The past dominates the plot in Shailaja Bajpai's debut novel, Three Parts Desire, where three characters chart their own paths, live their own destinies and harbour zero guilt for their actions. The Guide caught up with the writer in her Delhi home
The past dominates the plot in Shailaja Bajpai's debut novel, Three Parts Desire, where three characters chart their own paths, live their own destinies and harbour zero guilt for their actions. The Guide caught up with the writer in her Delhi home
Size does matter, but not always, feels Delhi based journalist-turned-author Shailaja Bajpai. So she isn't apprehensive about the possibility that her just-launched debut novel, Three Parts Desire, at 380 pages will deter readers from picking up a copy. "I know most books these days are slim. The original manuscript was about twice the size. But I didn't actually want to make it too short," says Shailaja, with a twinkle in her eye.
Shailaja Bajpai at her residence in Friends Colony in New Delhi.
PIC/Subhash Barolia
Three parts reality
The book deals with three central characters -- Didi, Baby and Kartik -- who try to unravel and come to terms with the skeletons of the past. Bajpai didn't name any of the characters in the book, intentionally. So Didi, the central character, is just Didi, the same goes for Baby. Didi's husband is initially called Purushottam but then he becomes Purush, as if to refer to men, in general. The past figures prominently as the story travels back and forth between The Hills where Didi lives, 3 Chor Bagh, the house where she was married and where Baby grew up, and Delhi, where Baby meets Kartik and abandons him once he fails in his quest to become an IAS officer, which kills Baby's dreams of becoming an IAS officer's wife and live in a Lutyen's Delhi bungalow.
Delhi, the city, is there too, and as some of the female characters actually thank the Emergency for the safety factor it ensures, it rings a bell with many a Delhiite belonging to the fairer sex who longs for the security and freedom to just be. For Didi, it is about trying to suppress the past; for Baby, it is about unearthing it, and for Kartik, it is about finding out about Baby's past so that he can come to terms with the present. A part of the book happens in real time, though. The characters in the book have their own life. "As I started writing, they developed a life of their own and would direct me to write," reveals Shailaja. It took her three-and-a-half years to finish the book. "I would get up each morning and religiously sit down to write for a couple of hours. Then I would head to office," the author shares, sitting in her Friends Colony home in south Delhi.
The writer's path
So what turn writer, especially these days when everyone has turned into an author? "I always wanted to write. I started writing as a kid. Once, I wrote a sad story about a fat girl. My father read it and laughed. I realised it wasn't going anywhere and then I became a journalist," muses Shailaja. One rainy day in the late '90s she decided she had enough. "I took a notebook and a pen -- I didn't have a computer back then. I sat by the window and started writing. So I didn't really plot this out. It happened naturally." For people in the 60s and 70s, her characters seem strangely very liberated. "A certain strata of society was far more liberated than we actually believed," the author clarifies. "Even in my family, we grew up without knowing much about festivals or castes."
What stands out in her book is that no character suffers from any guilt for their actions -- "Everybody is happy being who they are. I didn't want it to be a melodramatic, soppy story. Even Som Devi (Didi's mother-in-law), doesn't really cry. Only Mem did," says Shailaja, laughing. Take her main protagonist, Didi, for instance. "Didi loves to live. This attiitude allows her to go beyond what she has done. She lives the consequences of her deeds and does not go about moping," says Shailaja, who loves reading thrillers in her spare time. 
Three Parts Desire, Shailaja Bajpai, HarperCollins India, Rs 399.
Available at leading bookstores
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