Coming back to Kolkata after ten years seems a long time to be away from your birthplace. Yet, for professor, and author Rani Neutill the visit to her city is a homecoming of turmoil. It took the author ten years to write the memoir on her experiences, traumas, and her relationship with her mother. do you know how lucky you are? has been published by HarperCollins Publishers, and is a book doused in everyday experiences of a woman writing about the women in her life.
In an exclusive interview with The Statesman, Rani Neutill dives deeper into her memoir. She starts with, “I think it is kind of funny because, I think memoirs are supposed to be honest, real, and reflective of human-ness. My story was difficult, but I think it’s very raw.” The beginning chapter of the book starts with “I DON’T WANT TO SEE my mother. Returning to her is like running into a house on fire.” No doubt the book is raw. It is a neo-modern stream of consciousness novel with chapters of personal smoke and burns.
“You know you are still curating life. It is a difficult book, you are dealing with very heavy themes, and it deals with them pretty honestly. I think it’s more complicated than a binary for me. I came, every year, to Kolkata as a child. My dad died when I was 2. Every year we came here, because we had no family in Los Angeles, Pasadena. I had no sisters or brothers, or even aunts there. Then when I was just twelve, my mom left me here with my maternal grandmother. So, I had those years, till I was 16. After that I can say that I had an American life. Maa continued that transnational life, and eventually died here. A lot of immigration stories are about leaving and coming back, but it’s not that simple for me”, explains Neutill.
The author writes in chapter 12, “Suddenly I was no longer twelve years old. A maturity came over me as I tried to comprehend all that was happening, a stunning alteration of what life was going to be.” Neutill says, “In the book, it’s up to the reader to interpret whether my mother abandoned me, but it felt like that for the child. At first, I didn’t want to be here, I thought of myself as an American, I was a brat. But by the time I was leaving, I had made friends and didn’t want that displacement. I mean my whole education was about postcolonial identities. I haven’t even spoken Bangla in ten years, but that’s just how it is, I guess. I am bi-cultural that way. This identity thing is funny, it can be a cliché, it can be a torture, but in my case it’s what I have faced.”
“In the book I say that I started my undergrad studies and my PhD because I wanted to understand my family. So, basically a lot of illness in the family. I saw her in my childhood, and it was scary. I was thinking about the colonial effects, the Hindu nationalism, and even the staunch Bengali writers reincorporating this Hindu identity where women were the ‘home’. It is essentially the Victorian morals”, said Neutill. Colonialism did to us what Victorian England did to their women; the concept of angel in the house, and fallen woman.
On being asked about visiting the city after ten years the author exclaims, “Oh god, yeah. It’s yes and no on the change. There are all these shops, coffee shops, and cafes, but it is still the same. The bureaucracy’s the same, the roads are still adventure courses, and there’s these massive hotels all of a sudden. It’s more liberal, I guess. It feels the same, the rhythm of the city feels the same, the noise, the pollution is the same, maybe worse now.”
Rani Neutill wrote about the women in her life, in excruciating detail. “I think the stories are difficult and painful. I hope my story appeals to the people who have kept a secret of mental illness, and problems of their personal lives. I hope it matters to them. You might identify with it. I don’t make myself out to be a pretty version. I am far from perfect. I don’t only do good things, but neither do the people surrounding me. I talk about domestic violence, and between women. Not men, not the normative thing. I thought it was an important conversation to open up about.”
“I like ugly women, because I think that is honest. By ugly I don’t mean physical attributes, I mean the psyche and the characters. I thought of writing this book ten years back. My mother died very gruesomely and I found her in a very bad state. So, I come to the city, and my mother is between life and dead. I rush her to the hospital, and I think that night I started writing. I had such a difficult relationship with her. But the moment I saw her, it was almost like a tidal wave had come and swept all the history we had, and what was left was love. I was an academic, so I did not know how to write creatively. That was the birth of my creative writing career”, concludes Rani Neutill.
The book is a sponge of a personal chain of events, and how it intrinsically affects a person in an all-encompassing manner throughout their life. It is intense, and more importantly honest for the reader.