Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (6 page)

The fact is that I had become increasingly concerned
with the communal issues bedeviling our national politics and society in the 1990s, and I wrote extensively about them in my newspaper columns and in my last book,
India: From Midnight to the Millennium.
This was all in the nature of commentary. As a novelist, though, I sought an interesting way to explore the issue in fiction. Years ago, my old college friend Harsh Mander, an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer, sent me an account he had written of a riot he dealt with as a district magistrate in Madhya Pradesh. I was very moved by the piece and urged him to publish it, and I am very pleased that a collection of Harsh's essays about the “forgotten people” he has dealt with in his career has just emerged from Penguin under the title
Unheard Voices.
But his story also sparked me thinking of a riot as a vehicle for a novel about communal hatred. Since I have never managed a riot myself, I asked Harsh for permission to use the story of “his” riot in my narrative, a request to which he graciously consented. At about the same time, I read a newspaper account of a young white American girl, Amy Biehl, who had been killed by a black mob in violent disturbances in South Africa. The two images stayed and merged in my mind, and
Riot
was born.

I began writing it in December 1996, immediately after completing
India: From Midnight to the Millennium.
But in view of the various demands on my time with my work at the United Nations, I could only complete it four years later, around the end of 2000. In between, whole months went by during which I was unable to touch the novel. With fiction, you need not only time — which I am always struggling to find — but also a space inside your head, to
create an alternative universe and to inhabit it so intimately that its reality infuses your awareness of the world. That is all the more difficult when your daily obligations and responsibilities are so onerous that they are constantly pressing in on you, and you don't have a clear stretch of time to immerse yourself in your fictional universe.

Riot
is also a departure for me fictionally, because unlike my earlier novels it is not a satirical work. Like the other two, though, it takes liberties with the fictional form. I have always believed that the very word
novel
implies that there must be something “new” about each one. What was new to me about the way
Riot
unfolded was that I told the story through newspaper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals, scrapbooks, even poems written by the characters — in other words, using different voices, different stylistic forms, for different fragments of the story. (It is also a book you can read in any order: though ideally you should read it from beginning to end, you can pick it up from any chapter, go back or forward to any other chapter, and bring a different level of awareness to the story.)

The story of
Riot
was a story of various kinds of collisions — of people, of cultures, ideologies, loves, hatreds — and it could not be told from just one point of view. The challenge I set myself in writing this book was not just to imagine a dozen different characters but to try and enter their imaginations; in other words, to see the world through their eyes. In describing Zalilgarh from the perspective of “Mrs. Hart,” for instance, I had not just to visualize the town, a town like many I have seen throughout India, but to ask myself what a middle-aged, intelligent, but fairly conservative
American woman would notice about it. Similarly I sought to depict four or five different people's views of the Ram Janmabhoomi / Babri Masjid controversy; despite my own strong feelings about it, I tried honestly to empathize with each of them individually.

I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it's inside me, it's got to come out, and in a real sense I would die if I couldn't. It's the way I express my reaction to the world I live in. Sometimes the words come more easily than at other times, but writing is my lifeblood.
Riot
is my sixth book. But I have also pursued a United Nations career. I see myself as a human being with a number of responses to the world, some of which I manifest in my writing, some in my UN work (for refugees, in peace-keeping, in the secretary-general's office, and in communications). I think both writing and the UN are essential for my sanity: if I had given up either one, a part of my psyche would have withered on the vine.

I am often asked why, despite my international career, I have set all my books so far in India. The answer is simple. My formative years, from the ages of three to nineteen, were spent growing up in India. India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. India matters immensely to me, and in all my writing, I would like to matter to India. Or, at least, to Indian readers.

