Writer Nilanjana Roy reports in her 2016 collection of essays an almost literal desire to consume books. It was somewhere between her writing about freedoms, food and fantasy we find our insitence to understand the mundane and our recent and very unprecedented times through the written word.

Through Black River, she turns a police procedural into a layered investigation into the tensions that permeate the heart of India -- the faults of its machinery and high pedestals that differentiate the comfortable from the rest. She talks about her people with amazing intimacy. It wasn't a surprise to find out that much of the novel was inspired from her years of encounters on her walks around Delhi.

In the middle of a record-breaking Delhi summer, she kindly agreed to join us for an interview over email.

There is a nod to your father's bookshelf in the dedication of Black River in that regard we are curious to know your journey as a reader and a writer. Do you still have the same faith in the written word?

Many readers discover books for themselves, through libraries or bookshops; perhaps the greatest legacy my family gave me is that most of them loved books and reading, and I was never denied the freedom of raiding novels from my parents’ bookshelves. I shared many of the chapters of Black River with my father as I wrote them — “don’t think so much about it, get down to the writing”, he often said. And after his death in 2021, I finished the last few pages without him reading along, but with a profound sense of gratitude to him for encouraging me to keep going. Books aren’t an escape or a retreat from the world; writers make sense of the world, their imaginations can soar higher than their own lives, in many instances. Reading opened the doors of the world to my father and his brothers when they were growing up in Cuttack, and writing for their own pleasure gave both my grandmothers a sense of freedom and individuality. I learned early that the written word has tremendous power, and powers of sustenance, and can be a refuge or a challenge, a place of rest or a place that will unsettle you. It remains so even for generations of readers in their teens and twenties, who might find depth and a place to pause and reflect in books, so different from the flickering, restless streams of content you’re encouraged to consume or add to.

In Girl Who Ate Books, you talk about walking the streets of Kolkata as a child. Black River too, you have said, was inspired by walking around the city of Delhi. What strikes you most about the sensibilities of these two cities?

Calcutta does decay superbly, but in its bones, it is also a city that embraces revolution, and that used to have a matter-of-fact egalitarianism. Both cities are haunted and shaped by history — famine, war, Partition, upheaval, many mixed streams of culture and language — and by migrants and refugees. Delhi’s easy to stereotype; modern Delhi sprawls into Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, is less than forty years old, has grown like a malignancy, is power-obsessed, greedy, aggressive. And yet, walking around, you see the impress left by vanished villages, wetlands and forests, and you begin to understand that it also offers a sense of possibility to migrants across India, that it carries some softness within the harshness.

Do you still walk Delhi?

Always. I had to slow down a bit this summer after a foot injury, but walking and writing are intertwined for me. And exploring this city on foot is different from seeing the sights; so much of Delhi is hidden, visible only to the locals, and from the Aravallis to its centuries of history, from its border villages to the empty ghosts of apartments constructed but never lived in, it continues to surprise me. It has a well-earned reputation for being unsafe, but I’ve also received much kindness and help from strangers, and walking has become my way of claiming a small place in the life of this city of 33 million. You can slip into invisibility easily, among so many.

Who are some writers or artists whose work you keep looking up to?

This changes all the time, but from childhood, Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Girish Karnad whose plays we watched as college students, Mahasweta Debi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and slightly later Krishna Sobti, the poems of Avtar Singh Pash etc were big influences. Amrita Sher-Gil was a presence in my 20s, in part because most publishing houses were too broke to afford cover designers, so we’d source our artwork for book covers from paintings at the NGMA; and I keep returning to the work of Ramkinkar Baij, the sculptor Meera Mukherjee, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. Among later influences, Paula Rego, Refik Anadol, Dayanita Singh, Bharti Kher, Gauri Gill, Marina Rheingatnz, the photographs of Arati Kumar-Rao, and a few others.

There's a low-lying anxiety that permeates the happenings throughout the novel. Most of us or even the people of this city are outsiders, with our own private anxieties. Yet you write of Rabia, of Badshah Mia, of Chand with the familiarity of a friend. What do you keep in mind, as a writer, when talking to people that inspired them?

I believe you can only write in kinship, and to arrive at that kinship takes many conversations, with your characters as well as with people who might share similar backgrounds or experiences. I learned that listening is a two-way process; you can’t, as a journalist or as a writer researching a fictional world, demand to be let in to someone’s intimate, personal life. Often trust arrives only if you’re also prepared to be vulnerable, open. Characters have their own life, but if you approach them as equals, with respect and some humility, they will tell you who they are and what matters most to them, as Khalid and Chand, Rabia and Bihida, Ombir and Badshah Miyan eventually did, after I’d spent enough time with them.

You must have surely spotted the graffiti and debris along the North Campus walls. Often within the atmosphere of dissent, there is a sense of its futility. You have covered the many manifestations of hope in desperate times in editing Our Freedoms. In this regard, what do expect of the dissenting youth?

My generation (I’m in my fifties) were fortunate to live in a country that was significantly more free, for all its troubles, at a time when the world felt more optimistic and less riven by war, plagues, authoritarians and the return of a crushing imperialism. Your generation has survived a great deal already, from Covid to cult-like leaders, and has choices ahead of it — backwards to a conservative and crushing past, or forward to a future that promises everybody more equality, instead of rewarding just a chosen few. Refuse to believe that the future has to be like the present, or worse than the present; think for yourself and trust your best instincts; never let the desire for freedom, for yourself and for everyone across castes and faiths, burn out. And if you read enough, you’ll discover that other generations faced similar ebbtides across history, and battled through. Keep what you love most alive, no matter what.

We at The Medley always like to ask this question to our interviewees. Would you have a word of advice, caution, or general note to budding writers?

Don’t become a writer for fame (dubious), celebrity status (even more dubious), money (only 10-15 per cent of writers make any) or power (why even). But if you come to writing with an understanding of what it will demand of you, and give back to you, then a simple truth: stories will always shape the world. The stories we listen to and write, the stories we share, the stories politicians and others feed us, the stories that carry truths that slice through the lies of power, the novels, poems, and essays that nourish us have their own unbreakable spirit. Writing can be a career, or a calling; if it’s the first, many other professions are more stable and more rewarding. If it’s a calling, it will not be an easy road, but it is an astonishing way to live your life.