A memory―intangible to the core―shared by her mother helped oral historian and author Aanchal Malhotra give form to her first novel―The Book of Everlasting Things. Malhotra’s maternal grandfather used to work as a chemist at a pharmaceutical firm. He would bring home samples of fragrances, and mix them with the water in the air cooler during summer. And, the house would smell like heaven. That scent still lingers―both in the memory of Malhotra’s mother and in her own wish for a whiff of it. Traces of it―malleable as memory is―seeped into Malhotra’s imagination and helped her shape her novel’s protagonist―Samir.
Samir hails from a family of perfumers in pre-partition Lahore. It is amid the perfume bottles in his family-owned ittar shop that Samir falls in love with Firdaus, an apprentice calligrapher. But their love story gets shaped―and reshaped―during the partition, which divided not just land but people as well into Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Released in December, the novel evokes a mixture of scents―of people and places, too―that survived that bygone era of terror and fear.
Partition history is Malhotra’s forte. A decade ago, she became a collector of memories, materials and even sighs of that bloody age of mass exodus. Her Remnants of a Separation (2017) revisited partition via objects that refugees carried across the border. Her second book, In the Language of Remembering (2022), traced the “long-term, cross-border, generational legacy of the partition”.
Fiction though was uncharted territory for her. “I had a lot of trouble moving from being a historian to a novelist because the narrative of fiction is so malleable; it does things that we do not expect,” she told THE WEEK during the recently held Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode. “With non-fiction, there is so much control over things. There is so much planning involved, and you rarely deviate from it. But, to take a plunge into fiction was very hard.”
Though fiction is demanding, it is also rewarding, Malhotra quickly added. “I wrote about the partition in a very different way [from my previous work] in the novel,” she said. “I do not think I could have worked on the novel without doing all the work I did in oral history because it helped to make the narrative very authentic. The specificity of memory you collect from people is very rarely seen in novels. And, I think I was happy to be able to bring that into the narrative.”
Malhotra began working on her novel in 2016, around three years after she ventured into the process of recording oral histories of the partition. “Being an artist trained in metal engraving, my introduction to oral history was purely out of interest,” she said. “I realised very late that my family also had been impacted by the partition. And, I began to think that the generation after me would know even less. So, I started recording stories, which I would later realise was oral history.”
Both her maternal grandparents came from Lahore. Her paternal grandfather hailed from Malakwal, a small town in the Mandi Bahauddin district of Pakistan’s Punjab, about 250km from Lahore, and her grandmother from Dera Ismail Khan in the North-West Frontier Province. However, as a child, she never heard any stories of the partition. “I think that created a vacuum around my knowledge because I grew up in the 1990s with the knowledge of Kargil war,” said Malhotra. “The history on both sides of the border is limited. So, for millennials and those who came after, there is a very complicated negotiation we have to do with what we hear in the news and in the history books versus what we may hear at home as stories.”
And, when she started collecting stories, Malhotra found that the stories ranged from those of belonging, longing and kindness to stories of violence and hate, prejudice and bias. Her novel is a reminder, of sorts, of the need to preserve these memories and histories that were carried, or hid deep inside, by the last generation that was a witness to world wars and the partition.
Though its malleability may have helped her in shaping her novel, Malhotra said memory was a complicated thing. “Memory is not a recording device,”she said. “What we remember does not appear as a picture. It can be altered by the contemporary world and events.”
For that very reason, different generations may feel differently about the partition, observed Malhotra. She cited the story of a young man, whose family had migrated from Jammu during the partition and now lived in Pakistan, close to the border. “From his village, he could see a very foggy sort of image of a temple across the border,” she said. “And, later in life, he would learn that it is the Vaishno Devi Temple. India and Pakistan had just fought the Kargil war, and that image of the temple caused the young man great anxiety because it is enemy territory. However, he would be surprised to hear his father speak about the temple with a lot of warmth…and [he] longed to go back to that temple and see Vaishno Devi again.”
Though she did not hear many partition stories at home as a child, she would hear the word ‘refugee’ a lot. “My paternal family lived in a refugee camp for nearly a decade,” said Malhotra. “And, that is where my [paternal] grandparents met, fell in love and got married. My grandfather (Balraj Bahri Malhotra) started a bookshop (Bahrisons Booksellers) in what was refugee market [Khan Market] in Delhi. He would always [talk] about the [family’s] shop in refugee market. So, as a child, I heard that word a lot, but I did not understand the larger connotation it has.”
Malhotra also remembers her grandparents talking of the villages on the ‘other side’ of the border. This ‘other side’ did not register in her mind as Pakistan, but as “some mythical land “with mango orchards, fields, local bazaars and a “village version of happiness”. She is sure that her grandparents―from both sides―longed to visit those villages. “But no one ever did,” she said. “And, I was the first person who went there to rediscover anything that had been left behind.” And, find she did.