'Boastful Family Saga? So?'

As a writer, do you see yourself as observer or actor in life?

Well, this book (Red) is about the nexus between these two. Life is constantly trying to trip you up. My taxi driver who dropped me here gave me an example. He was telling me he was in Haridwar and a pandit there told him:If you block the path of an ant, it would turn left or right, trying to get aroundthe obstacle. You are creating problems for it, but it would constantly try to walk around it. That's what this book is doing: constantly returning to life. 

In a sense, this is what you are doing at this moment, right, after spending many years writing this book?

Some writers write a book a year, I don't know how they do it. I take a year just to redraft. I took three or four months only to write one draft. By the way, this is the first book I've written entirely on a computer. 

Was it a different experience? 

Completely. It changed my life. It changes how you write. In a way it changes how much time you take.And doesn't  necessarily make the writing more terse. You can just write as long sentences on a keyboard as you do with pen and ink. In fact, it's easier to be long-winded on a computer. But life around you filters into the narrative much more easily when you are on a computer. I don't know why that should be, but it does. You have time to look around while you are at the keyboard. I enjoyed it. 

A long time ago, you took the decision to be a full-time writer, eschewing the blandishments of job security. Was it frightening, the decision you took?

No, when you're young you don't care. I was 33 at that time. I had to wait a long time to find a publisher abroad because at that time there was no Penguin India, HarperCollins or Picador. There were publishers here, sometimes reliable, sometimes not, but the quality of the product left something to be desired. If you picked up a book published abroad, for example, you thought to yourself: I would like my book to look like that, I'd like it to feel like that. 

And also the money, surely? Because if you published abroad, you could perhaps afford to be a full-time writer?

Now, maybe, people are aware of the pelf and the rewards. At that time I was utterly ignorant. And I think any other writer of my age would have been totally ignorant. I didn't know what a writer was paid. I didn't even know what it was to be a writer. I just knew I had written a book and wanted the best possible (for it). You were not really looking for big bucks. Truly. It sounds like a virtuous statement. It's not. You were just ignorant ofit.

Your first hurdle, I presume, was finding an agent?

I went straight to a publisher. And got turned down. Took it to another one and got turned down. This was in London. I went there only to sell my book. I got a visa and went for six months only to find a publisher. At the immigration counter, when they found out I'd come only to sell my book, he asked me:'Is it good?' I suppose he expected me to say: 'I hope so'. But I said: 'Yes'. 

You were working at that time?

At that time, I had done small things but was living in Australia, having just finished a doctoral dissertation in Canada. I came back to Australia where I could legally work-- my parents had taken a decision to emigrate to Australia and then returned to India after a year. I then went there looking just for money. I had some money saved from my fellowship that saw me through the thesis on a particular Caribbean writer. I probably wouldn't have finished that thesis except I happened to meet this writer, truly a writer of genius. A man for whom I have great regard. His name is Wilson Harris. The moment I say that, people say "Who?" Anyway, he's a great writer--the greatest writer to come out of the Caribbean, bar none He's a couple of years older than Naipaul, but in another league. He's a poet who writes prose, who writes novels. I mean, the line is not broken up on the page between poetry and prose. Nowhere as well-known as Naipaul--he has small groups of devoted followers all over the world. People are willing to sit with his works--very difficult to read. But it's like one of those pictures where there's no point until you focus on it, and suddenly you see other things in it. 

Were you drawn to him through Naipaul's works?

In fact, I first came on Naipaul long before I'd even heard of Harris. I read Miguel Street. Wonderful. I loved it--the humour, the most marvellous ear he has for dialogue. I said, My god! 

What did you feel about his writing on India, did it suggest possibilities of writing at last from a perspective different from the West?

I didn't find Naipaul's writing effective and different. It was identical to other western writers. In Miguel Street, it was light comedy, he didn't make many judgements about the people, made light judgements but lateron ... Miguel Street didn't scrutinise them with a moral intent. He was happy just noting. Later on in his career as the note-taking became more subjective and more judgemental, then it became more problematic in the sense that the view of this eye was an intentionally European view. And later on, I saw the difference between what a writer likeWilson Harris, who also came from a similar background, was able to do without turning his back on the language but not accepting totally the master's tongue. 

Were you writing your first novel about the same time as Rushdie was writing Midnight'sChildren.

