FROM HEAVEN'S EDGE

"I wasn’t sure I was going to make this. It’s only in Singapore that someone is going to say, we’ll set up an event for you an hour after you land. Everywhere else in the world, people will say we’ll set up an event for you a day after you land. Given the security issues at Heathrow and all of that, I thought the chances of this plane taking off on time are pretty remote. But I thought, we’ll see how it goes. The plane arrived on time, things went smoothly, I turned up, people showed up to listen to me and we had a fabulous evening."

That mad bunch of folks who put the talk together was a bunch of friends who love their books, they wouldn't mind a world without Kindle, the written would do. They lovingly called their book struck trio - Literatti and took their chances with this author. The critics were divided, yet Maniza Jumabhoy, Tripta Singh and yours truly had enjoyed the ride through Romesh Gunesekera's 'The Match.' Prior to that, there was the love story set in a spoiled paradise. In 'Reef', 11 year old Triton, goes to work as a houseboy. His master Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by sea, swamp and the island's disappearing reef. It is here that Triton learns to polish silver, to mix a love cake with ten eggs, and to steam the exotic parrot fish for his master's lover. As the book unfolds you meet the boy becoming a man in a world on the brink of chaos. In the closing page, of the Booker short-listed Reef, Mister Salgado warns Triton that "we are only what we remember, nothing more....all we have is the memory of what we have done or not done."

The subtle deceptions were explored in 'The Sandglass' and 'Heaven's Edge' as well. In his latest book though he moved away from the mystical, magical settings. We'd been intrigued by it. That's partly why in a moment of heaven knows what, we said yes to putting the reading together. It's only when we went over the fine print of the flight schedule that we realised that we had only an hour between Romesh's landing and reading. For the longest time, we kept more than our fingers crossed. it all fell into place, Romesh showed up, Loi Zhi Wei of Penguin Books breathed easy and
we found our perfect match.

Q : Your book ‘The Match’ is bookended with two cricket matches, but you aren’t known to be a cricket buff, are you?
A : Don’t say that. Yes, I am a cricket fan. But I never thought I’d ever write a book that had a sport in it because I’m not a sporty sort of a person. I like cricket, I’ve played cricket when I was young. I never thought I’d end up writing a book about the sport. It’s partly because a lot of the books I’ve written had a lot to do with Sri Lanka. Some of those books have had to deal with the some of the sad aspects of Sri Lanka – the war, the violence, but amidst all of that, there has been this upbeat story and that is about Sri Lankan cricket. I’ve often wondered how I could capture that, so I tried and it worked for me. You can definitely call me a cricket enthusiast now.

Q : Cricket is huge in South Asia, during the matches it almost becomes the reason of your being. Did you sense that when you were working on the book?
A : I’ve found it a fascinating subject. It opened a lot of things for me, a new way of looking at history, a way of looking at what has happened in the past and the way in which groups of people identify themselves. No one quite knows where it started, some would say England, others would argue strongly against it. But it is a very artistic game in many ways. What I liked about that aspect is when you look at old photographs of the sport, they are very beautifully composed photographs. They shape of people, the body language when they play a stroke, the way people watch the sport. Obviously there are great divides when a match is on. But when somebody plays a splendid shot, everybody acknowledges it. It doesn’t matter which team you are off. When a batsman makes a century, the spectators pause for the applause and for a moment, even if it is a brief the differences between the teams as is reflected in a stadium is forgotten. Those sorts of things were really interesting. It was about capturing those moments which often become bigger than the game.

Q : When you look at test cricket, it’s a long drawn game, people take their breaks, possibly even read in between?
A : That’s what I thought as well. I remember writing a couple of stories. I tried writing some stories to try out and see if someone who isn’t interested in the sport could be drawn to it through a short story. It worked really well. I remember talking to one of the actors who acted in Lagaan. He told me its like making movies, there’s a lot of hanging around when you are watching cricket and he mentioned it, obviously in jest, ‘why don’t you write a book?’ And I thought, why not. I tried to persuade my publishers that there are lots of people who watch cricket who want to read books.

Q : Was that a tough sell?
A : Initially, yes, but they came around and here we are.

