Santanu Bhattacharya: Author of One Small Voice

This week Jack is joined by debut author Santanu Bhattacharya. Santanu was included in the Guardians list of the 10 best new novelists of 2023 and in 2021 he won the Mo Siewcharran prize.

His novel One Small Voice is a beautiful novel brimming with humanity and populated by a cast of characters that feel so real you could reach out and touch them.

Purchase One Small Voice

(0:58) The release of One Small Voice
(5:00) Santanu's childhood reading
(13:48) Writing habits
(18:13) Santanu's recent recommendations
(27:29) The books that changed Santanu's life
(44:43) One Small Voice

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a weekly podcast by the independent award-winning bookshop, Mostly Books. Nestled in the Oxfordshire town of Abingdon-on-Thames, Mostly Books has been spreading the joy of reading for fifteen years. Whether it’s a book, gift, or card you need the Mostly Books team is always on hand to help. Visit our website.

The podcast is produced and presented by Jack Wrighton and the team at Mostly Books. It is edited by Story Ninety-Four. Find us on Twitter @mostlyreading & Instagram @mostlybooks_shop.

Meet the host:
Jack Wrighton is a bookseller and social media manager at Mostly Books. His hobbies include photography and buying books at a quicker rate than he can read them.
Connect with Jack on Instagram

One Small Voice is published in the UK by Penguin Books

Books mentioned in this episode include:
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens - ISBN: 9780141192499
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe - ISBN: 9781913519438
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - ISBN: 9780141392462
A Sabbatical in Liepzig by Adrian Duncan - ISBN: 9781788169707
Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid - ISBN: 9780241981382
My Brilliant Friend  by Elena Ferrante - ISBN: 9781787702226

To find more titles, visit our website

Creators & Guests

Host

Mostly Books

Award-winning indie bookshop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

What is Mostly Books Meets...?

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a podcast by the independent bookshop, Mostly Books. Booksellers from an award-winning indie bookshop chatting books and how they have shaped people's lives, with a whole bunch of people from the world of publishing - authors, poets, journalists and many more. Join us for the journey.

Jack Wrighton - 0:05
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, the weekly podcast for the incurably bookish. We will be talking to authors and creatives from across the world of publishing and discussing the books they have loved. Looking for a recommendation? Then look no further. Head to your favourite cosy spot and let us pick out your next favourite book. For this week's episode of Mostly Books Meets we're talking to debut author Santanu Bhattacharya. Santanu was included in the Guardians list of the 10 best new novelists of 2023 and in 2021 he won the Mo Siewcharran prize. His novel One Small Voice is published on the 23rd of February. It is a beautiful novel brimming with humanity and populated by a cast of characters that feel so real you could reach out and touch them. Santanu , welcome to Mostly Books Meets.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 0:56
Thank you Jack, thanks for having me.

Jack Wrighton - 0:58
Our absolute pleasure and how does it feel, obviously at the time of recording, the book is soon to be released. For you as a debut novelist, how does it feel knowing that your book is soon to sort of go out and meet the general public?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 1:12
Yeah, I think it's an exciting time obviously and it got really real when I held the hardback for the first time in my hand. You know before that we had the proof copies and somehow it just didn't seem as real for some reason I mean even though it is a book format and I think my partner was quite disappointed when the proof copies came in and I didn't kind of scream with joy, but I did that when the when the hardbacks came in and yeah, and it I think it's just um, There's a feeling of you know, it's it's been a long time coming because i've been working on this for 10 years so there's a feeling of restlessness that, you know, this is what it was all leading up to, and it might as well now be out there in the world and in a way also kind of just feeling relieved that I can, in a way, separate myself from the book and move on.
2:05
You know, when you've kind of lived with something for so long, and it's just been yours, or kind of belong to a very close group of people such as your publisher and your agent and a few others, it just feels kind of liberating to put it out in the world and then, you know everyone can just move on with their lives and do other things. So that feelings there, there's also a lot of nervousness around what this actually means. It is a labor of love, it's quite a complex novel that touches on a lot of things and while writing you know I sometimes wondered if there was too much in it, whether I was talking about a lot of different things, but I kind of didn't want to censor myself if my characters were leading me to a certain theme than I did want to explore it. But now that it's going to be out in the world there's a bit of nervousness as to you know whether people will find find it a bit too much and whether they'll be able to wrap their heads around all the different things that are going on. It is someone's life over 30 years so I felt like I wouldn't do it justice if it wasn't multifarious.

Jack Wrighton - 3:06
Yes the nature of the story requires it to have you know many different sort of facets to it and from other authors I've spoken to you also get that sense of kind of excitement, relief, apprehension maybe, but the wonderful thing is is I think readers or you know people who love their books are most of the time you know very sort of open-minded so any of those worries that authors have I you know I think sort of dissolve away quite quickly when, I mean I'm sure already you're getting kind of early reader responses through.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 3:37
Yeah.

Jack Wrighton - 3:38
you know so you're kind of already seeing you know that response which I I think is a nice way of kind of easing into it as opposed to just you know bam publication day

Santanu Bhattacharya - 3:47
Going in cold.

