The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

WITH a bovine calculation of the sag in the barbed wire, the cow butts the makeshift stake, and dips its head to enter. Allan Sealy comes alive. Strangled cries issuing from his throat, he takes off at a trot, bends at the waist, and essays the mock charge of a carnivore. The cow looks up mildly surprised. Sealy intensifies the snarls, and keeps bearing down. At rump-slapping distance, the cow takes a quick decision, pulls back its head and ambles off. Sealy straightens up, waits for it to cross the road, rights the stake ineffectually and heads back, an apologetic smile breaking on his face. He is embarrassed by his display of aggression, discomfited that he may appear acquisitive. But the tiny garden he has annexed from the municipal kerb in front of his house, and impregnated with a variety of saplings, is important. Both for reasons of environment and inspiration. Its regenerative rhythms, closely tied up with the seasons, are closely tied up with the Himalayas-based novel he is writing. And for Allan Sealy nothing is more important than his writing.

Of course few people know that. But that's because few people know that he writes. His neighbours don't. Nor do their neighbours. In fact no one on Race Course Road, Dehradun, probably has a clue that the goateed Anglo-Indian with a foreign wife and an adopted child who emerges now and then riding a scooter is a writer, leave alone an extraordinary talent whose expressive and imaginative abilities are comparable to those of Salman Rushdie. Of course Rushdie too, as Sealy puts it with typical self-effacement, "probably doesn't know I exist". That's particularly bitter irony. For, as if the stars had malevolently conspired, Sealy's writing career has been dogged and derailed by Rushdie's. Sealy's magnum opus, The Trotternama, which must rank among the 10 greatest works of fiction by an Indian in English (right there with All About H. Hatterr, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Midnight's Children) fell in the Rushdie-shadow area, where it has lain, unfeted and forgotten. Ten years of hard research and writing, a great book, and in the sunshine years of Indo-Anglian writing, a slot in the shade.

Most writers would have given up. If your best shot doesn't even hit the board, it's difficult to carry on shooting. But Sealy has gone on firing. And missing. That is if the parameters are commerce and celebrity. But Sealy's aren't. More than a shooter, he's like a long distance runner, moving to an inner music that is divine and, for ordinary mortals, daunting. He wants the glories at the end of the run, but he's willing to stay the course to find out. Not for him the instant gratifications of the preening sprinter; not for him the frippery of the explosive jump. He does not demand an immediate verdict on himself. Like the long distance artist, he moves on self-belief. Like the long distance artist, he has his moments of doubt and loneliness. And these can be glimpsed in his eyes, for when he smiles, his eyes don't. They retain a deep difficult melancholy.

I. Allan Sealy, born in 1951, the son of a police officer in UttarPradesh, studied at La Martiniere, Lucknow, and then moved to St Stephen's, Delhi. While Lucknow was to be the setting for his masterwork, The Trotternama, it was at St Stephen's that he discovered "the wonderful world of books". But it was not all literature; there was also the guitar. Sealy played regularly at "jam sessions" in the legendary Cellar at Connaught Place; and it was through a month-long contract at Trinca's, Calcutta that he earned his passage to Canada, where he picked up a doctorate on Caribbean writer Wilson Harris. He was in his mid-20s, and for the next couple of years he travelled, met and married Cushla from New Zealand, taught, tried to write. Realising that manual work was less distracting than teaching, he quit academia and, in Australia, took to first stocking shelves in a departmental store, and then packing shoes in a factory. Anything as long as he could write full time. (He surrenders this information reluctantly, quietly; not with the bravura of those writers who, in their biographical notes, pride themselves on the range of odd-jobs they've held.) For the next near-decade The Trotternama consumed his life.

SEALY set his unclassifiable book—saga, epic, extravaganza, chronicle—in Lucknow. He moved to the city and lived there for a few years, researching and reproducing it with a Joyce-Dublin kind of fidelity. The nama told the spectacular story of seven generations of an Anglo-Indian clan, the Trotters, through its glorious beginnings in the 18th century to its dessicated present in the 20th. The material Sealy dug out was enchanting; but more dazzling still was his wielding of it. Sealy's linguistic and inventive powers were unbelievable: a random flip through the book brings you to your knees. As writer Mukul Kesavan says: "It's impossible to believe that anyone can write so well. The Trotternama is one of the major novels of the '80s, and I'm talking about the world not just India." But for a debut novel that has few parallels, it was jinxed. It should have made him a literary superstar, but all it did was to earn him a tiny coterie of awed admirers.

To begin with, Sealy's narrator, Eugene Trotter, was born on the stroke of midnight, "an inevitable metaphor for anyone writing a large fiction on India that looks at the past and present". But then Rushdie's Midnight's Children happened, and Sealy had to redraft his manuscript. Later publishers in England wanted him to serve up his book in a trilogy; Sealy refused to have it truncated. Viking finally bought the book, but just before it was to be released in 1988, his editor quit the house. The orphaned book received a final fell blow when Viking managed to buy Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and it immediately became the big sub-continental book to be pushed by the powerful engines of sales and marketing. Sealy could not have picked a worse moment to appear on the scene, especially with a book that the trade mistakenly identified as in the Rushdiesque magic realist mode.

Shuttling between India and New Zealand—in a perfect equation that gives each half of the couple a chance to live in their own country—Sealy then wrote Hero, a kind of fable set in the twilight zone where the two grand Indian obsessions, of cinema and politics, meet. MGR and NTR were among his role models, and he again researched his material, anonymously, in the studios of Bombay and Madras. Built on wit, self-conscious, post-modernist, Hero too sank without a trace. Sealy, incommunicado, always intransit, had anyway moved on to his next book: an unlikely travelogue through North America. His friends and admirers despaired. He needed to have a chat with Vikram Seth, they quipped. He needed to understand vogue and marketability. He needed to apportion himself to the media in exquisitely measured coffee-spoons, that both ration and enchant. Sealy, of course, was gone: embarked on a three-year-long project of travel and writing. From Yukon to Yucatan was published in England earlier this year. Beautifully written, with a perfect pitch, it displays a warm, curious sensibility. As Kesavan says: "He's the kind of travel writer I'd love to be. He gives humane, liberal, intelligent writing a good name." The book has found no Indian publisher.

His lack of obvious success remains a mystery. Among his admirers, some feel his writing is too rich for people used to a thinner diet. Others fault his self-effacing, extremely gentle manner. They feel that in a world where abrasive contentiousness pas-ses for talent people have a problem dealing with someone so hugely talented yet so intrinsically good. A few just put it to foul stars. But all agree that its only a matter of time before the buying-shouting world wakes to him—prodded perhaps by some instrument of consumer hysteria like the Booker. Sealy himself is willing to wait longer. Displaying that most attractive mix of deep personal humility and supreme artistic ego, he knows that "my books will live after me". Critic-writer Rukun Advani backs that: "In the years to come when histories are written up, Sealy will be ranked with Rushdie."

At the moment his desires are few. Tend the rainforest tree, ensure the whippy willows catch root, plan on moving closer to the forest. His wife thinks he needs to buy a new guitar—he gave his away when he first left India 24 years ago—to ease the tension creasing the corners of his eyes. Walking a financial tightrope, with just enough to see him to the end of the book he's currently writing, he thinks he just might. Meantime, like a long-distance athlete he unfailingly wakes many hours before dawn, and undisturbed by his sleeping wife and daughter begins to run, and as the blood warms up the loneliness dispels, and the doubts vanish, and the pounding of words is music in his ears.