Q&A | Puja Changoiwala: ‘Fiction can underline the truth, embolden it, and hand it a megaphone.’

On 24th March 2020, the government of India announced a national lockdown in the wake of rising COVID-19 cases. This explosive announcement caused an alarming exodus of migrant workers from their urban homes. In Homebound, author and journalist Puja Changoiwala fictionalizes a family’s trials on the road as they travel back to their hometown in Rajasthan on foot from Mumbai. Written after months of research and personal interviews with migrant labourers, Homebound is an essential reading material for all. Read an insightful interview with the author of this moving book.

Q. Homebound is written in the form of letters. Not only do these letters give a charged authenticity to the narrative, but they also manage to capture a sense of urgency in the situation of Meher and her family’s trying journey back home by ascribing a personality/intimacy to their stories. How did you decide on choosing the epistolary form for the novel, and how do you think this form has helped your writing of this story?

A. After India announced the first national lockdown at a four-hour notice in March 2020, several news reports highlighted the fact that millions of migrant workers were walking home. Numbers, of course, enjoy immense attention when it comes to national and global crises. The epistolary form of this novel, thus, was my attempt to shed light on the humans behind these numbers, to illuminate the macro through the micro.

Humans have inspired Homebound, and through this novel, I wanted to highlight their very real triumphs and their realer defeats. The book is an attempt to capture the hope, resilience and fortitude of India’s invisible workforce — real people who breathe, sense, and feel, and despite the disregard and hardship, continue to dream, hope and believe. The epistolary form played a key role in facilitating this. Apart from extending a sense of immediacy and greater realism, the form allowed me to present an intimate view of Meher’s most private thoughts and feelings without interferences from the voice of an omniscient narrator.

Q. Also, in line with our conversation about the form and style of the narrative. You have selected to create a fiction based on extensive field work and research. Although you address the choice of genre for the book in your Afterword to the novel, I am curious to know, is the decision affected by political factors too? Do you think fiction gives a certain license to be removed from reality, and in turn represent a much wider scope of the ‘real’ through this distance?

Another way to phrase this question:

In his essay, Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie wrote, ‘Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.’ How do you think Homebound responds to this idea?

A. Political factors did not influence my decision to fictionalize the exodus, but yes, in our increasingly litigious society, fiction does seem to be the safer way to say the truth. I think fiction, especially contemporary fiction, can underline the truth, embolden the truth, and hand it a megaphone. Homebound, for instance, is a composite portrait of many true accounts. It is inspired by the men, women and children, who, after the state announced the lockdown last year, fled the cities they built and trudged hundreds of kilometers to their rural homes. At the novel’s core is the story of these 450 million migrant workers in India — humans who form the bulwark of our economy, while living in Dickensian tenements, mostly working as daily-wage labourers without safety gear, written contracts, job security, paid leaves, health care benefits, social security and fair wages. Homebound is their truth, and although the government may deny the fragility of the migrants’ lives – even its own role in perpetrating the humanitarian crisis that engulfed them in March 2020 and beyond – it is their truth.

Q. There is a particularly jarring scene in the book where the police force is ‘sanitizing’ a group of migrant workers with harmful chemicals. When the media turns up at the spot and reports on the issue, I think I also felt there was a layered jibe on media practices too. The scene is made into a spectacle and there seems to be reportage only for the sake of that spectacle. In view of the media coverage and journalistic ethics employed in the documentation of the pandemic, where more often than not, the process straddled between vain glorification of the system by representing sanitized versions of reality, or live-streaming intrusive moments of trauma as ‘spectacles’, do you think media as an institution has failed to report on the exodus of the migrant labourers in lockdown?

A. I think as journalists, we’re trained to identify failures. Often, with the pressures of topicality and the 24 x 7-news cycle, we tend to report on what is and not what has been. We tend to forgo the history for the contemporary, the cause for the effect. This was my only contention with the press coverage. I think there were some powerful reports about the exodus in the Indian as well as international press, but only its new, newsworthy face – not the decades of systemic, structural delay that had coalesced into this moment. The reportage left me with several questions, and I’ve attempted to answer these through Homebound.

Q. A seminal sociological question that your book addresses is about alarming communalism in the country. You also write about the rising religious intolerance under the current regime while mentioning the Tablighi Jamaat. There have been unfortunate reports of violence against other communities too, where social prejudices have colluded with an often-superficial pandemic paranoia to vilify these communities. What are your thoughts on this phenomenon, where a corrupt system has co-opted social insecurities to push its majoritarian agenda?

A. I think the Muslim community has faced increased demonization in the past few years, whether they’re in Kashmir, Assam, or at a religious congregation in New Delhi. Dividing voters on sectarian lines is hardly new to India, but what scares me most is that the electorate still buys into this polarizing narrative – and not just buys, acts on it. Communalism still works as a political strategy only because we, the people, allow it to thrive. Hindus and Muslims, upper-castes and lower-castes, Hindus and Sikhs, there are so many dangerous divisions in our country today. We do not recognize that our pluralistic heritage is imperiled, or that our democracy is under threat. We’re repeating the mistakes we made in the past, and if history decides to repeat itself too, we’ll have a huge price to pay.

Q. 24th March marks the second year of the abrupt national lockdown that resulted in massive man-made sociological calamities in the wake of a global pandemic. ‘The struggle of man against power,’ Milan Kundera has written, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ In your Afterword to the book you write how forgetting about the migrant labourers’ killed due to institutional apathy would amount to ‘treason’. How do you think literature and cultural communication about the invisible human crises honour the memory of the people we have lost to such man-made calamities.

A. I think as journalists and writers, we have a front row seat to history as it unfolds, at least parts of it. And the greatest privilege we have is that of documenting this history, of being the storytellers, not the stories. With the Covid-19 pandemic, each of us has an added responsibility to dissect, analyze and document the crisis — our medical and humanitarian response, the victims and beneficiaries of this response, the repercussions, victories and defeats in these areas, how we coped and how we failed to cope. This, however, requires continued dialogue and analysis, and when it comes to the migrant workforce, I’m afraid, we already seem to have forgotten them. The exodus seems to have waned out of public memory already, and there has been little to no follow-up coverage from the press. All that anger and anguish, condensed by the habits of time.

Q. Previously you have written a power-packed non-fiction book, and ‘Homebound’ is your debut fiction, which is notably, just as powerful in its messaging and representation. What are you working on next?

A. Writing a book is a long, lonely process, and at the end of it, I often find myself missing journalism. Hence, after having wrapped up my third book, I’m now focusing on a few news stories and features. I’m currently working on an investigative feature about sixteen villages in India where less than 10 per cent of the population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19 – even as the government denies vaccine hesitancy exists, another about the inequities in vaccination coverage in low- and middle-income countries, and a third about rural India’s experiments with cybercrime, highlighting how some villagers use and misuse new-age technology to battle age-old poverty.