For 70-year-old novelist Dr Kusum Ansal, writing is like a prayer, a way of life that flows towards finding a harmonious identity of her own real being, and to reach fulfilment. In 1941, born to an affluent family in Aligarh, Kusum was brought up in a sprawling haveli where Ismat Chughtai was a regular visitor. But it was a cruel twist of
fate that she lost her mother when she was barely 10 months old. The tragedy soon followed her adoption by her childless aunt.
The city of Aligarh played a key role in sowing the seeds of writing in her. The family of book lovers boasted of a library that was full of rare books. “My father admired art and culture. He regularly organised kavi sammelans and mushairas. That was my first encounter with literature and classical music. I heard Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Madhushala and about other poets at a very young age. Ismat’s writing also left a mark on me. I was allowed to go to Delhi to visit art galleries or watch English movies, which we could not see in Aligarh. Those experiences are my precious possessions.”
Once on her birthday, her elder brother gifted her The Diary of Anne Frank, which became the trigger for her to pick up the pen and give words to her thoughts.
Armed with an MA in Psychology, Kusum took to taking care of the Ansal household when she got married to Sushil Ansal in 1962. Looking after a big joint family and three kids left her little time to pursue what she was passionate about. Though she is married into now one of the wealthiest business families of Delhi, life has not been easy for her. The early days of her conjugal life were the days of struggle and suffering.
“Ours was a middle class family where I had to look after my in-laws, along with my three children. In that crowded house we only had a small room. Those days Sushil had to work very hard to build up the business, which meant absolutely no holidays. My golden days of poetry and romanticism were brutally crushed. As a result, I would often go into deep depression. I remember I used to walk up to Lodhi Garden where under a tree I would sit for hours till the soothing hands of nature brought me back to normalcy.”
And then one day when Kusum was almost dragged by her friend Renu to act in Ghalib, a play, the course of her life changed. “I went back to the old manuscripts of my poems and a half-written novel. It was a new beginning. My first novel Udhas Aankhe was published in 1975. My short stories and poems were published in various Hindi magazines, but I was not taken seriously. Some writers commented that a person from my kind of family cannot write, and they even spread rumours that someone was ghostwriting for me. When Panchvati was published, the critics looked at my novels with a class bias and found my work to be weak. I was unfazed, but upset to be stabbed by people I trusted. My only crime was that I had taken up writing, in spite of belonging to an affluent family. For that I had to suffer. But I learnt to live with it.”
Twenty-four books later (in Hindi, English and Punjabi) her sensitivity towards social issues keeps the fire burning. From writing about the widows of Vrindavan to analysing the lives of Indians in South Africa in her latest novel Beyond Silence, she has been consistently dealing with subjects and themes with some kind of social reforms. “Our social system is highly flawed and one needs to point it out to the readers. I only pick up a topic I feel confident about and then I research to present a proper prospective on that issue,” she informs.
Her commitment towards her objective gave her wings and she went on to become the president of the ladies wing of FICCI. Nowadays besides writing, working with NGO Divya Chhaya Trust keeps Kusum occupied. She is excited about her book of English poems Pilgrimages to Mysterious Places which will be out soon.