STRENGTH AND SENSIBILITY

In her new novel, The Blind Matriarch, author and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Namita Gokhale speaks of the resilience women and families have shown during the pandemic and the renewed importance of pluck and perseverance

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

You started writing your first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion, 40 years ago. Since then you’ve published 20 books. What makes you so prolific?

I don’t think of myself as prolific. I’m one of those people who operates on nervous energy. I’m also very good at doing nothing. So, I’m not always able to reach that perfect balance of doing as much as I should be doing and not more. If I do, however, compress a lot of pointless activity into my day, then I often seem to operate better. If I don’t, if I try to do what other people call ‘relaxation’, then I fall into one of my favourite hobbies, which is hypochondria.

Your new novel, is set during the pandemic. How do you think COVID has changed our relationship with mortality, with ageing?

The first lockdown, as experienced by many people, was a softer run. I think most of us are aware, in some part of our consciousness, that we are mortal, though we try not to remember it. But during that second wave, mortality assumed a different dimension altogether. And there’s just a rippled mirror of that showing through in the book.

Your writing has always been informed by a sense of the erotic. Did COVID suck it out of this book?