‘My father encouraged me to lead the life I wanted to lead,’ explains writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi, ‘because he had not been able to be the artist he had wanted to be.’ In ‘Tracing Puppa’ from Granta 104: ‘Fathers’, Joshi remembers his father’s struggle to overcome social and political convention, to be his own man. In this interview for Granta.com, Joshi explains how he came to write ‘Tracing Puppa’, reflects on the ‘energy of book-crazed Calcutta’ and confesses to ‘secretly or not so secretly dreaming of writing for Granta’.
Photograph by nawaidanjum