Jack Wrighton - 3:48
Yes yeah and how does it you know that feeling of seeing people sort of you know that you don't know that are not your publisher or a friend must be yeah terribly exciting to see strangers reading it.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 3:59
Yeah and I think the first review we got on Netgalley, which is a platform where we put up the book and you know for proof version and then people download and get to read and the first review was just so good and I think that just kind of set the tone for me you know if the first review was was critical or iffy I guess it would have been slightly different, but this was back in September and she was just gushing about the book and you know she had so many good things to say and it's yeah it's been very positive from early readers since then which has been a relief but also just feels really good and like you said, I think, you know, people who will pick up this book are in it for the journey and then they're kind of open-minded about wherever the story takes them. They're happy to follow and, you know, because they're invested in the characters and invested in the story itself.

Jack Wrighton - 4:53
Absolutely. We'll talk, obviously, a bit more about One Small Voice later on. But one thing we always like to do on the podcast is kind of go back to the author's Pass, would you mind telling us a little bit about, you know, where you grew up? Were you always into books? Were books kind of a part of your life growing up?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 5:10
Yeah, so I grew up in India and I was born in Bangalore, which is in southern India. It's a big city now. It was always a big city but kind of has really grown over the last couple of decades because it's called the Silicon Valley of India. So a lot of tech companies have set up shop there over the last few years and a lot of techies have moved to the city. So it's seen a lot of migration from other parts of India and from abroad. But when I was growing up there, it was actually called a retirement city and I think it also had the epithet Garden City. So it was kind of really slow-moving, relaxed, lots of trees, lots of greenery, parks, and a lot of people… from the ex-army people, ex-defense people would settle down there. So it had a very that kind of relaxed vibe. Yeah, so I was always into books, I guess partially because my family were always into books.
6:07
My parents are big readers and you know, if they weren't reading books, they were reading the newspaper every day, and they were reading magazines, literary magazines. We had subscriptions to two newspapers and at least five current affairs magazines every month. we had them at our doorstep and you know they would get picked up and read by our parents and discussed. We also started kind of buying books at a very early age and this was really kind of a combination of a lot of different kinds of books. So my mother tongue is Bengali, so there were some Bengali books that my mother would start kind of reading out to us at bedtime fairy tales by Bengali authors. So we have Abanindranath Tagore who is, I'd say, in the western context, someone like Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales are very famous, but they aren't exactly children's books. Even adults can really, like even if I read those fairy tales today, I'd really enjoy them because the writing is quite literary.
7:08
The themes can be quite grown up. So we had that. We also very finally had this children's magazine called Misha that came all the way from Russia that my father signed us up for. So that was fun as well because you know there were these stories and comics and pictures coming from a part of the world that we were just not familiar with and that was kind of opening up the western world to us but also Russia specifically and you know a lot of pictures of snow and a lot of pictures of snowmen and things we just didn't know existed, I didn't see for ourselves. So that was fun and then I think the first set of books that we bought for ourselves was this set of abridged classics. We went to this book fair I remember and my parents then bought this set of classics for us which had all the classics such as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, all of those. And one of those kind of one of the set was Oliver Twist and that's the book I remember reading first and it's kind of stayed with me and you know when I think back to reading that's the book and if I have a memory of actually you know remembering like where I was sitting and what I was thinking while I was reading it and so on. So yeah, so I guess that's the background of where reading came from and all the different things we were reading, but also the stories we were being told. There was a lot of oral storytelling in my childhood as well.

Jack Wrighton - 8:41
It sounds like a wonderful environment. You talk about this quite leafy city, so sort of open spaces, but also all these magazine subscriptions. I mean, even just having that around the house, I think kids, even if they're not necessarily picking those up, I think sort of kind of you know it's part of kind of stimulating the mind so it sounds like yeah as sort of childhoods go you know very sort of, you know stimulating and kind of were you always encouraged to you know kind of share ideas or kind of you know even make your own stories up was that something that happened in your childhood?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 9:19
Not so much from adults per se because the Indian education system is and I think it I'm sure it's changed over time but back then it was quite top-down you know you had a syllabus and you had textbooks and you know you were you were told what to read you were told what to write so there wasn't that much room for creativity in terms of creating your own stories and things like that but I had a sister I still have I have a sister and we were growing up together almost as twins because she's just two years younger than me and so we did a lot of the storytelling with each other. So we kind of create these imaginary worlds that we were kind of 10 characters in, and we'd set up, sometimes we'd have like little sets that we would set up on the terrace and wear all these ridiculous costumes and involve our other friends as well. So we'd do these little skits and there was no audience. I mean, we were just doing it for ourselves, but that I think led to a lot of creating of stories and characterisations and a lot of debate on, you know, I don't believe in this, like, this is quite unbelievable.
10:30
I don't think this character would behave this way, or I don't think he would wear this or I don't think, I don't think they would speak to each other this way. So it's interesting how, you know, the, you know, the very basics of storytelling start with those kinds of debates you would have or the feedback you would get. So you'd go in proposing oh today, let's play this game where you're the teacher, this teacher, you're this teacher, you're this teacher, and I'm the student or something like that and then it would then become a collaborative effort where people would be like, oh, I think I should play the music teacher because, you know, I sing well or something like that and yeah, it was fun. It was fun. It was quite opened up the imagination quite a bit. This was also a time in the 1980s and early 1990s when we had only one state television channel and there was obviously no internet yet. So there was very little else happening which created this sort of time for all of us to you know just kind of spend time with friends and read and think and you know I don't know if it would have been possible if I was growing up today with the technology and all the distractions we have going on.

