One of the one percent in 13 million.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The fridge in Geetanjali Shree’s apartment in East Delhi’s Patparganj is empty. In the bedroom cupboard, hangers hang empty.

For more than two decades, this was the home the author shared with her husband, Sudhir, a historian of modern India. Here she wrote Khali Jagah, Tirohit, many short stories, and the early drafts of Ret Samadhi, which, in Daisy Rockwell’s English translation as Tomb of Sand, became the first Hindi novel to win the International Booker Prize.

Geetanjali Shree left this apartment during the first Covid lockdown to be with her mother in Gurugram, where her younger sister, Jayanti, lives. She and Sudhir never returned to live in the old apartment, choosing instead to stay at the sister’s place whenever in town. The house in Patparganj stays locked. This afternoon, she enters the apartment for a rare visit. The tastefully furnished interiors suggest a home still inhabited, complete with very many books, but the impression collapses when every surface is revealed to be blanketed in dust.

Back when they lived here, the couple jokingly referred to their apartment building as “Writer’s Block,” a double entendre that alluded both to a writer’s creative slump and to the building’s status as home to many writers. Upstairs lived poet Girdhar Rathi with wife, translator Kiran Rathi. Downstairs were novelist Nirmal Verma with wife, poet Gagan Gill. “So much of my work was written within these walls,” says the writer.

Geetanjali Shree made two spots in the apartment to write. One was the kitchen table. “I wrote a lot there because I could always see the trees outside.” The other was an old wooden desk rescued years ago from a Baroda junk house. Beneath its protective glass top, reflecting the ceiling fan above, lies a scattered collage of photos and sketches. The knickknacks crowding the desk include a miniature Taj Mahal in a glass case, once kept on legendary writer Krishna Sobti’s desk. A mug of pens sits in one corner. The author writes by hand, using a Parker fountain pen given to her by her mother. “I need that physical connection and slow speed.”

Graciously agreeing to sit for a portrait at her desk, Geetanjali Shree gives a glimpse of her work hours. “What kind of madness is it to spend whole days alone, writing on this desk day after day? Sometimes I would go out after days of silence for a walk within the complex and think that if I opened my mouth, no voice would come out. I would be so silent in this house.”

The writer soon gets up and makes her exit, leaving behind a house she is still fond of, even as the world around it has changed, carrying her to other homes, other desks.

[This is the 632nd portrait of Mission Delhi project]