Padmanabh Trivedi is a lecturer at a government polytechnic in UP and a research scholar at IIT Roorkee, India. His English poems have appeared in Dreich, Good Printed Things, The Bayou Review, Loft Books, and Roi Fainéant Press, and his Hindi and English short stories have been published in Setu and MY INDIA, MY GODS Vol. 1 (Bare Bones, 2025). 

In his essay ‘Barambaba’, featured in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF HUMOUR, Padmanabh reminisces about gods and ghosts of days gone by. The anthology’s editor Ankit Raj Ojha spoke with him to explore the memories and meanings behind the piece.

Tell us about your perspective on humour and its place in writing and in life.

The irony is that I am thinking seriously about humour right now. I think if life is the routine daal-chawal, humour is chutney, and if a conversation is an ice cream, humour is cherry topping. It’s like a tea break on a hectic day or a sudden shooting of a star when you’re gazing at a still sky. It’s a window of joy in a room of quotidian mundaneness.

Humour adds to the quality of good writing as it binds the reader with springs and splashes of joy. It makes the literary piece pungent and spicy that etches the moment of joy deeper in the reader and refines their taste, wit, and sense of humour as well. 

If one has a good sense of humour and ability to understand it, they are a gifted person indeed. Life for them and around them becomes so easy and full of stuff that makes it worth living. 

What are the things, works, and authors that have influenced your writing? 

Well, usually, serious things influence my writing. The incident I have based my story upon was a serious matter when I had observed it in the past, but I saw striking humour too in it. Hindi authors like Neerja Madhav, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Nirmal Verma, Premchand, Sharad Joshi, and Harishankar Parsai, and in English, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Roald Dahl, etc. have influenced my writing. 

Is there any image, phrase, idea, place, person, or memory that became the seed for ‘Barambaba’? 

I wish I could tell it all, but that would be a spoiler. So, I would very much like to talk only about the person who is at the root of my story. He is Misraoo. The name on his Aadhaar card is Anoop Kumar Mishra, which is something even his neighbours don’t know. In Awadhi, his surname Mishra becomes Misraoo. Misraoo had seen the harshest circumstances in his life, but that could never suppress his striking humour. As a child, he was my favourite person to be around.