You mentioned in your acknowledgments that Moni Mohsin inspired the title of your book.
I was talking to Moni during lunch and she asked, ‘What did you name your book?’ I told her we were struggling with the name and then she asked, ‘What’s the book about?’ I told him briefly. By the time I got back – this was in London – 15 minutes later, I got a WhatsApp message from her: “How about The Long Way Home or The Wrong Way Home?” So did happen. It was very nice of him to give me this title.
The book is almost like a meditation on how divorce has become an everyday reality for many and the taboos are almost ending for a certain class of individuals. Was this part of a longer conversation you had on the podcast or were you aware of it as part of your life?
A lot of my friends are divorced and single and while chatting with Faiza, one of them, who was also my former editor, we were talking about how there aren’t enough novels about divorce and I was like yes, that would be something worth writing. He said, ‘And in your voice, you should absolutely do that.’ Many of my friends are divorced and single. So, I have a ring side view on his life. There is no sense of permanency in Indian marriages anymore. I found that life really changes a lot after divorce, for better or for worse, and society can also recover from it.
It’s not a taboo or a stigma, but moving around in this world as a single person in your late 30s or 40s makes you realize that you’ll only be allowed entry into certain living rooms. The space where you are welcomed by couples shrinks because the social structures in our world are built in such a way that things only seem to work in even numbers. Look around us, Christmas, Valentines, Diwali party invitations, dinners for holiday packages are sold, everything is sold for couples. It constantly reminds one that the holidays are around the corner and I better hurry up and make a plan with my girlfriend or my family because no one is making New Year/Christmas plans with me.
I’ve also noticed that lonely people generally hang out with lonely people, not because they chose to do so. I have noticed that if someone is single or someone’s husband passes away early, they are suddenly dropped from the dinner guest list. I have felt the loneliness of these single women, although they are not complaining outwardly. They are happy because it is better to be happy alone than to suffer in married life. My protagonist is putting off marriage for all kinds of reasons that make no sense on paper and that’s what I wanted to talk about. There are many women who are very good at putting on a show of having a happy life and a perfect marriage but they are not actually living that marriage and then they are maintaining those marriages for all kinds of reasons.
A huge reason that is not talked about enough is that it definitely provides you a platform for social security, emotional security, even if it is a lie. Some people don’t even know how to live alone after marriage. You’re back in a place where the landscape has changed so rapidly. It’s not the same dating planet anymore. There’s dating apps, there’s situationships and there’s bread crumbing and there’s ghosting. I wondered what would happen to such a woman if she suddenly became single, she would try dating because it was the only way to do it but would she be self-conscious? What kind of experiences will he have? Will she still be looking for love? Because no matter what people tell you, humans have a sad insistent longing for companionship.
I think ‘love your own company’ is a little overrated as a concept. You need someone to share your happiness with, to share your life with. There is a lot of sharing happening online because people are very lonely in their lives. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, Kiran Desai said that during her book signing, many people told her, ‘You ordered your book.’ Sonia and Sunny’s loneliness And I’m really very lonely’. The loneliness epidemic is very clear, so I wanted to touch on that too.
A single girl feels invisible after 40. A single guy getting divorced at the age of 40 or 45 or 50, people will proudly introduce him to single girls and say my friend just got married. He’ll say, ‘Oh yes, I was in a long-standing marriage…I’m finally free’ and the next thing you know, he’s off to a destination wedding somewhere with a very young girl. It’s become a cliché and it’s a cliché because it’s happening. And a much-advertised marriage at that, without any consideration for a recent ex-wife or children. But when a woman turns 40 and if she wants to get out of the marriage or has been abandoned, she is often asked, how will you manage alone? Because in reality, this girl felt invisible at the same parties where, as a significant other’s plus one, she was a significant other in a real way.
Female heroes are given very little importance, especially in popular fiction. As a woman writing for women, are you conscious of this when creating your characters?
I understand women, to the extent that you can say you understand women. I understand pain and ecstasy. I’m a woman so it definitely plays a role. I have daughters, I’m close to my mom, I have a sister, I have girlfriends. So, I think I do it very naturally because I can’t write half-baked characters anyway. Which characters in this particular book did you struggle with writing? With Nayanthara (protagonist). Her mother somehow came to me very naturally and I had her friend Anjali and I also had a strange friend. Some characters, when you’re writing them, you start to enjoy them so much that you become more familiar with them. From the beginning, I really wanted flawed characters because there’s so much pressure on female characters in contemporary fiction to be good. I don’t know why women are expected to have such extremely high standards of morality. We are just as confused and confused as men. I wanted her to be a normal girl that you meet in everyday life. He’s more self-aware. But she has also humiliated herself and done stupid things and justified all her wrong decisions to herself. So, that was a bit of a challenge. As Namita Devidayal said in her long words, it is very difficult to write a female character who is not easy to like and yet makes you root for her. I don’t love Nayanthara myself but I understand her.
Some of the conversations you’ve had as part of your podcast (Not Your Aunt), have they fed into your novel in any way or provided fodder for your writing? Actually, no, I wrote this book two years ago. If you find there is some similarity, it’s because, naturally, as a writer I write about things I feel strongly about. And the podcast is about things I feel strongly about. As a writer I would make my different characters feel this way and justify it, like the socialite or the movie star in my book, I sympathize with these people, I understand their compulsions, I understand why they are living up to appearances. All these people, even though there’s not as much intimacy with these characters, you get a sense of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But I’m not coming at them from a place of judgment. My podcast is more equitable in that sense. That’s the difference between the podcast and here. But some of the things that I feel strongly about are things that Nayanthara feels or her mother or the man she meets in Landour.
What are you writing next?This also includes non-fiction and I will also start writing my next novel soon. As women, whether you’re single and living with your parents and taking care of them or if you’re married, a mother, we don’t have the luxury of booking a cottage on Anjuna beach in Goa and saying, ‘I’m finishing my novel’ or, ‘I’m writing this book of poetry.’ At JLF, I had breakfast with Elizabeth Gilbert and I asked her everything I wanted to ask her. He told me something about my life. She said I can do a lot because I am just a single woman but you need a wife to be able to achieve whatever you want to achieve. I want a wife. Yes, I need a wife. Of course, the reason I can write anything is because my husband provides me with the structure to do it, the scaffolding to do it. My kids are pretty independent, but a lot of the things I manage, from a creative standpoint, would be better if I had someone else. That’s why you see people who become empty nesters, the real creative journey starts only after that.
Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar based in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Tale of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
