It was with a trepidatious forefinger that I wiped the dust from the top edge of my copy of Difficult Daughters and looked at the publication date -- 1998. I had taken the novel down because its author Manju Kapur Dalmia was coming to Lahore for the Lahore Literature Festival 2014. Rereading makes you both the student and the tutor again -- the old self is queasily reminded of the younger self through underlinings, ticks, squiggles, arrow signs and emphatic marginalia including that staple annotation of the first-time reader, ‘irony’.

My copy of Kapur’s debut novel was a Faber and Faber first edition with a sepia-toned cover; the page edges had now long faded to brown to match the title picture of Kapur’s mother.

By any reckoning, literature is too solemn a word to use for contemporary writing; but in effect the sheer literary quality of Manju Kapur’s craft calls forth no other. Hers is virtuoso writing, a finished prose, shorn of pyrotechnics. We have writers as confessors, shackled to their personal lives, and writers as researchers, hanging their sheets of information from a bloodless storyline. But of writers immersed in their material, and enabled to draw tales from a community of relatives and neighbours, Manju Kapur appears to be the last great example.

Born in Amritsar, Kapur grew up in Delhi, and earned a Masters degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and an M.Phil from Delhi University. She has taught English Literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi for years. She is the author of five novels, and the editor of Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves.

As she sits on an infirm divan on the anterior lawn of Alhamra, Lahore, her 70 years rest uneasy on her: the short mop of hair is grey and the eyes, except when they animate at a bon mot, grave with the process of thought. Yet the face has the cherubic smoothness of innocence. The disparity is disturbing, and then in a way, a mirror to her writing, which yokes together the past and the present, the near and the far, in subtle and seamless ways.

The News on Sunday (TNS): What did it take to become a writer?

Manju Kapur (MK): I was always unhappy as a child but things are better now, as I grow older. I was born right after Partition. My father was posted to the US as a cultural ambassador, so we were there for seven years, and, after that, in Delhi, uninterruptedly. Because I was unhappy (and for no good reason), writers, perhaps, always stand a bit on the outside, looking at whatever they are writing about, both as an outsider and an insider. Temperamentally, I do feel a little on the outside -- I don’t socialise much at home, and now when I have given up my job, I almost never go out. And, yet, I am writing about people in the society because that’s what novels are all about.

I am writing about various social situations because, whatever it is, I am observing. Being an outsider gives me the status of an observer (of course, every outsider is not an observer). It just so happens that for being a novelist, you have to be a keen observer. It’s not only my experience of childhood (whatever that may be) but more than anything else, my experience as a woman that has seeped into my writing -- the experience of struggle, the experience of trying to be empowered, of the difficulties of being empowered, and the experience of juggling a domestic/family life with a public/professional life.

For many years, I taught at the University in Delhi, I had children, and I ran a house (somewhat badly, though), but just to have the time and space to do this when nobody is giving you space, was challenging. My role was that of a workingwoman, so why was I taking on more and more when it was always a question of time? For a woman to claim time for herself (and a writer needs a lot of it) is not always easy. It’s become easier as I have grown older and my responsibilities are less.

TNS: How did you embark on the idea of writing?

MK: At the age of 41, after my youngest child was born, I felt my years of having children were over. I was a teacher (not a brilliant, astounding one!); I hadn’t published academic stuff, and at that time, at the unlikely age of 40, I decided that death was approaching. In your 40s, you begin to think what legacy are you going to leave behind? I had a legacy I could be really proud of -- children, students, being a wife and a mother -- but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more, I wanted something uniquely mine and that was writing in post-Rushdie times. (I think Midnight’s Children was published in 1980).

In the 1980s, Rushdie spawned a lot of interest. He was an encouraging example. People felt that they had found a subcontinental voice -- a voice that was theirs -- and you didn’t have to write in Queen’s English, anymore. A lot of people around me were writing at that time. A friend of mine, in particular, started writing, and I said if she can write, I definitely could! It took me 8-9 years to write and get my first novel published. Every time it was rejected (it was rejected 8 times), I rewrote it. I never reached a point where I could feel I can’t improve it anymore.

Faber and Faber, London, became my first publishers.

TNS: What precipitated the narrative structure of Difficult Daughters?

MK: Initially I groped around for a story because when I started writing, I started with autobiography. I knew my life, so I started with the Delhi University -- life of a discontented lecturer. After 80 pages about her childhood, no story emerged. That is when I thought I should look at my mother’s life. After drawing upon my mother’s life, I said to myself now let me look at my mother’s life -- what made my mother the way she was, what shaped her who shaped me. By the end of it dealing with all these women, I had a 170, 000-word novel in my hands.

I said, I couldn’t go back to the life of a daily lecturer now.

Because my mother had studied in Lahore and grown up in Amritsar, and my grandmother had come to Amritsar after her marriage whereas she’d grown up in a small town near Wazirabad, I had to come to Pakistan to research. And being an academic, I used a lot of research. I read 10 years of The Tribune on microfilm. (Now it’s published from Chandigarh). That gave me a real sense of how people were living. Although I had interviewed a lot of people and read history books, it was the newspaper that became the defining feature, and I stumbled upon it by accident. I wanted to know what day a certain date was, for instance, and it was all there. The newspaper was such a minefield of information about the dailyness of life -- which is what you need to write a novel.