Q : You actually drew certain parallels between writing and international level cricket.
A : Yes, there are two things in this book. Basically, there is this boy who doesn’t know much about cricket but as a young boy he plays the sport with his friends. He is attempting to work out what this game is all about. Another mention in the book, is about the series of matches between the Sri Lankan team, the English team and the Indian team, so the other aspect of the book is that the main character of the book, Sunny, becomes a photographer in the book. There are parallels between all three actually – cricket, photography and writing because on the simplest level, I suppose a lot of people are interested in all of this. Almost everybody takes pictures, they take lots of them. Lots of people watch cricket, lots of people read books. And in all of the three, there are lots of people who would like to do it better. There are people who would like to be professional photographers, amateur cricketers who’d like to play for a team, those who are playing for a state team would like to play for a national team, and there are readers who’d like to be writers. At each level you are talking about only a tiny group of people who actually end up doing that. 11 people end up playing for Sri Lanka, for India, for Australia or any other national team. There’s only a handful of people who become professional photographers and there’s only a handful of people who end up writing books. I think it’s just very interesting to understand the number of people who are involved in this whole process.

Q : What about ‘Heaven’s Edge’? You set in the future, why’s that?
A : ‘Heaven’s Edge’ is very different because the stories are set in a different time. When it came to ‘Heaven’s Edge’ I wanted to write a book about the future, set somewhere where no one had been before. It was quite a big adventure for me. I had to invent a country, I had to invent a place, I had to invent a time as well as a landscape.

Q : Imagining that landscape – was that difficult?
A : I don’t know, I think for me writing any book is quite difficult. It’s quite a miracle for me at the end of it that I’ve actually managed to get it the way I want it. Inventing that world was difficult but I wanted to make it as real as possible. Many people read the book, only half way through they realize that it isn’t set where they thought it was set. This is a completely new place. I wanted to make it feel like a place everybody knows.

Q : ‘Reef’ was dominated by colourful and memorable characters. Was it tough considering it was your first book?
A : A writer’s job is to somehow get into somebody else’s world. ‘Reef’ was the first novel and I did want a book populated with memorable characters. To me part of the thing about writing a book is to create characters that will have an independent existence. As long as someone opens a book and reads it, they’ll come to life. It can happen in a novel, it’s the sort of dream that everybody is sort of following. You know when you make a movie, write science fiction or fantasy, it’s all about creating that fantasy. All of that actually happens in a novel. It’s all about creating the right words, place and somebody to read them and then something happens.

Q : You make it all sound very easy, but what’s the writing process like for you. Do you tend to re-visit your work or once its written, its out there for others to decide?
A : I’m not the kind of writer who says I’m going to write this book, in this way, in this period of time and just do it. I kind of have a general idea, a bit of an idea and then it has to grow organically. I spend a lot of time exploring what it is, who are these characters and it’s a little bit like sculpting something. You start with nothing. In fact, if you are sculptor, you are lucky because you at least have a bit of something to start with. I also re-write my books a lot, so each book is re-written many, many, many times over before it actually goes to print. What you see in the end isn’t quite what I would have started off with.

Q : I guess all of that work showed in your first novel itself. ‘Reef’ was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, did that mean a lot to you?
A : It was great. For a first novel, I couldn’t ask for anything more really.

Q : Is there already another story playing in your head as we speak?
A : Oh yes, there is always another story. In fact, every book I write also tells more than more than just a story. ‘The Match’ for instance, is not just a story about cricket, it’s a story about families and how people adjust to their children and how children adjust to their parents. It’s very about that relationship and about idealism, the idealism of youth. In Britain, quite often young people go through a very hard time, there is a lot of youth bashing. They are told they are useless, they don’t have strong ideals and I don’t think any of that is true. I think young people have a lot of idealism and they deserve a lot of respect. So many of them do things that a lot of young people never did in the past. This book explores that and I think in a way it questions if we do in fact get wiser as we get older. Do we sort lose the idealism over the years? I think the readers have to decide for themselves whether the son is learning from the father or the father from the son.

Q : They do say there is no one teacher in life. You learn from so many people in so many different ways?
A : Yah, that’s absolutely true. Understanding and appreciating that, I feel is very important.

More from Romesh on writing:
"The world being what it is I write to redress the balance, at least in my own mind. I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's too. Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are, and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there, and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language, while trying to make sense of our lives."

