Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
post
page
product
Want to stay in the loop with latest bookish news and views? Subscribe to HarperBroadcast!
harpercollins-broadcast
close
search icon

Between the Lines with Aanchal Malhotra

Share

A year since its publication, Aanchal Malhotra’s evocative and opulent partition novel The Book of Everlasting Things continues to linger in readers’ minds like notes of an unforgettable perfume. Narrated with grace and elegance, the book is also an ode to the lost histories of peoples and places displaced in times gone by. In conversation with Kartik Chauhan, Malhotra talks about her rigorous research process, the obfuscated stories of Indian soldiers in the World Wars and the peripheral characters that enrich the central love story of Samir and Firdaus. Read more:

Q. As The Book of Everlasting Things turns one—and continues to linger in readers’ mind like the notes of an unforgettable perfume!—what are some of your favourite milestones from its journey into the world?

 Aanchal Malhotra: Whenever a book leaves a writers desk, it ceases to belong only to them, and I was nervous for The Book Everlasting Things to belong to the world. It was not my first book, but it was my first novel, a genre I’d never worked in before, so I was delighted when it received praise in both India and America, and found a place on NPR’s Best Books of the Year, 2022. 

But the most important milestones were from readers who saw themselves in the book. Pre-Partition Lahore, where the first few years of the story are set, was constructed through fieldwork and interviews with those whod once lived therefrom description of schools, to the Ravi river, to shops in Anarkali Bazar and what they sold, to the beauty and community around Wazir Khan mosque, and even the riots that tore through the city in 1947. I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of readers who write to say that the novel has given them access to a world their ancestors left behind, to a city theyd dreamt of returning to. It has reaffirmed my belief that literature can transport us to inaccessible places of the past, now severed by manmade borders and often traversable only in memory.  

I wrote this book inspired by the aromatic habits of my grandfather [who was a chemist and amateur perfumer], setting it in the Lahore that my maternal family knew as home. I was fortunate that he got to see it before he passed a few months ago, that we’d spoken about it over the years that he knew how much his stories mattered to me.   

My grandfather’s box of flavours he worked with as a chemist at Dabur, India

Over the last year, the historical themes and feelings of this novel have spilled into the everyday in a way that both surprised and humbled me. At the Kolkata launch, my moderator and friend, Karuna Ezara Parikh and I were dressed by a local brand, Coloroso, in colours from the Indian cover. Jahnvi Nandan from The Perfume Library, who had worked with me for five years through the research of this novel, collaboratively created the final fragrance that Samir composes in his lifetime, Firdaus, Keeper of Paradise. Feranposh, a clothing brand in Srinagar, embroidered a pheran with the colours of dyes that Firdaus used in her illuminated manuscript. At the Delhi launch, Atelier Theatre Group brought the text to life through a dramatic reading.  

The Book of Everlasting Things has taken me from cities in India, to France and Mauritius, Bhutan and America. A Dutch edition was released, a Hungarian will be out in April, a Russian translation is taking shape. The audiobook, narrated by Deepti Gupta, won an Earphones Award. In February, it will finally make its way to the city of Lahore, which feels very much like a full circle.  

Q. Your oeuvre—from your non-fiction books to debut fiction—has focused on assessing the inheritance and transmission of memories across generations (time) and borders (space). How did the medium and form of the novel benefit from, and also help you to discover new insights into your work as an oral historian?

AM: My preoccupation as a writer has largely been of the retrieval and preservation of memory. I am interested in the singular voice, the small h histories of people and their experiences. I also don’t think it’s so different writing about real interviewees than it is writing about fictional characters, because the care I take to nurture each story or character arc is the same, and ultimately, they do inform each other. 

Of course, there are elements in this novel directly drawn from oral testimony – the description of places both in undivided India and France, the streets where my characters live, the dates of a fire or time of harvest, the route of a military regiment, and so on. The act of remembering is rarely chronological and often accompanied by forgetting. At times, the past relayed was blurred at the edges, like perforated, incomplete landscapes. As oral history testimonies, these must be transcribed as they are said, and cannot be edited or arranged selectively. But fiction is malleable, and what it allowed me to do was construct a context for those impressions through imagination. To build the singular memory into perhaps a dialogue, which grew into a scene, that led to another scene, which soon became a chapter, rooted in some shade of reality. In my notebooks are excerpts of interviews [conducted for my non-fiction work], and the fictional scenes [in the novel] that borrow from those moments. 

