The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  By the time we get to Dakshin, he’s done with talking and is looking forward to his vodka (Absolut Pepper, chased with plain coconut water). We order fried prawns as a starter, meen moiley, gongura mutton and kai stew. ‘Kai isshtew, kai shtew,’ he says meditatively, trying out the poetical possibilities of vegetable curry on his tongue.

  I try to get us back on track.

  ‘About the Holocaust . . .’

  ‘Actually,’ says Vikram, looking around, ‘I like this place a lot.’ Dakshin is quietly understated, with an appam station, thalis lined with banana leaves. ‘I’m just going to hide the red light,’ he says, switching his attention to the tape recorder. ‘Put a little katori in front of it . . . that does the trick.’

  The prawns arrive. He’s about to expand on the section in Two Lives where he’s talked about his working habits, a state in which bills, letters pile up and books are scattered around, where he retreats into a disorder from which only close friends can rescue him. But he’s distracted by the Carnatic music. He hums. I wait. He sings in snatches. ‘Trying to work out what the raga is.’ I give up, sit back, and prepare to enjoy myself.

  Over the next hour, he discusses his work (‘It took me a long time to call myself a writer’), marriage, where he believes, unlike Tolstoy, that all happy families are not the same. We discuss politics, and how ordinary people like Shantih Uncle and Aunty Henny can have their lives changed by parties whose agendas they wanted to have nothing to do with.

  Researching the deaths of Aunt Henny’s sister and mother has made him sensitive, not just to the horror of the Holocaust, but to the prevalence of commonplace violence. The map of Delhi is scarred by memories of 1984; we’ve passed roads where, as he says, not so long ago, Sikh families were killed in that terrible pogrom.

  This book has changed him, I realize; what he wants to do with Two Lives is to get his readers to look behind the closed doors of family history as well as a larger history.

  We’re at the coffee stage—kapi, he corrects me, pointing to the menu where it’s spelled K-A-P-I; the conversation has lightened again. He’s unburdened by fame, writers aren’t recognized in the same way as sportspersons or film stars, he says, ordering the date toffee without looking at the menu.

  ‘I always look ahead to the pudding, just so that I can put myself in the right frame of mind.’ What’s next? Perhaps a collection of poetry, or essays, or a novella. Vikram doesn’t really know, but for the first time in years, he feels free: ‘I’m not panicking.’

  As we walk out, the seldom-recognized Vikram Seth is accosted by a gorgeous, gushing fan who wants his autograph. He looks sheepish. ‘It happens sometimes,’ he says defensively.

  Right now, he has more important things on his mind than the next fan, or the next interview, or even the next book: he’s going off on a very important mission.

  I watch as this respected, well-loved writer, praised by the likes of historian Antony Beevor, steps out into the afternoon in search of a damask tablecloth for his mother. It’s a suitable quest.

  (Based on a 2005 interview. In 2015, Seth published Summer Requiem, a collection of poems; A Suitable Girl is scheduled for publication in 2016.)

  7

  Ruchir Joshi

  ‘There’s the book, between Delia Smith and Salman Rushdie,’ says Ruchir Joshi, gesturing carelessly at the spine of The Last Jet Engine Laugh. For the filmmaker-writer, this represents the end of a journey that began almost nine years ago. He began writing TLJEL at thirty-four, detouring every so often to make documentaries, and finished at the age of forty-two. The temporal rewards presented themselves early on, in the form of a £80,000 advance, and now that the book’s out, they continue to trickle in. There’s a phonecall from Star News asking to speak to ‘Mr HarperCollins’—they do, as it happens, want Joshi, but someone has entangled publisher with writer. I’m hanging around in his cheerful but horrendously hot barsati, waiting for Joshi to finish dealing with the stream of callers who attend every promising new debut so that he can be taken out for lunch to the Machan. It was supposed to be somewhere more exotic than the Taj Mansingh coffee shop, but practical considerations intervened: on a day peppered with appointments, the Machan is the perfect halfway house.

  It’s like walking into a wall of coolth after the torrid temperature outside, and we settle down gratefully at the nearest table, where Joshi orders a Foster’s while I settle for a sedate fresh lime soda. He seems oddly calm, for a debut novelist, and I ask whether he belongs to the school of writers who can detach the process of writing from the eventual fate of their work.

