The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Bapsi Sidhwa touches a nerve when she suggests that ‘writers are seldom candid about who really influenced them—they trot out the usual “accepted” names’. She continues: ‘But you can be sure he has influenced South Asian writers . . . Like the man, his writing is clear, perceptive and unpretentious, and like him it is also uninhibited.’

  The shortlist for Khushwant is short to the point of abruptness: two novels, three if you count Delhi; the histories; the short stories. At bookshops, I talk to the people who actually sell the products of the Khushwant industry. One says, ‘This is the English literature list. The columns will keep selling, so will the joke books. It doesn’t matter. You could append his name to a phone book and he will still sell.’ (And I’m reminded of the joke about Santa Singh—of the Santa-Banta fame—accosting a librarian and saying, what kind of book is this? Lots of characters, but no plot, no dialogue? Ah, says the librarian. You’re the one who checked out our phone directory.)

  One of Khushwant’s most memorable creations no longer exists: the legendary Illustrated Weekly. For Pankaj Mishra, it was ‘the first real magazine’ he encountered; later, Khushwant’s columns ‘if you were living in very small and isolated places, as I was, opened a window onto the larger world’. For Manjula Padmanabhan, it was the magazine that ‘ALL OF INDIA used to read’. It was a nondescript cocktail-party paper; Khushwant turned it into the journal you couldn’t ignore. Nothing was beneath his notice—he was never, says the man who notoriously pleaded Sanjay Gandhi’s cause, wrote with such passion on the Golden Temple affair and such clarity on Khalistan, interested in politics, so he wrote about books, nature, gossip. ‘I asked questions that touched a chord, even if it was why monkeys had red bottoms,’ he says. ‘Hadn’t you ever wondered? It took a lot of research to find out.’ Decades after the demise of the Weekly, he remembers each issue, the Kissa Kursi Ka jokes, Dhirendra Brahmachari carrying his white handbag on the cover, every writer he commissioned.

  The list of things people remember about Khushwant is as long as the list of canon-worthy books is short. Amit Chaudhuri sat next to him at the closing session of the Indian Literary Festival a few years ago, and noticed that he spent much of the session scribbling in Urdu on a piece of paper in front of him. ‘I felt then that just as some writers have wonderful manuscripts they never publish, Singh, in spite of his huge public personality, has chosen to keep the best of himself from us.’

  He never talks down to people. He’s curious, relentlessly curious. He’s candid, sometimes with devastating consequences in a culture used to polite hagiography and the veiled attack. He has, even in his nonagenarian years, the cheerful smuttiness of a schoolboy who never got over being a bosom man (‘All men are bosom men’). And as generations of writers and editors will testify, he’s generous, even as he’s sceptical of greatness (‘I have never met great men who don’t have feet of clay.’)

  It’s impossible to project Khushwant Singh as just a sales phenomenon; he is no cynical publishing creation. Nor is he, despite the stunning mediocrity of some of his work, a failed writer—just a writer who never had much need to live up to that early promise, whose columns still sing, still reach out in a way our op-ed writers have forgotten how to do. ‘If you want to write, you have to be true to yourself,’ he says.

  Look at him again; the figure in the light-bulb, the whisky drinker who retires at nine, the man who candidly admits to lusting after women in his heart, which, however, belonged completely to his late wife; the quiet historian, the writer whose proudest boast is this: ‘I always meet my deadlines.’ And the great secret of his success is simple. Underneath the Scotch-and-scholarship hide, behind the mask of mentor or destroyer of reputations, there’s the person who, when someone writes to him, always writes back.

  I’ve tired him out; it’s time to leave. I ask what lines he’d like to be remembered by, expecting him to choose something from one of his own books. But Khushwant Singh’s eyes light up and he quotes Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Dying Speech of An Old Philosopher’:

  I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

  Nature was my love, and, next to Nature, Art:

  I warm’d both hands at the fire of Life;

  It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

  (Khushwant Singh died in March 2014, at the age of 99. Among his more significant works were Train To Pakistan (1956), I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959), A History of the Sikhs (1966), and Delhi: A Novel (1990).)

