‘I was painting this—the shelves, the alcove,’ says Allan, reaching for his copy of Red to explain. ‘It’s in the poem, it’s in the poem, that’s where it is.’ And he reads from the poem on page 248: ‘Red came to me this way, no lie/ With the astounding rightness of a black swan’s beak . . .’ He went off to Hurla hardware, the shop I had passed earlier on the road, and found a litre of Signal Red.
One red they carried in acrylic and only one
not my dodgy haemoglobin red mercurochrome or port
not scarlet crimson not poppy not opticalmouse red not glorypea
nothing on the fancy shade card but
stopgo red.
It turned out to be a close cousin of the red Matisse was famous for. At the time he wrote Red, Sealy had visited The Hermitage, spending hours in front of The Red Room and The Painter’s Family, carrying back as a souvenir the cups in Petersburg blue from which we’re drinking freshly brewed coffee. ‘There are more Matisses probably under that roof than in the rest of the world put together,’ he says.
Sealy saw a parallel between what had happened in Matisse’s family life and his own—the surface peace interrupted by quiet schisms, the family dealing with the artist’s disappearance into a world where no one else can follow. He was fascinated by Matisse’s apparent conformity, the turbulence lurking under the beauty of those colours. ‘He’s such a revolutionary painter; he wears a tie, he’s bourgeois, and he’s a revolutionary, and then you begin to wonder: maybe revolutionaries do wear ties.’
‘I love colour,’ says Allan. It’s the only superfluous statement he’ll make; that love shows all through the house, in the aqua of his study, the monkish yellow of the tiles in the kitchen, the red cafetiere on the table, the weatherworn brick of the garden wall complemented by the brilliant green of the creepers. ‘If you write about what you love, you’re likely to be able to pull it off, provided you have certain basic skills.’
The conversation turns to practical matters. Like book sales: ‘If you’re a writer who doesn’t sell, the smallest blip of a sale makes you ecstatic.’ Sealy is uncompromising: ‘Part of me thinks, what’s the point of writing if you’re only going to write for twelve bright readers. But with every book, maybe one per cent you think of the reader, ninety nine you’re thinking of yourself, what you want to say.’ Of the publishing industry today: ‘Thank god for the way it’s set up, successful writers bail out the unsuccessful ones who’re willing to do what they want even if they lose their readers. A hundred years ago, there would have been no room for someone like me.’ And the name on the cover of Red: Irwin Allan Sealy, the full name instead of the initial ‘I’ for the first time. ‘I’ve been told it’s not Indian enough, that the kind of English reader who would look for ‘Indian writing’ would put my books down. So this is my response. Fuck you. This is who I am, it’s also my father’s name, it’s also a tribute to him.’
He continues: ‘It took me till my thirties to give myself permission to see myself as a writer. You’re measuring yourself against the best; it takes time to be able to say to yourself, I could do that—I could do better than that. Even in your twenties, you know that life is short, you know that you’re never going to read everything you want to read. So you’re always sifting. You’re trying to get at the very best from the very beginning. If you’re actually looking at yourself as a writer, you’re looking at all the possible books you could ever write, even if you don’t live to write them.’
I ask about his characters, the way they have of popping up from one book to another. Eugene Trotter from The Trotternama makes a brief appearance in Red; so does Bisht from The Everest Hotel. He grins. ‘It’s nice to keep in touch with the guys—or girls—from the past. When they look at you, it’s an accusing look: it says, you have abandoned me. Bringing them back is a way of saying, I have not.’
I can almost see them; Trotter, and his father, serving nimbu-pani at a Daryaganj hotel in The Brainfever Bird, Bisht, now at home in the thana of Dehradun, other ghosts from Sealy’s pages. In this house, where Sealy is so very clearly at home, they’ve taken possession of quiet nooks and corners. ‘I’m very happy,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why. It’s a kind of lunacy.’ He has plans for the house; more colours to be brought in, walls to be bashed in to make room for windows. More trees planned, to hide his neighbours’ houses from view: ‘It’s nice to just blot out that house, THAT house, that one: Tree! Tree! Tree!’ He has taken possession: ‘In a way, what you’re taking possession of is not the place but yourself, and that’s a source of strength.’