  ‘That would be lying: I know I couldn’t do certain things—no brownnosing or networking or fixing reviews. But one of my friends once told me about my films: “If you’re going to do something different, you can’t abdicate responsibility as soon as it’s finished”. Having got a couple of films out (Eleven Miles, which tracked Paban Das Baul, Gaur Khepa and other baul singers, and Planet Kolkata among them), perhaps I lack the fragility of a first-timer.’

  The barrier between writer and filmmaker is thin; during the last two or three years that TLJEL took, Joshi was tossing around a few film projects in his mind. ‘There are a couple of half-finished, half-conceptualized films I’d like to do now, including a feature script about driving in the mountains.’

  The novel itself, which was called ‘Midnight’s authentic grandchild’ by one reviewer, took quite a while to settle into shape. TLJEL spans a hundred years from the days just before Independence to two decades in the immediate future. Within its embrace fall a possible ending to Netaji Bose’s story, technological warfare, water riots in Delhi, a love story and several fractured loves, tangential perorations on sex, photographs and sewage systems. By any yardstick, it cannot be accused of being underambitious.

  ‘The truth is: it happened. I’d written My Father’s Tongue, which could have been the beginning of a Kolkata coming-of-age rock’n-roll, losing-your-virginity novel, except that my friends forbade me to do any such thing. It was not planned to the nth degree. There were rough ideas that needed fleshing out, one of the reasons why it took so long. It was a question of letting the damn thing grow organically, with all the fungus, all the unwanted rot. I know people who chalk out a novel in advance chapter by chapter.’ Joshi pauses with a director’s sense of timing. ‘I find it admirable. Like people who can do insurance calculations.’

  He’s onto his second Foster’s, having waved away the waiter with a polite ‘We’ll order later’; we employ the overflowing bread basket to ward off starvation. Isn’t it odd, I ask, that there are so few fictionalized portraits of the men and women who fought for Independence? And was there a particular reason why he decided to pick up on Bose’s story—both real and imagined?

  ‘Bose is a prime subject for fiction. He undergoes a journey, travels across Central Asia, Europe, Singapore—he’s always knocking at the door, there are sightings even after his death,’ says Joshi. ‘I was surprised that, as far as I could discover, there had been no fictionalization of Bose. He was at the other end of the spectrum from Gandhi’s non-violence; he was at odds with the Congress ahimsa postures.’

  That is one of the explanations for the dark hints of contemporary violence that criss-cross the novel. ‘If you look at independent India, there’s a fetishism of militancy and nationalism. In the end, Bose won: Nehru lost, Gandhi lost. It makes much more sense to remove their portraits and put up garlanded pictures of Bose, or of Indira Gandhi on a tank.’

  For those who’re wondering whether Joshi’s rendering of Netaji’s final years is meant to be authoritative, he leaves no room for speculation. ‘There’s a doubt about the story that Kalikaku tells of Bose’s last years,’ he says. ‘There’s a doubt about every single story in the book. That’s completely intentional. The stories that our parents told us need to be questioned and so do the stories that we’ll pass on. What are the new myths we’re manufacturing today? How will our children’s children treat those stories?�
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  He’s intent, the wisecracking persona set aside for a moment as he grapples with the retelling of the themes that have shaped his life for almost a decade. The present, he explains, is the main focus of the novel—which is, paradoxically, why he skims over it and focuses on the past and future instead. He may or may not know it, but he’s following Chinese literary prescriptions: know the past, to know the present; reflect on the future, to change the present. It seems like a good time to bring up the inevitable question of whether he writes ‘cinematically’. ‘Okay,’ he says, starting on another palm-sized bottle of Foster’s, ‘I know I flirt with pretentiousness by saying this, but certain scenes in the book are deliberately cinematic, while other scenes are constructs, notions taken from contemporary visual art. It’s like a collage or an installation, for instance, where what is not said is as important as what is picked out. There’s no reason why a novel shouldn’t lean on these sources.’ And what if, I query, that makes it a less linear, more difficult read? ‘Reading a book is a game, a jeu d’esprit, and if the reader is seduced enough by that to enter into the game, that’s fine. There should be a difference between reading Sidney Sheldon or Robert Ludlum and reading Ruchir Joshi.’