  5

  Arundhati Roy

  The lane through which you approach Arundhati Roy’s studio, in a moderately affluent New Delhi suburb, is unlovely—its strictly utilitarian aspect as a back alley not softened by the gathering monsoon clouds above. Inside is another matter: Roy’s workspace, in shades of ochre with Moorish blue windows, is a warm, welcoming space. ‘There’s no water,’ she says, and just as the lights and fans switch on again, ‘but the electricity’s back.’

  It’s a small but essential reminder that even here, in her private space, the concerns of the average Delhi citizen intrude. The affluence generated by the best-selling The God of Small Things would have been enough to insulate Roy from all the annoying inconveniences her countrypeople have to put up with. That she stays here is a deliberate choice; her work is here, a point that she will make repeatedly over the next two hours.

  Long before I arrived at that back alley, I had been revolving in my mind the two diametrically opposed sets of responses that Arundhati Roy evokes. To many foreigners, the prickliness she sets off in the Indian English-language media is puzzling, illogical, misplaced. To this company—and they include the likes of Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie and many others—Arundhati is a courageous woman not afraid to be the voice of conscience in troubled times.

  To many Indians, she is a manipulative poster girl (to use a term she personally cannot stand) who has taken to writing polemical essays because she wants to stay in the limelight without the labour of writing another GOST. She used to live, this band of doubters will point out, in Kautilya Marg—named after a Machiavellian manipulator of medieval times—a distinctly upper-class neighbourhood. Her essays, to them, are shrill rants on subjects that she is not qualified to address. Her recent brush with the Supreme Court—which resulted in an overnight stint in jail—was a martyrdom deliberately sought because she has a Saint Joan complex.

  I am here to participate in a conversation; as I will discover, that is Arundhati Roy’s explanation of what she has been doing ever since 1997, when GOST came out. Conducting a conversation, between those who have power and those who have been deprived of it; between the hegemony of institutions and the needs of the ordinary citizen; between those who do care, deeply, about the environment they live in, and those who are still mired in apathy.

  The rain starts coming down as we begin, drumming softly against the windows. We’re discussing the link between her essays and her first, only, Booker-winning novel. ‘The roots of so much of what I’ve written in the essays is in GOST,’ she says. One of the passages she’s thinking of is the one where her protagonist, Rahel, returns to the river running through Ayamenem, and discovers that it’s polluted. Another is the scene set in the police station—drawn from memory, when Arundhati watched her mother, the activist Mary Roy, in a similar situation. In the novel, Rahel watches as the policemen deliberately confront Ammu, her mother, with the fact of her helplessness in the face of their power. ‘I’m often asked whether I’m going to write fiction about the Narmada valley [where the controversial building of a dam dispossessed many of their lands and their identities]: it’s such a demeaning question. I want to say, it’s already done, that’s what GOST is about, power and powerlessness.’

  As we talk, the room fills up with ghosts and spectres. The ghost of her prescient 1998 essay on the consequences of a nuclear India, ‘The End of the Imagination’, reminds us that she anticipated the mushroom clouds now hovering over the subcontinent as India and Pakistan face off yet again, both armed and dan
gerous. ‘Just before you came,’ she says, ‘I took a call from an NYT journalist who asked whether I was planning to leave Delhi because of the nuclear threat. I tried to explain that I don’t come from the kind of stock that believes you can buy a life. I can’t think, “Oh there’s going to be a nuclear war, let me go live in Geneva”. I can’t. Everything that I love and value and hate and fight with is here; if it goes down, I go down. What I do comes out of a sense of love, irritation, anger, it’s all just a form of investing in the place.’