The sadness that usually descends on him once a book is finished is in abeyance; he’s been thinking of other projects. A novel about a family of engineers, some sane, some crazy. A serious history of Dehradun and the Valley, perhaps a travelogue. A long poem, marking a shift towards poetry, towards condensation. Red is the first book he’s written on the computer, instead of in longhand, and Sealy thinks that perhaps the medium encourages compression, just as the pen encourages longwinded, Trollope-length narratives, Dickensian digressions.
The novel opens unusually, with a reproduction of Matisse’s The Painter’s Family—the painting is something of an introduction to Red.
It is not a happy painting. The painter is absent, represented only by a bust of himself (‘Serf ’); the wife, in a corner, and the boys are in the background. The central figure is of Matisse’s daughter—her mother was his mistress, not his wife—who exudes a nervous, violent energy. Families are complicated, hydra-headed creatures, Matisse seems to be saying; do you really want to look deeply into the nature of the beast?
All this information is cribbed directly from Red, and it serves as an indication of the strengths and weaknesses of this formidable and thoroughly entertaining book.
Red is an abecedary: a book arranged in the form of an alphabet. You start with Aline—a woman so in love with Matisse that she will rip his canvases apart (only she knows if it’s a genuine Matisse or a clever reproduction that’s being dismembered) in order to see how he reached his colours—and move to Zach, a musician for whom the world in all its colours, is audible, a shifting soundscape. Almost exactly in between is the Narrator, who lives in a town called—this will sound familiar—Dariya Dun: ‘In the middle station of life, middle class, middling build . . . A foothills man, neither plainsman nor Montagnard.’
Aline and Zach meet at The Hermitage, one worshipping at the feet of Matisse—bourgeois painter, but a revolutionary in a tie all the same; one ready to genuflect at the altar of Aline. The chance encounter leads them to Dariya Dun, where N is a friend of Zach’s. Here, like live wires finally corralled in the same space, they make connections, shoot off sparks, create electricity and danger.
The Dun is in transition, the quiet valley transformed by better electricity connections, cybercafes that now allow the wonder of paintings downloaded pixel by pixel, in sleazy, worn-out booths where the previous occupant has been surfing porn. Zach and Aline are not the only art-lovers in town: there is a gang of Blackshorts, small-time thieves who worship a snake goddess and take the rites of crime every bit as seriously as art connoisseurs take line and colour. They’re led by Gilgitan, an artist twice over—a master criminal, and an amateur but instinctively talented painter of trucks, signs and tiles.
The Narrator grapples with his own problems—a meeting with a daughter he hasn’t seen for years, who brings the same energy and disruption into his life as Matisse’s illegitimate daughter must have brought into his. Zach moves in steady rhythm between the music that absorbs him to the exclusion of all else and the women who capture him completely, if only for a brief moment in between compositions. Aline, foreigner to the Dun, to the unspoken barriers of caste and class, is the one who makes the most direct connections. She sees little difference in essence between the sophisticated musician who travels the world and Gilgitan, the raw, untaught painter who romances a pig-girl (in one of the few unconvincing sections of Red) and falls in love with a paint
box.
Sealy tackles huge questions here: how do you recognize good art from bad; what makes us canonize Art with a capital A and dismiss other kinds of art in lower case; can an artist, a dealer in visions from elsewhere, inhabit the real world? Red is daunting, but it is also one of Sealy’s richest, most comfortably experimental books yet.
He romps through the alphabet, never forgetting the other meaning of abecedary—a primer, the first principle or rudiment of anything—but allowing himself the freedom to include the following: his own poems, a brief explication of the uses of spray paint in lovemaking, imaginary books (The Nagatarangini, The Annals of the Black Codpiece Society), elaborate games with fonts, misleading definitions.
It’s a novel which may frighten off readers unwilling to follow the labyrinth that leads from Matisse to the deadly repercussions of the Blackshorts’ thefts, but for those willing to stay the course, this might be Sealy’s finest work. It’s a pity Red is available only in old-fashioned book form: in an ideal, hypertext-friendly world, this is the kind of book you’d want only two keyboard commands for: Press Enter, Play Game.