  If that sounds arrogant, too bad; he means it as a simple statement of fact. It hints at an underlying confidence, the sort that made Joshi, about a summer ago, take on Pankaj Mishra’s polemics in an article that appeared on www.tehelka.com. I raise the issue tentatively, but he’s prepared, and willing, to talk.

  ‘I see Mishra’s whole persona, his statements about literature, the coming down hard on things not of his ilk as dovetailing perfectly with the political power game that’s playing out around us right now. The concepts of ‘apasanskriti’, the view that ‘Yeh hamara culture ka nahi hai’, this Sanskritized argument: these have been flipped over and translated in a curious way into a closing of doors, against regional literature and certain kinds of writing. And it’s not open to debate. Pankaj Mishra represented, to me, a front for a certain kind of revivalist view of art that enshrines Naipaul’s first three books and little else. You can’t swim in the ocean, so you want to recast writing as a shallow children’s pond! The bookshops of the mind should be open to all kinds of writing. I was trying to rail against the dictating tendency, to open up the debate.’

  Controversy, newspaper columns have suggested, are part of the Joshi style. Why, for instance, did he switch publishers midstream, shifting from IndiaInk to HarperCollins in India? Joshi trots out the stock answer, saying that IndiaInk’s Sanjeev Saith was a huge support, these things happen occasionally between author and publisher, it’s an internal matter. It’s an anodyne response. ‘It’s true,’ he says, not giving an inch. And speaks with eloquence about Saith’s unflagging help, especially at the beginning of the writing process.

  I ask him whether the lack of neatness, the reluctance to tie up loose ends is deliberate, or just messiness. He’s not the least bit put out, telling me how he cleaned up an early section from TLJEL, smoothened out the wrinkles, and entered it in The Independent’s short-story competition. ‘I showed it to a friend, who said, “Ruchir, seamlessness is not what I expect from you; it’s not your thing.”’

  We’re on the last Foster’s; Joshi displays at least one classic sign of the seasoned writer, an ability to drink steadily and stay completely lucid. He drains the glass and concludes, ‘So I write cactusy prose, pushing out in different directions. It’s not an easy ride, but a writer isn’t Lufthansa; I don’t specialize in not giving you turbulence.’

  (Based on a 2002 interview. Ruchir Joshi has edited an anthology of erotica, Electric Feather (2009), and published Poriborton: An Election Diary (2011). His documentary films include 11 Miles: A Diary of Journeys, Memories of Milk City, Tales from Planet Kolkata and A Mercedes for Ashish. His second novel, The Great Eastern Hotel, is out in 2016-17.)

  8

  Kiran Desai

  Kiran Desai’s first reaction after winning the Booker was to thank her mother. ‘The debt I owe to my mother is so profound that I feel the book is hers as much as mine. It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness,’ Kiran said at the ceremony in London.

  Desai worked on the novel that would become The Inheritance of Loss for almost eight years. ‘I’m a slow writer,’ she explained, ‘it takes me time to find my characters, their histories, their voices—I like to let the story unfold.’ Anita Desai, who wrote The Zigzag Way in the same period, spoke of Kiran working upstairs while she worked downstairs, a comfortable harmony connecting mother and daughter. Anita Desai’s Mexico novel came out to good reviews; Kiran struggled with a book that was turning out to be larger than she had expected.

  After the Delhi launch of Inheritance, Kiran talked of the difficulty of slashing 1,500 pages down to 300, of the days she spent interviewing Bangladeshi busboys, Indian waiters and other immigrants to the US in order to do justice to their stories. Her characters are all outsiders: a retired judge living in Kalimpong, scarred by the loneliness and rejection he experienced as a young man living in England; Biju, the son of the judge’s cook, discovering the harsh comedy of life as a continually displaced immigrant in New York’s restaurants; orphaned Sai, the judge’s grand-daughter, stumbling into a love affair disrupted as the hills go up in flames over questions of identity and belonging.