"I'm always trying to write a story. I never really talk about what I'm writing because I find that impossible to do. Writing, to me, is actually a way of living, it's a way of thinking, it's a way of discovering, it's a way of actually getting from today to tomorrow, and therefore I can't sort of preview it and quite often I really don't know where I'm going until I get there. It's a bit like getting into a car and driving and if someone asks you "Where are you going?", you say, "I'm just going somewhere over there." [laughs], but once you get there, you know that that was where you were going, actually. And you know perfectly well what's in front of you, every inch of the way, but you don't know the whole thing. It's a process of exploration, it's a process of understanding and thinking and trying to understand where you are, where the world is, where we're all going."

"Publishers get mad with me because I tend to meddle with books quite a lot."

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

It's one packed literary Saturday in Kuala Lumpur. Just take a look at this post by Sharon, almost feels like a mini-lit fest. I'm tempted to get there myself. Would love to hear everyone, though for this post I want to single out Max Lane who will be launching his book Arok of Java at Silverfish Books.

Max Lane is the translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's work. His is a literary journey that started almost by accident:
"It’s a long story with a short beginning. Basically I failed the subject of science in High School and the Headmaster said you have to have an additional subject and the only one that was available for me to take at that time was Bahasa Indonesia. Combined with the fact that I loved watching movies set in the exotic Orient, I started studying Bahasa. And the first opportunity I got, I packed my bags and started traveling. In fact, the first countries I visited were Indonesia and Singapore way back in 1969. Then I just got more and more involved in Indonesia and I haven’t quite been able to break that connection which started with learning a language and I don’t want to break that connection either."

Lane's long association with Pramoedya began in 1981 with the translation of 'This Earth of Mankind.' And that association has continued even after his death. 'Arok of Java' - the fifth book translated by him is based on an Indonesian folk tale about a rebellion against a 13th-century Javanese king, but it's a story that is bound to connect readers across the world, Max believes:
"It is a story about Indonesia 500-600 years ago. But it is also very much a story about power and about how human beings can become either victims of power or wielders of power and how their personalities can then change as a result of wielding that power and I think that’s something of universal interest."

Also of universal interest is the writer Pramoedya himself and one couldn't ask for a better narrator of the truth than Lane himself:
"Despite all the things he had suffered, Pramoedya was absolutely in love with his country and absolutely obsessed with getting its real history out. So every time you sat with him, you’d have a treasure trove of information and stories, which you would never hear or getting from anyone else."

Lane could be speaking for himself, he's got stories stacked and I want to hear more of them:
"You know, once he’d written his own manuscript, he’d never read it again. That was quite amazing. I saw some of the manuscripts Pramoedya wrote while he was in prison. He typed on a really old, dilapidated type-writer. The papers had no left hand margin, no right hand margin because paper was so difficult to get in prison. He typed the whole 800 page novel without a single typing mistake, without making an editorial correction to it, before it went to publication and never read the manuscript the second time. He’d say, “I can’t read it, I can’t read it.” He’d say once he’d written it, it was a being of its own, it had its own life. He never quite gave a convincing reason why he never re-visited his work but he created something that was perfect the first time round. I think that was one of the many things that was totally amazing about him. I think South-East Asia should be enormously proud to have such a genius author amongst its ranks."

And what touched me even more was Lane's frank admission about issues of loss in translation:
"I don’t think any translation can live up to the original, particularly when it’s written by a true master."

It sure makes me want to hear more of Max Lane and I'm pretty sure we all will. He'll be appearing at the Ubud Writers Festival next year. I can already hear the conversations.

PARALLEL LIVES

It was in February 2006 that I first heard of Kunal Basu. It was thanks to a review copy of Racists. The book kept me up all night. Could something like this have happened? The intensity of the rivalry between the two scientists was almost too real. What about the infants left with a mute nurse on a remote island in Africa? This story was taking me places, just as great stories are meant to. The next morning it was down to googling the name Kunal Basu. No, this couldn't be an Oxford don, teaching Management by day and writing such gripping stuff by night or perhaps the other way round. After 'Racists', I quickly got down to reading 'The Miniaturist' which took me from the 19th century to the 16th century into Akbar's court, completing the journey with 'The Opium Clerk.'

