‘Fiction is a technology for empathy for testing your brain to try and think like another person’

Gurnaik Johal is a writer from West London who has been short listed for the Guardian Fourth Estate BAME Short Story Prize in 2018. We are here to discuss his first collection of stories called We Move. It has won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Tata Literature Life First Book award. Gurnaik’s day job is to work in children’s publishing.In part 1 of the two-part series, Gurnaik Johal speaks to Jaya Bhattacharji Rose about his debut collection of his inter-linked short stories called We Move. He discusses his choice of using the short story form as it enables him to work upon multiple narratives simultaneously. This form engages the reader and that is what interests him. Excerpts …Jaya Bhattacharji Rose: Your magnificent collection of short stories is astonishing. You are a debut writer who has a promising literary career ahead of you. Why don’t you describe We Move?Gurnaik Johal: We Move is a collection of inter-linked stories. There are 17 stories and they are all set in one neighbourhood – West London. They span about 50 years from the 1970s to the present day.Jaya Bhattacharji Rose: They are inter-linked and I am glad you pointed out this out because inter-linking becomes apparent in the second half of the arrangement of the stories, isn’t it?Gurnaik Johal: Yes, I did not want it to be the central feature of the book, that you need to be following each character. I wanted the characters to pop in and out of the book the way people reappear and disappear in your neighbourhood or in your life. For me, it was a function of realism more than anything.Jaya Bhattacharji Rose: That is a very perceptive comment to make because when I was reading the stories a familiar character suddenly walked onto the pages, I asked myself … What happened there! And there’s nothing to prepare you in the first half to say that these are not standalone short stories but be prepared, watch out … their paths are going to cross …Gurnaik Johal: I distinctly remember being on the bus once and looking out of the window and spotting someone who was my best friend when I was eight years old or something. To see him as an adult now was like a shock. That was the moment I realized his life has carried on. We haven’t talked for many years. My life has carried on. I think allowing that into the book, feeling that people haven’t fully disappeared. People often read story collections, feeling disappointed not to know what happened next.I am not saying my book does but there’s not that feeling that the characters have disappeared forever. 108412828Ep 2: ‘Writing a history book is a patchwork of different perspectives, the true story lies between these perspectives’In part 2 of the conversation, award-winning debut writer Gurnaik Johal talks to Jaya Bhattacharji Rose about getting to the heart of a story, particularly when it pertains to the horrific events of 1984 that are still remembered by many in the immigrant community in Britain. There are many perspectives to share. He also discusses at length importance of music to his story telling. Apart from the innumerable references that pepper his stories, these point to a mixture of cultural identities and the fascinating idea that new forms can arise from dialogues between cultures. Excerpts …Jaya Bhattacharji Rose: I have lived through the 1984 riots. I remember them very clearly. That is a part of my life which I will never forget. I can never understand the horrors of violence when it boils down to this.So when you talk about 1984, for me it’s very interesting because you as a young writer who was born years after the incident, write with a sharpness which takes my breath away, particularly when you document some of those oral testimonies over there. How did you do it? Did it come out through your own recordings or did you talk to survivors or did you do textbook kind of research?Gurnaik Johal: I wanted to include real people in their own voices. There are two sections of that in the first three stories to put some real world history in the other half of the section. The only reliable resources are testimonies of people who were there, such as yourself. The only way we can get a full picture is to hear lots of different voices, a polyphony of voices, across different experiences rather than one authorial take on it.When we write a history book about something, best we can do is creating a patchwork of different perspectives and the true story lies between all those different perspectives.For the full interview, listen to the podcast(Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, co-founder, Ace Literary Consulting and Associate Professor, School of Modern Media Studies, UPES University, has been associated with the publishing industry since the early 1990s) Audio production: Shantanu Nanoti