Ten years ago, when I began writing what I hoped would be the likeness of a novel, I began groping for a title even before I had put pen to paper. I like to think of the titles of novels as a writer’s pet name for the project: those long years spent raising a recalcitrant infant needs nicknames. I’d read enough literary criticism to know that the title of a book was related to what it was about, but I chose to be sceptical: how did parents name children without ever knowing what their children’s lives would be about? The other thing that literary critics had told me, in the tone of dating experts, was this — first novels were inevitably autobiographical. Mine wasn’t — it certainly wasn’t about my life. A few months into the writing gym, I realised the veracity of that truism: I hadn’t set out to write about myself, but I did want to write about the place that had made me the person I’d become.

Siliguri is a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal, and I’ve spent most of my life here. For some reason, I’d decided that I did not want to put its name in the title of my imagined novel. I needed a nickname; it was a relief that I didn’t need to create one. Its geographical position as a connector, a ‘gateway’ to the country’s Northeast, a corridor as it were, had given it a funny and wicked nickname: ‘The Chicken’s Neck’. The story of three confused university students — a Bengali girl and her two friends, a Rajbangshi orphan and a Nepali student involved with the Gorkhaland movement — I decided to call ‘Love in the Chicken’s Neck’. Writing alone, keeping it a secret from my family who’d have thought this a useless exercise compared to the more important job at hand — finishing my doctoral dissertation — I sent it to a competition for unpublished manuscripts. Surprisingly, it was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. That was in 2008, and since then I’ve often had to answer queries about why I never got the manuscript published. The truth is that I was dissatisfied with the ‘story’ — I couldn’t be audacious enough to call it a ‘novel’ — and didn’t want a few hundred trees to be killed for a bad book. Now, all these years later, I like to think of that first aborted attempt as a good illustration of Siliguri itself — a provincial town’s experiments with self doubt. (A few years later, I found that all permutations of my name had been taken as Twitter handles. I am @SumanaSiliguri on Twitter, happy to have my hometown as a surname. It seems like a logical progression — in boarding school in Calcutta, I was ‘the girl from Silla’, the last word being a teenage abbreviation for the town.)

What was so special about my hometown that made me want to write about it? The answer to that would be one word: Nothing. As Tabish Khair, a chronicler of small town life, told me once, when we were driving out of Siliguri, “All small towns look the same, particularly when you are leaving them”. I like to think of this seemingly unremarkable — but actually deep subterranean — nature of provincial life as one that supplied to me the aesthetic of my writing. Though one can never be sure where affinities spring from, I am tempted to link the ‘Nothing happens’ aesthetic that I first encountered in Samuel Beckett, almost simultaneously with my discovery of Mani Kaul’s film Uski Roti , and of course Amit Chaudhuri’s delicate explorations of the ‘Nothing happens’ aesthetic in his novels, with my unselfconscious ambition for my own writing. I am certain that this way of looking at the world, my rejection of Aristotelian speed in narrative, a natural turning away from social and historical models of ‘greatness’, a modernist impulse to inhabit the cusp between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, all of these come from living in Siliguri, a place where Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and China are closer than Calcutta. I am also aware, in however preternatural a way, that my sense of morality — my place on the map — has come to me from living in a place rimmed by mountains, the Eastern Himalayas. Looking at one’s shadow against the expanse of mountains is a good education about one's insignificance.

My friends put my obsessive love for nature to my years in Siliguri, a ‘green life’, as I’m reminded from time to time. When I sit down to write, however, it is neither the consciousness of that green — its colonial but increasingly dilapidated tea gardens or the anorexic Baikunthapur forest — nor of hazy historical gossip surrounding Siliguri that orbit my consciousness. Having conditioned me to reject grand narratives, Siliguri pushes its residents into my stories: the anonymous madman who wrote unsolvable mathematical equations on its walls in the 1980s; the fishmonger Nimai who thinks 25th Baishakh — the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — is related to the 25th of December because of two men in beards; Sapna-didi, who calls Kuwait Colony near the rail quarters ‘Wait Colony’; Ratan, who believes Siliguri is immortal because it is made of plastic. I’ve written about its river Mahananda, now ‘Maha-ganda’, I’ve written about a tiger entering the town, I’ve also written about the Sukna forest that gives the town its green beard, but I’ve never written a poem or story about Siliguri. I doubt if I ever will. I’m superstitious — the most important things in one’s life lose grace and humour when one commits them to writing.

(In this monthly column, authors chronicle the cities they call home.)

Sumana Roy is a poet and writer based out of Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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