Kunal happened to be passing through Singapore and we finally got a chance to meet on 16th March 2006. I wished the conversation could have lasted longer. There was so much more I wanted to know about his writing. As I always do with authors whose writing stirs me, I mentioned the Ubud Writers Festival, the invite from Janet followed and he was there. There were no promises of an airfare (he paid for his ticket), when his books didn't show up on time, he made no noise. Here was someone, fired by the conviction that his work would speak and it did. Readers loved the sessions, festival organisers wanted him at their next fest and Kunal stayed himself. Feet firmly on the ground, unaffected by the adulation.

Could it perhaps have something to do with the parallel life he led? Just like my other good friend Captain Elmo Jayawardena. There was something about their approach to life, their optimism, their drive to change things, the way they talked about the issues of our times, the way they wanted to live more than just this lifetime to continue doing all the things they were already doing..... In their midst, talk of the number of books sold, royalties, advances lost its sheen. There was so much to them, so much I could learn, perhaps we all could - but I'm not in the business of speaking for everyone.

All I can do is share some thoughts, some snippets stored on tapes that I'm in the habit of rolling at literary festivals, during interviews, tapes that definitely don't deserve the solo space on my recording shelf....

Q : Kunal, ‘Racists’ is a book I’ve found hard to put down. What inspired you to write it?
A : To be honest, how I thought of the story of ‘Racists’ is a complete mystery to me. I’m not the type of person who spends a lot of time thinking about race or racial matters. I would like to say I’m race blind really. I’m not a biologist or a scientist, so I don’t think about the history of evolution, the biological thinking about race. So why on earth did I think of a story which has one child from one race and another child from another race marooned in an African island with scientists studying them remains an utter mystery to me. But once I did think of the story, I went back and started doing research into it. I went to libraries to find out about 19th century racial science and a whole world opened up in front of me. This turned out to be a world where scientists were really passionately engaged in trying to solve the puzzle of human variation.


Q : The story is set in the world of 19th century racial science. What made you pick this setting?
A : This world had as its grand ambition the hope that science would be able to solve the puzzle of human variation, the difference among the races, among the Europeans, the Africans, the Chinese, the Indians and so on. It’s a story of an imaginary experiment with two scientists, a British craniologist Samuel Bates and his French rival Belavoix who maroon two infants a black boy and a white girl on an African island. Now, the two children are raised by a young nurse, who is very pretty who is mute. They’ve deliberately selected a mute nurse because she would otherwise influence the children in terms of the races they come from. So the children grow up for a whole decade on this deserted island without speech, without any connection with civilization, punishment or play. The scientists come to visit them twice a year, they bring their fancy instruments, observe their behaviour as if they were two rats in a laboratory. But what they are really after is to determine whether one child is superior in intelligence and morality than the other. They are doing this to determine which race of the two is superior to the other.

Q : Kunal, you say this is fiction, a story fired by your imagination. But how important is research when it comes to developing a story like this?
A : You know this was a very fertile field of research in the 19th century. Lots has been written on this. For instance, what is the logical measure that would show one race is superior to the other? Thankfully, no such experiment, the one you read about in my novel was ever performed, although scientists came pretty close with something called the ‘forbidden experiment’. Scientists flirted with the notion of the forbidden experiment. Why forbidden you may ask? Forbidden because the planned neglect of children is really unethical.

Q : But your characters very well fleshed out, there’s a lot of attention to detail. Samuel Bates seems almost too real as does his French rival. Did you have a real person in mind when you were writing about them and their intense rivalry?
A : I did not model either of the two scientists around a historical figure of that time. I’m sure there are perhaps figments from here and there, but they were not modeled around actual human beings.

Q : You seem to have a passion for going back in time. In ‘The Miniaturist’ you take us back to the 16th century....
A : Yes, its sets in the 16th century and is the story of a child prodigy, an artist who is enormously talented and he is the son of the chief artist of Akbar – the great Mughal Emperor. The protagonist of this novel has everything going for him, he is talented, he is the son of the boss and everybody expects that he will grow up to be the chief artist and that everything will be great for him, except that it doesn’t. Things change when he commits an unpardonable crime – a crime that I won’t reveal for the benefit of those who haven’t read the book. It results in his exile from Akbar’s kingdom and he then goes around the inhospitable terrains of Central Asia, as far as Turkey. What he is looking for is an answer to the question – what is the real value of art, the real purpose of art and what constitutes artistic success?

