♪ - A journalist, organizer, MFA instructor and author, Anjali Enjeti uses her passions, background and writing to contribute multi-generational voices to the literary world.

Her debut novel, "The Parted Earth" is an exploration of love and identity across cultures, generations, and continents.

I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established Southern authors as we sit by the river.

(upbeat music) ♪ - [Narrator] "By The River" is brought to you in part by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, Strengthening Community, OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB, the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

- It is another beautiful day here at our waterfront studio in Beaufort.

Thanks so much for joining us for "By The River," our love letter to southern writing.

Here, we invite authors from South Carolina and all across the southeast to share their stories.

We sometimes have the story behind the story.

And here today, we're talking with the author of "The Parted Earth," Anjali Enjeti.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It's really exciting to have you here.

- Thank you so much, Holly.

I'm so thrilled to be here.

- And this is another one of those that I'm just looking at and it's so beautiful, the cover.

This is one of those that you'd like to have out on the table for everyone to admire.

So tell me, first of all, just what this book is about, if you could sum it up for us without giving it all.

- Okay, I will do my best.

So "The Parted Earth" is a novel that takes place over 70 years from 1947, the partition of the subcontinent up, until almost the present day 2017.

And it's the story about two main characters.

One is Deepa who is a 16 year old living in New Delhi in 1947 when the British are packing up and are on their way out and are about to divide the subcontinent into two countries, the Hindu majority country of India and the Muslim majority country of Pakistan.

The other character is a woman named Shan Johnson.

Her real name Shanthi, which also an Indian name.

And she is Deepa's granddaughter.

But Deepa and Shan are estranged.

And they are estranged primarily due to the trauma that Deepa experiences as a 16 year old in New Delhi as a result of Partition.

Partition resulted in the deaths of between one and two million people.

There was horrific communal violence, and it ended up being the largest human migration in the world.

15 million people found themselves on the wrong side of the new border, dividing Pakistan and India, and had to leave their entire lives, their homes, friends, and family members to get to the other side.

And, it resulted in a lot of harm, a lot of violence.

And Deepa, especially, is affected.

And as a result, sort of closes up and keeps silent about what all she's endured.

And, so the book is really about how the trauma of one generation ends up seeping into the lives of the later generations.

And it asks the question of, can that be healed?

- What kind of emotions might one experience when reading this, especially those of different cultures?

- So, you know, it's interesting, Holly, a lot of readers experience surprise.

Very few people who do not have roots in the South Asian subcontinent know about Partition at all.

It happened after World War II and the Holocaust, and it's not a history that was in a lot of books that people like you and I read when we were in school.

So a lot of people just don't know about it.

And they're really shocked that such a major historical event that affected so many people was not part of the formal education of people here in the United States.

But I think too, there's a feeling of deja vu.

The geopolitical strife, the trauma, the division between different ethnic and religious groups is something that we see, unfortunately today.

Of course we haven't had 15 million people have to flee the United States, but there is a lot of hate and bigotry in the book.

That is something that we can see all over the world right now, sadly.

But it's also a book that I hope people feel some sense of healing from, some sense of hope that, you know, however long we carry trauma, there can be a point where we can still continue our lives and go on.

- When you set out to write the book, was there some sort of mission for it to be informative on a historical event?

Or did that kind of come as a surprise to you as well that people didn't know?

- So I'm a gen X-er so I primarily grew up in the seventies and eighties.

I knew very little about Partition, despite having an Indian parent until I started doing my own research in my twenties, which I wasn't even researching the book.

I was just interested in learning more about Partition.

So I knew a lot of people coming to the book might not know much of anything, right?

I mean, when I was in high school, Richard Attenborough's three hour film "Gandhi" came out, right, so I knew about Gandhi.

I'd read another book called "Freedom At Midnight," which was a book about Partition.

I didn't really know much else.

Some people knew about Salman Rushdie's novel, "Midnight's Children," which did very well all over the world when it was published several decades ago.

So I knew that there would be a fair amount of people who hadn't heard of it, but I didn't want to write the novel as if it was a history book, right?

I'm also a journalist by day, so I always run into the issue of getting a little bit too fine-tuned with the facts and losing sight of the story.

So I wanted to remember that this was a novel, just telling a story.

So what I did decide to do though, was I put an author's note at the beginning of the book.

