Tejaswini: Yes! Before we set up this discussion, Jayant and I were exchanging messages on WhatsApp, and suddenly he said: ‘Do not hang all these stories on the Bombay peg’. [Everyone laughs] So I told him, you have to trust me, I’m your translator. But I think our little exchange points to an interesting problem. We’re promoting this book with the subtitle ‘Mumbai Stories’, and it’s a deliberate choice to call it that. Not just because the reader is more likely to pick up the book, but also because there’s an internal coherence, there’s a recognizable geography. Let’s talk a little more about this. Surabhi’s pointing to the way by which the structuring of the story itself is making that tension palpable – between urban experience and a Bombay experience. I’m glad we’re not setting it up as a tension between universal and particular, which would make it a pointless debate. But our question is: what is it about the stories that make us want to see them as Bombay stories? In our own general investment in the urban experience, do we feel Bombay is archetypal of that experience in India, is that why these are Mumbai stories, speaking to that collective experience? We all have our experience of Bombay, as inhabitants or as visitors, and we’re not unmarked by that experience, whatever it is. And I think we’ll agree it’s an experience unprecedented in India.
Nisha: For me, my Bombay experience is very much like going to the movies, in that when I come out, I feel the aftermath, am dazzled by it. I never have a bad Bombay experience – it is always with that glow. There is a difference in the actual quality of light. It used to strike me when I came from Delhi to Bombay. In the way the light falls on people’s faces, it does glamorize everything. In Delhi, the extremely harsh light is ugly-making. I kept thinking about this when reading these stories, because Jayant talks about light a lot. Every story has light. Think back to ‘City Without Mirrors’, or ‘Mogri’s World’. But there’s a distinct difference in the way men see the light and the city and women do. For the women characters, homes are horrible places where they wash lots of clothes. They seem to find their breadth and their latitude outside the house. Unlike the man in ‘City Without Mirrors’, who finds the home a refuge he can retreat to. For all the women characters, light and life and all kinds of possibilities seem to lie outside.
Another thing is that many of the characters have double lives. Some don’t – like Popat in ‘No Presents Please’ – he’s an orphan. But the bus story is a good example of how, in each geographical location, the person has another life. Pandurang may be considered a dumb person in the city, but he is a cool dude back home! In the story, he’s forced to take the bus into his other life, and that’s when everything goes haywire. I don’t know if this is specific to Bombay, but it’s true of urban life in India…
Tejaswini: For a research project I’m working on, we interviewed several young women who were migrants into Bangalore. Especially among working class women, even those who experience the city as horrible, their city life gives them a glamour back home, so they’re willing to put up with the deprivations of urban life. I think there are people like that in Jayant’s stories too. But it’s interesting Nisha should mention ‘Crescent Moon’. That, and ‘A Spare Pair of Legs’, are the two stories which have some scenes set outside Bombay. But without Bombay those scenes would not work. This brings us back to the question: are these Bombay stories, and if so, why? Ashwin, you’ve read other Kannada writers from Bombay, – Yashwant Chittal and Vyasaraya Ballal – how is Jayant’s writing different? What is about this Bombay experience in the broad canvas of Kannada literature? I know there is very little of urban experience in Kannada anyway…
Ashwin: Rather than talk about the substantive issues of what makes this Bombay vs. what makes this Delhi, etc., I want to ask what’s the way of writing about Bombay that you find in writers before Jayant. For them, Bombay is the context of their stories. We usually use ‘context’ in two senses: the things you need to know in order to understand, and two, something more subtle, it refers to the things that go unsaid, which form the background, for the intelligibility of the conversation.
Tejaswini: But there are things alluded to rather than unsaid – you’re not given a full explanation, but there are markers which a reader of Kannada literature would understand.