Q : Kunal, as you tell me this, its hard for me to imagine that another part of your life sees you teach Strategic Marketing at Oxford. How do you create these creative spaces to write about the fascinating stories you present to your readers?
A : The most difficult question to answer in any interview is – where do I get my stories. The best explanation and its perhaps the right explanation is that I’m a great day-dreamer. I’m constantly thinking about things, listening to conversations, finding out about people’s lives, picking up bits and pieces from here and there and then the stories starting shaping in my mind. Once I’ve got an idea and am fired by it, then comes the research into the subject to bring the story to life, to do it full justice. In terms of my professional life, yes I am a Professor of Management, but it’s a life which is quite distinct and different from my life as a writer so there is no secret corridor that connects the two.

Q : Speaking of secrets and corridors, lets track back a little bit to your first book. ‘The Opium Clerk’ which is a journey from Calcutta to Canton tracks the lives of young men whose lives get linked to the fortunes of the opium trade. How did you stumble upon this story?
A : I was trekking in Thailand some years ago, I was near the border of Burma and I came across this dog-eared paperback which was describing the Golden Triangle and the whole opium trade. I was never interested in the drug trade. Intellectually, it doesn’t hold my curiosity, but there was a phrase in that book which leapt out and fired my imagination. It said, “In the 19th century Calcutta was the world’s capital of the drug trade and the drug of choice was opium.” I thought to myself that this can’t be right. I’m born and raised in Calcutta and I thought I knew everything about Calcutta. But in my history books, I hadn’t found any references to that. At that time I was living in Canada, so I went back to my University library and started reading up just about everything I could find on the opium trade and the whole story revealed itself to me. I learnt all about this enterprise that spanned from Europe to Asia, India, China, Malaya and all the different parts of the world and the book came together.

Q : As a writer, should you be a better observer of things around you, should you be one who is interested in the past or should you just let your creativity speak for itself?
A : I think all of the above. I think its important for me to lead a full life and leading a full life means to engage with the world around me. Also the memories and nostalgia of the world that has gone by resonates with me and my books do capture that. Talking to people from different parts of the world helps enormously when it comes to writing. And my professional life, helps me engage with so many different and fascinating minds everyday. Apart from that, I’m constantly observing people, whether it is on the road, in the supermarket, the way they walk, the way the talk to each other, the way they converse with you. Then, of course there is reading, almost all kinds of stuff from the popular press to the more serious literary works. All of that creates the crucible from within which dreams are formed and ideas take shape.

Q : Apart from writing books, you have also written plays, documentaries, acted. How do you balance so many things?
A : I balance a variety of different things by not trying to think about too much about the differences. I think I’m guided by my passion, guided by what I’m excited about and if something keeps me awake at night and says this is something I ought to do, then I do it. I think I’ll do myself a lot of disfavour if I said to myself that - Oh my God, I do management writing, I write fiction, poetry, screenplays – how does it all fit together? I don’t think all the pieces of my life need to fit together as long as they make sense as individual bits and as long as people appreciate them, I’m happy to lead a disjuncted life.

You'll be hearing a lot more of Kunal in the days ahead. The Japanese Wife, a short story written by him is being made into a film by acclaimed film director, Aparna Sen. In an interview with Tehelka, she said she was smitten by it. "The improbability of it attracted me, I found it haunting - a love poem in celluloid. Mainstream cinema is peopled by people who have buying power. This is completely different, it's about people who are essentially good and innocent and yet all of it is not in earnest, there is gentle humour. It's funny, really."

If you happen to be in Singapore in December, you can hear Kunal talk more about this and his work at the upcoming Singapore Writers Festival. He'll be appearing on several panels, though for purely vested reasons I'll extend the invite for the one on:
Saturday, 8th December, 1pm
A Tale of Two Cities features David Davidar and Kunal Basu
At the Chamber, The Arts House

TIME TRAVELLER

It's funny how exams or the thought of the ones that are looming large can set you off in different tangents. Last night, we were journeying through India, narrowing down parts of the country when we reached West Bengal. "Didn't Amitav Ghosh write about a jungle here, Mamma?" Aneesha asked. I don't want to run the risk of creating an impression. Aneesha hasn't read any of Amitav Ghosh, I'd be happy if she got by her text books for the moment but Amitav has a special connect for her. She remembers him from the first time we were at Ubud, she remembers him because he stayed "downstairs" at the Honeymoon Guesthouse, she remembers him because an Amitav Ghosh question is her trump card in her home-grown quiz contests. If that's the way words are meant to connect, I'm not complaining. I'm pretty certain the reading too shall follow.