Jack Wrighton - 11:38
That's quite a common theme from some authors we've spoken about is sort of saying that even now as contemporary writers that they struggle with the amount of stimulants really that are kind of constantly coming our way from our phone, from our computers, boredom, there's a sweet spot. Too much boredom I think can be sort of destructive, but having that at least that free time, maybe boredom is the wrong word, but it can also be a very sort of stimulating area and kind of encourage that wonderful sort of flourishing of imagination.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 12:11
Yeah, and I was going to use the word boredom, so I'm happy you used it, but it is boredom and I think it is a prerequisite to creativity in a way that also what is too much boredom. I feel like there's some social norming around kind of boredom is a function of the times we live in, right? So right now we get bored really easily because we know that there are five other things we could do. But when I was growing up, I wouldn't think of it as boredom because that was just the understanding of time. you know, I have this time free and it's free time and if I'm getting bored I find something to do. I pick up a book or I call a friend over or I go annoy my sister. I don't know, I just find something to do but I wouldn't think of it as boredom.

Jack Wrighton - 12:55
Yes that's a really lovely point that our window of what we consider as boredom has, you know, shifted very dramatically in these kind of times where the moment you start kind of having a thought and just having a moment to yourself that actually you pick up your phone and suddenly you're imbibing some sort of information.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 13:17
Yeah and I was going to say that because I feel like we exist in times where we don't have the opportunity to feel bored at all because we always have our phones so the moment I find myself doing nothing or with nothing to do nothing kind of actively occupying myself, I go pick my phone up and so I'm never bored, which is, in a way when I say it, it sounds good that I'm never bored, but actually I think I'm just kind of consuming a lot of unnecessary content that I probably could have done without. I was going to say trash, but yeah, some of it is trash.

Jack Wrighton - 13:48
I love how you self-regulated there, just like, no, I think, I think trash is fine because I think there is a lot of a large part of the, certainly the internet and what we see on our phones is kind of the the digital version of sort of junk mail through the letterbox you know it's stuff that does take up some space in your mind but actually doesn't mean anything it's just trying to sell you something or influence you in some way but it is trash I think that's an absolutely fine word to use and I suppose it explains why we have this idea and why certainly some writers kind kind of this idea of them sort of isolating themselves for a period of time, you know, going to the image is sort of some cottage somewhere and, you know, with no internet or TV, but actually that kind of space where you're sort of forced to focus. Is that something you found was useful for your writing process?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 14:42
So I never really got a chance to go away somewhere to write because I also work full time and there's a question of kind of taking time off from work and all of that. But I did write at a time when I knew that I wouldn't be disturbed. I was writing very early in the morning. So I wake up at four and write until eight before work started. That's a time of day when no one's awake, nothing's really happening. So you're pretty much left to yourself and your own thinking and that was a really productive time for me. Find myself being really productive early in the morning for that reason. But I did go to this one writing kind of workshop for a week in Devon and we didn't have internet. Even though we were a group and we were doing workshops during the day, but there was space to write. It created enough kind of room for us to produce work if we wanted to. I do find it a bit pressurising in a way, if I give myself, you know, if I go away somewhere to a cottage, let's say, and give myself two weeks, and then it's like, I have this two weeks, make full use of it and if you don't, then this time is lost and it creates a pressure of its own, unless you go away for a kind of extended period of time, or it's quite extensible, you say, fine, I go away for two weeks, but I don't get enough writing done. Let me extend this to four weeks. But I think very few people can manage to do that because they'd have stuff to come back to and obligations at home and at work and things like that. So I would rather create a pocket of time on a daily basis or in my regular life and try to keep to that discipline rather than go somewhere and lock myself up and then worry about whether I'm getting enough done or not.

Jack Wrighton - 16:25
I imagine it's not very creatively helpful to have that sort of pressure on.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 16:31
Yeah, especially when you're starting off, I guess a lot of established writers then kind of build enough bandwidth into their daily lives to be able to write. But I think especially when you're starting off, there is a lot of pressure and how much you're creating, whether you're doing enough with your time and also because I think the first couple of books just need a lot of soul searching and editing and rewriting and revising and really thinking through what do I want to say? Is this the best way for me to say it? Consider the other feedback that's coming in. So you need to spend a lot of time with the text by yourself. If I went away somewhere for two weeks, I don't know if that would have been enough time. I definitely come back with thoughts and ideas but I don't know if I'd get enough writing done.

Jack Wrighton - 17:20
Yes and I think it's good for those listening who may themselves kind of feel that they have a book in them, you know, to make them realise that it's not something where they have to kind of leave their job, abandon the other aspects of their life because who can do that? But actually your point of making kind of pockets of time around your kind of typical day suddenly makes it feel more accessible, something that can be done.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 17:45
Yeah I think you have to kind of find a way to fit writing in and make it work as part of a regular life rather than think of it as an activity that does not exist in your daily life and and it's something you need to kind of you know it's almost a parallel life you need to create to be able to write because that's quite unrealistic even as I say it like you can't have a a parallel life. This is the life you have and you know you have to somehow fit the writing into this.

