Devapriya Roy's book deals with mental baggage that we carry all our lives but in an entertaining manner. The author talks to Karan Bhardwaj
There is no dearth of books dedicated to fitness and weight loss techniques. However, Devapriya Roy’s The Weight loss Club: The Curious Experiments of Nancy Housing Cooperative (Rupa Publications) is different. First, it is a fiction. Second, it deals with the burden of everything we carry except for the actual body mass that is the baggage of emotions, tensions, feelings etc. Set in the middle housing colony in Kolkata, there are many interesting characters in the book which are stuck with something or the other thing in their lives. If Meera is bullied constantly by her traditional mother-in-law, college-going Abeer is maneuvering ways to impress Mandy, the hottest girl of the colony. The author says, “The subject of weight loss is so very much in vogue that I got tempted to address it in fiction. I think the possibilities offered by fiction are vast. Instead of stock advice, one can actually engage with people and their real demons. The weight here, really, is more in the mind. There are so many self-help books and health books and diet books and beauty books that try to tell people how they can achieve a certain goal and then bingo! Their life will turn around. The Weight loss Club turns this concept on its head. It’s about happiness, but in a far subtler messier deeper way, for life is like that — subtle, messy, deep. The only sort of changes we need to effect in order to be happy is to listen closely to our own selves, our bodies and our hearts, and not to TV commercials.”
One of the most gripping characters in the plot is of Oxford-return Sandhya, who is half hippie, half saadhvi but a full spiritual guru. She lands in this society and changes the life of all the other characters. The character resembles the like of Brahmacharini Maya Tiwari. “The real-life inspiration behind Sandhya is Brahmacharini Maya Tiwari only whose profound book The Path of Practice chanced into my hands five years ago. I have neither met her nor am I an initiate myself, but her life is so rich with mysticism and secrets of nature that it fascinates me. Sandhya is a very limited sort of tribute to her, though naturally in an entirely fictional vein,” shares the author.
The book is a whole gallery of emotions of a woman. “I am fascinated by the different kinds of relationships that exist for a woman. The theme of sisterhood is definitely a strong albeit subtle presence in the story and thus builds the rousing end. A few dark themes have been sneaked into the book too, such as postpartum depression, a condition that is not very known or understood in India,” says Roy, whose first novel The Vague Woman’s Handbook was published in 2011.
The author is now busy with her next book called The Heat and Dust Project. It is a travelogue of an interesting journey which she and her husband Saurav Jha embarked upon. They travelled through India on local buses on a very tight budget of Rs 500 a day for bed and board. It is also a first-of-its-kind dynamic book as the couple used Facebook to document their journey even as it was underway.
“Once we decided to leave our jobs, do things differently, then the vague plans actually began to crystalise. We are both essentially big-city people (we were brought up in Calcutta, then lived, studied and worked in Delhi). So travelling through so many small towns and hamlets (some of them now morphing into big-towns) was a very educative and transforming process. Then, while we were growing up, geography and history books would throw up names of places that to our childhood ears were full of mystery and excitement. From Thanjavur (with the great Brihadeshwara Temple) to Kanyakumari (the tip of India) to the Zamorin of Kozhikode to the forbidding forests of Madhya Pradesh and the haunting quality of old stones scattered all over the sub-continent, every place we have travelled through has had an interesting story to tell,” says the author. The Heat and Dust Project is expected to be released next Summer.
While speaking about her journey, Roy brings us an interesting anecdote. “We were in Barmer in Rajasthan. After giving us a lovely tour of the sand dunes, our auto rickshaw walla, Ramaram Mali, invited us home for dinner. It was a lovely meal — bajra rotis with a desert-brinjals subzee and lots of home-made ghee. As we were finishing dinner, a sudden shower came. Out of nowhere really as there had been no shred of clouds in the sky and it was late January! Right on cue, the lights went off. It was a profound moment. As we waited, watching the rain in the courtyard, Ram told us that in the desert they say if meh (clouds) and mehman (guests) come together, it’s a very good omen. (laughs.) It certainly was a good omen for us!” she recalls. “From recovering our stolen camera in Kanyakumari with zero knowledge of Tamil to eating a chulha-baked thin-crust pizza in Orchha (population sub-5000), we’ve had many adventures, escapades, joys, and hysterical meltdowns in the course of the journey!” she adds.
However, there were challenges too. “Risks involved like uncertainty of transport schedules (generally ordinary long-distance buses do only around 40 kilometres an hour – if we’re lucky) and of landing up in unknown places late at night without knowing where we would be shacking up till morning. Also, being a man-woman duo we have had to prove our marital credentials in quite a few places before we were provided accommodation,” she says.