  Those who read her essays carefully and in sequence may, as reviewer Ian Buruma did, find much to quibble over or differ with. Whatever your differences with Roy’s views, few could actually read the collected essays and not emerge with a sense of continuity. She isn’t addressing separate issues when she speaks of nuclear bombs, shifts to big dams, continues with a polemic on privatization and the dangers of globalization, and ends by asking America to look at its own foreign policies for an explanation of 9/11.

  ‘All these things—big dams, nuclear bombs, globalization—are about power and powerlessness. Why is one opposed to big dams? It’s not the irrigation yields. Fundamentally, one is opposed to the centralization of authority and of resources. With nuclear bombs, it’s the same problem. How is the state of the world going to be decided by this person who can press the button? It’s undemocratic.’ She will say, a little later, that she finds the accusations that she moves from subject to subject strange. ‘It’s not different subjects; they’re all the same subjects.’

  When Roy makes a plea, it’s simple: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve written. Her eyes are luminous, insistent, as she continues: ‘All these people who get nostril-quivery about me: why doesn’t she wear a khadi sari and pretend she’s an Adivasi [tribal], you know. We have been brought up to believe that the only people who can ask questions have to be Gandhi, wear loincloths, spin, act self-righteous. If you’re seen to be having a good time and still ask political questions, it’s a big problem.’

  India is more comfortable with activists like Mahasweta Devi, the revered Bengali writer whose writings and life have revolved, for the past twenty years, around her struggle to allow India’s tribals to live lives they want to lead, rather than the government-prescribed alternatives.

  Arundhati Roy, with her wealth, her blue jeans, her iconoclasm and her resistance to labels (‘writer-activist, like a sofa-cum-bed,’ she said in famous disparagement) breaks the established mould. Roy’s case would be that there should be room in India—or anywhere—for both Mahasweta Devi and her.

  ‘When I go abroad, everybody wants me to pose as some great radical who’s been hunted down by this native banana republic—you know, like I’m Taslima Nasreen. I just say, look, I’m having a conversation with an institution in my society. There’s no fatwa against me. This is a conversation, and these are the ways in which a democracy becomes sophisticated,’ she says. The rain is coming down hard now, like a friendly drummer joining in with our conversation. All these things (the essays, the fight with the Supreme Court of India) are only done out of a huge affection for this place, however terrible it is. Why on earth would someone like me do this? I could be living in the French Arrondissement, I could be in Cannes every year . . . I could do that if I wanted to.’

  If she’d exercised that option, here’s what she would have missed. An obscenity case against The God of Small Things, pertaining to the relationship between Ammu and Velutha in the novel, which was filed in 1997 in the Kerala courts and went on for several years.

  The Supreme Court fracas, where Arundhati Roy was pulled up for comments she made—in response to a petition that the august court threw out, in effect saying that the case against her was unjustifiable, but that her comments on the case threatened the majesty of the court. She paid a token fine of Rs 2,000 and spent one night in Tihar jail—not a terrible penance, in physical terms, but a terrible warning, in terms of the precariousness of her right to personal liberty. A case was filed against her after she wrote an impassioned article in Outlook magazine, about the massacres in Gujarat. The petition alleges that she, who condemned the killings of over 800 Muslims, is responsible for ‘instigating communal hatred’. As is the practice with these cases, she was required to appear personally at a Baroda police station.

  ‘I’ve always said that the worst thing that can happen to a writer in India is not a bad review,’ says Roy, with some understatement.So why, in the face of trenchant criticism, should she continue? Why not move, as she says she can, to the French Arrondissement? Because this is where she belongs, and because her true audience are the taxi-drivers of Kerala, the Bhils of Madhya Pradesh, the nameless legions who write fan-mail every day. And why not temper the writing?

  ‘I think people have a real problem with feelings,’ Roy says, ‘I insist that feelings are facts. I insist on them. I absolutely do. And I think people get thrown by that.’ Not that she holds facts in contempt. On the contrary: ‘It is the facts that outrage me (about the Narmada dam issue). It is those facts that fuel my fury.’ (Though she doesn’t say this, many feel that the jibes against her are misogynist, and in comments’ sections online, the abuse against her is often violently sexist: for a certain kind of Indian male, any Indian woman who speaks her mind as fearlessly as Arundhati does is seen as a threat.)