Jack Wrighton - 18:13
Absolutely. Now to change direction just slightly, obviously Mostly Books is a small bookshop in Abingdon. Bookselling is what we do so I'm going to ask you to be a bookseller for a moment. If I was a customer or just someone wanting to talk to you about books, I'd love to know what books have you read sort of more recently that have really really stuck with you? What would you be pulling off the shelf to show me?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 18:37
So a couple of books that I have just finished. One is called "A Sabbatical in Leipzig" by Adrian Duncan. So Adrian Duncan is an Irish author, and he writes about an Irish man, Michael, who is, I think in his 60s or could be early 70s even and he's moved to, he lives in Spain now. So he's moved to a Spanish city, but the entire book is kind of going back and forth in time, talking about his growing up years in Ireland, and then a sabbatical from work that he took to join his partner, Catherine in Leipzig, and then the death of his partner and what brought him to Spain. So it's a pretty kind of simple story, if you will. You know, there's a man who's a civil engineer, and he grew up in Ireland, then moved to London for a few years, moved to Germany, and then moved to Spain and built bridges along the way. That's kind of his trade. He built bridges, he's a civil engineer. But the way it's written is just so beautiful. It's not a very long book, I think it's 125 pages.
19:43
But it basically is just this guy kind of with his thoughts because he's now alone, right? And he's older, he's alone, his partner has died. So it's just with his thoughts and we stay with his thoughts and you know, we kind of almost are following his mind and minds are chaotic. So you could smell something and that will take you to something in your childhood which will then you know remind you of an image that will then take you to somewhere in midlife and then a sound could then take you somewhere else in your life and bring you back to the present and that's how the book is written just kind of following his mind through the different memories and the triggers that are kind of triggering all these different things in his memory and it was such a beautiful kind of meditation on how minds work and how once we get to a certain point in our lives we think back to our lives but find these interconnections and how we kind of you know one memory can bounce us to another one and we keep kind of going back and forth and I just haven't seen it done at all in this way in any book. I thought, you know, it was experimental but it was also very brave.

Jack Wrighton - 20:53
You would make a very good bookseller, you would. It's nice sometimes to take time with a book that, dare I say, doesn't necessarily have a plot or isn't kind of plot heavy because actually there's a lot that's to be enjoyed in kind of experiencing time in a character's world, in their mind, and the way you describe that, you know, made it sound really, like a really enjoyable experience.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 21:17
Well, I'm glad. But also, I mean, it's 125 pages. So it's not like, you know, you're expected to stay in this character's mind and the story not going anywhere for 400 pages or something, right? So it's still quite kind of manageable. But still kind of very evolved in how it's written. I had to look the author up because I have to admit I hadn't heard of him before and he's kind of, you know, it seems like he's in his 30s or 40s. So, but it's so convincing that you know this this character is in his early 70s let's say and it's just so convincing and how the character is written you would imagine that the author themselves were of that age and that's a real challenge I feel like you know, my novel has a cast of characters like you said at the start and it takes a lot to be able to put yourself in the shoes of all these different people of different age groups and you know think about what they would think and I think it's maybe slightly easier to do younger characters because you've gone through that age yourself, but it's a lot more challenging to do older characters because you haven't gotten to that point yet. But this was done really convincingly.

Jack Wrighton - 22:33
And I imagine as well when you're approaching, as I sort of mentioned at the beginning, that's one thing that really stood out for me with One Small Voice is the characters. It feels sort of, you know, beautiful in their complexity. Is that something that you found, you said this book took you sort of so many years? Was that kind of one of the things that you kept going back to? You know, it must be hard, you know, creating all of these people and, and breathing life into them. I can't imagine that's an easy process.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 23:04
Actually, it wasn't hard at all. That was the best part and that's what kept me going. I kind of, when I started, I knew what happens at the start and what happens through the middle. So the two kind of incidents that the book is, you know, that are the tent poles of this novel. So, you know, I knew where the story was going. So it wasn't surprising for me. The fun part and the challenging part was how do I take the reader through this journey, right, from this point A to point B and that's where the characters came in and they kind of really helped to take the story forward themselves. They came to me quite fully formed and ready. I didn't have to do a lot of work on them. If anything, I just had to probe, you know, if I put them in this situation, what they would do and then I would just kind of know that this is how they would respond. So I don't think it was difficult, but I just had a lot of fun exploring the nuances of the characters and sometimes they'd surprise me because I wouldn't expect them to behave in a certain way and then, you know, it would seem like this is the way, this is the right way for them to behave, or this is the right kind of thing for them to say or do and I'd be like, this is fun because I just didn't see this coming. You could go in with a plan, you know, I wake up at four and then I'm like, I'll write this chapter today and you have a plan for that chapter. But once you start putting words on the page, it's just going somewhere else and I think that's the fun of writing because if you knew what you were going to say or do then you know it's fun for the reader but it's not so much fun for you so you need to be having as much fun writing this piece as the reader should as well and I feel like a lot of that adventure and energy would transfer over to the reading experience as well if the writer themselves are having fun.

