How The Tribune helped shape my novel

My first novel ‘Difficult Daughters’ was largely set in Amritsar and Lahore of the 1930s and ’40s. With no experience in writing fiction, I agonised about the best, most convincing way to tell a story, wondering how to use other people’s memories to breathe life and vitality into the whole thing.

Lahore was the missing link in ‘Difficult Daughters’. The newspaper files at Teen Murti Library made it come alive

The Amritsar sections were comparatively easy. The city of my birth, the home of my grandmother, aunts and uncles, it was a place I had visited often. Lahore though was difficult. How to recreate a place I had never seen? I had heard about it many times from everyone I interviewed; fabled city, glittering with the lights of nostalgia. No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work. My Lahore sections were dead.

It was to check some completely minor fact that I stumbled upon the idea of looking up the newspapers of the time. Get your details right. Get the dates, the facts, the prices, get all that right, for everyone you talk to says something different.

What were the newspapers that came out from Lahore? There was the Civil and Military Gazette and there was The Tribune.

And where were these newspapers kept? In Delhi, you could find them in the Teen Murti Library. The librarian looked at me suspiciously as she demanded my field of research. Fiction, I mumbled. She looked unconvinced. I was forced to present my academic credentials. A teacher from Miranda House carried more weight; for, a wannabe novelist on her own was not enough to gain entrance. I had to fill in an application form, get counter-signatures from my institution, wait to get an admit card. Finally, with the paperwork complete, I was directed to the microfilm section upstairs.

What did I want? The Tribune. What years? Ten years starting from 1937 should give me enough atmosphere.

The librarian tenderly threaded the microfilm through the spools of the reader, a bulky machine with an old-fashioned TV-like screen. You put it on like this, she said, as she switched on the lights; you move it up and down like this, and every 45 minutes you have to give the machine a rest for 15 minutes, for these get heated and then break down. As I scrolled slowly down the faded pages, noting the ads, the weather, the cultural events, the photographs, the political happenings, I was transported into the Lahore of British India. Here, in front of me was daily life, something no interview, no article, no textbook had been able to capture. Here in this wobbly text and faint print was history unfolding, because unlike the books, the interviews and the articles, made wise by hindsight, the newspaper had no such perspective. It all felt so innocent.

No one could imagine the bloodshed, the trauma and dislocation that would drench the land a few years later.

August 15, 1947: India Wakes to Life and Freedom, announced the headlines. August 16, one day later, saw the last issue of The Tribune from Lahore. Violence took over. The office was abandoned. The paper relocated to Simla.

After that, I read no more. I had got what I wanted, a kaleidoscope of vignettes capturing the daily life of the city. Excitedly, I tried to pour everything I found significant into the text. Ultimately, my story could not bear such weight. Or so said the publishers. I had no option but to cut, and cut again, until I managed to fashion a novel that was historical without actually being a work of history.

The book was well received so clearly,

‘Difficult Daughters’ did succeed in bringing those years to life.