The Labour of Historical Fiction

I don’t know if I can pinpoint when the idea to write fiction took root in my mind, but five years into working as an oral historian of the 1947 Partition, the landscape of what would become my first novel had grown too insistent to ignore.

- Aanchal Malhotra

It didn’t arrive fully formed, but came to me in images—gestures, dreams, conversations, memories—blending together as a composition. The novel was about smell, about a family of perfumers devoted to the beauty and pursuit of ittar.

When I first conceived of The Book of Everlasting Things, its world was small. The story followed a boy named Samir, growing up in Lahore in the 1930s-40s, training to be a perfumer under the tutelage of his uncle, Vivek, who carries a secret from his time on the battlefields of the First World War. For decades in the novel, the secret stays dormant, untouched, irrelevant even, until it reveals itself in the years after Partition, when Samir is exiled in France. There, in his uncle’s journals, he discovers the buried truth, and this is how The Great War spills into the novel—coating its chapters in trench systems and regimental diaries, censored letters and slaughtered soldiers, war-sounds and war-stench, and a collision of Empire and allegiance that would reverberate across generations.

As an adult in Paris, Samir recalls to his wife, Léa, that during his childhood, he knew that his uncle had been to war, but always wondered “what perfumers did in battle”. Building this particular historical world—where a young man goes into war as a soldier, and comes out of it as a perfumer, changing the tides of his future generations forever—became in itself a great act of imagination. In fiction, I could search for the private rupture that would transform a soldier’s senses and set him on an unforeseen path.