Jack Wrighton - 24:52
Yes absolutely I think you can… well you can't always necessarily tell but I think, I don't know, sometimes you get a flavour of the kind of the passion that has gone into writing something. I'm interested in you saying that the characters would sort of surprise you. I've heard other writers say before that a kind of good sign is when a character, you know, demands that it's written in a certain way as opposed to you going well no I think this would work for the plot or this would work for this scene. It must be, I don't know, a very wonderful moment when you kind of realise the character sort of leading that and you're just there to kind of put the right words into place in order to express what's happening.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 25:33
Yeah it is a funny experience because I mean in a way they are your creation and you know they can't leap off the page and run away and do their own thing so you still very much have control over what they're saying or doing but I think it is equally important to listen to them as well and I think it's just kind of some some sort of touchstone that we need to develop as we write to know if something is ringing true or not and identify if something is not ringing true, then it's probably not true to the character and then query yourself for what would make them ring true. Because I think if it's not true, or if it's gimmicky, the reader picks that up. If it's kind of if the character comes across as not genuine or dishonest in any way, it does kind of get picked up by the reader. So it's good to then pause and think, why is it not ringing true and what is it that the character really wants to do at this point rather than me trying to put words in their mouth or me trying to get them to behave in a certain way and it's the other way around as well, you know, because sometimes if you go in with kind of the brief to yourself is I don't want to write stereotypical characters. I want everyone to surprise all the time. That's also putting a lot of pressure on yourself and the characters because, you know, in a way they're also, if you think of them as ordinary people, they also want to be doing things and they don't always want to be kind of breaking all the rules and surprising you all the time. That would be quite chaotic. So in a way, also knowing kind of where they fall in line and where they break out is also important and that's a fine balance.

Jack Wrighton - 27:06
Yes, very nicely put how you know characters aren't sort of self-conscious of how you know realistic they are, people aren't, you know I don't sort of go about my day thinking you know would… does this seem natural? Would I be doing this? You just do. So we're back in the bookshop. I'm afraid you'll be doing some more selling.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 27:26
Yeah, I have a job to do.

Jack Wrighton - 27:29
Absolutely, and this is quite a big question because previously we phrased this as a book that's changed your life and again if you were turning to an imaginary bookshelf in front of you there, what books would you be getting out to show me?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 27:42
Yeah, I did think about this question quite a lot. Also because when it came to me, it was phrased as books that changed your life. And I was like, wow, that is a big question. The first book that I'd like to talk about is this book called "Trying to Grow" by Firdaus Kanga. It is this very kind of less known book that I picked up in my school library and I read it and I kind of put it away and I was very impressed, but it somehow stayed with me and I'll tell you why in a second. But I also had to look up who this author was, is, when this book was published, only recently when I decided to talk about this book because I just haven't read anything else by this author, never heard this book mentioned anywhere. So for those interested, this book was published in 1991 and in the 1990s, there was a BBC TV adaptation of this book, which I'm now really curious to look up and watch. But this book is essentially a story of a teenage boy. He has a medical condition. I think he has brittle bones and if I remember correctly, he's in a wheelchair and so his mobility is limited. He is in Mumbai, which back then was Bombay and he lives with his mother, father, and I think there was a grandmother as well. He's kind of this, he has this really funny, naughty, snide voice, and it's written in first person.
29:12
Back then, a lot of books I would read, I think most of them would be written in third person. There'd be this narrator narrating a story of characters. This was one of the first kind of books I'd read that was in first person. It just felt so genuine and felt refreshing, but also a lot of that kind of personal humour that a first person narrative allows and a third person does not, was coming through in the book and so it's the story of Britt, who is this teenage boy in Bombay, and he has a crush on his newly arrived neighbour, who is this very beautiful man, very beautiful kind of, another beautiful teenage boy and then later, you know, there's also a relationship with a woman, and Britt's mother is quite obsessed with the British and part of why his name is Britt is because she is quite obsessed with the British in colonial times and she almost rules the end of colonial times and the other reason why he's called Britt is because he has brittle bones. But yeah, I think it's just like, I wouldn't even call it coming on page but because there's no kind of major climax happening in the end. It's just this boy who is in a wheelchair going through life and having these crushes and relationships and sexual awakenings and this was one of the first books I read about bisexuality in India and we still don't have a lot of books that talk about queerness and gayness and kind of the sexual spectrum coming out of India still.
30:51
So it has to be one of those books that did it way back in time and did it really well and for me, kind of grappling with questions of sexuality back then in my teens, this was quite eye-opening and in a way, the tone itself was so liberating, but also kind of the context of Britt's disability made it even more interesting because here was this boy in a wheelchair and the story could have been a lot of different things, could have been a sad story, could have been a sorry story, but he didn't care. It was a fact of life for him. But what he was really concerned about was this hot guy next door and how to hang out with him and how to get his attention and that's kind of all of us in our teenage years, you know, we're all in our own situations, all, you know, grappling with like, you know, there's school, there's family, there's kind of, there's classmates, there's bullying and all of that, you know, feeling yourself not fitting in. I'm sure everybody has kind of their challenges in their teenage years, But a lot of the teenage years is also occupied by just kind of crushing on people, right? You can spend a lot of time thinking about your infatuations and crushes and that's what Britt was doing as well.

Jack Wrighton - 32:10
Yes, a lot of time.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 32:12
And that's what Britt was doing as well and it was just refreshing. I mean, I'd love to go back to, it's out of print in the UK, unfortunately and somebody listening to this should please go print this book and put it back on shelves. but it is in print in India. I checked it's available on Amazon India. So when I go back and the next time I'm in India, I'm gonna buy this book again and reread it. Thanks for asking the question because it reminded me of this book and yeah, made me think about it again.

Jack Wrighton - 32:40
Absolutely and that sounds wonderful as well 'cause as you say, with a central character with a disability, this book could have become many things and it's telling that it feels from how you've described it refreshing now that it's a character with a disability but that doesn't become the sort of central crux of the story that actually it's about another human being kind of enjoying their life, enjoying that very teenage thing of heavily crush it. When it's a teenage crush, it's serious. It takes up a lot of time.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 33:16
Oh my God, it is so real.