There was an interviewee who remembered a line she’d heard over and over again on the train platform while fleeing from Jhelum to Delhi during Partition – “Hindu paani, Muslim paani.” In Remnants of a Separation, I wrote that not only had land been divided, but so had something as essential as drinking water. For many years, it stayed with me; I wondered what made Hindu water different from Muslim water, how old the person selling the water was, how many people had been served, and how many deprived. I wondered what my interviewee had felt when she’d heard the cry. These are things I wish I’d asked her then. In chapter 15 of Everlasting Things, it is brought up by Savitri, who sees two young boys wheeling a trolley carrying “Hindu water” through the streets of Shah Almi, and wonders whether soon, the invisible elements like the air too, will be split in half. Upon hearing this, Som Nath thinks of kites flying in this newly divided sky. Samir thinks of Firdaus.  

Another example that allowed me to explore the emotional profundity of secondhand memory was when I wrote about Ambrette’s burial in Grasse. In chapter 42, Samir learns that her “gravestone had not been engraved, but rather inscribed by Vivek”, who had carved his late wife’s name with his own fingers, “testament to the fact that she would never be separated from his touch, even in death.” Writing these lines moved me deeply, because they were drawn from an interview in Pakistan in 2014, where a granddaughter described how her grandfather had returned to India in 1986 for the first time after Partition. He visited the graves of his ancestors that were now separated from him by a border, and upon seeing no headstones, had created a makeshift plaque with wet mud, carving out each name in Urdu with his fingers.  

A significant transition from oral historian to novelist was allowing myself to create space within lived, recorded history an opening for it to absorb fictional characters, and in turn, make them real enough to be considered a natural part of that history.

Q. While the novel narrates the poignant love story of Samir and Firdaus, their story is circumscribed by a rich cast of characters who are not only affected by the action of the novel but also contribute to its motions. How did you manage to insert these varied character narratives, voices and lives into the novel? And how do you think you are yourself connected with and anchored in your characters? 

AM: Spending time with the secondary characters of this novel has given me so much joy, but also insight into the world of the primary characters. Mohan, Savitri, Som Nath, Ousmann, Zainab, Altaf, Sunder and his brother Jagdish, Mushtaq Alam, Sophie, Fahad, Aayat, Ambrette, Paul, Sucha Singh, Gaspard, Edouard, the young perfumer in Paris, the young journalist in Lahore – the world of Samir and Firdaus, and the entirely separate world of Vivek, is hinged on these relationships. It was fascinating to witness the evolution from their original inspiration and intention, and I want to speak about a few of them [apologizing in advance for any spoilers, of course!]  

Several years ago, I was watching an elderly Kashmiri gentleman who is a papier mâché artist, work with finesse and delicacy on the object he crafted, and I knew immediately that the calligrapher in my novel would be based on his likeness. Over the years, I got to know him and his work, and in fact, the character of Altaf is his namesake as well. Khushboo Lal, the eccentric perfumer from Kannauj is physically based – from the habits and gestures of interacting with perfumed elements, to the manner of speaking and being – on Mr. Vijay Kapoor from ML Ram Narain perfumers, where I did my fieldwork, but since the character exists in a pre-Partition time, his life was drawn from the memories Mr. Kapoor shared of his ancestors.  

Zainab is the most foresighted character in the novel, in my opinion. She is spicy and opinionated, and I could hear her very clearly. Creating that invisible partition between her and Altaf broke my heart, but differing political opinions can tear through families and I wondered how such a couple would live with the consequences. Initially, as I was writing Léa, I feared that the narrative would treat her too unfairly, but she proved to be quite formidable,  and ultimately, was a much happier person than Samir.   

Syed Ali and Yusuf are two characters with elaborate, colourful, tragic histories (think colonies of rang-wallahs, trails of scent, the loss of beloveds, sea voyages at a young age), which had to be edited down quite a bit from early drafts. But I loved how much texture they brought to the narrative, and it is the smallest things from their interactions with Samir – the map of the world, the vial of rosewater, the stray leaf pocketed in the garden and carried to Lahore – that have stayed with me as totems.  

