The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  When I read that sentence again last week, it brought back exactly what made K.D. Singh’s bookshop so special. He was often ensconced in a corner, listening to jazz, and when I met him at the age of ten, he ferretted out my love for Gerald Durrell in seconds. ‘Try this,’ he said, handing me James Herriot. It was a perfect recommendation, the first of many through the next thirty-odd years. His wife, Nini Singh, his daughter, equally book-loving staff and Sohan at the door handled business when he was away, but it was a pleasure to see KD in his element, handling readers he knew as competently as total strangers.

  I was at the store once when a lady came in, asking for book suggestions. She liked Rumi; KD paused for a second, and suggested Agha Shahid Ali. The next week, I was back browsing (buying books is a ruinous habit) when another person asked for suggestions. ‘I love Rumi’s poetry,’ he said. KD directed the man to Jiddu Krishnamurti: the two customers had browsed books differently, and to him, their minor shifts in taste were as clear as footprints.

  Over the years in Delhi, I sometimes missed living in a city with great public libraries, and often wondered what it might be like to live in Tokyo, with its 1,675 bookstores, or Paris, with 1,025 bookshops. But the truth is that all a reader needs over their lifetime is one good bookstore, preferably run by a great bookseller.

  When K.D. Singh’s cancer set in, we missed him and the book talk terribly. In all these years, he had seldom gossiped about the publishing industry; he preferred to chat about the books themselves. It was easy with him to start discussing authors in one decade and to finish three centuries further back in time. The day after he died, The Book Shop was open for business as usual, a reflection of the values he and his family had brought to the book-selling business.

  It will be a while before it sinks in that I can’t drop by The Book Shop to ask KD what he thinks of Mai Jia’s Decoded, or of the new translations of the season. But on my bookshelves are the years of spoils brought home from The Book Shop: about three decades worth of reminders of an extraordinary bookseller, and of a friendship built on the shared love of books and reading.

  (Written in May 2014, after K.D. Singh’s death.)

  SIX

  Plagiarism:

  Three Unoriginal

  Stories

  1

  V.N. Narayanan

  The voice at the end of the line was perfectly calm; the only suggestion of strain in V.N. Narayanan’s conversation came from the long gaps, the pauses, the jerk of disconnection as he jumped from one train of thought to another.

  In 1999, V.N. Narayanan was a respected senior editor at the Hindustan Times. His weekly column, ‘Musings’, had run on the edit pages for over a decade, and he moved from subject to subject with enviable fluency. Then one of his columns made the news for all the wrong reasons—Narayanan had plagiarized his entire piece from a column by another journalist, Bryan Appleyard.

  Writing about the plagiarism in The Sunday Times, Appleyard set out what had happened: ‘The column appeared in the Hindustan Times last month under the headline “For ever in transit”. Of its 1,263 words, 1,020 were identical to those in an article of mine published in The Sunday Times Magazine in February under the headline “No time like the present”. Of its 83 sentences, 72 were mine. Mr Narayanan even spoke of a sign he had seen while walking through Newark airport in the United States. I did the walking; I saw the sign. Apart from a touch of local Indian spin in theme, detail and tone, Narayanan had ripped me off.

  ‘B.N. Uniyal, who broke the story in the Pioneer, made quite a meal of his scoop. He had plenty of material. A collection of Narayanan’s columns—which are called Musings—had been published under the title I Muse, Therefore I Am. In the preface he mocked those who would accuse authors of plagiarism and wrote of taking the ideas and words of others “to innovate something of your own”. Uniyal was having none of this. “You have not only lifted entire paragraphs and sentences from Appleyard’s article,” he wrote, “but have actually stolen all his experiences, his ideas, his reflections, even his person and personality.”

  ‘Narayanan was at first too distressed to talk but promised that he was “going to choose an appropriate time to explain my action to all of you”. But he took my call at his Delhi home. “Mr Appleyard,” he said, “I am being massacred here. I have been 38 years in journalism. I’m out of it now.”’

  In the weeks and months that followed the plagiarism scandal, I had several conversations with journalists and writers where we talked about our own fears. ‘Narayanan may be an extreme case, but his kind of plagiarism is something that all of us who write for a living secretly fear might happen to us,’ I wrote at the time. ‘Most of us read furiously: books, newspapers, magazines, columns on the Net, blogs. As Anne Fadiman commented when speaking of John Hersey’s extensive—and unacknowledged—borrowings from her mother’s writings, one of the occupational hazards of being a certain kind of reporter or editor-writer is that you get used to running other people’s prose through your typewriter and calling it yours. Another occupational hazard is simply that much-derided plagiarism defence: it was my unconscious wot done it, so sorry. It’s been over-used, but cryptomnesia does occur more often than we realize.’

  It was about two months after the Appleyard plagiarism scandal broke that Narayanan called me, ostensibly to discuss the column I’d written on the subject. He wanted to answer a question I’d asked, a question that perhaps lay at the heart of the whole business: why, even if he was pressed for time and thought he would steal Appleyard’s central conceit, would he not change words, phrases, the recounting of memory? He had made no attempt to cover his tracks—the column was a straight lift, but by changing key details from Ireland to India, Narayanan had also established his intent to steal.

