Anees Salim, the Prize-Winning Author Inspired by Being Told to 'Go to Pakistan'

Kochi-based Anees Salim recently won a Sahitya Akademi award, in the English language category, for his novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants – the fourth writer from Kerala to receive the prize, but the first in the genre of fiction prose.

Before him, both Kamala Das (1985) and Jeet Thayil (2012) were given the prize for poetry collections, and Arundhati Roy (2005) for a collection of essays.

Yet the road to acclaim has been far from easy. Salim had his first breakthrough after years of rejections. The book was Tales from a Vending Machine, a novel about the daily travails of Hasina Mansoor, a young Muslim hijabi girl who works as a vending machine assistant at an airport.

Written in the first person, it draws her character through a mundane day, punctuated by her sense of humour, her resilient nature, and her daydreams of stumbling on the extra-ordinary in a dreary, ordinary existence. Salim still manages a Facebook profile by the name of Hasina Mansoor, whose posts are characteristic of his protagonist’s wit and humour. (Despite her popularity, Salim has no plans to recast her.)

In this email interview, he talks about how the ‘small town’ came to feature in his writings, of how his travels around the country and the cities that he grew to love shaped what he wrote, and how being asked to ‘go to Pakistan’ seeded the idea of his award-winning novel Vanity Bagh.

Most of your works contain an autobiographical element. So how did the feisty character of Hasina Mansoor of Tales from a Vending Machine materialise?

Hasina Mansoor was born out of desperation. I had finished two manuscripts prior to this and both had been rejected by publishers and literary agents around the world. These rejections had almost convinced me that I was not cut out for literary fiction. So I decided to write something fast-paced and entertaining as a last attempt.

The thread of the story came to me at an airport lounge where I was waiting for a delayed flight out of Cochin. I kept shuttling between my seat and a tea vending machine as they rescheduled the flight over and over again.

Behind the counter sat a sulky young girl who, clearly cross with the world, collected money and pushed the cup of tea your way almost angrily. By the time my flight was called, I had decided to weave a story around her, making her as hilarious as possible. And I finished the manuscript in six months flat and my agent found a publisher for it in three days.

Like my all other characters, I think there is a bit of me in Hasina Mansoor as well. Her fantasies, angst and aspirations are mine too. 

After Tales from a Vending Machine, you’ve published four other books. A character like Hasina Mansoor never returned. Is this deliberate or are you waiting for the right time?

Tales from a Vending Machine came out as my third book, though it was the one that clinched me my first publishing deal. Hasina Mansoor is one of my favourite characters, but I don’t see myself writing another book like it, even though my good friend and award-winning author Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar keeps egging me on to bring back Hasina Mansoor. That book was an experiment that thankfully got my writing career started.

You have mostly lived and worked in Kerala. So while reading Vanity Bagh, I was intrigued by how accurate your depictions were of the Hindu-Muslim conflict and the North Indian settings thereabout. What made you write a novel like Vanity Bagh?

I grew up in Kerala but travelled extensively across the country to see places and meet people. I stitched together the mohalla called Vanity Bagh from many Indian cities I fell in love with. And the idea of Vanity Bagh happened many years ago when someone, on the brink of losing an argument, asked me to ‘Go and live in Pakistan’. That statement stayed with me and slowly developed into a novel.

Would you mind elaborating?

This was many years ago, before Pakistan was regularly chosen as the place ‘the unwanted ones’ should be banished to. It hurt me beyond words. But it also made me relook at the cities where certain mohallas are overtly or secretly referred to as Little Pakistan. And that was how Vanity Bagh was born.

The book is set mostly in a neighbourhood called Vanity Bagh where everyone is named after a popular Pakistani figure, and the mohalla is constantly at war with Mehendi for reasons pertaining to faith. And it became a book of mutual hatred and distrust.

There has been an abundance of writings on the so-called ‘small towns’ of India, including your own. What prompted you to base your books in these locales? Was there something missing about these stories that you felt you had to tell?

In fact, my first unfinished manuscripts had big cities as their backdrops. And my first two books, The Vicks Mango Tree and Vanity Bagh, were set in an imaginary city called Mangobagh. It took me a while to realise that my hometown was full of stories. I found it easier to place my characters in streets I roamed as a child, in the house I grew up in, by the sea and on the cliff my hometown is famous for.

Two of your novels are directly political in their content and three others have elements of political commentary in them. Would you agree to this or is it just an over-reading of your work?

The Vicks Mango Tree and Vanity Bagh have substantial amount of political commentary running through them. But even in these books I tried to focus more on human crises than political ones. For instance, in The Vicks Mango Tree my attempt was to talk more about how the Emergency impacted the lives of common people than how the suspension of civil liberties made it one of the darker periods in Indian history.

Out of the five, which book would you say resonates the closest to your style of writing? And which character is closest to your heart?

That’s a tricky question. I think I enjoyed writing Vanity Bagh a shade more than other books. And the nameless boy in The Small-town Sea is the closest to my heart because he was modelled after my son.

How important is craft and style for you in comparison to the story idea? 

For me craft and style are as important as the story. I love to experiment with craft as long as it doesn’t complicate the plot and disrupt the flow of the book.

Has being an advertisement professional helped you as a writer? Or, is there no connection between the two?

My day job as an advertising professional has neither shaped nor adversely affected my writing career. To me, they are different streams of life and I don’t want one to influence other.

Some of your books have received more acclaim than the others. Do you feel that the rest have been underrated?

I believe that The Vicks Mango Tree hasn’t got the attention it deserved. It was my first book and I worked on it for years on end. I hope the book will one day earn more readers and more reviews.