The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Sahgal was herself ‘blotted out’ during the Emergency. ‘It was very hard on those who wrote for a living in those days and were not toeing the line of the dictatorship. The publisher who had contracted for A Situation in New Delhi, explained that my family name made it difficult to publish me. I can’t be expected to change my name to Suzy Brown, I said, and the book wasn’t published until much later.’

  Looking back, she sees her books, especially the first six novels, as a chronology of the emerging India. ‘There is always politics in the background, balanced by the hopes and fears of that time. If A Time to Be Happy, my second novel, showed an India at the peak of idealism, Rich Like Us, my sixth novel, was about the decline and decay of that idealism.’

  In recent years, the blotting out has been a voluntary process. Sahgal has remained an influential figure in the world of Indian letters, heading the Eurasia jury for the Commonwealth Awards in 1990, and being the chief guest at this year’s awards, but she hasn’t published a novel since 1988. The pen hasn’t dried up: she’s written two novels since then but held back from publication. ‘I didn’t feel comfortable in this climate—the packaging, the advertising, the hype.’

  Like many of the writers who wrote in the era B.R. (Before Rushdie, as you may have guessed), Sahgal views the present situation with a jaundiced eye. ‘I was writing at a time when perhaps writing was not the kind of horse race that it’s become now. Before this phase set in it was a highly individual occupation. Now you have to take the ‘readership’ into account, the market into account.’ The eyes, masked till now with the professional opacity of a feted author who also hails from one of India’s first families, flash into imperious life. ‘I would never have submitted to that in my day.’ Our time is up; the next in a long list of assembly line interviews is waiting.

  (In 2014, HarperCollins India published Out of Line: A Personal and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal by the well-known feminist editor and publisher, Ritu Menon.)

  13

  Pico Iyer

  Close your eyes, waggle a pencil over a map of the world, swoosh downwards. Attach the other end of the pencil to a compass and draw a circle, à la Alu in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason.

  The laws of probability dictate that wherever the pencil falls and whatever the circle encompasses, Pico Iyer has been within its circumference. As a writer of travel guides, initially; then as a wandering nomad with homes in four continents; as a global soul, a one-man bridge across cultures; as a public man with the ascetic soul of a monk.

  Then you come to a circle in west Asia, and tick off Damascus, Syria—but not Iran. Pico Iyer took John Macmillan and Camilla, the two protagonists of Abandon, there, but he stopped outside the borders himself. We have, as we discuss this apparent omission, what Pico calls ‘two nations on a plate’ before us—prawn appetizers Thai and Kerala style, served exquisitely as always at The Spice Route.

  The warmth and charm that Pico exudes is genuine, but it masks the man’s persuasive powers, not to mention indomitable will. I arrived at The Imperial determined that, after a surfeit of authorial lunches within its portals, we would lunch anywhere but here. Tables had been tentatively booked at Japanese restaurants, at fine continental restaurants, at Italian restaurants.

  Pico looked beseeching and murmured something about really, really wanting to lunch at The Spice Route. I murmured something about sudden death and decapitation at the hands of The Editor. Pico looked even more beseeching. To cut a long story short, we found ourselves . . . not elsewhere, Pico rubbing his hands together in satisfaction as he ordered his favourite prawns. ‘I had my little heart set on this,’ he remarked. (For long-term readers who’re wondering whether The Imperial has me on its payroll, I have two words: cold coffee. Read the final paragraph.)

  Abandon is another exploration for a man who’s spent most of his adult life hacking through the urban jungles of the big city and debunking the myth of paradise lost and regained by national tourist boards. With eight books under his belt, this is only his second foray into fiction—relatively new terrain, to be quartered, explored and illuminated in characteristic style. The quest for a Sufi manuscript takes us from California, where Pico has spent fourteen years, to India, where he has roots, to Iran, where he was careful never to go.

  He didn’t want to risk his travel-writer self taking over from the fiction writer. He did want Abandon to be, for him as much as for his characters, a flight from the known into the unknown, or, to use a phrase he repeats almost as ritual incantation, from darkness into deeper darkness.