  *

  My notes on the conversation are first scribbled, in exact shorthand, then the writing slows, then there’s a series of question marks, a few stray phrases and my unjournalistic comment: ‘What the hell really happened here?’ Narayanan talked for over an hour, his voice shaking from time to time as he tried to explain—but continued to shy away from a complete explanation. He never used the words ‘plagiarism’ or ‘theft’ or ‘stealing’. Instead, he spoke of the ennui of writing for years, of searching for a subject week after week, and I felt a small shiver of hack-writer’s sympathy.

  Had he ever done this before? Had he ever stolen from another person’s writings? Narayanan refused to answer the question directly. He had already stepped down from his post, and his writings would not appear for the next eleven years in any major Indian newspaper, though the magazine Life Positive would carry some of his columns. Some journalists, sifting through the mass of columns he’d produced over his thirty-eight years in the business, found suggestions of borderline plagiarism—an idea lifted here, a phrase evocative of someone else’s writing there. There appeared not to have been anything as blatant, as obvious, as Narayanan’s lift from Appleyard—except for a case in 1992, seven years before the plagiarism scandal broke. Accused of plagiarizing part of a column, Narayanan had blamed his ‘photographic memory’, and the Press Council had exonerated him.

  Over the course of our conversation, Narayanan offered partial, and mutually contradictory, explanations. He had copied and pasted Bryan Appleyard’s article, struck by the central idea of visiting airports, intending to do his own piece on the subject. (This didn’t explain why he had not, in fact, used his own memories of visiting airports and instead stolen Appleyard’s memories of walking through Newark airport.) He was working against a tight deadline—again, an explanation I was instinctively inclined to be sympathetic towards; the writer fears the blank screen, the hardened hack fears the blank space in the newspaper where his or her column should be. And he had, inadvertently, sent in his working notes for the column instead of the piece he had written. (But this didn’t explain why he had replaced all of Appleyard’s personal references with his own set of Indianised references.)

  It was, in many wa
ys, the most strikingly odd conversation I have had as a journalist. There was a sense of shared embarrassment, a sense of being a reluctant listener at a reluctant confessional. Narayanan circled around and around the central issue, unable to confront it, unable not to address it. I see from my notes that I asked him the direct question—had he plagiarized Appleyard, and had he been aware of the enormity of what he was doing—five times, not with accusation, but with compassion.

  Perhaps the compassion needs to be explained. Plagiarism is the most heinous sin in a writer’s book, for a reason; it’s not just the theft of an original idea, but it’s the theft of another person’s voice, the most intimate and irreplaceable part of a writer’s style. Even journalists—workmen-like carpenters rather than artists—have their signatures, their voices, and what Narayanan did to Appleyard was unforgiveable. I understood, instinctively, Appleyard’s anger and outrage, even as I understood, a little more dimly, Narayanan’s predicament. Most journalists recycle original ideas, or borrow inspiration from a wide variety of sources, or learn to add in just enough of their own opinions and perspective to put their byline on a piece, especially if they’re on the news desk. But for most of us, crossing the line between inspiration and plagiarism is unthinkable.

  (For years after talking to Narayanan, I became obsessive about my own, minor writing, checking each piece several times to ensure that I hadn’t stolen a word from another writer’s work. On one occasion, I read my column in print, chilled by the conviction that I had come across those paragraphs before—and I had, in a column on the same subject that I had written several years previous. Autoplagiarism is a dreary confession to make; it smacks of either narcissism or lack of imagination.)

  In every response Narayanan made to my question, it seemed clear that the line had begun to blur for him, perhaps years before the actual plagiarism occurred. He spoke about the trickiness of memory—how could anyone of us be sure of what we remembered? He spoke of the curse of having a photographic memory, and of the difficulty of then separating your own thoughts from what you had read. I could, again only dimly, follow this train of thought. Many of my writer friends abstained, like ascetics, from reading literature while they were working on fiction—the fear of contagion, of absorbing another writer’s style or mannerisms or turns of phrase was a very real one.

  Narayanan spoke of the tyranny of the weekly column, the necessity of serving up ideas, frequently one’s own warmed-over ones, like so many meals made up of leftovers over the endless procession of years.

  At one point, he asked a question that really does matter: didn’t his record count? All those years of original, unplagiarised prose that he could, in sincerity, lay claim to as his own work—had this one (or two, or three instances) instance of plagiarism wiped out all of that? The only possible answer is that yes, it had; just as a thief doesn’t get brownie points for all the homes he’s left in peace and not violated, all it takes is one instance of plagiarism for the work of decades to be permanently tainted.

  The conversation ended on that hanging note. V.N. Narayanan never admitted his guilt, and to this day, I don’t really understand why he chose to unburden himself to a very junior journalist and columnist he didn’t know. But over the months that passed, I thought less and less about his crime, and more and more of the burden of guilt that he carried. I thought of how slippages happen, in one’s moral universe, so gradually that one might not even notice when a line has been crossed. I wondered if his exoneration in 1992 by the Press Council had been good for him, if it hadn’t in some way fostered a belief that he could get away with anything. I wondered, having a bad and patchy memory myself, if having a photographic memory could cause such confusion in one’s mind that you might mistake a page by another writer for your own work.

