There is a simple answer for all those who find art obsolete and constantly question the function of art in our lives: it liberates us! Novelists, Anosh Irani and Sandip Roy, are two such people who are aiming towards liberation through the art of writing. They shared their concerns in conversation with Bee Rowlatt at the JLF session Breaking Free: The Novel and Gender.

The session began with both the authors reading extracts from their novels. Anosh Irani’s novel “The Parcel” revolves around “two lost and broken souls” as he himself puts it. Madhu in his novel is a member of the hijra community and a retired sex worker who has been appointed the task of preparing a new girl for the sex trade who is the eponymous “parcel” in the novel. All throughout the novel, she has been referred to as “the parcel”, to deny her all the human attributes as if she is just a piece of flesh.

For the reading, Anosh chose a part where a client asks Madhu to send a picture of “the parcel” and once he was done with reading, the recital left the audience with unease in the heart. Bee Rowlatt instantly commented on the fact that his novel is not a “leisure read” and asked him to clarify the “intent behind penning such an uncomfortable read”. Anosh recalled a quote by Tennessee Williams, “ I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.” Expressing the true intent behind the novel he said, “While writing the novel I wanted to be as truthful as possible. I wanted to hold a mirror for what was going on. He shared how he grew up near Kamithapura and the place has both “haunted and inspired him”.

I found out during the session that the true meaning of the word hijra is “to migrate”. Thus, they are a migrating community who are constantly trying to find home both literally and metaphorically with their quest to find home within their own bodies. Anosh Irani’s novel is about a boy, Madhu who is born with the body of a boy but the soul of a female and is consequently rejected by his family for the same. Anosh gave the audience an insight into the functioning of the hijra community and how the community works on a guru-disciple relationship, the guru being the one who initiates you into the community.

Madhu in the novel longs for a metaphorical home and is a character full of “yearning” and finds the “lesser version of her dream” in the form of ‘the parcel.’ A character that is full of “tremendous self-loathing and longing” finds a refuge in “the parcel”.

Anosh then shared how he grew up near the Kamithapura area in Mumbai, notorious for the sex trade. There was a convent school near his school and every day as the sun went down, a number of sex workers including some hijras would line up outside the school wall. Bee then asked him if the sight scared him, to which he answered, “No, but I used to wonder why is there life not like mine? I had a longing to understand these people. One cannot write out of mere fascination, and I wrote about them because I was compelled to do so.”

Sandip Roy, who is open about his homosexuality, shared about his fear of the community, he said, “I used to be terrified of hijras, maybe because of the fact that they were so out and open unlike me who was trying to hide his real identity. I felt like they could see through me and would know that I was trying to hide. I tried to look away and avoided to look at them directly in the eyes because I felt like they could see into me and could see me naked.”

Sandip Roy’s novel “Don’t let him know”, revolves around a gay man who is married and has a son. He read an excerpt from the novel where the central character Avinash is in the adolescent stage of his life and struggling with the truth of his sexuality and the societal gender constructs that clash with it. Immediately after he finished the reading, Bee asked if his book was about “the vulnerability of a gay man”? He expressed how in India a gay man being married to a woman is not an “uncommon scenario”.

In the novel, by the time Avinash gets an access to the gay world and the reality of his identity, he is already married and has a son. Sandip through the novel attempts to clean the figure of a gay married man who is in a heterosexual marriage of the tag of “villain”. He brings out the poignant side of the story. When Avinash gets an access to a gay party in Mumbai, it is for the very first time that the world that he yearns for is “within his reach and yet tantalizingly out of it.”

Sandip also shared how through the character of Ramola, Avinash’s wife, he has tried to bring out the pain of a secret that as a wife she had to conceal and also the exasperation of a widow’s life. The novel traces her journey after discovering her husband’s dark secret. Taking a hiatus from the serious topic, he laughed as he quipped how in India “when you come out of the closet, the whole family goes into the closet with you.”

Towards the conclusion of the session, somebody from the audience asked if it is easier to be homosexual in India. Sandip agreed as he said, “In India, people are more homo-ignorant than homophobic and that is why it is easier to get away with it.”