deeply. It is not only the Calcutta that I grew up in, but also the world of books and writing, words and language, of memory and storytelling. The novel is also about the loss of that world, about its slow decay and death. It is about the way this space, so often about the ordinary, intimate everyday, fades out in the face of the more dramatic headlines of history. The pervading metaphor of this world and its slow decay is Silverfish, the insect that makes paper its home and slowly eats it away.

Milan, the protagonist of the novel, is a figure whom I know from both the imaginative and the geographical spaces of the novel. Like many of us in Calcutta, I’ve met him many times, at various places, in various avatars – the College Street intellectual, the Little Magazine poet, the unnoticed teacher of literature in government schools. He is also the ordinary man smothered by an apathetic state administration, and its violence and criminality that sadly, are still very much around us.

But the main subject of the novel, as I see it, is Milan’s relation with another forgotten story that has appeared in his life. This story, for which I mixed history with imagination, is from a voice from women’s world in colonial Bengal, also lost in the sound and fury of time. This is a story that Milan cherishes as an artist, and which casts a strange new light on his own struggles with a corrupt political system. The idea that possessed me was to create a writerly connection between these two stories of the two Calcuttas, separated by time and yet united somewhere in the experience of hope and despair, of futility before the powers-that-be and yet of tiny, glorious, triumphs such as the very act of writing.

Even though I had some familiarity with these worlds, I could identify with the two main characters only through a shared love for words and the desire to tell stories. In terms of concrete markers, such as age, situation in life and daily concerns, they hardly have anything in common with me. The obvious challenge of working with such characters is that you need to adapt voice and a style where there is very little room for self-indulgence, something I could happily do if I was writing about a character with autobiographical echoes.

There was also the question of language. Much of the novel – and certainly the entirety of the historical story within it – was about life that was lived in and thought, spoken and written about in Bengali, articulated in a novel written in English. Though I tend to think and imagine in English, in parts of the novel I tried to create a sense of the strangeness of the ethos captured by the English language, of the world not lived in English. This in fact is one of the exciting challenges of writing in English about India – the peculiar gulf of experience that exists not only at the larger levels of culture, but at the micro level of syntax, idiom and expression. It is in the building of bridges across this gulf, evocative but fragile, that I feel some of the deepest sensory excitements of writing.

More importantly, the publication of Silverfish speaks to the growth of a strong domestic industry – and the readership behind it – that is showing an interest in local homegrown motifs, not merely the versions of India that are more easily recognizable in the West. Though I’ve now lived outside India for several years, I’ve always believed in the expressive powers of English as one of India’s many languages, and the robust health of the English-language publishing industry within the country bears that out.

Many people have been asking me about the relationship between my work as a novelist and that as an academic teaching and writing about literature. I don’t think I could have become one without the other. The kind of literary-critical work I do is fundamentally shaped by my vision as a writer of fiction, and the kind of fiction I write – though originating in a sensory encounter with life’s fleeting moments – often comes to me enriched with the realm of ideas with which the intellectual is constantly trying to grapple. The writing of Silverfish has illuminated this for me even more deeply than it had been in the past.

Saikat Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of English literature at Stanford University. Born and raised in Calcutta, he has spent the last decade studying and teaching in the US and Canada, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. To read more about Silverfish and its author, visit www.saikatmajumdar.com

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