  And I wondered, if after decades of letting the lines blur, it might not come as a relief to be caught. Like an exhausted mountaineer up on the slopes—from my notes, I see that V.N. Narayanan uses the word ‘tired’ some twenty-six times, ‘exhausted’ eleven times—he might have wanted to pick up a stone and throw it down the mountainside, knowing in advance the weight of the avalanche that it would bring down on his head.

  2

  Kaavya Viswanathan

  In 2006, a young writer called Kaavya Viswanathan became famous for all the wrong reasons.

  The story broke when The Harvard Crimson cited a dozen-odd passages from How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life that seemed strikingly similar to passages found in two of author Megan McCafferty’s books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. McCafferty was an odd choice for a plagiarist: her books came out in the last six years, and she’s a fairly well-known author in the teen market.

  Here’s a sample of what The Crimson found, and there was passage after passage like this one:

  From page 213 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go.”

  From page 175 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Sean stood up and stepped toward me, ostensibly to show me the book. He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the book toward me.”

  The New York Times said that the similarities were more extensive than even The Crimson indicated—they counted twenty-nine passages to the Crimson’s dozen. Kaavya’s defence was that she did it, but she didn’t know she was doing it—the classic unconscious plagiarism plea. She was ‘very surprised and upset’ to learn about the similarities; she ‘wasn’t aware of how much’ she may have ‘internalized Ms McCafferty’s words’. There was much scope for irony here: when it was revealed, before the scandal broke, that Kaavya Viswanathan’s original debut novel had been massaged into shape by editors as well as something called a ‘book packaging company’, her editor asserted staunchly that the writing of Opal was ‘1,000 per cent’ Kaavya’s work. Make that somewhere around 900 per cent.

  What made Kaavya’s plagiarism, unconscious or not, such a burning issue that the Malaysian Star, the People’s Daily of China and the New Guinea Gazette would all consider it front-page news? This was a book from a genre not especially known for its originality—boy meets girl plays out against the battlefield of SAT scores, teen friendships and fashion bloomers.

  It’s a first novel that was massaged and pummelled into shape—again, long before the plagiarism storm broke, Kaavya’s editors were comfortable admitting that Opal Mehta needed more work and more ‘inputs’ than most manuscripts, though they gave her credit for an ‘original’ idea. Given that one of Megan McCafferty’s novels is about a young girl trying to get into Columbia, and that Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel is about a young brown girl trying to get into Harvard, the only thing original about Opal Mehta lies in the fact that it features an Asian protagonist. In other words, we may not have known how much of Opal Mehta had been borrowed, accidentally or not, from another published writer; but we did have a fair idea of the many processes that went into the manufacture of this book, complete with the advance, the hype, the deal.

  Kaavya Viswanathan was definitely a plagiarist, but she was also a competent writer—and a product of today’s market, a contemporary success story where the key elements are packaging and media managing, and where the book itself is just the content.

  This is usually the point at which a reviewer is supposed to snort, paw the ground and tear into the bad, bad marketing machine that treats literature like burgers: all best-sellers have the same basic formula, tweaked a little bit for local palates. And I do understand Amit Chaudhuri’s impatience with the Indian litera
ry world for treating books as success stories, yet another mark of the India Shining brand conquering the world, the author as the sonin-law who’s done so well.

  But for the first time in publishing history, as several commentators have been pointing out recently, it has actually become possible for anyone to be a writer. There is no formula for great literary fiction, which is a bit of a problem; but then the market for literary fiction is a niche market, a boutique market, so the mainstream reader doesn’t have to worry her head over that particular issue. It is often seen as a bad thing that more and more novels are being produced—I use that word deliberately—today; that creative writing courses allow anyone with a smidgeon of talent access to a wider market, once they’ve polished their skills; that any reasonably bright person can hammer out a book in six months and have a decent shot at being published.

  The obvious argument against applying the laws of the marketplace to literature is that sales are far more important in publishing terms than quality. If you look at what’s been resold to India as the great Indian novel in recent years, if you look at the world’s best-seller lists, it’s hard to disagree that publishing is no longer about looking at the literary qualities of a book.

  But there’s another way of looking at this: for the first time in the history of writing and publishing, it is possible for everyone to be, or contemplate being, an author. In the initial stages of this exercise in democracy, books will almost by definition be written for the moment; a lot of what ‘succeeds’ will be only average; a lot of books will be written by many for a very few readers.

  Narayanan’s plagiarism ended his career. Kaavya’s borrowings did her book great harm, but her career suffered far less. She studied law at Georgetown, and in May 2010, the online magazine Gawker carried the derisive headline: ‘Harvard’s Most Infamous Plagiarist Is More Successful Than You.’ The young student had been accepted for an internship at one of New York’s more successful law firms, and appears to have moved on from the scandal. Aside from the massive advance that Opal had attracted, it was hard to take the plagiarism very seriously.