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October 10, 2022
Rijula Das's Playlist for Her Novel "Small Deaths"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rijula Das's deeply empathetic novel Small Deaths is marvelously dark and insightful.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"[Rijula] Das’s searing debut centers on the plight of sex workers in contemporary Calcutta, India…This devastating novel is in turn touching and painful to read. Das, a Bengali-to-English translator, is definitely a writer to watch."
In her own words, here is Rijula Das's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Small Deaths:
My recently published book Small Deaths was a product of writing, rewriting and re-rewriting over 7 years before it was published. That, as I realise sometimes, is the better part of the decade. One problem, or perhaps I should call it a characteristic of writing a book for as long as that you change as a person, as an author; you cannot recall the music you listened to when you first put some words down, or what song accompanied the glass of champagne on the day you finished the first draft.
Like the manuscript, the songs I have listened to over the course of its making has changed. So consider this below list an impressionist’s guide. It captures the mood of what I think is the spirit of the book, now, looking back on it. Perhaps what I listened to was wildly different.
The other problem in the playlist is that of language. Small Deaths is set in Asia’s largest redlight district, a neighbourhood called Shonagachhi in Kolkata. It’s peopled by pimps, policeman and sexworkers in the margins, who have varying facility with spoken English, and when I imagine them talking, or the music they play on their phones, it won’t be these songs. The book is currently being developed into a series. I cannot imagine that any of these songs will score that universe. I look forward to that playlist but for now, this is the author’s sentimental, and playlist.
*Artist at that time known as Christine and The Queens, Jonathan (Feat. Perfume Genius)
The first Christine and The Queens album, Chaleur Humaine, came out in 2014, the year I started writing Small Deaths, and I listened to it on a loop. I own every LP and a giant poster of Chris hangs up in my living room. This song is not from that album, but his music has accompanied every iteration of Small Deaths. This song in particular has a quiet, haunting and dream-like quality. My novel’s world is chaotic, busy and violent, but this song was a reminder of the quiet moments of reckoning that my characters needed to confront themselves.
Kid Francescoli with Julia Minkin, Blow Up and Kid Francescoli, Moon
Hours of these two songs on loop has threaded through the great pandemic rewrite of Small Deaths. In 2020, I was seriously overhauling the book, structurally and line by line, and there was no end in sight. I was convinced it was not up to scratch and I wrestled daily with the book. There is ‘distance’ built into the soundscape of Moon. I cannot explain what I mean by that, but it feels like being on a train, or moving through life. It reminds me of being a lot younger and trying to write a novel, and not knowing if I ever could.
There is something wonderfully ‘of the moment’ about Blow Up, like having the sun in your eyes on a long summer afternoon, and glasses of rosé in a provençe villa; like deciding to be young for a last holiday, falling in love, and feeling like there is immense possibility, and wind under your wings.
Arooj Aftab, Mohabbat Karne Wale
If there was ever a song for Tilu Shau, it probably would have been this. Tilu Shau is my knock-kneed, balding writer of erotic fiction, terribly in love with the fierce Lalee and drowning in his own unbearable smallness of being. I love Aftab’s hypnotic voice and a wholly unique update on the music arrangement of this very popular Urdu song. The entire song is mesmerising and perfect for listening on a loop, which is what I have been doing. A rough translation would be – “There won’t be a dirth of lovers, but in that soiree, I won’t be there.”
Tajdar Junaid, Dastaan
An exceptionally talented musician and composer from Kolkata, Tajdar’s album What Colour Is Your Raindrop was a revelation. This piece, called Dastaan, an Urdu word for tale/saga, is as layered and textural as that word. This piece, like a fable, reveals a different aspect of itself each time.
French 79 feat. Sarah Rebecca, Diamond Veins
I think of this as ‘Sonia’s song.’ There’s something about motion and this song. It makes me think of long aimless drives in the outskirts of New Delhi, in winter when it transforms into a noir city. I imagine Sonia, smoking languorously, one arm hanging out of the window, racing through yellow lamplights in amongst the smog and dust.
The National, I Need My Girl
It’s probably evident by now that I’m a sucker for a sentimental song. There is something deeply vulnerable, and naked in this song. “I am good, I am grounded/Davy says that I look taller/ I can’t get my head around it/ I keep feeling small and smaller.” To me this song is about masculinity and it’s lonely places, an absent-minded looking-about for that missing piece while having a drink with old friends and coming home alone. I found company in its reassuring loneliness.
Goo Goo Dolls, Iris
An old one but I suppose I listened to it nonstop when I was 19/20, a time when a song can imprint on your brain in a way that is impossible to wash out. A first book has a curious way of bringing out every long-forgotten ingredient from your mental pantry, give it a wipe and ignore the expiry date. I think this song was one of them. I think this as Tilu’s song at the moment he goes to meet Lalee, in the very first page.
Rijula Das is an author and Bengali-to-English translator. She received her PhD in creative writing and prose-fiction from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she taught writing. Rijula received a 2019 Michael King Writers Centre Residency in Auckland, New Zealand, and the 2016 Dastaan Award for her short story "Notes from a Passing." Her short story "The Grave of the Heart Eater" was long-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019. Rijula's short fiction and translations have appeared in Papercuts, Newsroom, New Zealand, and the Hindu. Small Deaths, her first novel, was long-listed for the JCB Prize for Literature and won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award in 2021. It is currently being adapted for television. She lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand. For more information visit www.rijuladas.com.
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