Midnight's Children was published in 1981. I was writing my thesis in the late 70s, and at the same time writing my novel. The two things went on simultaneously. I then stopped the novel and wrote the thesis which I wouldn't have done if it was on anyone else. I finished that and I immediately went and started writing my novel again, using the money I was supposed to use for academic purposes. I finished the novel. It helped that it was Canadian dollars and I was living in Lucknow. It lasted longer.It was a bold idea at that time--to live in India and be a full-time writer. 

Were you thinking of it as a lifelong vocation?

I was thinking only of the book I was doing, something that didn't allow any other option. Because it was a Lucknow book I was living in the heart of Lucknow. The city became the hero of that book. 

You were making up the rules, as it were? Because at that time, with perhaps the exception of R.K. Narayan, there was no writer I think who didn't have a day job. Where did you get the idea that writing books was going to be your full-time job?

I don't know. I just knew I had to give all my energy, all my time, to this book. I wasn't going to give anything to anybody else and I was just lucky to have those funds which were running out. But still, I was eking them out. I was living by the smell of an oily rag. On next to nothing. I was living with my present wife--we weren't married at that time. There was no one else. I truly lived in the present. There was no future. Even now I am happy living day by day. It becomes a habit. That's how I was living then. 

By the time your book was ready, Rushdie's Midnight's Children was out. Did that help you?

No, I felt the opposite. Because I had written something quite similar and he'd finished.Around the same time in his life--he is three or four years older than I am. My book came out three or four years after his. It was a feeling that he'd done it. Publishers felt we had already done this guy, why do we need another Indian book? In that world there wasn't a sense of the floodgates. It was just this feeling of:why is this guy coming and offering us something similar? So I just had to go door to door and very soon my visa ran out. I still hadn't found a publisher. Just in the last week I found an agent and left my manuscript with him. Took another year and a half to find a publisher. It wasn't easy. 

Meanwhile you were writing your next book?

No, by then I was working in Australia. By that time my money had run out. I was working in a shoe factory. I didn't know what I was going to do if I couldn't sell my book. I had closed the academic gates; I had decided by then that was not my career. And at that time, people would be publishing their thesis, writing articles, whatever it takes to further that career. And I had decided I wasn't going that way. So apart from that sort of negative thing of knowing what I wasn't going to do, there was nothing positive. I just had to wait. I knew it was a good book. 

What do you feel about the current trend of building up writers like stars in order to sell their books? 

I don't approve of it. But then you could say, I never had it so, you know, sour grapes. I don't want to say anything more about it.

But why don't you approve?

Because I believe it takes attention away from the book. 

But you could say it also helps bring attention to the book?

I don't know, never having had (that sort of attention). I think the publicity is bringing attention to the author rather than the book. 

Doesn't that trickle down to the book?

Maybe but in the whole hoopla, in the whole circus, the personality is being developed.

And the writing suffers as a result?

I can't say. But I think in my case the writing would suffer. Or it would become more infrequent. I would need a longer period of recovery from the bright lights. You write in the dark. You are blinded. You want to be blinded by something other than the spotlight. I very often write in the dark, I very often close my eyes when I write--that is exactly the opposite.

But how can you write in the dark?

At night. On the page. In my bed or at my desk. I can show you hundreds of pages where the lines cross, or a big white patch where all the writing has been done in one little corner. 

But it's not possible, is it, these days, to write totally in the dark and not work at publicising your book?

Maybe writers have to do that in order to make a living out of their writing. I think I would have trouble if I was going around the world, doing book tours of every city. I would probably not do it. 

You are one writer writing in English who still insists on living in India. Doesn't that work as adisadvantage especially when your readers and publishers are mostly abroad?

It just worked that way for me because I have a home in Dehradun. My father built it and we all contributed towards the costs. Now it seems like the right decision because people are coming back to India. 

How do you get this sense that people are returning back to India?

I feel it in the way the country has been for the last few years. Suddenly we are no longer in a place that you pass by, a place you go to for an exotic holiday. Suddenly we are becoming the centre. Ealier, the centre was somewhere else. Some place you go to. Suddenly, the centre of gravity has shifted, maybe is shifting. This feeling is reflected in every profession, including writing.

Is there any virtue, do you think, of being a writer resident in India rather than being based abroad?

I don't know if there is any gain of flavour by choosing to live here, but I think they lose flavour by not living in the place they are writing about. 