It's just one paragraph that lays out the nuts and bolts of what we're talking about here, because I didn't want readers to have to go and Google everything that they were reading.

I wanted to give them a little bit of a grounding before they started the novel.

- Okay, you mentioned your research process.

What did that entail for you for the book?

- So I graduated from college in 1995.

I had been interested in Partition and I started reading anything I could.

And if you remember, Holly, in 1995 most of us did not know what the internet was.

And so where I got my information was the library and local bookstores.

At that time, you know, I wouldn't have even known how to order books from India about Partition, right?

So a lot of these authors were US authors.

They were British authors.

But they were not authors who were living in the subcontinent.

So I read what I could.

And then when I finally started getting comfortable with using the internet, which was in the late 1990s, I started doing searches online for Partition, just to find out more information.

And it's here that I started pulling up newspaper articles that were published in India and in Pakistan, which gave me a very different perspective about what was going on.

But eventually after years of reading, I discovered an organization around 2011 called the 1947 Partition Archive.

It's a nonprofit organization that was based in the bay area.

And their mission is to collect the survivors' stories from Partition.

So they go in with a video camera and they train historians and they ask people, what was it like for you to live during Partition?

Once I found that organization, I started reading excerpts from survivors' testimonies.

And of course I got a completely different picture of what had happened.

- So that's when it really amped up was in 2011?

- About 2011.

- Okay, so when would you say that the idea of the book came about?

Was it always kind of the back of your head starting in that, I guess 1995 era?

- No, not at all.

I wasn't even a writer in 1995.

I was starting law school.

I didn't think I could.

You know, writers were these gods and goddesses to me.

I could never imagine that I would have what it took to be a writer when I was younger.

I was an avid reader and I loved reading historical fiction, but I just couldn't imagine myself in that role.

It was also in 2011 that I got the idea for the book.

I had read a lot of Partition literature up until that point.

And I didn't particularly feel like I had a point of view that really needed to be shared.

But when I learned about the archive, when I learned about how many stories were lost, because over 60 years past from 1947, until there was a formal, widespread effort to collect survivors' stories.

That's astounding when you think about how much sooner stories were collected from say the Holocaust and from Hiroshima, right?

Over 60 years passed before anybody really made a major effort to write down stories.

So it was when I discovered the archive that I realized that this would be a book that didn't just talk about Partition, but asked the question, what happens when we don't know anything about our ancestral history?

What happens, how does that shape the lives of the descendants?

- How would you say you, yourself were changed during this writing process of telling this story?

- Wow, that's a really tough question, Holly.

You know, I would like to say that, I think when you write about communal strife and communal violence and when you write about things like extremism, it makes you feel that actually we are so much more alike than we are different, but we just buy into these ideologies that like to highlight our differences.

You know, at the end of the day and the reason I told the part of the story that takes place during Partition from the perspective of 16 year olds, right, who do not share the same faith is because there is so much more there.

There are basic emotions that go across all of humanity, right, kindness, love.

Even though there was a lot of violence during Partition, there were also loving neighbors who didn't care what people's backgrounds were.

They were people that, you know, hid family members.

There were people that protected the possessions of those who were of a different faith.

There were still people who resisted the violence, right?

And so I think writing that book made me remember and realize that there's still always good people there, no matter what's happening.

- I love that.

This is one of my favorite questions to ask, because I love hearing the variety of answers.

What kind of feedback have you heard from some of your readers?

- You know, the most common feedback I get are from readers who are descendants of survivors of Partition, whose relatives did not feel able to share the stories of the trauma that they lived through.

I have readers who said, I tried to talk to my grandmother about what she went through.

I know that they had to flee in the middle of the night, leave everything behind.

I know that a great aunt died from disease or from malnutrition or other relatives died from violence.

There was a lot of unfortunately sexual violence, particularly against women during Partition.

And so the family lore and the rumors of that time are all that a lot of what descendants have.

And so they really related to the character of Shan who had no idea that her grandmother lived through Partition and endured such immense tragedies because she became silent after that event happened.

- I'm sure that can be very emotional hearing from some of those readers too.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- And you have two books that came out back to back.

How did that happen?

Was this a lot of pandemic writing or it just happened to all happen at once?

- So the truth of the matter is, Holly, that I spent 11 years trying to sell seven different books.

And so it was purely coincidental that these books came out at the same time.