  We have eschewed wine in favour of disgustingly healthy fruit juices—watermelon for him, fresh-squeezed orange for me. Aside from the many countries he can claim as home—India, England where he went to boarding school, California and Japan where he lived for many years with his partner, Hiroko Takeuchi—Pico explains that he can also lay claim on several religions.

  He was born a Hindu; imbibed the principles of Christianity at school and has been a regular at the (Benedictine) New Camaldoli Hermitage in California for more than a dozen years; spent several years in Japan exploring Buddhism in ways more practical than mystic; and found himself interested in Islam more recently.

  One of the obligations of being a Hindu, in his view, is to be able to enter the other, to use imagination in order to understand the apparently alien. He took ‘the liberty’ of translating the word ‘Islam’—usually rendered in English as submission, or surrender—as ‘abandon’, with its dual meanings. ‘In America people focus so relentlessly on this clash of cultures, Islam as the enemy, us versus them,’ he says, as we order soups rather than a main course in deference to Delhi’s appetite-sapping heat. ‘I wanted to move away, to explore the notion that Islam might be inside us and around us.’

  It is not a unique perspective—as Pico has pointed out, the Sufi mystic Rumi is the bestselling poet in the US. I mull over the prospect of Pico joining him on the bestselling charts: not with the fiction, but with his own poetry. Of the twenty-odd poems in the book, perhaps six or seven are by Rumi. The rest were composed by Pico himself.

  As we drift into a discussion of other writers—Pico balanced about Salman Rushdie, me venturing some small criticism—the lights flicker and go out. Perhaps it’s blasphemous to criticize Rushdie, I say, as we descend from darkness into deeper darkness. Aha, chuckles Pico, an electric fatwa.

  His Tom Yam and my Laksa arrive, and as the lights come back on, Pico gently dissects America. ‘America is the strongest country in the world, and the most concerned with changing the world, and the least concerned with learning about the world.’ He is as scathing as a man this instinctively polite can be about George Bush: ‘When he came to office, he’d been to fewer countries than my nephew and my niece, aged three and four. He is pronouncing vehemently on the world without having seen it.’

  Inevitably, we’re back with the question of what travel means to the original global soul. Pico invokes a classic moment: ‘When you get to the plane, sometimes you can see your house from the air. It gets smaller and smaller until it’s indistinguishable from the other houses, and then you’re above the clouds, and you can’t see it. One of the things I like about travelling—or about retreating to a monastery—is that suddenly all those things that seem so amazingly important when you’re at your desk at home become amazingly trifling.’

  Perhaps what keeps him going is a different kind of faith, the trust he places in culture as ‘an alternative form of politics, with the imagination actually being able to conceive revolutions better than the politicians can’. Pico’s next novel has him donning a female narrative voice. ‘With my androgynous name,’ he quips, ‘I’m quite used to receiving invitations to dinner for Mrs Iyer.’ Since he does most of his writing in rural Japan, he confesses to having ‘fallen into the terrible habit’ of taking movie stars as models for his women characters. Camilla in Abandon was modelled on Gwyneth Paltrow; those who prefer their women less wispy, dreamy (and annoying, as
we’ve discussed at length) will be relieved to know that Pico’s next heroine will be inspired by Kristin Scott-Thomas, who is neither wispy nor annoying.

  Alongside the novel, Pico’s been working on another travel book, though ‘travel’ seems a mean and inadequate label to place on those lucid, inquiring writings. This one took him to some of the poorest countries in the world—Bolivia, Haiti, Yemen, Cambodia—in search of a corrective to the prosperity of late 1990s America.

  Of course, this wouldn’t be poverty tourism, I comment. He winces, but faces the implied criticism head on. ‘So much of what I write is about that huge gap between the privileged and the dispossessed. Perhaps this sounds like comfortable liberal guilt. But if you have a choice between being stuck in your cocoon and going out, I’d much rather go out, experience a keener sense of reality. It’s a way of unsettling our unreal lives of comfort.’

