A Generational Saga

Author Sujit Saraf’s latest novel, Harilal & Sons, captures the Marwari community through a fictional filter, in a sprawling, compulsively readable narrative.

- Sneha Mahale

What motivated you to write Harilal & Sons?

My grandfather died nine years before I was born. In those nine years, everything they said about him had become wrapped in the pieties that are usual about dead forebears. In keeping with the times, my father was uncommunicative when it came to information about his father. No one, in fact, was able to recall the name of my grandfather’s first wife. All I had to remind me of him was a photograph hanging in my father’s shop, showing a stern man seated in a chair. The idea of a sweeping story about that man, emblematic of the world of Marwaris, has been with me for a while.

How difficult/easy was it to write about one’s own community?

It was simple, in the sense that I grew up in a conservative Marwari household in a small town in Bihar. My mother recited the Sunderakand every evening; she had never seen an egg at close quarters; and she organised a Satyanarayan Puja once a year. Although I was sent to a boarding school in the hills and then found my way to Delhi and the West, the village was never taken out of the boy.

Yet it was difficult to write this novel, in some ways. This is a personal tale. It is impossible for me not to get sentimental about it, to regard the man and his story objectively. Indeed, I sneaked myself into the story; one of the little brown boys who appears in the last chapter is me.