Take the genesis of The Everest Hotel. "I did a watercolour before I wrote the novel," says 47-year-old Sealy. A pair of feet propped up, the mountains in the distance, and a clear divide in the intervening space—a green graveyard on one side, a grey-and-black auto workshop on the other. "So all I knew was there would be an old man, a division between the old and new India. But characters keep popping up. It's very fanciful. This book was an exercise to see how I could drift...constructively."
But why adopt a Kalidasa-inspired seasonal framework, why limit oneself to a one-mile radius? "Well, it's a book about nature. The action is not exactly cyclical. At every stage of the season, the narrative illustrates that mood. In the drought of summer, there is longing; in the rains you have Brij and Ritu coming together. But that doesn't stop things from happening, the story has to unfold."
An unfolding aided by the serendipitous discovery of a book of German poems by a wartime internee. "Inge (a neo-Nazi who shatters the uneasy tranquility) popped up last, I didn't know till then that there would be a German," Sealy recalls. "I saw she could be a character who comes between Brij and Ritu and she took over that part of the story. Things keep happening right up to the end, it has its own inevitability."
Indeed, this submission to inevitability, to unimagined possibilities, seems to have guided the writing and peopling of The Everest Hotel. So when you ask him why Ritu has to leave Everest and whether this departure was intentionally foreshadowed in the opening page, Sealy shrugs: "It's just a device. There was nothing to say that Brij would have committed the act he did, it's the way the story unfolds. I felt right in the beginning that it was a doomed love, something had to happen."
As for the future, Sealy's flirtation with form—which is the hallmark of his bulky Trotternama, masala moviesh Hero and finely detailed travelogue From Yukon to Yucatan—continues. Says he about his next project: "It's a kind of imaginary gazetteer. Well, it's non-fiction, so it won't be totally imaginary, but I'm going to have fun. A British civil engineer at the turn of the century could take no liberty. I'm going to take this idea and stand it on its head. It will be a portrait of a particular region, the Shivalik hills, as a unit, distinct from the Himalayas." Where no doubt one of The Everest Hotel's peripheral characters, the ever watchful Ramapithecus, will reappear.