  Unreal is a good word. It encompasses the silver tea service, the Earl Grey and the jasmine tea, the waiters careful not to point out that we have talked at such length that we now sit in a small pool of light in the darkened shadows of the empty restaurant. The bill arrives, including a mysterious addition for a cold coffee that neither Pico nor I remember ordering. I query it, but the man insists it was consumed in the lobby. The meal and the general air of satisfaction makes me too lazy to argue. Besides, I think as we exit, pursued by solicitous hotel staff, it’s the one piece of evidence I have that proves The Imperial is, if anything, secretly trying to get a message across: come back with Yet Another Author and next time it’ll be something really expensive added on to that bill.

  Fathers and Sons

  There is nothing passive about the act of reading. It may seem mysterious that one writer exerts a powerful undertow on your life while another leaves not even a watermark impress, but there is nothing accidental about the choice a writer makes in his literary friendships.

  In a hotel room in La Paz, Bolivia, a writer who has come here seeking a break from his desk begins to write, unstoppably. He writes about a boy in school, steeling himself to carve down the next twelve months into manageable chunks of time, left alone among a host of boys whose fathers have all just ‘vanished down the driveway’; the boy’s name is Greene.

  ‘Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?’ asks Iyer. And with this, he opens up a meditation into literary friendship—into the twinned faith and doubt he shared with Greene, into a world of fathers and sons, innocence and guilt. The Man Within My Head pays tribute, even in its title, to Greene, whose first book was a novel, The Man Within.

  Pico Iyer’s first book, published in 1984, was a collection of essays on literature called The Recovery of Innocence: Literary Glimpses of the American Soul. These essays, now hard to locate, came out seven years before the death of Graham Greene, who had written some of the most bitter lines about innocence in The Quiet American: ‘Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.’

  Neither Greene nor Iyer ever had that kind of innocence themselves, though they saw it and responded to it, sometimes helplessly, in others. In his travel writing, Iyer travels defiantly as a stranger, a permanent outsider wherever he might be, rather than the all-knowing, omniscient narrator who infests the travel magazines. ‘So long as I was loose in the world, unaccompanied, I was never bored or at a loss,’ he writes. Greene, unlike Iyer, was often a terrible traveller; ‘at night there are far too many objects flying and crawling’, he writes of Freetown, where he found life ‘pretty grim’. But the two men had a similar eye for detail. Greene’s line in The Heart of The Matter could have been borrowed from an Iyer travelogue, for instance: ‘On the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse.’

  And Greene’s more flamboyant side does not alienate Iyer. He can discuss Greene’s many affairs and his drinking with interest, though he shares neither of these parallel and demanding occupations. Drawn to monasteries himself, Iyer has a broad curiosity that allows him to be taken with Greene’s plans to open a brothel in Bissau as a way of gathering espionage information. (Kim Philby, Graham Greene’s boss, turned this down; it would not have been economically profitable.)

  But the affinity—the very real kinship—between Iyer and Greene has deeper roots. ‘If you try to push him into a compartment,’ Iyer writes of Greene, ‘you’ll always get it wrong.’ He could be writing about himself; both writers have a complex relationship with faith and religion, for instance, and neither can be easily straitjacketed, either as the Catholic writer or as the monkish novelist. ‘You can’t read the books in terms of ideologies,’ he tells us of Greene. In his own writing, he finds himself walking through Greeneland, landscapes of doubt and betrayal, faith and confusion, the loneliness but also the richness of the human condition mapped down to the least explored corners.

  It took ten years for Iyer to write this book, and perhaps more; perhaps the account of this intense relationship really goes back to his childhood, shaped at the kind of British schools that shaped Greene. This might be the closest that Iyer—the most open and yet the most reticent of writers—gets to writing his autobiography, which he does sidelong. Why Greene? Why not another writer? He knows and doesn’t know the answer to this, and he shares as much as he can with his wife, Hiroko, and with the silent reader.

