‘I never follow rules’

Filmmaker and artist Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, who is making her debut as a novelist, on why good storytellers don’t carry baggage

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari is two minutes late for our scheduled Zoom call, but she is already apologising profusely. “I got the passcode wrong,” she tells us. The artist and filmmaker, who has amassed wide acclaim for her films, Nil Battey Sannata, Bareilly Ki Barfi and Panga, spends the next 10 minutes talking about writing, journalism, and how she religiously follows certain bylines in the newspapers. “I just love certain writers. I am not the quintessential Bollywood director; I am very away [from that]. But, I’m glued to everything [happening around me],” she shares.
 
It’s only when we flash a book at Tiwari that she laughs, apologising again—this time for digressing. The cover of the book we are holding shows the flower of a cannonball tree, its petals layered and exposed, like the protagonist Oorja of Tiwari’s debut novel, Mapping Love (Rupa Publications), which releases this week.      
The book, which Tiwari started writing three years ago, was completed only last year, during the lockdown. “The pandemic came as a surprise to all of us. One could have either cribbed about the situation [the lockdown], or tried to work around it. I chose the latter,” she says. Tiwari still had about nine chapters to write, when she went back to it. “I realised that this was the only thing I could do for myself in the given circumstances. Of course, we had to keep praying for the wellbeing of those around us. But, there were a lot of things that were not in our control. So, keeping that in mind, I decided to cut off from everything and focus on my writing. I would sit down daily from 4 to 7 pm, and just write.” Her manuscript was ready by January this year, after which work on the edits began.

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Tiwari’s protagonist Oorja, who returns from the US to India, to mend her relationship with her estranged father, makes a stop at the spiritual city of Varanasi, hoping to find him. Pic/Getty Images

The novel tells the story of Oorja, who reeling from the loss of her mother—the one person she really loves and whose funeral she cannot attend—decides to return to India from the US, to mend her broken relationship with her estranged father, only to learn that he is missing. With a crumpled note of his in hand, she sets out on a long sojourn, from Varanasi (Benaras) to a little town near Corbett National Park, and later to Delhi, to encounter more love and loss on the way. “I am quite poetic and emotional by nature. Sometimes, we carry emotions inside us, that cannot be explained. I wanted to understand this whole idea of love, by mapping the feeling through the different characters in my story,” says Tiwari.

Mapping Love began with naming the protagonist Oorja, which means energy that is exploding. Tiwari says it gave her the head-start. “For me, it’s very important to name the character before I do anything else. Once I do that, I realise that a lot of things unveil on their own.” Her Oorja is introspective, philosophical, and mostly, forgiving. The journey she undertakes is a spiritual one, but also, one that is filled with a lot of mystery. Tiwari’s plot has several knots, which only come undone in the end, putting the actions of her characters into perspective.

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She admits that her novel cannot be pigeon-holed into a particular genre. “I never follow rules, especially when it comes to my creative work. I like challenging formats. When I made Nil Battey Sannata [2016], it didn’t seem correct for the business of movie-making. It was the story of a mother and child, and showed an economic background that we are not used to seeing in cinema. But, it did wonderfully well. At the time, I was asked, what genre does it belong to, and I coined the term mid-stream cinema,” she remembers. “The truth is, I never set out thinking about the genre. It doesn’t happen that way for me. Unless, of course, you are a 
novelist who writes only a particular kind of book.”

But, spirituality she feels is an over-arching theme, which consumes most writers. “Even [Haruki] Murakami whose works have a lot of magic realism, has characters who look inward. His lines, ‘And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over’ to me, is very spiritual.”

Tiwari, who is also an award-winning advertising professional, says the craft of writing caught her interest five years ago. “I started by writing poetry. But, even an artist, who has lived in drawings and paintings, with a specialisation in typography [she is a gold medallist in Commercial Arts from Sophia Polytechnic], the written word has always attracted me.”

One has to keep evolving as a storyteller, she feels. “What is important is that you don’t judge yourself and worry about how it will turn out. I am not anxious about how the literary circle will perceive my book. I don’t carry baggage, and that’s something I have followed with my other work, too. I just want to keep experimenting,” she says, asking, “What’s the worst that can happen?” You will never know, until you have tried. 

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