There's a view, for instance, that Rohinton Mistry's novels about Bombay lose something despite his writing skills because he lives elsewhere.

If I lived in Canada, I'd write about Canada. My immediate feeling is that. I live so much in the present, I cannot live in the past. How can you possibly write about some remembered past? You can write about it maybe once. But even in recovering the past, you are constantly coming to the present. How can you keep recovering the past, like embroidering? I couldn't do it. 

So you think your decision to remain in India rather than be based abroad worked out in the end?

I think it worked out fine for me. Because I am constantly writing out of that world. I couldn't write about, say, Canada, from here. 

Who is your reader? Is it a reader in India or from anywhere in the English-speaking world? Because if that's so, then don't you have to go on book tours abroad to promote your books there?

I've given up on that, to tell you the truth. I never ever had a big readership abroad. It's probably too late to start on that now. If you want to succeed abroad you have to be young. You have to be good-looking. It helps if you are a young woman. All these things count. I'm none of those things. Ruskin Bond too has none of these things. What can we do?

So you just write and wait for fame to catch up?

I don't write for fame. I may have done so at one time. But fame didn't come. It was harder to get than I thought. All of us who write our first novels have thesevisions of glory -- 99 out of a 100 are going to be disappointed. There will be a lucky one. He or she might have what it takes and they have other things. Good for them. It didn't happen to me. I have to work with what I have at hand. What I have at hand is my material, the landscape, the world that I know and have grown up in. That's my world. I feel a little uncomfortable even when I come to Delhi, let alone going somewhere else. There's no virtue in it. It's just what you're comfortable with. 

V.S. Naipaul has recently lashed out at this trend among Indian English writers to write about their families. He was wondering if they've ever looked closely at their own families, seen them for what they are: shoddy and petty. Why are they making it out to be something that is grand and beautiful, when it clearly was no such thing. What do you think? 

I think it may have nothing to do with the reality out there. The reality out there may never have changed. It is to do with your particular perspective. Naipaul has a particular perspective. When he writes his saga, it's not a saga. He's looking at more unconvincingdetails, in the case of Mr Biswas. And he manages to build a very good novel out of that. You can do exactly the opposite thing, taking many other things and magnifying them. 

This comes from an Indian tendency to be boastful, according to him.

It may be true. 

The only Indian writer he thinks who is not boastful in his writing is Ruskin Bond.

Does Ruskin Bond have a saga? I think he has a saga. Room on the Roof is one of the greatest novels produced in this country. I have read, not so long ago, his semi-autobiographical Scenes from a Writer's Life. I haven't read anything of Ruskin's that hasn't appealed. In the same way as Miguel Street appealed. Maybe there are similarities there. The I in Ruskin's case is a very infant I. In Naipaul it is a very knowing I. The humour that is coming out of Miguel Street and the humour that is coming out of Room on the Roof is very different. I loved them both. I can say I loved Miguel Street. But his (Naipaul's) later books I don't love. And I am very judgemental about them. But this book is not a saga because it is one boy's view of the world. The two personalities are very different, their two voices are very different, and yet they are fictionalised. In a sense they are not writing novels. Just about life from their point of view. But what is wrong with writing family sagas? There is nothing wrong with it. 

But these sagas are boastful, according to Naipaul.

Now that you say it, sagas as a literary form are boastful. In the long, cold Northern winter, the warriors gathered in this little hole to tell their stories: about the battles they fought and how, in a way, he was the greatest warrior. That's where a saga comes from. They are by their nature boastful. So what? 

But do you think Indian novelists tend to dwell too much on family themes?

In the Indian context, family is much more important than in the West. And I think Naipaul has dwelt on the family and family themes. What about A House for Mr Biswas? It's all about how he's trapped in his family, how he is trying to break away from the constraints of a family. Ifits tone is different, that's the way Naipaul has chosen to present it. But that's not the only way to write about a family theme. 

What's your next book?

The next book is again set in a small town, close to Dehradun. It's a Roorkee book. Now who in his right mind will write a book about Roorkee and expect to be read in London or New York? It's about an engineering family and Roorkee is the town where engineering started. TheGovernment College of Engineering which is now the IIT. All the basic infrastructure of this country came out of Roorkee 150 years ago. I don't care if anyone calls it a familysaga. It's fiction, so if I boast, it'll be about a fictional family.

A shorter, edited version of this interview appears in print.