“I realized HURDA cannot be one person’s story”—An interview with Atharva Pandit
Debut novelist Atharva Pandit discusses why he chose to render the true-crime story as fiction in Hurda, the polyphonic nature of the narrative, and his uninhibited portrayal of the investigation and the actors involved in the case.
I picked up debut novelist Atharva Pandit’s Hurda (Bloomsbury, 2023) on a whim. Principally, I was interested to read an arresting crime thriller. As I sifted through the book, however, an eerie sensation of familiarity took over me: I didn’t know of this real-life incident at the core of Hurda’s plot, yet the story merited attention, as if it was unfolding intimately close to me.
Hurda is an engrossing book, centred around the disappearance of three sisters—Anisha, Sanchita, and Priyanka—on Valentine’s Day in 2013. The novel is written in the manner of an unfolding, whose propulsion—its intrinsic characteristic—makes the reader stick to the end. The plot is revealed from various perspectives, problematizing the conventional narrative by introducing characters indirectly complicit in the tragedy. Pandit renders this narrative with nuance and attention to detail, almost in a form of reportage. Another strength was Pandit’s use of language to tell this story, its chutneyfied English follows in the great lineage of Salman Rushdie.
In an email conversation, Pandit discussed why he chose to render the true-crime story as fiction, the polyphonic nature of the narrative, and his uninhibited portrayal of the investigation and the actors involved in the case. Edited excerpts:
The Chakkar: In an earlier interview, you cite the influence Smita Nair’s 2013 article (“Once there were 3 sisters”) on the alleged sexual assault and murder of three siblings from the Bhandara village. Nair’s exceptional piece of journalism can be considered a summary of the book, too. I was wondering what compelled you to leverage the real-life incident in fiction. What opportunities lay in the fictional realm, compared to what could have been achieved had you attempted a book with layered narration, like The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro?
Pandit: The Good Girls was one of the influences on Hurda, for sure. But Sonia is an exceptional reporter, and I am not. To write something as good as The Good Girls, I think you need to have a lot of experience, insight, and nuance. But when I started writing Hurda, I wasn’t even a journalist. In fact, it was Smita Nair’s report that made me want to become a reporter like her.
But I came to realise that I am not as good of a reporter as Smita or Sonia, and the other thing was that I felt freer, in terms of the writing, while writing fiction. For example, there are several characters in Hurda who are not necessarily from the actual village where the tragedy happened but are people I have seen met and interacted with in a completely different setting over the years. In a novel, you can do that sort of a thing: jumble up people and traits and just make up characters as you deem fit; but of course, that would be an unethical thing to do in a non-fiction narrative, especially if you are writing a book like The Good Girls. So, I would say it was a choice that I made out of convenience and, of course, because of my limited reportorial skills.
“The complexity of human behaviour and their reactions and utterances in different circumstances is what I wanted to explore, in one sense, through Chitranshu. Just because someone has the ‘right’ stance about something does not necessarily mean that they are an overall decent person.”
The Chakkar: As Hurda’s polyphonic nature exceptionally heightens the confusion in this drama, I was wondering if you could discuss the structure you employed, and what helped you choose this journalistic kind of narrative, with excerpts peppered throughout—such as that playful inclusion of a nonfiction piece by Chitranshu Chitale, who offers his views on the story as if he is distant to it?
Pandit: It took a lot of time for me to find the right kind of language and the right kind of structure or form in which to tell this story. I kept on writing drafts from various perspectives. Third-person omniscient, close third-person, first-person from the POV of various characters in the book; for a long time, I remember I was stuck on Chitranshu’s first-person POV because I couldn’t really figure out his voice, which I think was because I couldn’t really figure out who he is and why he wants to write this book.
In short, figuring out the structure of Hurda took a lot of time and dozens of drafts. Eventually, when I went to the actual village and spoke to certain people, I realized that this cannot be any one person’s story because there were multiple stories, perspectives, and characters all with their own versions of the events as they transpired. This has always interested me: all these different perspectives on a single event or a single person. It taught me a lot about the power of the narrative, and who gets to control it, or has controlled it traditionally.
In Hurda, of course, Chitranshu is the one controlling it, but his distance from the story and his general attitude towards other people as also the telling of this story leads one, hopefully, to question the narrator and therefore the story that the narrator is telling. What is their investment in it? Why are they telling it? Where are they coming from while telling this story? And then about the authenticity of the story. If you have liked the story, but you know that the person narrating it was an absolute asshole, how do you then look at the story? Does it change your perspective about the story itself? All those sorts of things were bothering me.
The Chakkar: Which reminds of to how Chitranshu Chitale’s obsession with the story further problematizes the narration, because of his own misdoings. Could you share if you purposely wanted a grey character here, as opposed to a heroic, idolizing figure, or an uninvested omniscient narrator?
Pandit: Chitranshu was always there in the story because… he is like the fount of my experiences. I would like to believe it’s me interrogating myself and my principles and values: I consider myself a decent individual who doesn’t wish harm on anybody. Sure. But living in the real world is much more complicated than that, and cracks do appear. So Chitranshu was a product of what I imagined I could have been, could be, or perhaps even am. I didn’t set out with the intention to portray him as someone or something specific, but I knew I didn’t want him to be the saviour. Because I think that’s a ridiculous notion: someone coming in from the outside, solving the Great Mystery and saving the day for everyone. It just doesn’t work like that. And I was tired of that narrative being repeated in books and films and all those series. So, I wanted to strip the saviour of that saviour complex.
