PVLF 2025

Interview with Pinaki Gangopadhyay, Author of “Yet, Remember Me”

A poetic novel about love, memory, and loss—Yet, Remember Me begins on divorce day and unravels truth through silence, grief, and Tagore’s ghost.
on Jul 15, 2025

Frontlist: Pinaki, Yet, Remember Me begins on the day of a couple’s divorce. What drew you to this emotionally complex starting point, and what did you hope to uncover about love through it?

Pinaki: Because divorce, not marriage, is where truth finally shows its face. I wasn’t interested in the predictable romance of falling in love. I wanted to explore its decay, its erosion, its echo. What does love look like when it’s gasping for breath, not posing for pictures? Aditi and Shashi meet on the day they part. But they aren’t just ending a marriage—they’re confronting illusions, regrets, unfinished songs. That day is also Tagore’s death anniversary. He hovers over them like an invisible witness. What fascinated me was this question: When a man dies, whose widow is the woman—the one she married or the one she truly loved, in silence, in poetry, in memory? That’s where the story begins—at the intersection of truth and tenderness.

Frontlist: Your novel delicately balances personal grief with political turbulence. How did you craft a narrative where private and public heartbreak coexist so seamlessly?

Pinaki: You see, that’s how real life unfolds. We mourn our children while wars rage on. We fall in love during revolutions. Shashi’s grief over his daughter’s death, his guilt over Lavanya’s suicide, bleed into the political wounds of his time—Bangladesh’s refugee crisis, the Naxalite violence, the exploitation of tribals. But I didn’t want politics to be a backdrop. I wanted it to be a character—loud, messy, interfering, like history always is. Aditi internalises everything. Shashi externalises it. Between their silence and fire, a story emerged that didn’t treat love and revolution as opposites. They are born from the same wound—the need to be seen, to matter, to resist oblivion.

Frontlist: Tagore’s influence is subtly embedded in Yet, Remember Me. How has his legacy shaped your creative journey, and what made you incorporate his spirit into this contemporary story?

Pinaki: Tagore was never on the bookshelf; rather, he was always in the bloodstream of every Bengali. But saying that, I didn’t want to pay a mere tribute. I wanted to interrogate, do a forensic study into the mind of the genius, and trace his autobiographical footprints in his work. I wanted to ask: can a man whose words shaped generations still speak to a woman like Aditi today? Can his silences still haunt a man like Shashi? Over 200 of his verses appear in the novel, not as decoration but as dialogue. “Rabi” becomes Aditi’s imagined lover, her solace. “Shashi” is the broken, flesh-and-blood echo of the poet. One is divine. The other is disturbingly human. And somewhere between them, we discover how fragile it is to love, and how arrogant it is to expect to be remembered.

Frontlist: As a poet and lyricist, did you find your poetic instincts guiding the rhythm and emotional cadence of your prose in this novel?

Pinaki: I wrote the book like one writes a song—pauses, crescendos, silences. I don’t believe in separating poetry and prose. They’re not genres; they’re temperatures of the soul. In Yet, Remember Me, every sentence had to breathe. Shashi’s voice is raw, like a cracked violin. Aditi’s voice is elegiac, like a note held too long. The music of memory guided everything. Some pages were written in tears, others in trance. You can structure a novel. But a poem? A poem leaks in through the cracks. And that’s exactly what happened here.

Frontlist: You explore memory—both personal and cultural—as a central motif. What does ‘remembering’ mean to you in the context of modern relationships?

Pinaki: It means everything. We live in a world that celebrates forgetting—new love, new feed, new thrill. But remembering is an act of rebellion. It is how we honour what time wants to erase. In the novel, Aditi doesn’t just remember Shashi. She remembers Rabi—the man she never met, but loved more fiercely than her husband. Shashi, in turn, writes his life into a manuscript, hoping someone will remember him kindly. In modern relationships, remembering is not about nostalgia; it’s about truth. What we choose to forget says more about us than what we claim to love.

Frontlist: Coming from a world of science, Vedanta, and startups, why did you choose fiction as your medium for this story? Was Yet, Remember Me born from something that couldn’t be expressed through your nonfiction work?

Pinaki: This story wasn’t written—it was survived. In 2013, I was told I might have cancer. For three months, I lived with the possibility of dying. And in that quiet panic, I began to write—not a thesis, not an argument, but a whisper to the world: If I go, let this remain. Fiction allowed me to say what footnotes cannot: grief, desire, regret, spiritual longing. The way Tagore said it—amar e gaan guli, tomar kache rakhi—my songs, I leave with you. This novel isn’t a work; it’s a will that’s yet to be executed, waiting for the divine judge to place the final stamp of oblivion that one is destined for.

Frontlist: As a debut novelist, did you feel pressure to simplify or commercialise your story? Or were you determined to stay true to its philosophical and emotional depth?

Pinaki: I rewrote the book 18 times over 10 years. If I wanted to write a relatable story that lingers in the mind and builds its nest in the hearts of the readers, and not just a marketable novel, there were moments when I was told to cut the philosophy, drop the poetry, make it pacier. But I knew this book wasn’t meant to entertain. It was meant to endure. I didn’t want a reader who finishes the book in a day. I wanted a reader who carries it for years. The kind of book where you underline the words. The kind you revisit when love breaks or memory bites. I chose truth over trend. And I don’t regret a word of it; rather, at times I feel there is too much that has remained unsaid. Hopefully, the sequel that I am planning to write will give new soil for planting trees uprooted from this landscape.

Frontlist: In today’s fast-moving literary market, where plot often trumps reflection, how do you hope a nuanced debut like Yet, Remember Me will reach the readers it deserves?

Pinaki: I never wrote this book to chase the market—I wrote it to chase meaning. Stories like Yet, Remember Me are not meant to shout; they are meant to stay. They don’t explode; they echo. So when readers began discovering it organically, and the book earned a 4.8 rating on Amazon from those who took the journey slowly and deeply, it felt like quiet validation. A 4.8 rating, I think, is one of the highest in the category of Literary Fiction. No billboard can replace that kind of truth. What moves me most is the word of mouth—the way readers are passing it on, quoting lines, writing to me about their own memories, their own Rabis and Shashis. That is how this book was always meant to travel—not in a flash, but like a whispered song remembered years later. If it finds a place in ten hearts deeply rather than a thousand minds fleetingly, I would still consider its journey a success. Because some stories aren’t meant to trend; they are meant to be treasured.