Q. One of my favourite segments from the novel is Vivek Vij’s diary from World War 1. The contribution of the Indian soldiers in the two World Wars have unfortunately been obfuscated, and so few accounts survive today. How did you confront this hidden history in the novel?

 AM: The Great War arrived through the military testimonies I’d recorded during my Partition fieldwork. Men and women who had served in WW2 narrated stories of their forefathers who had served across the black waters in WW1. My interest, thus, grew in the experiences, desires, sacrifices, loyalties, and longings of the 1.5 million Indians who fought in the war, and how their extraordinary contributions had been relegated to mere footnotes, until very recently. But the fact that the Indian soldiers were fighting on European soil, seemingly at par with European soldiers, was a complicated operation, for it did not mean that the well-ingrained differences between them suddenly disappeared. If anything, they were exacerbated.

1914 French postcard showing a Sikh Havaldar posing for the photographer at Marseille, France, in the early days of the First World War

 But to do justice to their stories and the complex landscape – geographic, climatic, sensorial, racial, linguistic, cultural – that they found themselves in, I used the aid of the letters that they wrote, which numbered up to 15,00020,000 a week when they first arrived in France. This was a feat because most soldiers were illiterate and would narrate these letters to scribes, and yet so generous they were in descriptiveness, texture and profundity of feeling, that they often read like poetry. Most of them were from land-locked villages and had never seen the ocean. They didn’t know who they were fighting, how long the war would go on for, who all were involved. Punjabis (from India and Pakistan) made up 1/3rd of the Indian army but there were also Pathans, men from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Garhwal, Nepal, and this is reflected through the languages they dictated their letters in.

Indian soldiers in trench, 1915_NAM. 1976-05-52-73

Despite the degrees of separation, for me, these letters became a source akin to oral testimony. In them, they describe the weather, the sound of bombs and guns, trench warfare and food, the yearning for home, aspects of loyalty, dismay and confusion, the learning of languages and knowledge of different cultures. They compared the war to Mahabharata, to the battle of Karbala. They described the trenches. They were assaulted by poison gas. They missed their music and roti. They learnt languages. Some wrote of death, but many wrote of love. They detailed the bitter cold and what they would do when they returned home. 

These letters were held, translated, read and sometimes censored [in part or full] by the British Censor Mail, for reasons like making sure no details of battle or location were being sent, and also, in general to know what the morale of the Indian soldier was.  

Part of the largest volunteer army in the world arrived in Marseilles on 26th September 1914. The European war was starting to encompass the globe

To escape this censorship altogether, Vivek, who is a soldier in the Lahore Division, but also his regiment’s scribe, begins to keep a journal. Many of these entries are drawn from real letters, which reveal to Samir – when he finds the journals decades later – what his uncle truly experienced during the war.  

Q. In an interview with us last year, you said that you imagine Samir and Firdaus to be together in every universe. What do you think connects them in such a profound way across time and space? Can absence be a sort of presence too?

AM: Isn’t absence the most persistent presence? I wanted Firdaus and Samir to be happy together, but their present world wouldn’t allow it. But something everlasting bound them together, not just in the present but also in memory, thereafter. Yes, their stories can be told with other people, with Fahad and Léa, yet they are told most faithfully and completely with each other. There is a line in the novel when an older Samir is in Paris and is thinking about how at a continent’s distance, and despite not knowing whether she is even alive or not, the tenderness that he feels for Firdaus has remained unchanged – The arc of life and death had nothing to do with love, then. Love continued on, if left to its devices, he deduces. So, I do imagine them being happy in some other world, in every other world, through other timelines and intersections, in a kind of Cloud Atlasesque way 

Q. You have also described the novel as a visceral, sensorial work. Sections of the novel can also be read as treatises on the lost arts of perfumery and calligraphy… How has your understanding of these art forms and art objects evolved over the course of time?

AM: To be honest, writing parts of this book felt like returning to the printmaking studio – a place where, before I was a writer, I’d spend each day. While writing scenes about handmade perfumed paper, I drew from the years spent making paper from scratch; cooking and beating the fibers, washing the pulp, draining the sheets, setting them to dry, brushing them to remove the excess lint. The subtleness of the deckled edge, the transparency of a single sheet and how it let the light through, the imperfections of the handmade. Thinking back to all these meditative gestures allowed me to deposit them into the text and hopefully make it visceral for the reader.  

