Teesta: Character Development

According to MD, the narrative of the Teesta story seems flat. I agree. I was trying to write about a politically naive girls' coming into some kind of social consciousness. I was trying to write about the classic teenage apathy to anything social, political that I have seen in my high-school buddies. In other words, I was trying to write about a girl very different from myself. Not only different from the person I am now, but also the person I was in my teens. Now, M's comment made me re-think something. I had been feeling the flatness even before he pointed it out to me. I had been feeling this flatness while I had been writing the story. It is as if I don't really know how to get inside Teesta's head. What I realized is that, I don't really know how to write about politically naive girls. Besides, why would a girl who is un-interested in arts, activism, politics, society be interested in anything that Teesta is taking upon herself to do in this story? None of the apathetic teens I knew in my neighborhood got involved in community leftist theater groups, would care about Anne Frank. So, I need to be upfront about it. I think I am beginning to figure out what was happening there. I was trying not to write about the classic leftist proto-type activist girl. I was afraid of falling into the socialist realist stereotype. But then, I haven't met anyone who is totally naive, totally in-interested suddenly beginning to inhabit the spaces I am trying to write about. Heck, someone totally naive and without a capacity to observe social norms wouldn't even observe and care about what I want to write as the culminating point of the story! So what am I afraid of?

Yes, I do not want to write a kind of triumphalist red-sun kind of a story. That's why I need to examine the contradictions of girlhood and an emerging political subjectivity thoroughly within this story. But a girl who is passionate otherwise, precocious, observant, with artistic impulses, but with a speaking impediment, a fear to speak out, should make for an interesting character. Because there are some glaring contradictions right there! And I need to explore those! And yes, I shouldn't really feel apologetic about the kinds of characters I explore in my stories. If I am primarily concerned about the people and subjectivities which crowd the post-Partition middle-class Bengali leftist subcultures, and the place of women within that, I need to write about their contradictions without feeling inhibited. That is my material, and while it might be too limited for some, there is no way I can be a writer without exploring the questions my life within such spaces had given rise to. Yes, basically, I need to go deeper into my own childhood, young adulthood to write about Teesta than I was daring to do in this story. So, right now, I know, I have a lot more to do in terms of the Teesta story, but I am beginning to feel a kind of peace about the whole thing too. Thanks, MD.