Stories of everyday quests

I was working on individual stories over the past three or four years and the stories came together as a collection. It doesn’t belong to any particular genre, except the genre called life. The collection features stories about all sorts of characters,” she says. 

Anjum, who has written three novels, says that she doesn’t usually find inspiration in a dramatic incident or life experience. “I’m not interested in the weighty stuff that could be happening at the edge of the story — the communal riot or the atom bomb. The main challenge while writing the book was to convince me, in a world driven by functional demands, that something as meagre as a made up story can matter,” Anjum explains. 

The 14 well-crafted stories in the book give us a sense of the daily life of a wide cast of characters. “All the protagonists are always, inward-looking, and whimsical and vulnerable outliers. Where is their place in the new order, where have they come from and where are they going? A Day in The Life answers these questions,” she reveals about the book published by Penguin. 

Quiz her about the research she did while writing the stories, she says, “Very little, unless one considers living itself a form of research. Research for me consists of things such as compulsive eavesdropping, noticing the way a person smiles or coughs or blinks, or how language is used in a newspaper report, or what the weather feels like on a particular day.”