Jerry Pinto, author of the powerful Em and The Big Hoom, has curated and edited a collection of 13 stories called A Book of Light: When A Loved One Has a Different Mind.
Pinto speaks to The Quint about both books and India’s dismal mental health infrastructure.
1) Mental illness across the board remains a difficult subject to talk about, let alone share personal stories about… What led you to create this collection (A Book of Light) and what were some of the biggest challenges along the way?
The answer to that question was clear in my head. I had based my novel on what our lives had been like, what we had been through. But I had also written a novel and you do not put a real-life character into a novel; they will simply suck all the oxygen out of the rest of the book. That’s the funny thing about fiction: you have to try and make it sound like it must have happened that way while telling everyone upfront that nothing like this has happened except in your imagination.
But these questions and the responses to the readings started me thinking. There was need for more dialogue, more conversations, about mental health. Many of the writers in this book were friends who had told me things and I went back to them and asked them if they would write about what they had been through.
2) There would have had to be a great deal of trust for the writers to share these stories — can you take us through the stories that have stayed with you? And how did you go about editing what are such personal and often traumatic memories?
I think we don’t know how much we must trust our editors. Perhaps some editors don’t know that either. I know I have had a very good run: in journalism, I had Hutokshi Doctor who was a magnificent editor – she could always cut past the frills and see the beating heart of the story. Then, there was Anil Dharker who would give each one of my wild ideas a running chance. Radhakrishnan Nair at Man’s World was also like that: someone who could see the possibilities in a half-baked story idea. But most of all, Ravi Singh, who has my complete trust. If I write something and Ravi won’t publish it, I won’t publish it anywhere else because I know it is not worthy of me. So I simply wipe it out.
When you have had that kind of luck, you try to pay it forward by trying to be that kind of editor.
3) In terms of access to help, what’s quite distressing is the low number of trained mental health professionals in the country…
Access to health is an issue that we don’t even seem to consider important. Since the time of the first government, the health ministry has always been considered unimportant. And as anyone will tell you, the importance of a ministry is judged in terms of its budgetary allocations. We spend so little on health it’s shocking.
(Amrita Tripathi is a freelance journalist and the author of two novels, Broken News and The Sibius Knot. She tweets @amritat)
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