Ashwin: No, I’m referring to something else. Hitherto, there was a Bombay – and it was this, an urban hell or a private gravity-free space, in contrast to some village in North Kanara or South Kanara (typically it is Bombay vs. the Kanara districts! – it is the Kanara people who go to Bombay, not old Mysore people like us). [Laughter] Take Yashwant Chittal, he’s a fine novelist, but for him Bombay is a theme. So you recognize Bombay in Chittal’s writing as some kind of a moral personality, good or bad, it’s like a person (maybe like something Hobbes would have called Leviathan!). But in Jayant’s stories, there are a number of contexts in which things get enabled. Bombay is not either a slum or Kamathipura or anything like that, but among other things it’s the possibility for two young people to come together to elope and go away in different directions. It’s also the possibility of a couple taking care of their sick and ageing domestic help and finally giving up, and giving her a sleeping pill. Bombay is all these things. So looking at Bombay with this lens – as the kinds of possibilities – and by possibilities I don’t mean things people do and which they couldn’t have done otherwise, but things that happen. The kinds of possibilities, that might not have existed – this aspect of the human condition would not have been brought forth but for Bombay. It’s not a description of ‘what Bombay is’, but what it enables. And it enables many things.
Tejaswini: Are you talking about Bombay in general or about Jayant’s fiction?
Ashwin: The latter. The Bombay that enables. That is not Chittal’s Bombay which is more interested in Bombay as a moral context. Or that of the other Kannadigas who write on and about Bombay. For them, Bombay is a unifying vanishing point, whereas for Jayant – it’s all the enablings that it brings forth.
Nisha: Maybe this is simplifying what you’re saying – but when we consider most of the characters, they are not thinking of Bombay at all, they’re only thinking Mulund or Malad or whatever. The only two people who think of Bombay are the two guys on the plane – the one who lives in Bombay along with his wife and keeps talking of how they love Bombay. Like other middle-class people, they are having that ‘Bombay’ conversation. For everyone else it’s Jogeshwari, Borivali, etc.
Tejaswini: But when the little boy comes from Farmagudi, it’s ‘Bombay’ he comes to. Just two days in Parel with the tea boy and the chawl life – for him that is Bombay.
Ashwin: I think the man with three wives – one in Ratnagiri, one in Jogeshwari and one in Borivali – that’s a metaphor for the Bombay that I’m talking about. Look at the middle wife, the second one. There’s one arm that reaches back to Ratnagiri, and another to Jogeshwari.
Surabhi: She accepts the former, but not the latter.
Ashwin: But she goes to visit when her husband is ill.
Nisha: She insists that the Ratnagiri wife should be informed, but not told that he fell ill in the bed of the third wife.
Ashwin: In fiction like Chittal’s you have Bombay as an enclosed space, where you don’t have these kinds of reachings out.
Tejaswini: Yes. When Kannadigas read Jayant’s fiction, they’re looking to see themselves, and they don’t see themselves, and that becomes a problem. Some of Jayant’s stories talk about north and south Kanara people who go to Bombay, but 99 per cent of the people especially in this book are non-Kannadiga characters. Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi…
Ashwin: Like the character Asavari Lokhande in ‘No Presents Please’ – I was always impressed by people with surnames because like many south Indians I don’t have one.
Tejaswini: Kannadigas read about all these characters with surnames, which is a mark of modernity in the Kannada context, and they are not Kannada-speaking people. So, the very simple modes of identification employed by readers don’t work here. Th
ere is some Antariksh Kothari, there is some Dagadu Parab – strange names, who are these people? It’s probably like watching a film that won a national award, in an Indian language you don’t know.
Ashwin: An interesting issue is that all these stories end before an action, they all end with what I’m calling knowledge of one’s circumstances. Coming back to ‘Truckful of Chrysanthemums’, we have an entire night in which anything might happen. Or in ‘Toofan Mail’, he is about to crash through the glass but he must recuperate all the elements of his own formation before he does that.
Nisha: Or, like in ‘Inner Room’, the wife wants to tell the mistress that she’s leaving the house, and the mistress wants to say, don’t go, but the story ends before either of them does anything.
Tejaswini: How do you recognize that moment? – that is the question. For me the most interesting story in this regard is ‘Partner’, where the two men don’t really know each other, and when Roopak sees his roommate’s appendix in a bowl after the surgery, he can’t then leave.
Nisha: What happens when you do a screenplay with this kind of story?
Surabhi: I’m very clear that these stories should not be stretched at all. Not just the end, but even what I said about plot lines getting shrunk and expanded in counter-intuitive ways. I’m clear that one should stay with that rhythm of Jayant’s stories. The problem is that one ends up with a short (feature) film. Now the short film genre allows for clipped endings but in a very gimmicky sense. Always it’s like – ‘see I got you, see I fooled you’. This is not a problem when you read the story. But in a film, after thirty or forty minutes, you can’t have a clipped ending.