And it is Aneesha's words that have set me off on a journey to recount some of the things that Amitav has shared right from the writing process, to the way he's picked some of the issues he's written about. From 'The Hungry Tide', to 'The Glass Palace' to 'In An Antique Land' to 'The Shadow Lines' Amitav has shown his eye for detail. It's something that's evident in his spoken word as well:

Q : Your book ‘The Hungry Tide’ has been called “a whirlwind work of the imagination”. You’ve set it in the largest mangrove forests in the world – The Sunderbans. What took you there and what did you hope to achieve through the setting?
A : I’ve been going there since I was a child because I’ve had a family connection with that area and they’ve always kind of haunted my imagination and I always wanted to write about them. If I wanted to achieve anything at all, it was to let people know about this astonishing place and this astonishing landscape.

Q : What did it take to bind ordinary people in an exotic place than can possibly consume them all?
A : It’s a place where you have man-eating tigers. I went back there, spent a lot of time with the local fishermen, did a lot of research, spent time looking at tiger prints. It was a very long journey, it was an intense journey, I suppose what I really wanted to do was to know it myself, to understand the depth of its history, the depth of its ecology, the way people relate to it, the way people come together, their life in the midst of this intriguing setting.

Q : You mentioned going back there as a child, revisiting the place after so many years, what was going back there like?
A : I think The Sunderbans is one of those places that changes very very little. It’s really a place that’s very persistent in a kind of timeless way.

Q : You bring a lot of your personal experiences in your books. Did that happen in ‘The Hungry Tide’?
A : Yes, very much so. For example, the book culminates in this enormous cyclone and for all of us who live in that area in the Bay of Bengal area, for us cyclones and these other cataclysms are a fact of life. It’s such a strange thing, that I wrote this book which came out in June. I was back in December and there was this enormous tsunami. It’s an extraordinary thing because after the tsunami so many people called me, including the Governor of West Bengal who asked me if I had an intuition about this, that such a thing would happen. It was nothing like that, there was no intuition but anyone from that region or anyone who is familiar with that region will tell you about living in the shadow of these enormous kind of geological upheavals and cataclysms.

Q : It’s interesting that in each of your books you talk about areas, places, countries, perhaps even people you’ve known, traveled to. Some of these places aren’t really talked about everyday. In fact, in ‘The Glass Palace’ your characters seem to flit effortlessly between the boundaries of both geography and class. What was it like to string it all together?
A : It’s interesting you ask me that. When we look at Asia we tend to think of all these great numbers of people leading very settled lives in China, in India, in various other parts. In fact, the reality is that people’s lives intersect in these interesting, interesting ways.

Q : I guess what you’ve been able to do is to put all of this into words. A lot of us end up going through life losing a bit of it along the way, then when you read it in a book, you are instantly transported by that experience, or incident….
A : Absolutely, you know this is exactly the case. I was in Mauritius where I met some Chinese families who had been settled there for two or three generations. Just to hear the stories of their lives was a fascinating experience. How they would go back to China to be educated, how they would come back, how their families co-existed in two different places, just these astonishing connections between peoples, their lives, the places they live in, their countries. All of this fascinates me.

Q : Do you think we are losing our oral traditions as we go from one generation to the next as we travel from one place to the next?
A : In a sense we are losing our direct connection with it, but one thing that is noticeable to me is that people are actually more and more interested in their particular past, in their family histories, so yes and no is the answer to that.

Q : War and the collision between history and individual lives. You have addressed this in your work. Personally, how have you been affected by it?
A : Somehow my life has been intersected by all these strange upheavals. I was in New Delhi during the riots in 1984. I was in New York on 9/11. In one way or another, I’ve witnessed it, I don’t know how to account for it. But I feel that in some ways my writing has also been a process to bearing witness to all these unfortunate upheavals.

Q : Do you think all writing should do that?
A : I feel its impossible to lay down prescriptions for all writers and I do hesitate to do that. I can only talk about what works me. I feel a need to bear witness to what I’ve seen and to express it through words.