Jack Wrighton - 33:18
Oh, absolutely. It's a power that's not to be messed with and no wonder the teenage years are so stressful because it's not a time of life I'd necessarily revisit. But yeah, that book, yeah, absolutely. If someone is listening to this, who can get the button push that will cause more of that to be printed in the UK, we would definitely have that mostly books. That sounds like a fantastic book.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 33:45
Thank you. So I'll move on to the second one.

Jack Wrighton - 33:47
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 33:49
It's called Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It's quite well known. It is set in post 9/11 New York. When young Pakistani man travels to New York, well, he's already been there. He's gone to America, he's gone to university. He has an amazing job. I think it's in consulting or in the financial sector in New York and he thinks he's living the capitalist dream and this is what life is supposed to be. He's having fun. He's in New York City, but also like all his friends are very diverse and he feels like he's on top of the world. This is what life and liberation and youth is all about. Until 9/11 happens and that then kind of really raises questions on identity, on what we really stand for, what our value systems are. The reason why this book is so special is that it does it both from an internal and external point of view. So it shows us the shift in perceptions and how he is perceived and the labels of identity that are put on him in a post 9/11 world, and how he is responding to the external world changing. but there's also a lot of kind of introspection on what it really means to be a person of colour in a post 9/11 world, in the heart of the 9/11 attacks and therefore you know, what should we stand for how should we behave and it goes down to the very day to day where is this still the job that I should be working on do I still believe in this kind of capitalistic mission or should I be spending time doing something else with my life and that's what made this book so special.
35:34
For me, it was obviously not close to my experience, but closer to me in terms of identity and place in the world because Pakistan and India are neighbouring countries. Seeing a South Asian person going through this experience of being a global citizen, but also really having an awakening in terms of their identity. I said, that kind of interiority and exteriority and the friction between the two was just beautifully done and it's also a very smartly written book. Again, another first person narrative, has very strong moments and you stay with the character. So yeah, it's really smart. It's really ahead of its time. I don't think there was a book back then that was doing, you know, that was saying these things with so much directness, but also with so much kind of refinement and in a way for me, I feel like that was the book when I read it, I felt like, cool, I could write something. You know, if this is a book that has done so well and is being read by the whole world, then maybe, maybe there is a way to tell our stories and they will be read too and because I think growing up, there was a lot of exposure to the English classics, none of which were based in our parts of the world. So it always felt like, you know, yeah, I love books and I love stories, but I don't see a place for kind of our stories. I mean, there isn't a place on the shelf really and it made me feel like, cool, this, this, this, you know, I could write something and this could go somewhere. So that I would say like that kind of was the seed of inspiration for me to become a writer. So that's another book that I really hold up as an inspiration.

Jack Wrighton - 37:19
Absolutely, and it's a real reflection of kind of the energy that can be gained from reading a book in which, more so than other books you've read before, you see something, even if it's just an aspect sort of reflected back at you that you think, yes, I haven't seen this before and this is something I can, that speaks to me. The energy of that, a big reaction I think to that is that sense of, oh, well actually, yes, I can tell stories as well, stories that in some way will kind of reflect the world we live in and specifically the part of the world or how I sort of move through the world. That's a real testament to the power of that writing and Mohsin does have that. We are very fortunate to have him on the last season of the podcast. Has that very, very sort of succinct, sharp writing. Direct, as you said, I think direct is a really good description of that. I think I saw, I hope you don't mind me mentioning this, on your social media somewhere. I think you had shared you going to a signing, I think, with Mohsin and sort of mentioning something about sort of fangirling or something like that. It sounds like, yeah, obviously a sort of a big inspiration and influence of yours.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 38:33
Yeah, this was in 2011 and I was at the Jaipur Literature Festival and Mohsin was there and he was on stage talking about his book and then I had my copy of "Reluctant Fundamentalist" and "Moth Smoke" and I literally like ran and I think there was a bit of a queue and I got them signed. But the person managing the queue was kind of moving us along because there was quite a queue. So I didn't really get to say anything and then afterwards, a bit later, I think we'd kind of been broken for lunch and stuff and I was outside the gate of the venue and Mohsin came out and he was getting into his car and I literally rushed to him and I was like, “hi, it's really good to meet you. I just want to tell you, I'm a huge fan” and he was like, he must get this every day. He's like, oh yeah, yeah, nice to meet you. Thank you, thanks for saying that and he got into his car and drove away and I was just standing there for some time feeling like, this is awesome. That's the most important thing of my life.

Jack Wrighton - 39:39
That's a wonderful image. Particularly yes, because he does seem to have, I don't know, he's very sort of, you know, he takes it all in. He had quite a, you know, interviewing him. He was very sort of chilled and just, you know…

Santanu Bhattacharya - 39:50
Yeah, he's very calm. Yeah, he's very calm, yeah.

