Anjum Hasan has a gleam in her eye when she talks about her debut novel Lunatic In My Head (Zubaan-Penguin-2007). Suppressed expecta–tions and curiosity are the fleeting images you glean as she resignedly gives you a purview of her book. Resigned, because she’s done it before, many times over, by her own admission. She is always asked: ‘What is the book about?’ Though she is enthusiastic about explaining the bare bones of her two-year-in-the-making work, the young 30 something poet does not want to set preconceived notions in the reader’s mind. So, the first thing she does is hand over the Rs 295 novel with the cover photograph by her Swedish husband Zac O’Yeah and says, with the decorum that her convent school education has drummed into her, “You must read it.”

You read it and you are immediately struck by the everydayness of Hasan’s Shillong, the base of her novel, which is somehow not the mysterious, unknown place you thought it was. Your hazy image of the north-east lifts because you think, hey, the place is not so different after all. Local bakery shops, obscure beauty parlours, the missionaries who held their sway among the residents and the quaint restaurant serving favourite sweetmeats. Even the moods, the weather, the topography are reminiscent of hill stations across India.
So what makes you read on past midnight instead of reaching out to the other books lined up by your bedside?

It’s in the telling of the tale. The lure is in the vivacity of multiple ethnicities in the confines of a small town, hemmed in by the hills. The geography contributes somehow with the fight for identities. Hasan’s skill is in how she gets into the teeth of characters so varied in age – an eight-year-old called Sophie Das; a 22-year-old Aman Moondy and Firdaus Ansari, a woman whose age is left to the reader to guess.
“To be able to write on characters so different from myself is the challenge. That is how you test yourself,” says Hasan. Her portrayal of little Sophie, a hungry eight-year-old, sitting at a Khasi marriage banquet and not being served food because she is a dkhar (non-tribal) is most evocative. Racial undertones, bracketing individuals into stereotypes, preference for a male child, of women cooking to please their men – all are a merciless reflection of our fundamental Indianness.

When Hasan is asked whether her debut novel is autobio–graphical, she comes back with: “I like anonymity. I don’t think my life will be interesting to others. If I write an autobiography, what is left? My life is my sense; I want to hoard my memories for myself.”
But, hasn’t she poured every one of the 26 years she spent in Shillong into her book? She attended a convent school, which is the background of Sophie’s life. Hasan has an MA in Philosophy, which finds an echo in Aman’s educational moorings. Sophie’s father is a teacher, so too is Hasan’s father and mother. Is it her love, or one of her four siblings’ fanatical obsession with Pink Floyd and rock music that fills the book, or the result of deep discussions held at home on such subjects, you wonder.

Hasan admits that her source is from her fascinating childhood. Her parents gave her freedom with no expectations.
The large spaces of her childhood left her free to draw, be creative and imagine stories in her head. Even her sister, Daisy Hasan, is writing a novel on Shillong. “But her style is quirky, and completely different from mine,” she says.
Hasan, who has been penning poems since she was 17, has been published in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Her first book of poems, Street on the Hill (2006) is a bold look-see at life in small-town Shillong. “My poetry has been very well received. I think people were charmed by it,” says Hasan, who in 2007 was included in an anthology of short stories 21 Under 40 by young women writers. Today, she works with the India Foundation for the Arts, in Bangalore, three days a week; the rest of her days are devoted to writing.