Q : Another interesting term that I’ve come across in your work is the “aesthetics of violence.” What do you mean by that?
A : When I used that term it was essentially to oppose aestheicizing violence. I come from India which has been a witness to a great deal of violence in the last 30-40 years. The lesson that I’ve learnt from reading Mahatma Gandhi is how do you create non-violence in a very violent world. I think that’s a moral as well as an ethical necessity for writers too. Often as a writer, particularly one who has been witness to a lot of violence, you are tempted to re-create that violence in your work. I feel that it is very, very important for writers to try and distance themselves from it, to try and reflect upon it and to try and create circumstances where you can write about in a non-violent way about non-violence.

Q : You live in New York but go back to India almost every year. Does India always surprise you?
A : Oh, yes. India never ceases to amaze me. The changes you see in India even within a couple of months are simply unbelievable. India is a very different place from the India in the 1980s though. The sense of governance is much greater. In my own city, Calcutta, the improvements in the last 10 years have been staggering.

Q : Going back to your work. In ‘The Shadow Lines’ you wrote – “every word I write is the product of a struggle with silence.” It’s something that’s stayed in my head ever since I read the book. Word, writing and silence, what is the struggle about?
A : It is in two senses that I said that. I’ve often been writing about places, situations and people which are normally not written about. Burma, for instance. In the past very few people have written about Burma or noticed its existence for that matter. For me, in some sense writing about Burma, writing about Burmese history was a process of discovering a silenced aspect of our past and that was really interesting. But I think writing in general is often about battling our own resistances. I think, in some way we all experience a sense of resistance to writing about just writing.

Q : Would you then say that putting all these thoughts down on paper is a process of self-discovery for you?
A : It is in a sense. For me often it’s a process of the discovery of not just the historical aspects of the place I choose to write about, but also a process of discovery of the people who make up that place.

Q : Speaking of discovery through words, through books, your critically acclaimed work ‘In An Antique Land’ is widely recognized as being authentic even by Egyptians. What took you on this journey? It wasn’t just the pyramids?
A : (Laughs) That was over 25 years ago. I lived in a small village in Northern Egypt with the villagers. I learnt to speak Arabic. I wrote very truthfully about what I saw and you know life in a village is like life in a village anywhere. I was there for a year to start with and after that I’ve been back several times. I was at Oxford and was supposed to be doing a PhD in Anthropology and someone said to me: “where do you really want to go?” and I thought, “Why not Egypt?” That’s pretty much how I landed there and how the book happened.

Q : You have also captured some of your experiences in Egypt in ‘The Imam and The Indian’ – which includes 18 essays written over a 16-year time period – from 1986 to 2002. What changed and what impacted you the most during those years?
A : A number of things. I write non-fiction, essays and journalism from time to time. That collection was actually published in India. It’s now going to be published worldwide under a different title called ‘Incendiary Circumstances.’ One of the first of the essays in that book was about Cambodia. The war was still going on when I went there. When I went to Angkor Vat, the Khmer Rouge opened fire. There was bombing around the temple. It was something I just had to write about. It was some of those experiences that have been put together in this book and I hope people can take something back from it.

Q : How does your background and training as an anthropologist, a historian and a journalist impact your work?
A : I don’t think of any of these fields as being any different from the other. I think they are all ways of writing. I think they have all different times fed my curiosity to know more about the world, the circumstances we live in. And my curiosity is what made me a journalist, an anthropologist, a writer, it’s just a kind of habit. Usually I’m on the other side talking to people. I always have my little note book with me. You can see me busy taking notes. It just interests me to know about other people’s lives.

Q : Do you have your ‘Blink’ moments. You are talking to this person, you are drawn to the story and you know this what you definitely want to write about?
A : Absolutely. When I was in Cambodia, I went looking for Pol Pot’s family. I travelled a lot and reached a central Cambodian province where I met his brother. It was an astonishing experience. I went to his house, he was an ordinary peasant and as he told me the story of his life, I knew in that instant that here is someone I must write about.

Q : I know you’re not into giving advice to other authors, but if you were asked to say something to encourage budding authors, what would you say?
A : I would repeat what Honoré de Balzac said, which is, "ceaseless work is a law of art."

Q : In addition to writing a lot, you also read a lot. Who or what do you normally read?
A : Oh, my reading is very eclectic. I read whatever I can find. There’s absolutely no normalcy in my reading but I stumble upon things all the time.