Vanity Bagh

Writing Matters: In conversation with Anees Salim

By Archana Pai Kulkarni

Anees Salim

Acclaimed as one of our most gifted raconteurs, Anees Salim won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018 for his novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants. The book also won the Raymond Crossword Book Award for Best Fiction in 2015.

His other books include The Vicks Mango Tree (2012), Tales from a Vending Machine (2013), Vanity Bagh (Winner of the Hindu Prize for Best Fiction, 2013), and The Small-town Sea that won the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for Best Fiction, 2017, and was shortlisted for The Hindu Prize as well as the Tata Literature Live! Award, the same year.

Salim is Creative Director, FCB Ulka, Kochi, and an avid traveller.


Archana: Anees, welcome to Kitaab! Congratulations on winning the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Blind Lady’s Descendants.

You are known to be a literary hermit and have mentioned that these recognitions have made you unnecessarily wary and self-conscious. Do you worry that the baggage of expectations that comes with awards, coupled with a surge in readers’ interest in you, may be too invasive and affect your writing? What makes you shy away from social interaction and literary platforms, when being out there could mean better sales and a larger readership?

Anees: Thank you. Yes, recognitions have put extra load on me and I have started discarding more story ideas than I used to do in the past. I don’t know if readers’ interest in my books has affected my writing because I haven’t written a book since The Small-town Sea was published.

Coming to my lack of social interaction, it has always been like this. All my books were released without official launches or book tours. And most of them have done reasonably well. But you are right, a few public appearances could have helped the books do better. The truth is I find it extremely hard to change myself.

Archana: The characters in your novels are consummate storytellers, be it the unnamed protagonist of The Small-town Sea or Amar Hamsa in The Blind Lady’s Descendants. Stories are also told from the perspective of a fish or a bird, narrators buoyed up by the protagonist who presumes what they are witnessing. ‘What did they see?’ is a recurring adjunct, a narrative device you use to offer an unusual overview, which cannot be relied upon entirely. Could you elaborate upon the choice and use of this tool?

Anees: Well, I believe children are the most imaginative and fearless storytellers. They have a unique way of looking at mundane things and their points of view can sometimes make you feel liberated. As a child, I used to imagine how birds would see my home, how my school would appear to earthworms, how chickens would heave a sigh of relief when we demanded lamb biriyani.  Since The Small-town Sea is narrated by a thirteen-year-old – my youngest ever protagonist – I thought of using my favourite childhood pastime as a tool.

Archana: Death arrives early in some of your books. Your characters seem accepting of it, including their own. While there is a sense of melancholy and foreboding that shadows their rumination upon death, the characters succumb to it willingly, as if this cessation of their lives, however premature, is elemental and not so unpleasant, an inspiration even. They seem to meet death halfway, walk towards it, so to say. You also juxtapose a death with a birth. Amar in The Bind Lady’s Descendants is born on the very day that Javi, his doppelganger, dies. Vappa in The Small-town Sea dies three days after the unnamed protagonist’s thirteenth birthday. Why this preoccupation with death, and the mention of birth and death days alongside? What does the subject do for you as a writer?

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Anees Salim bags The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013

Novelist Jim Crace made the announcement at the valedictory session of The Hindu Lit for Life: The Hindu

AneesSalimKerala-based writer Anees Salim won The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013 for his second novel, Vanity Bagh for consistent writing and humour and imagination. (Read our interview with Salim here)

“The book is a very comic account of a young man from a minority group from a place called Vanity Bagh, also called Little Pakistan. It is about physical cities, both real and imagined,” said writer Timeri N. Murari, one of the jury members.

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Indian reality, from the margins

Vanitybagh“Vanity Bagh” by Anees Salim and “Foreign” by Sonora Jha are representative of works of many new writers who do not mind taking the risks involved in portraying Indian rural reality in English, writes K. Satchidanandan in the Frontline.

It has been some time since the subcontinental English fiction came of age and began to grapple with Indian history and reality with a confidence and an artistry one seldom comes across in its early practitioners. This new confidence that one first found in writers such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh marks many of the new writers who do not mind taking the risks involved in portraying Indian rural reality in English: the risk of exoticisation, of the work looking like an inadequate translation, of the difficulty in expressing in English the nuances of rustic life and speech. And, looking at the result, one can well say it has not been a vain adventure: we now have a corpus of such fiction that can legitimately claim to be as much Indian as fiction written in the languages whose losses in texture are compensated to a great extent by the intimate insight into the lives and minds of the men and women who people their ably painted landscapes.

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The Hindu Prize 2013 Shortlist announced

Sonora Jha
Sonora Jha

The much-awaited shortlist for The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013 is finally out. The panel of distinguished judges has selected the five books from which the winner will finally be chosen. The panel comprised Malayalam poet, author and critic K. Satchidanandan, poet and writer Arundhathi Subramaniam, author Timeri N. Murari, surgeon and novelist Kavery Nambisan and writer and critic Geeta Doctor.

According to the judges, the number of entries for this year’s The Hindu Prize was overwhelming in its variety and diversity of tone and subject matter. “In narrowing the list down to the five shortlisted novels, we attempted to balance the delight in discovering new voices with the need to prod the conscience of a new generation with unsettling images and ideas that come under the mask of fiction,” says Geeta Doctor.

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Anees Salim: Successful or not, a writer’s life is an endless struggle

AneesSalimIn our times of overwriting and over-publishing, literary legends are difficult to come by. Yet, once in a blue moon, we do come across a rare story of literary struggles that surprises us. The story of Kochi, India-based novelist Anees Salim is one such story.

Anees is a college dropout turned ace advertising professional. He wrote four novels but none of them got accepted by mainstream publishers in India. “After being disappointed by the agents abroad, I also started to submit it to Indian publishers, but heard nothing from them,” he said in an interview. “Then I submitted my manuscript to Kanishka Gupta of Writer’s Side Literary Agency, and within 15 days my novel was sold in an auction. Ironically, among the bidders was a publisher on whose table the same manuscript had been languishing for last six months. ”

Once his first novel was sold, the rest also got picked up, all in the span of a single year. The Vicks Mango Tree and Tales From A Vending Machine have been published by Harper Collins; The Blind Lady’s Descendants by Amaryllis, and Vanity Bagh by Picador.

His debut novel, The Vicks Mango Tree, is set in the Emergency period. The Blind Lady’s Descendants tells the story of a Muslim family living in a little known town. Tales from A Vending Machine is the story of Hasina Mansoor, a young Muslim girl employed at an airport vending machine, and her string of adventures. Vanity Bagh sketches the picture of a tiny Pakistan inside a big Indian city, against the backdrop of a serial bomb blast.

He talks about his trials and tribulations as a writer in this interview with Kitaab’s editor Zafar Anjum:

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