Jack Wrighton - 39:53
I'm aware as well. I want to, obviously, we want to get onto one small voice as well. So if you could give us the third book that you mentioned that was a big influence as well.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 40:01
Yeah. So this is Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend Quartet and this is not a book, but kind of a set of four books. But it follows the friendship of Elena and Lila. It starts in Naples in a very working class community in Naples, I'd say somewhere in the 1950s and then kind of tracks them through the next 60 years. So they’re kids at the start, in the beginning and then a lot of things happen through the years. But at the core of it is this friendship between these two girls. But there's also a lot in there about kind of evolution of Italy and the post-war years and the different kind of social, political changes that are happening in the country and there's also, again, a very, very rich cast of characters. I think there's about 50-60 different people in the book and she really kind of gives them their space and she never takes the reader's intelligence for granted. I don't think she's ever stopped to wonder, is this too many characters? Would they be able to remember? And there's also all these kinds of connections. This is this one's brother, that is that one's sister. This happened to them and by the time you read the fourth book, something happened to somebody in the second book. But she never takes the reader's intelligence for granted and she trusts her memory. She trusts our ability to latch ourselves onto characters and each character is really given the space to breathe and they could be nasty one minute but they could be totally charming the next minute and that's how human beings are.
41:41
We can't put ourselves kind of on a straight line and we're also reflections of, we're not just ourselves, we're reflecting off of, kind of what's coming at us. There could be settings where I am one thing and another setting I'm completely different. I could be really closed up and formal in a certain setting but really friendly and warm in another setting and I think that's what we need to give our characters. So for me I read this book when I'd written a couple of drafts of One Small Voice and was really struggling with this characterisation because I could see that my natural tendency was to let characters be who they want to be, but I also kind of like this was early days so I didn't also have the skills to make that happen on the page. So either my characters were a bit one tone, or I was going into kind of like pages of explanation as to why they had behaved differently and why they had managed to surprise us and none of them was doing the job and when I read Ferrante, I felt like I can just leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions and they might really like a character, and the character might then disappoint them later in the book. But that is fine because that's what human beings do. You know, we might really like somebody until they do something that might really, you know, tick us off or whatever. So finding that freedom to let my characters live and read on the page was a real revelation and I think the draft of One Small Voice that I wrote after reading these books just came out kind of feeling a lot more true to the characters and that's why this is one of the very important books because it helped me write my first novel with the kind of confidence that I didn't have before.

Jack Wrighton - 43:26
Absolutely, and it seems I can really, one of the books I will sort of sell to people in the shop is the My Brilliant Friend Quartet and having read One Small Voice, that sense of characters and how they move through the world how they're rooted or how they're not rooted in kind of very specific places. Obviously, you know, Naples is almost a kind of character itself in the books. I can really see that in One Small Voice, that same sense of you know I felt if I went to sort of Naples now I'd almost expect to meet the characters from Elena Ferrante's books in the same sense that you know the characters in One Small Voice just feel so beautifully real in that way that yes they can surprise you in bad ways, you know in the same way that people we know can they can you know do something and you think why have you done that what are you doing? And that's one of the joys of reading One small voice is that you know just that kind of enjoying the humanity of it is wonderful but I want to pause there because before we sort of you know talk a bit more about your book I'm giving you the very hard task now and I realise this is quite cruel of me of the in this bookshop scenario the next book you're pulling off the shelf to tell me about is your own is One Small Voice, what made you bring this book into the world?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 44:43
So One Small Voice is what I call a modern Indian millennial novel. It is a story of Shubhankar Trivedi, who also goes by the nickname Shabby, and it is a coming-of-age story of a young man in contemporary India. It starts in the early 1990s when Shabby is 10 years old. He unfortunately witnesses an incident of mob violence during riots that have kind of gripped the country, and for various reasons he decides not to talk about what he has seen. So he keeps it bottled up. The story then follows him over the next 25 years. On the one hand, he's trying to find a way out of that trauma. But on the other hand, he is also a very… an ordinary, you know, young person growing up and he's experiencing life as a child, as an adolescent, as a young adult who has moved to, you know, the big city of Mumbai to work and it is really the the story of the young and how they are relating to and perceiving the world around them, be it the politics, be it the social changes, be it the dynamics with the family, which I feel like a lot of my generation of Indians, we have a slightly different sense of the world than our parents did and so there's a lot of stuff to sort out with them in terms of what they think the world should be and what we should be doing versus what we think our lives should be like. So there's that dynamic as well. So yeah, it's really about the young and how they perceive the country around them and in a way, through Shabby's life, I'd say it is also a reflection of contemporary India and its last 30 years, which has been a period of immense change, immense transformation, social, economic, political, and how that has affected individual lives, how that has impacted relationships between people, what that has meant for communities. So we get snippets of all of that through Shabby and all the different characters and the changes that happen in their lives over this period of time.

Jack Wrighton - 46:49
You've done it again. One thing that really interested me particularly because something you were saying earlier when you're talking about the Ferrante about that characters don't sort of go in a straight line or people certainly don't and of course your book has this sort of wonderful structure where we sort of shift in time. When did that idea come to you? Was that quite early on, this idea of you know of kind of sort of non-linear or was that something that came later on in the process for you?