In reading, the experience allows you to mull over what you’ve read. Oh my god, one went to VT and the other somewhere else, oh this man walked away with the father’s portrait – the intensity of the emotion is somehow sustained in the act of reading, but not while watching a film. One thing I’ve tried and given up on is the attempt to merge two stories, which is what happens when you’re working with short fiction as a film-maker. Each of the stories have their independent universe. If they are merged, it becomes about characters and situations instead. And the rhythm also goes for a toss. I don’t know how I’m going to resolve that. But the end is what is the trickiest. ‘Interval’ is the best example of that. You can easily expand both moments when they go in separate directions, but that will destroy how the story unfolds. The moment of ending tends to get dramatic in film, unfortunately.
Nisha: There was the New Yorker editor long ago who said he would reject a story that ended ‘he felt tired and drank some tea’ or something like that. So there’s always the problem of the ending in short fiction.
Tejaswini: There’s no real conclusion in any of the stories, whether it is the frame-maker giving away his father’s portrait, or two young people who may or may not get married because the invitation is in jeopardy, and we don’t know what exactly happens at the end of any single story. We know the old woman will take the pills and die, but still, the night remains to pass.
Ashwin: The thing about working your life out is not to achieve something. Like the Chinese proverb that goes: What’s ahead of you is not the future but the past. Like psychoanalysis, which allows a patient to become reflexive about his or her past and that which hadn’t been assimilated up until now. That process of assimilation begins in these stories where they actually end. The endings are not abrupt because, for the growth of the protagonist, it marks the fulfillment of a process in the psychoanalytic sense. There’s very little fiction these days in Kannada which does this. The plot dominates the story. Rather than people coming to stand in a relationship to their own past.
Tejaswini: And all these characters are very routine, everyday characters, they aren’t heroic. They’re just muddling along in their daily lives. In every story, something happens to that very ordinary character – that too not some great event, but interruptions are introduced in their daily life. Whether it’s the horse running away, or in ‘Gateway’, after that sad story of a fellow who can’t get a job, there is his wife getting into a boat, and thus interrupting that whole sense of what she is, who she is, what their life together has been. Such interruptions also create a moment in which you may perhaps look back. Some of them are very young people, of course, like Popat. But the interruption creates that space in which they have to understand how they’ve come to where they’re at. For me, the interruption is important. Like in ‘Opera House’, the finding of the flask under the seat, which becomes then the same day the theatre closes down – for me the finding of that flask is far more important than the closing of the theatre. Similarly, the whole incident of the partner’s watch looms much larger than his hospitalization, because that becomes the mark of how the partner has changed, become another person.
Surabhi: I want to bring the conversation to the women in the stories. I don’t want to make it a generic Bombay thing, but these women couldn’t have been in Delhi, couldn’t have been anywhere else. I don’t want to mull over what is it about these women that is so Bombay, but Ashwin spoke about enabling, and Teju spoke about breaking the routine. This seems to affect the women characters very differently – it is less dramatic than what happens to the men. Even the two women who come together in the ‘Inner Room’, even at the moment where the wife says she wants to leave, it’s not heartbreaking, like the moment when the roommate looks at the removed appendix. The women characters are sort of comfortable in how they deal with the ‘interruptions’. Meera Kothari has brought too much fruit while visiting her husband’s mistress in hospital, so the mistress tells her to take it home, and Mrs Kothari then simply puts it in the fridge, not at all dramatic – think about the contrast between the excised appendix and the extra kilos of fruit the woman has taken to the hospital! It’s how Jayant has seen the women characters located in Bombay that makes for this kind of storytelling.
Nisha: I’m juxtaposing Jayant’s fiction with other writers I’ve read recently, who write fiction set in Delhi. And the big difference I see has to do with caste markers. I think it’s closely connected to what you’re saying about what’s enabling and what is not. All of those people want to move on, but they seem stuck, in their Thakur-ness and Jat-ness. They’re all trying to do new things, and there’s a lot of internal mulling about what’s allowed, what isn’t.