The other thing that I wanted to explore through Chitranshu was the complexity of any individual. Chitranshu likes to consider himself as progressive and liberal, someone who is on the side of the marginalised; he would defend their rights during debates, or in this day and age he would probably put up angry posts or stories riling against injustice—which, to those who know him through all of that, would make them think that he is a decent person. But then there are things that he does in the novel and things that he utters when he is with his friends, which make him a total prick. So, who’s the real Chitranshu? Or rather, how do we judge a person? On what basis? The complexity of human behaviour and their reactions and utterances in different circumstances is what I wanted to explore, in one sense, through Chitranshu. Just because someone has the ‘right’ stance about something does not necessarily mean that they are an overall decent person, I think.
The Chakkar: This largely Anglophonic narration was interspersed with Marathi, to offer the texture and tone of the place and time where the story is set. I was wondering if you could discuss the role of language in your book—where you employed Marathi without offering translation on several occasions. In my view it doesn’t obliterate anything at all; instead enhances the narration.
Pandit: Thank you for saying that! I wasn’t very attuned to the language part of Hurda until much later, when I was much more mature in terms of my writing and reading. All the initial drafts were pretty much toneless; narration, plot points, and character arcs were there, but the language was stagnant. All the characters spoke the same way. Which I thought was one of the problems plaguing the book, one of the reasons why it wasn’t working. It was set in Murwani, but its language tone and voice were not matching with the location. And that made the pace and the flow of the book awkward. When I realized this, I began to write in a more free-flowing manner, which is to say that if I felt a Marathi word in an English sentence fit and sounded well and did not feel jarring—at least to me—I let it be.
Several reviewers have pointed out that the English spoken in the book sounds more like a Marathi version of English, which is exactly what I was trying to do. Because my ‘milk tongue’ is Marathi, I think in Marathi, even while I am writing in English. So, I just decided to write in that manner, and that sort of just clicked because it helped in building the different tonal variations of the characters, which in turn made them (I think and hope) distinctive.
But all this would not have been possible without my extremely supportive editor R Sivapriya at Bloomsbury; she just got what I was trying to do, and that made things easier.
The Chakkar: A few characters—PI Dighole, Chitranshu Chitale, and Godambe—are deeply misogynist, and you masterfully render their thoughts and their viewpoints in a dialogic manner without any hesitation. While Dighole becomes a representative of what goes around in institutions like a police station, Chitale and Godambe’s attitudes demonstrate how misogyny continues to dominate newsrooms. I was wondering if you wanted to render them as-is, with all their flaws and complexities, or were you encouraged to sanitize their voice at any point?
Pandit: No, they were rendered as-is, the way they were written. I must admit that I was a little hesitant while writing the dialogues, but these were things that people had actually said without remorse, things which I continue to hear all the time from the so-called educated classes within the so-called progressive circles. So, whenever I wondered whether all this was too crass and unnecessary, I would also remind myself that, to not include it would be doing a disservice to the book. I had already played a role in encouraging these sorts of vile, misogynistic sentiments by being silent, and not speaking out against them when they were uttered in front of me, so to further censor it in any form or manner within the book would have—let’s just say, in hindsight—made it impossible to forgive myself.
“Whenever I wondered whether all this was too crass and unnecessary, I would also remind myself that, to not include it would be doing a disservice to the book… to further censor it in any form or manner within the book would have made it impossible to forgive myself.”
The Chakkar: Could you share if you had a sensitivity reader/editor going through the manuscript?
Pandit: No, there was no sensitivity reader or editor. I am not sure I understand that practice, by the way. I mean, if it’s for a factual check—does this crop grow in this part of this region during this season?—that’s one thing; but if a sensitivity reader is looking to sanitize the experience of the characters in the book in order to not be offensive in some way or to sound less offensive somehow, I am not sure I would agree with that.
The Chakkar: Since you were a South Asia Speaks fellow, could you share in what ways fellowships and mentoring programmes like SAS help authors?
Pandit: South Asia Speaks and its fellows are absolutely thriving out there! I have lost count of the number of book deals SAS fellows have bagged—there must be at least a dozen-odd books coming out in the next couple of years, which is absolutely incredible. It’s unbelievable.
As for myself, I had Prayaag Akbar as my mentor, and Prayaag is one of the best readers I have had the fortune of knowing: he will tell you what he doesn’t like, but he will tell you in a manner that will make you see the problem and then he will let you tackle it. I had some very insightful conversations with him about certain authors, certain books, and the process of writing and reading—just two people passionate about writing and reading and books talking it all out, which is bliss. And this is what mentorship programs like SAS do, I think: they provide a community of people who are as devoted to writing as you are. They make you feel less lonely in this business. They make you feel accepted, and they also instil that much-needed confidence in your writing.
That’s how I felt when I got selected for SAS: that someone finds my writing worthwhile, so it is important that I believe in myself and make it worth their while. I feel like SAS is one of the most important mentorship programs out there right now, and that is all thanks to the efforts of Sonia [Faleiro] and the team.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
