You once remarked that winning the Pulitzer was like being a kid and winning a senior citizen’s award. Do you feel more comfortable as a Pulitzer winner now that you have written your third book?
Not really. It (Pulitzer) will always remain a very strange and in some senses very early, one may say premature, period for the writer I was at that time.
But it must help in terms of confidence levels?
Writing is so humbling, there’s no confidence involved. It helps to have some experience, a greater degree of familiarity with the process of writing. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.
One would think it would have given you permission to take wider risks in exploring lives you have nothing in common with. Is that a conscious decision: not to move away from the familiar terrain?
I’m just not interested. I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can’t be forced. I see no need to write about anything else, or any other type of world. There’s more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.
There’s a preoccupation in many of these stories with the loss of a mother. Any reason?
I grew aware of that as the book was being put together. I did experience the loss of my mother-in-law and father-in-law around the time, and it’s the closest I’d come to losing a parent. It made me much more aware that it was an inevitable part of life and it made me think more about losing my own parents who are still living.
Did it have anything to do with you becoming a mother yourself?
Absolutely. That was the other experience that I think I was interacting with: witnessing these losses of parents and also more or less simultaneously creating a family myself with my husband. And just that awareness of life and death in a very basic way was something I was very aware of and I think perhaps will never be aware of in quite the same way in my life—because, I know I’ll lose people in my life, but I don’t think I’ll have more children. There’s something about that concentration of experience in a certain phase of life.
Two children in the space of five years—is it because you can’t find the time to write that you had to resort to the short stories instead of another novel?
I don’t think of short stories as a secondary option, ever. I happened to have some ideas for stories, that I had on the backburner when I was working on The Namesake and it was all very natural to return to those ideas when I finished that novel. In a sense, when life is very overwhelming, working on stories can be slightly more manageable because they are single pieces you can wrap your head around a little more effectively. But having said that, I felt I wrote these stories over a period of many years. It was not that I wrote one, and went on to write a collection.
Compared to your earlier books, India has moved more into the shadows with this book.
The characters are certainly second generation, they are not immigrants themselves but children of immigrants. But at the same time, I think they are very lost, they don’t sense that they belong despite being born and raised in the United States. Because the stories focus more on the children of immigrants, I think the presence of India is less in this book because the presence of India is necessarily (more) novel than it is maybe with their parents. But at the same time I would argue that the characters are in their own way quite lost.
How do you juggle so many roles: writer, housewife, mother of two?
Everyday it’s different. Wake up at 7-7.30. We have breakfast, but don’t all sit down, a sort of rush job. We take my son (5) to school. My daughter (3) goes to the same school twice a week. On the days she doesn’t go to school, I have a babysitter who comes to help me out. On the days when I have nothing else to do, once my son is at school, and my daughter is with the babysitter, I write. I haven’t written everyday for years, that is not something I am capable of doing in my life. I just try to strike a balance. I try to work when I can. I’ve had a babysitter since my son was six months old, so that we have a steady presence in our life. I couldn’t have written the book without her, she clearly was crucial in allowing me the hours to write these stories down which were all written pretty much after I had children. The days are rather mercurial with young children. Even if one wants to arrange the hours according to a certain plan, things are always happening—one of them has a cold and needs to be taken to the doctor, one of them stays at home, the babysitter doesn’t feel well, whatever it is, it is impossible to ensure that a day will go according to a certain plan. I just try to write when I feel there’s an opening in my mind. It’s not a matter of time, but a matter of the mind feeling possibly clear and able to satisfy the many responsibilities I have during the day, in terms of feeding the family, cooking, shopping for them.
Oh, do you cook?
(Laughs) No one else can cook in my house! It’s a major undertaking to feed four people everyday. It’s something I have to do. It takes time, it takes thought, it takes planning.
And now your book is coming out, it would require major book tours?
I’m going to be travelling on and off for a month. I’ve been away from them (her children) briefly not very many times but this would be the first significant amount of time I’ll be consistently away from them.
Do you still speak to your children in Bengali now that they are going to school?
Less so. My son so understands Bengali and Spanish, but he doesn’t speak it as well as me or even as well as before he went to school. And my daughter is more or less English-speaking. It is particularly hard I think when both parents speak a different language.
Do you have a sense of sadness, that you are the end of that immigrants’ line?
I do feel I am the end of the line, in that sense. They are beginning a new line. That’s partly why I am trying to write about it. But I think we carry within ourselves so much of what’s passed. It’s not the present day that is informing us, certainly not in my life. I think I’m always aware of what I came from, how I live, how I was raised, where my family comes from. And just because I’ve moved beyond it does not mean it isn’t within me.
Is that why you dedicated this to both your children, as a document of a way of life that is being erased?
I think all my books are about that. I think all books are about that. I dedicated this book to them because I wrote it when they came into my life.
On your last meeting with the Indian press, you said you felt all your buttons were being pushed. Do you still feel like that?
(Laughs) I think it remains a general feeling. The questions are generally tougher, I’ll say that.