I had sold the other book "Southbound," which is a collection of essays first.

And then I think it was about nine months to a year later that I sold "The Parted Earth."

Two different publishing houses, they had their publishing schedules and they just ended up coming out at the same time.

- It just happened to be, so I imagine this has been quite a busy time for you.

- It has been.

- But what you've been looking forward to?

- Yeah, I mean, you know, what can I say?

I never ever thought it was gonna work out for me.

I really, truly no longer believed that I was gonna have a book come out when I got my first book contract, because I'd been submitting for so long.

And, you know, it just wasn't striking a chord with anybody that I shared the book with.

So towards the end, I was just barely sending out the books anymore.

I just thought, oh, well, you know, I'll just go keep doing my other writing.

I teach in an MFA program and I've got three kids.

So I just said, well, I guess that's gonna be my life.

So it was just such a wonderful, I mean, I have to pinch myself still.

Honestly, I still look at the book and I'm like, wow, that's my book on that table.

I mean, it's still surprising to me.

- Well, you know, here with "By The River," we have this neat partnership with the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

And so we have students who work on part of the show.

Jeremy there running that camera.

But these are the kinds of things we talk about.

You know, I mean, these are students who are at that point in life of what am I gonna do?

They may have tried to go a certain path and it just doesn't seem to work out, but it's what they want to do.

And so many authors have told them, like, if it's in your heart, if it's your passion, you keep at it.

And this is kind of a story like that.

You said that there were those times of rejection, but you kept at it.

What was it within you that said, I'm gonna keep going?

- You know what?

I had to come to a point after years of rejection of realizing that the value of what I was doing was in my writing, not in the publishing, that if I never ever got this book published, there was still value in the story.

And that I had still created something that I was very, very proud of.

I had to divorce that, right?

I mean like the success that you get, whatever your job, your salary, your title, the end of the day, that's only gonna take you so far.

Are you proud of what you do?

Do you feel like you bring a special viewpoint to your work?

Then just keep at it and value that.

Value your output, your personal goals and meeting those goals.

Don't value whether someone finally gives you a contract for what you're doing.

- I think that's advice we can all hear, so thank you for sharing that.

Tell me about the first set of eyes that are on your work.

Who reads your work first, and what kind of feedback do they give you?

- You know, I've got a few trusted readers who read my work.

They're all also writers.

So they're, you know, editors in their own right.

And, I share with them.

I try to share the entire draft of a book with them because one of the issues that I have as a writer is that I might be able to give you a really good chapter, but if you read it in the context of an entire book, you'd realize that I might not even need that chapter.

Or maybe that chapter doesn't serve the greater story.

So I try to give someone the entire 300 pages so that they can read the entire book and see, is there a huge problem with character development?

Is there a problem with the plot?

Does it spend too much time going back and forth in different decades?

Are there too many flashbacks?

Because I often have the biggest problems with big picture issues, not with small issues.

So giving someone a chapter, that chapter is often gonna be fine.

The problem is does the chapter even work in the book at all?

- And tell me about your writing process.

Is it, I go and write this many words every night, or is it here and there?

- I wish.

I'm all over the place, Holly, all over the place all the time.

- Well 'cause you're so busy.

You have a lot of stuff happen.

- I do, but you know, it's funny.

I went to a writer's residency in Tennessee called Rockvale, wonderful place for writers.

I went for like six days recently and I went there with a draft of my next novel that was like maybe 55,000 words.

And I was done with that six days, I came back with a novel that was 45,000 words.

Now that sounds like I'm going backwards, but because any creative process is not in a straight line, right, I realized that I just needed to cut a bunch of things that were not working.

So I go weeks without writing.

But what I do all the time though is I'm thinking about it, right?

I'm solving a lot of the problems in my head.

So I try not to marry myself to goals that involve number of words on a page because that just doesn't tend to work for me.

- And would your family say the same thing that you're always writing in your head?

Is it one of those things that's like, mom, come on now.

- Absolutely, yes, they would.

I mean, you know, it's interesting because I think any artist, right, they've got this life in their head where they're constantly thinking about what to produce and what they want to do and challenging themselves.

- And these characters become part of you.

- It does, it does.

They feel very real to me, right, so it's like, I've got the family in my head and then I've got the family around me who are like take me to swimming, hurry.

- Yeah, yeah, I love that.

Oh, okay, so you've got these two.

