A brave new book lets its words do the talking

Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words by Payal Kapadia is published by Hachette India. Here, Payal shares more about this book. Excerpts.

AABP: In today’s time , when young people are bombarded with digital media, how relevant are books?

Payal: It isn’t just young people, all of us are bombarded by social media. What comes to us dressed up like a story has more to do with selling than with telling. These days, our best ‘stories’ peddle versions of ourselves to others.

I wanted to reclaim the stories we heard as children. Stories that made us fall in love with the words, that helped us sleep or kept us awake. Stories that inspired us to reach with our imaginations beyond what we knew. That howled inside us like a burning wind, that made us cry. The most powerful stories curl up and make a home inside us. They remind us of who we are, why we’re here. They are a gift, they’re possibly the most marvellous thing about being human.

AABP: Tell us about the world Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words is set in.

Payal: Asha and Zeb, my two Speaker-heroes, are like teenagers everywhere. They have the angst of being fifteen, but without the words to express that angst. They paint walls in the dead of night. Think Banksy, think graffiti, think young rebels. The Words look like us, except that they have ink in their veins, not blood. Woebegone, the Word who runs the warehouse but reports to the Speakers, has a conflicted identity. Wonderful, one of the most popular words in the warehouse, yearns for freedom but is too afraid to go after it. The Thesaurus rex is a monster-figure – like the demons we’re taught to fear in our own world. At its heart, this is an adventure, with heroes and journeys and villains, real or imagined.

AABP: And who are they up against?

Payal: The arch villain –Gunther Glib–comes to power on the back of his promises, like leaders everywhere. He has a way with words, as his name suggests, and the Speakers elect him because they buy what he’s ‘selling’. So do the Words. His story is so powerful, he believes it himself.

AABP: In a world where words are truncated and trivialized – how do you convey your passion for words?

Payal: Our words are quite possibly our greatest inheritance. Think about it. The words we use today started out 6,000 years ago as rudimentary sounds exchanged by prehistoric nomads on their move across Europe. What could connect us more deeply with our past, with each other, with ourselves? So many words wilt unnoticed inside a dictionary, unused. Equally, it troubles me that there are words we overuse, that lose their power to move us. With textspeak and emojis, I wonder sometimes if we end up saying anything at all.

I wanted to write a story about dying words. In Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words, the Words look like us, they have insecurities and longings of their own. They depend upon the Speakers, and if they don’t get spoken, they fade. I wanted my readers to feel close enough to the words to care about them.

AABP: And you stuck them in a warehouse?

Payal: Yes, not exactly a ‘children’s space’, I know. A warehouse is cluttered and functional, but don’t most of our wishes get fulfilled by warehouses these days? Press a buy button, and you can have almost anything. But what happens at the other end of that button, what is that something that you can’t buy off the Internet, that’s what I’m asking. In this world where we feel we have more and more, could we possibly be getting less and less?

What if language was commodified, like everything else, and we had to buy our words to use them?

AABP: Who are your traget audience?

Payal: This can be read by children, by grown-ups, and it possibly says different things to different people. I told the story without minding what genres it wandered into. If you think about it, our world has all the makings of a fantasy, but we don’t spare a second glance anymore. I mean, look at all the things we accept as normal in our own world – birds that fly, rain that falls, waves that flow and ebb, everything. That’s where I felt my book slowly moving into magical realism. And then, as the story unfolded, I saw so many parallels with our own world.

AABP: So, is it – or isn’t it – dystopian?

Payal: It’s an echo of what our world is today. No nuclear apocalypse or global famine has befallen this world. There is no overt violence; if that’s what dystopian means these days. It’s more a sense of sickness, setting in so slowly, you don’t know it till it’s too late.