  ‘I couldn’t quite convey even to her how difficult it was at times to read The Quiet American: I’d pick up my worn orange copy with the pages beginning to separate from their binding, and I’d see a brash American reaching out for support, or Fowler calling the man he’s more or less condemned to death his ‘friend’ (perhaps his only friend), or see him trying to petition his wife for a divorce and realizing, at the very end, that, as Teresa of Avila had it, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered, and I couldn’t say why it struck me with such force.’

  When Iyer writes his essay about Greene, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’, for Time magazine, his father leaves a message on his answering machine. As the father speaks to his son, he is so moved that he begins to sob. ‘It was a shocking thing, to hear a man famous for his fluency and authority lose all words.’ Some weeks later, Iyer’s father is dead; that ‘gasping call about Graham Greene’ is the last memory he has of hearing from him.

  The ideal father, he reflects, would be an adopted one, a virtual or a chosen father who could offer answers to the questions left behind, the ones that sons (and all children) never get to ask their parents in the end. He has no virtual father, perhaps even no need for one. Instead, Iyer has Graham Greene, the man with whom he shares his secrets, his sins, his most intimate needs. It is a closer relationship, this claimed kinship between a dead writer and a living one, than any other could be.

  (Based on interviews and reviews from 2003 and 2012, when The Man Within My Head was published. In 2014, Pico Iyer’s very popular TED talk, ‘The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere’, was brought out as a book.)

  14

  Rohinton Mistry

  To ascribe motives to Rohinton Mistry that the author may never have had in mind is a dangerous pastime. Mistry, who has no fondness for the present-day recasting of writer as public figure, TV celebrity and soundbyte-generator rolled into one, rarely gives interviews. He is, however, fairly good at expressing his views on subjects such as Germaine Greer’s criticism of A Fine Balance and Amit Chaudhuri’s dig at Parsis in another review. Chaudhuri escaped the kind of unpleasant literary immortality conferred on Greer, whom Mistry has excoriated within the pages of his most recent novel.

  Nevertheless, it was impossible to read Family Matters without being reminded repeatedly of the two other novels that preceded it, and I found it hard not to think of Mistry’s three novels as a coherent entity. All three books follow the same essential structure, superimpos
ing the tangled lives and concerns of their Parsi protagonists over an ongoing narrative of post-Indira India. All three are set in Bombay; or as in the case of A Fine Balance, in an unnamed city that bears such a strong resemblance to Bombay that the point is not worth quibbling about. All delve into the complicated, messy business that humans make of their lives, and all trace the legends, myths and present anxieties of India’s dwindling Parsi community. In brief, even though Mistry may not have intended to write his first three novels this way, they form a Bombay Trilogy. And Family Matters can be read in two ways, then; as part of a larger structure, or in isolation.

  In terms of style, Mistry is something of a throwback, an oddity in the same century that has spawned writers of the demoniacal energy of Michel Houellebecq and Irvine Welsh, or of the ferocious inventiveness of fellow Canadian, E. Annie Proulx. He lays claim to the sprawling, leisurely canvas that belonged to writers from an earlier century, a widely peopled space where narrative is usually linear, episodes and setpieces carefully planned. Hilary Mantel once compared him to Dickens—adding the caveat that along with Dickens’ strengths, he also shared that novelist’s penchant for caricature.

  The first whiff of disappointment with Family Matters strikes with the title itself, with its weak double pun surely wispier than the anodyne A Fine Balance. The early part of the narrative, though, places us securely in the heart of Mistry territory, where the internal tensions within the Parsi community and the internal tensions of a particular Parsi clan form overlapping stories. At the heart of Family Matters is Nariman, his old age shadowed by Parkinson’s disease and the legacy of a disastrously unhappy marriage. He is, Mistry gives us didactically to understand, a casualty of the Parsi insistence on keeping bloodlines pure. Nariman never married Lucy Braganza, his long-standing girlfriend, because of the repercussions that decision would cause in his parents’ world. Instead, at forty-two, he entered into a bloodless marriage with a Parsi divorcee. Lucy haunts him, however, a living ghost, and his renunciation will eventually have tragic repercussions all around.