Daman Singh’s first novel, set in a women’s hostel, explores the dark terrain of the human mind.
Nine by Nine is Daman Singh’s first attempt at fiction, having written a book on development 10 years ago. The title refers to the horribly limited physical space that usually goes for a room in most women’s hostels, at least in India. “The (hostel) experience is pretty standard,” laughs Singh when I meet her in her considerably more spacious but simply-kept home, and tell her how the setting of her book reminds me so much of my own days at the Lady Shri Ram residence hall, complete with its congealed dal, strict visiting hours, illegal Maggi meals and boarders queuing up late in the night or in the wee hours to receive calls (from friends and family but usually interested Others) on a single phone line.
Having stayed at the PG Women’s Hostel, Delhi University (while doing her BA in Maths, a surprising area of study for a would-be writer of fiction, no doubt), and later at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, Singh is well acquainted with her chosen setting. “And I also visited other hostels to meet friends,” she smiles _ including LSR. The hostel setting came after much thought.
And only after the story that Singh actually wanted to tell, about a woman with a flawed psyche, delving into motivations and complex links between thought and action, swirled around in her head for more than a year and took firmer shape. “I have always been interested in how the human mind works,” she explains, and lets us know that even her early reading comprised of studies in character. One of her favourite books, she says, happens to be A Beautiful Mind. “The movie didn’t do justice to it at all.” No film, she adds, “even that latest 15, Park Avenue has been able to do justice to the subject sensitively. I found it too stylised”.
That was director Aparna Sen’s take on schizophrenia, a territory that Nine by Nine too strays into, though Singh leaves the affliction of her main character, Tara, a little more ambiguous. “In my mind,” she says, “(Tara) is a manic depressive … it is surprisingly common, you know…” But Singh does not spell out the diagnosis, also because she didn’t want the story “to become too heavy and depressing”.
The hostel backdrop and the setting of the story at a time of early youth of its protagonists certainly makes it more readable. The characters come across as real and their daily goings on (borrowing clothes to go to a wedding reluctantly, for instance) will bring smiles of instant recognition from readers. “It was a time,” Singh reminiscences, “that was perhaps the most colourful of my life.”
The story explores the lives of three friends - Anjali, competent and ambitious but thwarted by her mother’s unspoken demands; Paro, the quintessential small-town girl, unapologetic about her only ambition in life, to get married the arranged way; and Tara, with liberal parents, brilliant but tragically depressed. And whether or not you agree with the way the plot progresses, the strength of the book lies in its ability to keep us engaged with its characters, and in its presentation of a way of middle-class life that is immediately recognisable.
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“There are bits of me in all the characters,” Singh announces. Like Anjali, for instance, she is very organised, and like her she also wanted to go abroad to study- “didn’t get a scholarship”. But, no, her own mother is not at all like Anjali’s, she laughs, when I ask her about the difficult mother in the story. In contrast to the conservative family that Anjali has - she is unable to realise her ambition because of them - Singh’s upbringing was liberal enough. The author and her two sisters - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s three daughters - were free to study what they wanted and how much, “though, I suppose, my father always hoped that at least one of us would take up economics. But my elder sister announced that she would do history and I took up maths, which was not really an informed choice but I enjoyed it. My younger sister did take up economics but even she gave it up to pursue law,” chuckles Singh.
With a PM for a father, Singh is used to dealing with much curiosity and “excitement”, as she puts it. In fact, her work as a development consultant with a couple of NGOs -looking at issues of “jal, jungle and zamin, which are very deep and can’t be dealt with in a superficial way”- suffered after her father became PM. “I realised, after one or two times, that whenever I would travel to these areas, there would be much happiness and excitement,” but one wouldn’t be able to connect with the people in any meaningful way. When people got to know that someone from the PM’s family was visiting, “everything would come become bijli, sadak, pani,” she quips. Having had to give up that career, as well as spontaneous travel (Singh loves animals and is a wildlife enthusiast), she seems to have now found a full-time career in writing, even though that is something she says she always wanted to do.
One thing that her development work afforded her was travel throughout India, “in buses and rickshaws and bullock carts”, and thus a chance to meet many more people from different backgrounds. Singh tells me with obvious pleasure about one of her most memorable stays in a small town called Devgarh, at a local high school, where in the evening, with nothing better to do, a friend and she would stand at the windows singing loudly and get answering songs from the neighbourhood.
What’s next? Well, a book about a boy growing up in a small town, she says, who is just discovering the many prejudices that exist, of gender or caste or religion. Once again, this is going to be a story where “nothing much happens”, a study in character. So, does she show the first draft to anyone in the family? “Of course not,” she grins, “I don’t want my self-esteem to be completely destroyed.” Her mother is a discerning critic, though. While her father has not read Nine by Nine yet, Singh says, her mother called up “just this morning to tell me that she wants to ask me a couple of things. She will probably ask me things like ‘I hope I am not that character,’ or, ‘I hope I never said something like that to you’.” That’s just being a mother.
As we stand outside in a sunny patch of green with a football net put up by her son, Daman Singh knows as much.
NINE BY NINE
Author:Daman Singh
Publisher:HarperCollins
pages: 249
Price: Rs 250