As for perfumery, when I began thinking about this book, it was not with any natural talent, but mere curiosity for the intersection between smell and memory. However, the more you smell, the better you smell. And for the five years where I did research with perfumers across India and France, I was struck by the sheer beauty, delicacy and precision of this esoteric and highly secretive art form, and was honoured to be temporarily invited in.  

Q. What are some of your favourite books that helped you write your own debut fiction?

AM: Every year, I read [whole or in part] a novel called Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is multi-layered in plot and on a sentence level. There are scenes from that book that have stayed with me – the sunflower field, the collection of odd items by Jonathan, the journey of unearthing the past, the boxes of Trachimbrod. Rain by Cynthia Barnett is an elemental delight, and I cannot recommend it enough. Our Indians at Marseilles by the Russian artist, Massia Bibikoff, who visited the Indian soldiers in Parc Borély in October 1914 before they headed off to battle in Flanders, and drew their portraits, complete with their signatures. This is not that Dawn by Yashpal, a great Lahore novel. The poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, Anne Carson, and Roland Barthe’s A Lover’s Discourse for the minutiae of gesture and feeling.  

 In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast

 

 

The Book of Everlasting Things
About the Book - The Book of Everlasting Things

LAHORE, 1938.Drawn by an intoxicating smell, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar shop in Anarkali Bazaar. Over the years that follow, the perfumer and the illuminator of manuscripts…

About the Author - Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed and award-winning books, Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of…

To read more, order your copy of The Book of Everlasting Things, by Aanchal Malhotra today!

₹ 599.0000
  • Amazon
  • flipkart
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
The Book of Everlasting Things
About the Book - The Book of Everlasting Things

LAHORE, 1938.Drawn by an intoxicating smell, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar shop in Anarkali Bazaar. Over the years that follow, the perfumer and the illuminator of manuscripts…

About the Author - Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed and award-winning books, Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of…

To read more, order your copy of The Book of Everlasting Things, by Aanchal Malhotra today!

₹ 799.0000
  • Amazon
  • flipkart
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
Remnants of a Separation
About the Book - Remnants of a Separation

Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now…

About the Author - Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed and award-winning books, Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of…

To read more, order your copy of Remnants of a Separation, by Aanchal Malhotra today!

₹ 899.0000
  • Amazon
  • flipkart
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
In the Language of Remembering
About the Book - In the Language of Remembering

Oral historian Aanchal Malhotra's first book, Remnants of a Separation, was published in 2017 to mark the seventieth anniversary of India's Partition. It told a human history of the monumental event by exhuming the stories lying latent in ordinary objects…

About the Author - Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed and award-winning books, Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of…

To read more, order your copy of In the Language of Remembering, by Aanchal Malhotra today!

₹ 799.0000
  • Amazon
  • flipkart
  • Or buy from your local bookseller.
Books by the author
See All
The Book of Everlasting Things
The Book of Everlasting Things

LAHORE, 1938.Drawn by an intoxicating smell, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar sh...

In the Language of Remembering
In the Language of Remembering

Oral historian Aanchal Malhotra's first book, Remnants of a Separation, was published in 2017 to mark the seventieth anniversary of India's Partition....

The Book of Everlasting Things
The Book of Everlasting Things

LAHORE, 1938.Drawn by an intoxicating smell, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar sh...

Read more interviews
See All
Crypto Crimes
Between the Lines with Mitali Mukherjee

Mitali Mukherjee's chilling and unputdownable new book Crypto Crimes traces the murky underbelly of the crypto world and its mercurial spread across I...

Instruments of Torture
Between the Lines with Aparna Sanyal

Descend into the deepest, darkest torture chambers of the soul, where rapacious dreams dwell and nightmares are forged. In these pages, the mind’s d...

Mahi
Between the Lines with Anand Neelakantan

When Mahi, a young elephant, decides to fulfil his dream of flying over the blue mountains, little does he know that he’s setting in motion a chain ...


Deprecated: File Theme without comments.php is deprecated since version 3.0.0 with no alternative available. Please include a comments.php template in your theme. in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6085

There are no comments.


Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 67

Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 68

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Favourite Banner
Your favourite literary newsletter just got a makeover!

New Releases • Author Speak • Events & Festivals Recommendations • First Look • After School Tales Press Room • Pre Orders • Coming Soon • Special Offers Trending • Just In • Also Read • And much more...