  The Inheritance of Loss was richly layered, written with sensitivity and humour, and for over a year, no one wanted it. Kiran Desai collected rejection letters until Hamish Hamilton finally took it.

  The editors who turned her down must have winced when Inheritance made it to 2006’s controversial Booker Prize shortlist, which omitted writers like Peter Carey, David Mitchell, Andrew O’ Hagan and Nadine Gordimer in favour of relative newcomers. After eight years of silence, Kiran Desai woke up to a phone that rang off the hook. Even then, she was seen as a dark horse compared to frontrunner Sarah Waters.

  (This interview was conducted in Delhi along with the translator and critic Ira Pande.)

  Ira Pande: I’m impressed by how you managed to sustain the feeling for this book over such a long period of time—nine years.

  Kiran Desai: We writers get competitive about this—how long did it take Mohsin (Hamid) to write his book? Many years . . . Nadeem Aslam took eleven years.

  IP: More, I thought, and he shut himself in a room . . .

  KD: He took eleven years, I took seven. It wasn’t hard to sustain the feeling for the book, not hard at all. It was hard to finish, to put a stop to it, to go the other way from writing in every direction—that was easy, the difficult thing was realizing that to make a book, I had to do the opposite process and start throwing out bits. I cut a lot from the book.

  Nilanjana Roy: I heard you threw out about eight chapters?

  KD: It wasn’t even eight chapters, it was 1,500 pages, and 800 pages, and 350 pages of it . . .

  IP: People have started to complain about the doorstopper book from India, because everyone’s writing these enormously fat books. Sometimes I feel it would work better if there was more editorial intervention, because as a writer, few could do what you did—chuck out whole bits on your own.

  KD: It is hard, because there are so many angles, you can go on forever, turning something around, going into another character, another angle of the whole thing. You have to realize you can’t just go on forever, but there is a trend towards big books all over the world. Look at American books—the new (Thomas) Pynchon, (Dave) Eggers . . .

  NR: In a way it was a pity you didn’t do this, just to correct the gender imbalance.

  KD: It is a gender thing! My mother was saying this, how young men are encouraged to write really, really big books, and women are often made to cut that down, almost as if it is a gender thing, that women write smaller, slimmer books and men write big, ambitious books. And the men are being accused of—what is the phrase?—hysterical realism. Which is funny, that’s an amusing gender argument, where men are accused of being hysterical and
women are being curbed and careful.

  I sometimes think it’s just the process of writing. We work on a computer, it’s easy to keep everything, to research, add more and more. I bet if computers weren’t around, a lot of men would write smaller books. Someone said that with Dave Egger it’s really obvious—all those additions and all those footnotes that he can only do because he can play on the computer. But Salman (Rushdie) was saying, I realize we should write shorter books because we get paid the same amount! (Laughs)

  IP: Can I ask you about The Inheritance of Loss? Did the title suggest the book, or did the book suggest the title?

  KD: The title came right at the end. I’m still not sure it completely fits. A lot of people didn’t like it—I’ve been told it sounds like a self-help manual, someone said, you should just call it The Loss of Inheritance, and that would make much more sense. I was struggling to come up with something because it’s a book of so many different parts. I thought of all the typical ones: The Judge of Kalimpong—sounds vaguely like colonial literature, The House of Cho Oyu, and then this came up.

  NR: It struck me how much loneliness and isolation there is in the book. Biju, the cook’s son in America, Sai, cut off from a normal childhood, the judge alone in England, where you almost feel sorry for him, despite his harshness later . . . Was that taken from family history?

  KD: Not quite that close, but the judge’s story was certainly taken from hearing about the experiences of people going to England. There is often an attempt to cover up what actually happens when you go abroad. For all immigrants, the story that you create at the end is the story you can live with and that you like to tell. It’s not what actually happened. Immigration is like the act of translation, the possibilities of dishonesty are so big, so immense. It’s a place where you can embroider any kind of story, and I think most people do. You also want to go there saying that you haven’t come struggling like other immigrants might have, you’ve come from a position of dignity, it’s also an attempt to create your past, I think, in a different way. You have to make up a story about that as well.