Santanu Bhattacharya - 47:15
Yeah it was something that came much later so the initial few drafts were all written in a linear way so it started at the start ended at the end we see Shabby grow up and go through life and that was actually something that my agent said to me. So when she read the manuscript and she offered representation, she said a lot of the good stuff is in the second half and a lot of that is attributed to the fact that he's kind of growing up in the first half of the story. I wanted to… I was very clear that I wanted to write the story from the point of view of characters at that point in time. So if the scene is happening, it's almost in scenes. So if the scene is happening in 1993, then the characters exist in 1993 and I find that most books write about childhood in almost like in a flashback sort of way, where you have the adult wisdom and the adult reflection on what happened so that you can explain to the reader, you know, where you sat on the rungs of society, what was happening around you, what your relationships were, and I did not want that sort of adult voice to dictate the child experience. I wanted each character to kind of experience life as they're experiencing it in real time. But what that meant was that the protagonist then is obviously quite unformed because he's a child and he's an adolescent and he's seen this thing, this very kind of defining experience has happened in his life. acting out in a lot of very unpredictable ways, but he's not being able to explain to the reader why and, you know, because he's still unformed, he doesn't know how to.
48:56
So it then made sense to think about how to bring some of the latter parts into the first half of the book, because the reader could then have something to kind of grasp instead of just kind of spending 200 pages with this growing up child and, you know, their kind of unformed thoughts going off in all different directions. So that's where this structure came from, where it goes into different timelines. The other reason is, so like I said, something happens at the start of the novel, which is this incident that Shabby witnesses, and then something happens midway through the novel, which I won't give away. But Shabby goes into a kind of a prolonged period of trauma post that incident and I felt like I really wanted to explore that. I really wanted to explore kind of those years where he's kind of closed off from the world, but also what it means to have him gone through something like that and what the world wants of you. The world wants of you to kind of become normal as soon as possible. You're like, yeah, yeah, this thing happened.
49:54
Come on, get on your feet. You can do this, da da da. So what the world is telling you versus what you are feeling and I wanted to take my time with that and that's why I wanted to use these chapters in the present day to really delve into all those different facets of that experience of trauma. Because if I'd left it in a linear way, what was happening in the linear structure was all of those chapters were kind of just dumped together after that incident and a) that wasn't a good reading experience because you know you were spending 100 pages just kind of reading about this character in trauma. But also the story needed to move forward. So you know I myself found that I was discounting a lot of the things that I wanted to say. I wasn't spending enough time doing it and this structure really allowed for those years to be spread out and for us to really get a sense of what his state of mind is in those years.

Jack Wrighton - 50:48
And it leads to a very beautiful sort of um haunting throughout the novel is how I'd put it might not be the right word and again without giving anything away we're aware that you know something has happened and then also this event that happens earlier on in Shabby's life it you know kind of then also you know haunts him afterwards and the structure of that works sort of yeah beautifully for the reader because we're you know we're sometimes aware of these kind of you know things lurking in the background we know we will we will get there but we're sort of you know putting the the pieces together.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 51:21
No I'm so glad it worked and because that was something I was I was not very sure about you know how this would come across you know whether it would be seamless reading experience, switching between these two time periods. But yeah, it was also interesting in terms of, it almost gives it a bit of a thriller element and I'm quite cinematic in my head. So I think of it in scenes, like I have kind of visual cues for all of these characters and where they are, and the flats they live in, and the street they live on, and so on. So I'm a very visual person and for me, these are almost like if each of this was an episode then you would start with the present day and then move to the back, to the backstory and that's how I was thinking of it and that almost gives you a sense of right something is to come, so it keeps you reading wanting to know what is that incident that happened to him that has put him in this state of mind.

Jack Wrighton -52:19
And you know as well it's got that great sense of kind of interior worlds and kind of the way the sort of the scenes are built as well also again makes it an incredibly readable book. You know, you want to, once you finish one scene, as you've called it, you know, you want to go on to the next one because of how sort of richly written it is as well. I'm aware that time-wise, unfortunately, we're sort of getting to the end of our conversation. I believe we've asked for a reading if you've got a segment from the book that you would like to read. If you'd like to go ahead with that, it would be great to hear some of the words.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 52:56
Thank you. Yeah, I do have a section in the novel. This is where Shabby is… he's got a job in Mumbai. So he grows up in a smaller North Indian city of Lucknow and then he moves to Mumbai for work. And this scene is where he's kind of on a flight, moving to Mumbai for the first time. 2000s Y2K Shabby. The man arched his eyebrows in surprise. “Huh?” “My name is Shabby” he repeated and settled into his seat it was neither aisle nor window he felt foolish not asking for a window seat at the check-in counter he hadn't even known about checking in no one had to check in for indian railways. Subramaniam the man in the aisle seat introduced himself the south indian name, placing him confidently on the map. He still seemed hopeful that Shabby would reveal more about his origins. But Shabby looked away. He was a 24 year old on his first flight ever. He wasn't going to spoil it, making small talk. Shabby. The name had bounced off his tongue that first day of engineering college, as he'd introduced himself to the other students. It gave away nothing. Where he was from, his religion, caste, even gender. He could be anything, anyone. As far as he was concerned, Shubhankar Trivedi was dead. The others had been the same. Sunil was Sunny, Kashyap was Cash, Ramesh was Mesh. The ones who didn't rename themselves were named by friends. The dark skin was Kaaliya, short one was Tengu, pothead was Ganjeri. Everyone deserved a second chance. It was the new millennium, Y2K. They had left their parents' homes forever. A new life beckoned.

Jack Wrighton - 54:44
Santanu , thank you for finishing with that wonderful reading from One Small Voice, which once this podcast is released will be available at Mostly Books in-shop and online, but also available at your local independent. Santanu , thank you so much for joining us on Mostly Books Meets.

Santanu Bhattacharya - 55:01
Thanks Jack, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure chatting.

Jack Wrighton - 55:06
Mostly Books Meets is presented and produced by the book selling team at Mostly Books, an award-winning bookshop located in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. All of the titles mentioned in this episode are available through our shop or your preferred local independent. If you enjoyed this episode be sure to check out our previous guests which includes some of the most exciting voices in the world of books. Thanks for listening and happy reading!