Tejaswini: That’s really interesting, and marks off the Bombay social space as different. For example, the Asavari story with her and Popat, who are they, what are they, where are they from…
Nisha: I think in Jayant’s stories, you have a different (lack of) caste marking than what you find in mainstream paperback English writing in India. That writing is also hyperlocal, you can have an entire novel set in a Barista café in Khan Market in Delhi, but nobody has any caste. They may have caste names, but not caste, in that it doesn’t seem to affect anybody.
Tejaswini: There’s a different strain of social mobility that Bombay allows for and opens up. For example, the Wedding Horse story. Dagadu is most likely a Dalit name, and he marries the horse owner’s daughter. That daughter has a suitor, Gulam, who is probably Muslim. And nothing much is made of the fact that he is Muslim. Because that’s not how Bombay deals with these things. There are, of course, heightened moments when it could become an issue, but in the everyday routine captured by these stories, it isn’t. So Jayant is not setting aside the social differences, but he’s saying this is how it is.
Surabhi: Neither does he make it out to be a cosmopolitan Bombay which ignores such differences. It’s such a relief and delight not to see here that cosmopolitan smugness about Bombay! And there’s no grand meta-narrative about Bombay either. So the stories don’t foreground the 1992 riots or the 26 July floods, even though they may form the backdrop to ‘Unframed’ or ‘Water’.
Tejaswini: Just a few months ago, I was on a long taxi drive with a chatty driver. I was in the middle of translating ‘Water’ at that point. Out of the blue, the driver began
telling me of his experience during the 26 July floods. He told me an almost identical story, but it had two women in it instead of the two men in Jayant’s narrative! He said he looked after them, bought them biscuits, and they were so grateful they wanted him to come inside and eat a meal with them when he finally took them home.
Surabhi: There are two typical Bombay tropes – one is the alienated person and the other is the super-enabled person. Jayant’s characters refuse to fall into either of those categories. They are enabled only for that moment – that moment may be cataclysmic or just one more dot in their routine. There is no attempt to get into ‘what is the essence of the human condition in a metropolis’. So it’s not about figuring out Bombay, it’s about being in Bombay.
Ashwin: It’s not Salaam Bombay.
Surabhi: Nor is it Maximum City, Slumdog Millionaire, etc.
Nisha: Or all the new non-fiction…
Tejaswini: I’d like to ask Ashwin to locate the fiction on the slightly larger canvas of other Kannada writers engaging with Bombay in particular, and the urban experience in general, because you don’t find much of that in Kannada literature.
Ashwin: Jayant has not received a sustained critical response in Kannada. I wonder if there might be something, some apparatus, which is absent in the Kannada critical realm and which could have taken on board fiction like Jayant’s. There’s an old and venerable tradition in literature which is almost gone now, which is, to write about how people make sense of the situations they find themselves in. In most bad fiction and bad philosophy, it says that making sense of your situation is equal to gaining an explanatory grasp of your condition, of your situation. That happens all the time in our lives too, especially people who are educated, middle-class people, we somehow think gaining this explanatory grasp is equal to making sense of the situation. For example, we have some ambition, some project, and something comes to nothing, and then we are sad. And then we say that the particular class background that I come from made me have these ambitions. And because of the very dynamic of the class that I come from, this ambition was frustrated, etc. You can add any number of explanations like this. This is the intellectual kind of explanation, which these stories successfully work against. Because actually we make sense of our situations not by gaining an explanatory grasp, but through a pause. A pause from routine situations, by different combinations of actions, by finding ourselves in a place we are not used to anymore, or taking decisions we thought we were not equipped to handle. Two fine examples for me are, one very chilling, and the other very heart-warming, if you want, are ‘Truckful of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Crescent Moon’. Here is a woman who must finally make sense of her impossible situation. We can read this as representing some sort of middle class guilt, but that’s not the point. At the end of the day, the couple who are taking care of their domestic help are really nice people, oiling and braiding their domestic help’s hair and all that … I am not interested in the moral angle of that problem. What I’m interested in is that here’s someone who has, probably on the last night of her life, some juxtaposition of events and actions, and counter-actions, and come to a point where she can make sense of her situation. This is an impossible situation, and she has not understood this until now. The more heart-warming story is the one where this fellow runs off with a double-decker bus…
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