T
HE ONLY TIME I PROPERLY MET
the incomparable Indian artist M. F. Husain (discounting, that is, the occasional fleeting handshakes in crowded gatherings) was in New York in 1993, over dinner at the home of the then Indian ambassador, Hamid Ansari. Sitting before the book-laden coffee table in the ambassador's Park Avenue living room, I recounted to the master the famous story of what the immortal Pablo Picasso used to say to aspiring artists of the avant-garde. Disregarding their slapdash cubes and squiggles, Picasso would demand: “Draw me a horse.” Get the basics right, in other words, before you break free of them. Husain loved the story; he promptly opened the book in front of him, a volume of his own work from Ambassador Ansari's collection, and proceeded to sketch, with astonishing fluidity, a posse of horses on the frontispiece. I have never forgotten the moment: watching the artist's long brown fingers glide over the page, the horses’ heads rearing, their
manes flying, hooves and tails in the air, as Husain left, in a few bold strokes, the indelible imprint of his genius.

So to collaborate on a book with Husain was an extraordinary privilege. And to do so on the subject of my home state, Kerala, on which Husain had completed a series of astonishing paintings, made it a special pleasure as well.

For horses, in our volume, read elephants. They are everywhere in Husain's extraordinary evocation of Kerala: crashing through the dense foliage, embracing supple maidens with their trunks, and, in miniature, held aloft by triumphant womanhood. The elephants cavort by the waterside, drink, play, gambol, lurk. They are the animal form of the grandeur and gaiety of “God's Own Country.” Elephants are indispensable to every Kerala celebration, from weddings to religious festivals; there is nothing in the world like the Thrissur Pooram, when hundreds emerge, be-decked with ornaments and flowers, to receive the homage of the Malayali people. Elephants infuse the Kerala consciousness; they feature in the state's literature, dance, music, films, and art. It is said that the true Keralite can tell one elephant apart from another just by looking at it. In their myriad shapes, sizes, and colors, Husain's elephants embody the magic of Kerala: the extraordinary natural beauty of the state, its lagoons, its forests, its beaches, and above all the startling, many-hued green of the countryside, with its emerald paddy fields and banana groves, and coconut and areca trees swaying in the gentle breeze that whispers its secrets across the land. And in their strength the elephants capture, too, the resilience of Kerala, its defiance of the Indian
stereotype, its resolute determination to progress, and above all, its empowerment of women.

What can one say about this remarkable work and its remarkable subject, in this curious collaboration between a great artist who has signed his name in Malayalam, a language he cannot speak, and a writer who traces his roots to Kerala, a homeland he has only visited on his holidays? The “Marunaadan Malayali” — the expatriate Keralite — is so widespread, and so common, a phenomenon that the phrase has entered the Malayalam language. And here I am, one of the tribe, inspired by the paintings of a man who is the most “inside” of outsiders, seeking to capture in far too many words the insights into Kerala that he has illuminated with the dazzling fluency of his brush.

Though I am a Malayali and a writer, I have no claims to be considered a Malayali writer: indeed, despite setting some of my fictional sequences in Kerala and scattering several Menons through my stories, I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I cannot write my own mother tongue. And yet I am not inclined to be defensive about my Kerala heritage, despite the obvious incongruities of an expatriate praising Kerala from abroad and lauding the Malayali heritage in the English language.

As a child of the city, growing up in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, my only experience of village Kerala had been as an initially reluctant vacationer during my parents’ annual trips home. For many non-Keralite Malayali children traveling like this, there was often little joy in the compulsory rediscovery of their roots, and many saw it more as an obligation
than a pleasure. For city-dwellers, rural Kerala (and Kerala is essentially rural, since the countryside envelops the towns in a seamless web) was a world of rustic simplicities and private inconveniences. When I was ten I told my father that this annual migration to the south was strictly for the birds. But as I grew older, I came to appreciate the magic of Kerala — its beauty, which Husain so exquisitely evokes, and also its ethos, which animates his images.

What does it mean, then, for Keralites like me, now living outside Kerala, to lay claim to our Malayali heritage? What is it of Kerala that we learn to cherish, and of which we remain proud, wherever we are? Those are the two questions I have tried to answer in my own essay accompanying Husain's paintings. In many ways my sense of Kerala is tied up with my sense of being Indian. I guess Husain could say something very similar himself. He has personalized my copy of our book not with horses or elephants, but with a boat, riding low in the water, taking us — like Kerala itself — gently forward.

