Finding Light Amidst Shadows

Author Nilanjana Roy speaks with Reader’s Digest about writing Black River, her latest literary thriller, and facing the darkness of man with compassion and vulnerability

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

In her blurb for Black River Sonia Faleiro wrote, "it feels completely true". Her book The Good Girls memorably starts with girls suddenly hanging from a tree. Given that yours begins similarly, were you ever tempted to fictionalize fact? Did you keep at bay the horrors or give them room?

When we imagine a writer leaning on the truth, we imagine the incidents that get into the newspapers, or on television. The truth is here to some extent, but there's a difference between a book that's based on reality and one that aims for a kind of truthfulness to what's happening in the world. From 2009 to 2013, when I was working on gender for The New York Times (NYT), I spent a lot of time in places that would never make it to the newspapers these were commonplace where the damage was not violent or egregious enough. But, a family or a survivor was still left completely shattered. Everywhere I went, I was seeing a collective absence. There were these missing girls, who were knocked out of life because of the violence of their times. Munia [from Black River] came out of that. I was seeing the lasting agony of these absences. I think I was struck by being both an intruder on very private grief and a witness to how deeply that grief would go, changing people's lives for years afterwards. You don't get over the death of a child. We because murders, keep searching for justice. Yes, there is the justice of the courts, and there is the justice of knowing, or, as one of the characters in the book tries, to get some kind of acknowledgement. The justice has nothing to do with the absence. And the absence was what I was writing into.

Was journalism, and you're reporting for NYT, an education in novel-writing?