TNS: How was the first novel received?

MK: The book received Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and suddenly there was so much attention. When the book got published, it garnered normal reviews but when I won the prize, I got rave attention for three weeks, which was scary. We all went to New Zealand to receive the prize. This kind of fame is quite distracting -- you don’t quite feel yourself. You have to talk to reporters almost always about yourself. You have to get your pictures taken, and think about how you look when you are no glamour queen. Itall quite disconcerting. I did wonder how the film stars could ever feel normal.

TNS: How would you respond being compared to Jane Austen?

MK: Being compared to Jane Austen is a high honour. Austen is also making huge statements about the world by talking about the domestic lives of women. But nobody calls Austen a ‘women’s novelist’. They call her a classic. She’s part of the clan, and so is George Eliot. Hopefully that distinction will be elided in contemporary women’s writing also, and instead, seen as something significant about the world said through the lives of women and their relationships. But then there are more important things that are being said than just relationships -- there are statements about patriarchal assumptions, about money, about socio-economic values, etc. -- being conveyed through this medium.

TNS: Women are the ones who scaffold relationships in your novels. They play a vital role in keeping the family structure intact. Have you ever thought of passing on the buck to the male counterpart?

MK: Well, in my last novel, Custody, there is a man who plays the kind of role we are talking about. It’s about a divorcing couple. He’s the hero of the novel because he’s there right from the beginning till the end. He’s battered and torn between his first wife, his second wife, his daughter and his son. It’s not a one-person story though. (Ekta Kapoor, dubbed as Yeh Hain Mohabbatein has made this book into a tele-serial for Star Plus. Ekta Kapoor, who’s met me only once, said she’s going to extend the serial way beyond the scope of the novel because the book can’t possibly provide material for 270 episodes).

My second novel, A Married Woman came about as a result of the research I did for Difficult Daughters. It centres around the Babri Masjid incident that took place on December 6, 1992. I thought it was a terrible shake. I was totally against it. It violated the fabric of Indian society. If I hadn’t written Difficult Daughters, I would have probably written A Married Woman because I felt the seeds of Hindu-Muslim enmity were sown during Partition, and this incident was one of its ugly faces. This was the background theme. The other theme in the novel had to do with friendship between women -- how women are very supportive of each other. The story came gradually as I wrote it. Just being friends didn’t work, so I made it ‘sexual’. There was no story and no plotline in keeping them ‘friends’, so I had to change it by rewriting it. I was on the fourth or fifth rewrite, when I said this is not going anywhere, so let’s change it!

Next came Home because of my students. I taught at Miranda House for many years, and the novel was born of my conversations with some of them about the kind of lives they led and the kind of expectations they had had. Once again, I wanted to go back to my earlier theme of how joint families can be really destructive of their daughters and their sons. On the contrary, they can be really supportive as well. In fact, I wanted to show how they function in both ways -- they can destroy and they can protect both to extraordinary lengths. It was that kind of dichotomy that I wished to show.

TNS: The Immigrant is not just about relationships -- it’s about the shift in landscape. How do you see India, on the one hand, and Canada, on the other, play a role in the narrative?

MK: Since I studied in Canada, I knew about the brides going from the subcontinent, and about the terrible things happening to them. I wanted to write about the immigrant experience, so I set my novel The Immigrant in Canada. I also wanted to address the immigrant experience reflected in these people when they come back home.

Every family has people who go abroad and come back, but they end up belonging nowhere. I just wanted to explore that, and bring together in that book many stories that interested me, such as the emergency, issues of identity (what makes you who you are), and so forth. "Am I Indian because I live in India?" "Am I Hindu because I am sitting in India?" "Am I still a Hindu when I don’t practice a single Hindu ritual, yet get around as a Hindu?" When I go abroad I won’t eat beef even though, in actuality, I don’t care. I would celebrate Diwali with more gusto abroad than I ever did at home. And I’ll miss the food and the smells more than I ever did at home. Is it a contrast with your surroundings that impel you to reinforce and assert your identity? I wished to explore sexual identity, romantic identity, marital identity, and political and social identities. You have to constantly reaffirm who you are. That’s why writing has been so important to me because it makes me stronger; it gives me a voice. When I started out in the 40s, the discovery of my voice was really an enabling experience.

TNS: How would you recount the experience of Partition -- your mother studied twice in Lahore (she did her BT from an Arya Samaj Institute which has now become a girls’ school, and her Masters from Government College), your grandmother came from what has now become West Punjab. How do you feel about the land that you belong to slice into two?

MK: We have a great sense of loss. The country is divided but what increases this sense of loss is the fact that it’s so difficult to visit. If there were a permeable border, the sense of loss wouldn’t be so strong. It’s also the sense that something has been taken away from you permanently. Nobody wants possession or ownership but what if the two countries could have a friendlier, open relationship?

It’s a fact that where there was one country, now there are two, for whatever reason, but you still don’t feel so much loss if you can come, if you can still experience it. Then their similarities and differences won’t matter so much. There’s always a sense of longing, nostalgia and regret. And that is fuelled not just by Partition but also about how difficult it has become to cross the border. It’s the barriers that accentuate these kind of feelings of loss and longing.