‘The process of writing a book gets you to a higher, greater intensity than almost anything I can think of,’ he had said earlier. ‘Your world for the duration of that book, the writing of it, is truly other. There’s no way of describing it to anybody, even anybody you live with. It’s a good feeling, the equivalent of the chemical high. Writers are addicted to that other world in the way that a drunk is to his booze.’
Now, as we say our farewells, I ask if he’s moved beyond the need to question himself. Irwin Allan Sealy laughs. ‘A writer has constant self-doubt. There is only that interplay between total despair and complete self-confidence. There’s nothing else. Really. There’s nothing else. Probably both at the same time.’ And then he goes back to more important things: the trees need pruning, watering, the civet cats are illegally occupying the verandah chairs, his garden needs attention.
(Based on profiles and reviews from 2006. In 2014, I. Allan Sealy published his seventh book, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack.)
2
Kiran Nagarkar
It’s two days after Kiran Nagarkar received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his third novel, Cuckold, told from the point of view of Mirabai’s husband, and it hasn’t changed his life one bit. We’re headed to the Spice Route at the Imperial, in deference to the writer’s preference for Thai food and an allergy to lentils that knocks most Indian restaurants off the list.
No heads turn as we walk in, but that’s not surprising. Nagarkar isn’t the kind of writer who makes it to Page 3 in Delhi, or to the Bombay version, and it doesn’t really bother him. The Sahitya Akademi award came in four years after he wrote Cuckold, seven years after the Bombay-based author wrote Ravan and Eddie and some three decades after he began writing in the first place. That’s a long, long time to wait for recognition; long enough for Nagarkar to admit that the pleasure it gives him is alleviated by a sense of slight bitterness at being unjustly ignored.
He wants a table where ‘we can talk in peace’; not necessarily an easy order to fill at the Spice Route, which is always populated by the chattering classes in one degree or another. But the waiters are understanding; they find us a table off to a side in the central courtyard, where we enjoy the brief illusion of being under a Chettinad roof. It’s something to do with the acoustics, perhaps, but the table seems to be located in a dead spot: even Nagarkar’s voice, strained into relative hoarseness after a cold and two unaccustomed days of speech-making, can be heard here.
It doesn’t take us much time to order. He is a main-course kind of guy, so the soups and salads go out of the window. We settle on the chicken done Sri Lankan style, a Thai lamb curry, Thai stir-fried vegetables and steamed rice. As we wait for the food to arrive, Nagarkar toys with the hot towel the Spice Route offers to all its guests.
He grew up, he’ll tell me later, in a world where hot towels were unthinkable fripperies. His father was a clerk in the railways, the eldest earning member of a large family. Nagarkar was brought up to earn his own living; he has never hankered after the huge advances and giant royalty cheques that accompany contemporary fame, just ruminated on the recognition that never came to him. ‘Not that money would have been despised, you understand,’ he says with a gleam in his eye. ‘But it was never necessary.’
In the days of the Emergency, Nagarkar did find recognition of sorts, at the hands of the censor board. He’d written a play called Bedtime Story, that used the stories of characters in the Mahabharata—Draupadi, Eklavya, Karna—to make a comment on what was happening in India at the time. ‘I can afford to tamper with an epic like the Mahabharata—it’s in your bloodstream, in my bloodstream,’ he says of the form he’d chosen. The censor board read the play and suggested seventy-eight cuts. ‘Only the cover was left.’ M.P. Rege went along with him to plead the case of the play. They argued for half a day. ‘I think they just wanted to wrap it up by then, so they agreed to twenty to twenty-five cuts.’
But the intervention of the censor board had already branded the play as dangerous. Dr Sriram Lagoo, also a friend of Nagarkar’s, called every experimental theatre group he could find in Bombay. There were about 120; four agreed to perform the play. ‘It was still jinxed,’ he says wryly. ‘It went into rehearsal and production so many times, and always something happened.’ Bedtime Story was finally performed—but it’s always been a hot potato for theatre groups. (It was published in 2015; instead of being dated, it had acquired a new relevance and a more intense meaning in this decade of highly polarised politics.)