I know a lot's happening in your world, but what's next?

- So I'm working on another novel right now.

It's still in its very baby stages, but I am returning more to my roots.

And I've been living in the Atlanta area for 14 years, but one of my favorite places in the US is North Georgia.

Northeast Georgia, right at the tail end of the Blue Ridge mountains.

There's a whole bunch of waterfalls there.

I love hiking up there.

And so this book is also going to have a bit of an international spin to it, but it's mainly gonna be situated in my heart space, which is Northeast Georgia.

- Which might require a few research trips, right?

- Yes, very important to do research out there.

- That's great.

All right, well, I love that.

Another thing that we're doing this season is we're talking about teachers and how teachers have inspired us in some way.

And so if you could think back, I mean, we could talk grade school, college, whatever, but is there any teacher that kind of stands out in your mind as someone who really, you know, pushed you to be maybe who you are today?

- Yes, I have a fourth grade teacher, and in fact, we are friends on Facebook.

His name is Mr. Conley.

You know what, honestly, I think one of the best things he did for me wasn't even specific to writing.

It was he really taught me to not take myself so seriously, to not take anything so seriously.

You know, I'm very type A personality by nature.

I'm one of those people that has a lot of lists, that keeps a calendar.

But I think he saw in me, not just a student with potential, but a student that maybe needed to loosen up a little bit and have a little more fun.

And I learned a lot from that, from getting some kind of perspective, right?

At the end of the day, we've got to do stuff that brings us joy.

We've got to, you know, make sure that we are not taking everything so hard.

And that's what he taught me.

And it was a very valuable lesson.

- That's interesting that he saw that as early as fourth grade.

- Yes.

- And obviously made a difference, so I love hearing those stories about those teachers.

It just shows what an impact they make in our lives.

- Absolutely.

- I love that.

Well, that does it.

Thank you so much for joining us here for "By The River."

- Thank you so much for having me.

- And coming to Beaufort.

It sounds like you've got a good meal and have another one lined up.

- I do, I do.

- So that's great.

Everyone, thank you for joining us for "By The River."

We love having you around.

Now if you'll stick around for our Poet's Corner and enjoy that.

We'll see you next time right here on "By The River."

(upbeat music) - [Angelo] Today, I will praise.

I will praise the sun for showering its light on this darkened vessel.

I will praise its shine, praise the way it wraps my skin in ultraviolet ultimatums, demanding to be seen.

I will lift my hands in adoration of how something so bright could be so heavy.

I will praise the ground that did not make feast of these bones.

Praise the casket that did not become a shelter for flesh.

Praise the bullets that called in sick to work.

Praise the trigger that went on vacation.

Praise the chalk that did not outline a body today.

Praise the body for still being a body and not a headstone.

Praise the body for being a body and not a police report.

Praise the body for being a body and not a memory no one wants to forget.

Praise the memories.

Praise the laughs and smiles you thought had been evicted from your jaw line.

Praise the eyes for seeing and still believing, for being blinded from faith, but never losing their vision.

Praise the visions.

Praise the prophets who don't profit off of those visions.

Praise the heart for housing this living room of emotions.

Praise the trophy that is my name.

Praise the gift that is my name.

Praise the name that is my name, which no one can plagiarize or gentrify.

Praise the praise.

How the throat sounds like a choir.

The harmony in your tongue lifts into a song of adoration.

Praise yourself for being able to praise, for waking up when you had every reason not to.

- So I'm gonna read a very short segment from Deepa's point of view.

She's 16 years old and living in New Delhi during the 1947 Partition.

And Deepa is coping with the tensions around her by writing poetry.

She's a young poet.

And one of the things she's also exploring are the feelings that she has for another boy.

His name is Amir and he's also 16.

So she's just been asked by her school teacher, Madam Grover to stand up and recite a poem that they had to write for class.

And this is what Deepa wrote.

It's called "Night Notes."

"Pen to paper, paper to pen, coaxing my heart with ink the shade of midnight.

Shapes shift under the moon's glow, unfolding musical lyrics.

Sweet sounds bringing you to me, me to you.

Verdant leaves cradle dew drops in their veins, our only witnesses."

(upbeat music) ♪ - [Narrator] "By The River" is brought to you in part by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina, Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, Strengthening Community, OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB, the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

(lighthearted music) (cheerful music)