I
T WAS AT THE HAY-ON-WYE FESTIVAL OF LITERATURE
a few years ago that I realized with horror how low the fortunes of P. G. Wodehouse had sunk in his native land. I was on stage for a panel discussion on the works of the master when the moderator, a gifted and suave young literary impresario, began the proceedings by asking innocently, “So how do you pronounce it — is it Woad-house or Wood-house?”

Woadhouse? You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather, except that Wodehouse himself would have disdained the cliché, instead describing my expression as, perhaps, that of one who “had swallowed an east wind” (
Carry On, Jeeves,
1925). The fact was that a luminary at the premier book event in the British Isles — albeit one sponsored, it must be admitted, by the
Sunday Times
— had no idea how to pronounce the name of the man I regarded as the finest English writer since Shakespeare. I spent the rest of the panel discussion looking (to echo a description of Bertie Wooster's Uncle Tom) like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow.

My dismay had Indian roots. Like many of my compatriots, I had discovered Wodehouse young and pursued my delight across the ninety-five volumes of the master's oeuvre, savoring book after book as if the pleasure would never end. When All India Radio announced, one sunny afternoon in February 1975, that P. G. Wodehouse had died, I felt a cloud of impenetrable darkness had settled over my day. The newly (and belatedly) knighted Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and of the prize pig the Empress of Blandings, was in his ninety-fourth year, but his death still came as a shock. Three decades earlier, Wode-house had reacted to the passing of his stepdaughter, Leonora, with the numbed words: “I thought she was immortal.” I had thought Wodehouse was immortal too, and I felt like one who had “drained the four-ale of life and found a dead mouse at the bottom of the pewter” (
Sam the Sudden,
also from that vintage year of 1925).

For months before his death I had procrastinated over a letter to Wodehouse. It was a collegian's fan letter, made special by being written on the letterhead (complete with curly-tailed pig) of the Wodehouse Society of St. Stephen's College, Delhi University. Ours was then the only Wodehouse society in the world, and I was its president, a distinction I prized over all others in an active and eclectic extracurricular life. The Wodehouse Society ran mimicry and comic speech contests and organized the annual Lord Ickenham Memorial Practical Joke Week, the bane of all at college who took themselves too seriously. The society's underground rag,
Spice,
edited by a wildly original classmate who was to go on to become a counselor to the prime minister of India,
was by far the most popular newspaper on campus; even its misprints were deliberate, and deliberately funny.

I had wanted to tell the master all this, and to gladden his famously indulgent heart with the tribute being paid to him at this incongruous outpost of Wodehouseana thousands of miles away from any place he had ever written about. But I had never been satisfied by the prose of any of my drafts of the letter. Writing to the man Evelyn Waugh had called “the greatest living writer of the English language, the head of my profession” was like offering a soufflé to Bocuse. It had to be just right. Of course, it never was, and now I would never be able to reach out and establish this small connection to the writer who had given me more joy than anything else in my life.

The loss was personal, but it was also widely shared: P. G. Wodehouse was by far the most popular English-language writer in India, his readership exceeding that of Agatha Christie or Harold Robbins. His erudite butlers, absent-minded earls, and silly-ass aristocrats, out to pinch policemen's helmets on Boat Race Night or perform convoluted acts of petty larceny at the behest of tyrannical aunts, are familiar to, and beloved by, most educated Indians. I cannot think of an Indian family I know that does not have at least one Wodehouse book on its shelves, and most have several. In a country where most people's earning capacity has not kept up with international publishing inflation and book-borrowing is part of the culture, libraries stock multiple copies of each Wodehouse title. At the British Council libraries in the major Indian cities, demand for Wodehouse reputedly outstrips that for any other author, so that each
month's list of “new arrivals” includes reissues of old Wode-house favorites. Wodehouse's death was page-one news in every English-language newspaper in India; the articles and letters that were published in the following days about his life and work would have filled volumes.