Photographs: Alexander Maksik, Saffiyah Patel, Manvi Rao (Madhuri Vijay)ELLE.IN 76 JULY
LO S T
Paradise
While working on her debut novel on Kashmir,
author Madhuri Vijay found inspiration in the
unlikeliest of places—Hawaii. Here, she writes
on how their similar histories of accession and
violence influenced her book
S
ix years ago, I visited the
Hawaiian Islands for the first
time. The purpose of my trip
was two-fold—I was going as a
tourist, but I was also starting
work on what would become my first
novel, The Far Field (HarperCollins).
Whenever I told people I was heading
to Hawaii, they invariably responded
in the same way: with sighs of envy.
I was familiar with this response; I’d
spent the past two years teaching at
a remote school in the mountains
of Jammu & Kashmir, and it was
the same way people reacted when I
told them about that. I could almost
predict the moment a listener would
shake her head and say, wistfully,
“I’ve heard it’s paradise.”
Of all the places I’ve travelled, no
two have been branded “paradise”
quite so quickly as Kashmir and
Hawaii, perhaps because they bear
the twin crosses of being seductively
beautiful yet eternally out of reach
to those who would seek to possess
them. In Kashmir, I found this
paradox fascinating enough for
it to become the core of The Far
Field, which follows a young South
Indian woman, Shalini, on an
ill-fated odyssey to J&K. Having
grown up in Bengaluru, I know the
fraught position Kashmir occupies
in our national psyche, suspended
between crown jewel and black sheep.
The last thing I expected, landing
bleary-eyed at Maui’s plumeria-
scented airport on a balmy November
afternoon, was to find the same forces
at work in the Pacific.READ