The food arrives promptly; Nagarkar’s a ruminative eater, giving each separate mouthful the attention it deserves, so that the meal begins to take on the elements of a religious ceremony. The chicken and the stir-fried vegetables are excellent, but the Thai lamb curry leaves a lot to be desired. Neither of us could care less, though. The conversation is what we’re savouring.
Nagarkar is a man twice repudiated. Once by the English media, that faintly applauded both Cuckold and the novel that preceded it, Ravan and Eddie and otherwise forgot him; and once by the Marathi literary world. ‘A question that keeps coming back at me is, why have you abandoned Marathi?’
At surface levels, it’s understandable. He began his writing career in Marathi; even his first novel, Seven Sixes are Forty-Three was translated into English some years after it had first come out in Marathi. ‘In truth, I had only four years of taught Marathi. I come from a Westernized family—we were part of the Prarthana Samaj. I have an obsessiveness about Sri Krishna that I haven’t understood—in my play, in Cuckold, it seems that Sri Krishna has always intruded upon me. But I call him “Sri Krishna”, “Lord Krishna” because of my background: for most Maharashtrians, he would be just “Krishna”. The real question should have been, why did I move from English to Marathi?’
Is it necessary, I ask, for a writer to always have to choose? Why wouldn’t it be possible in a country that has so many tongues for a writer to be bilingual in his work, as we so often are in our everyday speech? In return, Nagarkar tells me a story, his voice rising above the growing hubbub of noise as the restaurant fills up. It’s about the time he hawked his second novel to the review sections of all the Marathi newspapers, asking them to slam it, to be as critical as they wanted, but just to review it. The response was a stony silence. Kiran Nagarkar, who had crossed over into the alien territory of English, would not be reviewed.
As we help ourselves to more chicken and steamed rice, he tells other, funnier stories. Of the woman who’d come to interview him, who began with a rant: ‘There’s a limit to how sensational one can try to be. You write a trashy book, and you even had the indecency to call it Cuckold, defacing the memory of Mirabai’s husband.’
Of the ad agency where he earned his bread and butter for twenty-four years. Of his brief role as a paedophile priest in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open: ‘A friend told me after he saw the film, you’r
e just like that in real life. I think that’s rather a dubious compliment!’ Of another, critically acclaimed filmmaker who does ‘serious’ cinema: ‘You know, the kind of work you would want to run away from if he didn’t have a reputation that forced you to stay and watch it through.’
As we ask for a coconut caramel custard for Nagarkar, a Darjeeling tea for me, he suddenly switches gear. ‘My own self-deprecation does not reflect the criminal self-assurance I also have—even an arrogance,’ he says slowly. ‘I’m harsh on myself, yes. There are Marathi writers who say, why do you still write? No one cares, you might as well stop. But there is something inside. A conviction—no, the knowledge—that I am a good writer. I have something to say. And my only agenda is to tell a story.’
He hasn’t written anything for the past six or seven years—the toll you pay when your audience walks out of the hall before you even get started. And yet, Nagarkar is ungrudging of the success that other writers have achieved, able to discuss Rushdie with a professor’s dispassionate meticulousness, Amitav Ghosh with unsparing approval. His engagement with literature and books is visible at every turn, as the conversation moves from the similarities between the Mahabharata and Dostoevsky’s works to the question of the architecture of a novel (‘a very visual metaphor for me’).
As we move out from the pleasantly dark interiors of the Spice Route into the dusty glare of Delhi, he has one last certainty to share with me. If he had to do it all over again, face the heartbreak and the neglect, the criticism and the cavilling, or be given a life filled with all sorts of blessings but empty of writing, Kiran Nagarkar would take the heartbreak. No questions asked.
(Based on interviews and reviews from 2005-06. The Extras, the sequel to Ravan and Eddie, was published in 2012; Bedtime Story was published in 2015, twenty-seven years after he wrote the play. In 2015, the final novel in the Ravan and Eddie trilogy, Ravan and Eddie: Rest in Peace, was published.)
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 16