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.

Often called ‘the fresh voice of the north-east’, she has never had to explain her poetry. “Conversation comes to a standstill when I introduce myself as a poet,” she says, at a book reading in Landmark bookstore, Bangalore, where she lovingly savours each word she reads from Lunatic…her love for the hills, the moods that are brought on by the ever-changing weather, quite transparent. Yet, her nostalgia does not mask the idiosyncrasies of the small town that draws its character from its inhabitants, the omnipresent university and unfulfilled ambitions. “I am not overfond of Shillong but it is a fantastic place for a novel and poetry,” she says. “You have to love a place to write about it. But you have to have distance to see.”

She ‘saw’ it when she left Shillong almost seven years ago to settle in Bangalore. “When I was there, I wrote poems on what was happening around me.” Her poem Neighbourhood, where The soft-spoken pakoriwallah smelling of his pakoris, his half hour island of defiant passion on the steps of somebody’s house… is visual, voyeuristic and bold.
She strides two worlds, sorry three, no four…poet, reviewer, short story writer and newsletter-magazine editor, with panache. “I always feel I am going to crack up,” she explains away her multi-tasking feat. But for writers who need to keep a finger on the pulse of those outside their world, she has made a conscious choice: “I want to work and write. It keeps me in touch with the art world. While working in IFA I have a window to the world. I didn’t want to be boxed-in, in the writing world.”

Hasan loves and admires 19th century novelists and the influence of English Literature’s classics is as pervading as each riff of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in her novel. The character, Firdaus just can’t ‘appreciate’ Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which is all about ‘the routine act of trying to catch a fish’. At the same time Sophie’s father, an out of work lecturer quotes out of Dickens’ Dombey and Son and Firdaus’ M Phil mentor launches at length into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “19th century novelists created a universe, a capacious kind of thing. I love R.K. Narayan, too. Their sense of sweep is incredible. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. I am completely at the beginning,” she says in awe of them.
The three characters in Lunatic… belong to families who had settled in Shillong and therefore they are dkhars, just like Hasan, whose parents are originally from Uttar Pradesh. “They have a self image which is different from what they are. They feel a sense of distance and remoteness and it is difficult for them to adjust to reality,” says Hasan of her characters. “In Shillong, everything is connected; it is inhibiting and makes you vulnerable. It is very much like a Malgudi-esque place. People are not completely at home, but they feel a sense of belonging.”

She identifies Shillong as having four distinctive traits – its missionary influence: “Everybody goes to a convent school where you develop decorum”; its rock music: “Every youth plays the guitar, if you don’t, you’re not cool enough”; a culturally heterogeneous place: “It’s the hub of the northeast, very urbanised, intrinsically multicultural”; and its landscape. All of this, she has inked in her novel.
The girl from the hills has surprisingly taken to the urban jungle of Bangalore, but she won’t talk of settling in just yet, for there is no “forever” in her vocabulary. “I like Bangalore. I thrive on anonymity,” she says, something she could not escape in Shillong where “there is nobody who does not know me”.

The sounds of her Bangalore existence will resound in her next novel, which has a dual setting – the garden city and Shillong, with Sophie as the central character. Not surprising since Sophie is the most eloquently moulded character in Lunatic…. “I really think it will be a fascinating story. It is about an immigrant waiting to break free. Is that me? Partly, but I moved here for a job. I didn’t necessarily move out to be on my own,” she clarifies.
Husband Zac O’Yeah, is a writer of travel books and novels. He has also published a book on Gandhi in Swedish. “It is because of him that I wrote this book,” says Hasan, who acknowledges him on page 291 with ‘To Zac – sui generis and raison d’etre – my greatest debt’.

A month after the launch of Lunatic In My Head, she is curious to know how people will react to it. “I prefer criti–cism from people I have never met,” she says. Reviews and interviews on her have filled media space for weeks now. A fresh, young, photogenic face and a pen, which opens up a window to a beyond-place, are heady combinations that could be summed up all too quickly as a great marketing package. “I think it makes me happy that there is a growing interest in the north-east,” she responds, without being affronted. “My book is helping to open it up. Also, I am writing about identifiable things. Anyone can get his teeth into it. I am not an emblematic north-east writer. It’s not the final word or the first word, maybe just one word,” she adds enigmatically.
Her poetry is about the everyday life, of ordinary people in their ordinariness, rendered in easy but powerful verse. Her novel picks up on that tradition, and because of that, it will find its readers, in India and abroad.