  And—final question—why do her critics froth at the mouth at the very mention of her name? Arundhati Roy smiles. The rain is now hammering insistently on the windows, and she loves the feel of this unseasonal storm. ‘The reason they go for me . . .’ she says, slipping uncharacteristically into third person, ‘one has this huge audience. So they’re criticizing exactly what makes one the author of a book that sold six million copies worldwide. The way I write is who I am. And who I am is a writer who’s read enormously, in every country.’

  I think that this is one of the reasons she’s disliked in India: she’s willing, in a most unIndian manner, to flaunt her success. But success isn’t what defines Roy according to Roy—it’s all about what she does and how she does it. ‘One of the things I demand of a writer—myself, included—is the space and agility to take statistics, to put them alongside the story of a man from the Narmada valley about how he felt the first time he saw the waters submerge his village.’

  The demands of living in Delhi are beginning to intrude, in the shape of phone calls, of people wanting to check those dry water tanks. ‘I can use feelings and facts and stories and anything I want in my writing. I can use all of these as ammunition. There are no rules for me. I would not accept any rules. I’m going to do what the hell I want so long as I’m not being manipulative and I’m not lying.’

  So there it is, out in the open, the reason India’s uncomfortable with Arundhati Roy. We don’t like nihilists. We don’t like immodest nihilists, even if they have a lot to be immodest about. And most of all, we really, really don’t like immodest nihilists who’re telling the truth as they see it, from the position of relative power they happen to be in. Arundhati Roy’s business is to question; only the powerless in India will appreciate that.

  (Based on a 2003 interview. In 2004, Arundhati Roy published The Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire; in 2010, Listening To Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy; in 2011, Broken Republic: Three Essays, and in 2013, The Hanging of Afzal Guru.)

  6

  Vikram Seth

  At the Seth family house in Noida, Vikram Seth oscillates between charm and gloom. He hates interviews, but accepts with resigned tolerance that he must ‘do publicity’ every six years or so. He’s resigned when an interview stretches for ten minutes too long, resigned when the photographer makes him change his shirt. ‘She’s the second photographer who’s made me do this.’

  Then we discover I’ve selected the same restaurant where the family’s taking him for dinner. Vikram’s mother, Leila Seth, protests. You don’t argue with a photographer, or with a former Justice of the Supreme Court, so we change plans, heading to Dakshin at the Marriot
t.

  Two Lives, the non-fiction work that’s forced Vikram back into the glare of publicity, is the most personal of his books, but also the only one where his own voice is so deliberately reined in.

  As a teenager, he lived in England with his Shantih Uncle and Aunt Henny, who became ‘surrogate parents’. He knew that Aunt Henny, a German Jew, had lost family to Hitler’s concentration camps, and that Shantih Uncle had lost his arm during World War II, but that was all. He was floundering—panicking, he says—after A Suitable Boy, a writer in search of a subject, when Leila Seth suggested he interview Shantih Uncle.

  Two Lives took almost a decade to write. It’s part family memoir, part Holocaust remembrance, part personal history, told with a sensitivity that fluctuates between reticence and, for the very private Seth, a surprising openness. ‘I thought of it as a three-stranded book, not two-stranded. But then I didn’t want Two Lives to become Three Lives.’

  Home in that period was London, where he used to bathe in the Serpentine (‘I’ve become a bit of a wimp about winter swimming now’) and where, walking across Hyde Park, the image of a man, a musician, came to him and grew into An Equal Music.

  It’s also been Delhi; Dariba Kalan, where his father still has family; Rajaji Marg, where the Seth family occupied a sprawling bungalow in a cheerful tangle of separate but intersecting lives, and now the suburb of Noida.

  Aunt Henny taught him that language could be a home, too, as she took him through the intricacies of German, a language he found inimical but eventually settled into with great pleasure.