Why loiter? And I would see these men roll their car windows and just look at me and stare. I don't think they were saying anything. It's just very surprised that a woman would walk on the street in this really hot afternoon sun, under the hot afternoon sun, walk. But I wanted to do that for myself because that remained something part of me. I was very, very it makes you feel very awkward when people look at you because you're just walking and trying to take ownership of the street. So for me, Bombay was this place that encouraged me to be independent, to be on my own. And I think the more you see the city on your feet, the more you discover stories. And that is how I got inspired to become a storyteller and a journalist. So yes.
Supriya Nair 40:03
That's remarkable. Pron?
Pronoti Datta 40:05
Well, two things, I... I sort of echo what Jane says. I mean, you really get a sense of the ethos of Bombay when you're walking on the street. And a lot of that makes even more sense when you learn about the history of the city and how it's really sort of a migrant city, how people came here from all over the place and the conditions that enable them to thrive in the city. It just sort of, you know, the city seems a lot more impressive when you're... when that history informs you. But I want to make a slightly different point that, you know, why Bombay is meaningful to me. Like, I think Bombay gave me a shtick, you know, when I was writing, when I got into journalism. You're kind of looking for a beat. You're looking for your slot, really. And I started out as a theater journalist and I really enjoyed that. But I think I sort of discovered my shtick when I started writing about the city... you know, local stories, features about the city subculture, et cetera. So in a sense, the city really gave me a sense of meaning, you know, so when you don't identify with, you know, things like, I don't know, community or religion or whatever, the one thing you do identify is with this very sort of polyglot, you know, city. So it gave me a sense of attaching myself to something belonging to an idea. Yeah.
Supriya Nair 41:27
Understood. And that reflects in different ways in both the novel and in Bombay Duck. Amrita?
Amrita Mahale 41:34
Yeah, I want to repeat my relationship with the city, which both of you have heard about multiple times. I was born in Bombay. I did not grow up here. I grew up in Gujarat and I moved every couple of years because my dad was a banker. So he got transferred every two or three years. I grew up in Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat. I was in Godhra for a year. But my extended family was here in Bombay. So we would come back here, every summer vacation, every winter vacation. So my favourite times of the year were the months spent in Bombay with lots of cousins, a lot of freedom because this was an era before helicopter parenting, before screens. So the children had a lot of freedom to go out, go to parks on their own. And then I moved to, my family moved back to Bombay, which was then Mumbai, when I was 15 years old and I was about to start junior college. And we lived in Andheri and I decided to go to Jai Hind, which is just maybe 100 meters from here. So in my second week in Bombay, I had to start taking the local train from Andheri to Churchgate. So I felt like a grown up. It was all very exciting. And then I spent four years in college in a hostel in Powai. So again, there was a lot of freedom and just growing up without...without necessarily someone watching over you. Which is why I thought this was the greatest city in the world. And I suppose my first novel, Milk teeth, reflects some of that, you know, the fondness, the nostalgia. It reflects a child and a young person's love for the city. I should have mentioned that after college I moved away for 12 years and I wrote Milk teeth in those 12 years and I moved to Bombay only after Milk teeth was released. So this was my first time living in the city as an adult when I moved here six years ago. And when you pay rent, when you have to commute to work, when you have to manage a house with a partner, but still run a house, I felt the weight of the city in a way that I hadn't before. So that changed my relationship with the city a lot. But I feel like now in the last five or six years, I have a newfound appreciation for what the city enables. And like you said, this is a city where you see women out and about, where you see women on trains, in public spaces. And this is a country with very low female labour force participation. So the crowd of the city, can be annoying to the crowd, the rush, the traffic, which can be annoying to somebody sitting in a cab waiting to get to office or waiting to get home, is also what enables new possibilities, new futures for... for a lot of women, a lot of people. I suppose these are the aspects of the city that I see reflecting more in my more recent work.
Supriya Nair 44:38
To me, I've lived in other cities in India, but this is where I've spent most of my life. I think what the city has really given me is just respect for work and the sense that life is shaped around work. And I realize that that can sound bleak and dystopian, but it is the thing that has enabled me, I think, to build a life that is different from the life of my parents and to imagine that I can do two or three things at once. And I think perhaps in different ways, that is also true of you because none of you are, you know, 50% day jobbers, 50% parents or caregivers and, you know, I don't know, like then some other secret 50% writers. You... everything that you do, you are all that. And that takes extraordinary effort. It takes extraordinary commitment. And in some ways I think it's resulted in great excellence on the part of all three of you. And in some ways, I think some of that just comes down to the fact that women work really hard
Amrita Mahale 45:39
They do.
Supriya Nair 45:41
...and constantly and get used to the idea that not every reward that comes your way is tangible. That is also the most fulfilling thing I think about writing and being able to put literature out into the world for these three amazing writers.
<Music begins> 45:56
OUTRO 46:01
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