Love, trinities and mathematics: Manil Suri on his new novel

[Did this interview for Vogue India]

INTRO: Manil Suri’s third novel The City of Devi is set in a Mumbai ridden with religious hatred and threatened by nuclear obliteration. Against this backdrop, the book’s two narrators, a woman named Sarita and a gay man named Jaz, separately journey northwards in search of Karun, a special figure from their past.

Coming after The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva, this book completes a trilogy of novels that are named for the three major Hindu Gods. However, instead of following Vishnu and Shiva with Brahma, you have concluded with Devi. Why?

I’ve stopped calling it a trilogy now, because that might give the impression that the books have the same characters – it’s more like a triptych. In terms of how many people actually worship these Gods today, Devi is more significant than Brahma; also, she has attributes of both Vishnu and Shiva and that made it interesting to bring them together. And of course, there is a strong link between the city of Mumbai and the Mother Goddess figure Mumba.

But this is just one motif in the book. I’m more interested in the idea that the number three is the magic number of the universe: apart from the many trinities across religions, in scientific terms there are three generations of fundamental particles, quarks, that make up everything. The number plays an important part in this narrative.

You’ve done something you never attempted before in your fiction – a speculative, dystopian story about impending holocaust. How did this come about?

The original plan was to write a love story around the idea “When all else is gone, what will you search for?” Initially I thought of constructing the plot in terms of a huge natural disaster, but then I began looking at politics. In 2002 there was much sabre-rattling between India and Pakistan, but then the US stepped in and helped diffuse the tension. I wondered: what might happen in this region if a similar situation arose but the West was distracted by its own conflicts. That became the starting point.

There are intriguing links made here between ancient prejudices – the sorts of things that make people kill each other in the name of religion – and the tools of modernity. In your view, has technology brought us closer to the scenario depicted here?

Yes and no. Today cyber-attacks can inflict great harm remotely – we don’t need a physical presence in order to unleash bad things. But I’m always hopeful that people can come back from the brink. Technology can also help responsible governments to put safeguards in place – though the flip side of that argument, I suppose, is that those safeguards often trample on people’s rights. It’s hard to say.

You also have a back-story about a blockbuster film called Super Devi, which fuels religious tension. Is this a cautionary tale about the power of Hindi cinema to stoke emotions?

More than mainstream Bollywood, an inspiration for me was the very popular Ramayana TV serial of the late 80s, and how that played a subtle role in stoking religious chauvinism and perhaps even precipitating the events that led to the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. But the power of films is undeniable: think of what has recently been happening with the Innocence of Muslims film trailer that led to violence all over the world.

Was the dual-narrative structure a special challenge as a writer? Jaz’s voice is much more irreverent and “jazzy” than Sarita’s is. Also, there are present and past events in each of their narratives.

Jaz was a different character originally, not funny at all – I threw that away and started over. More than creating two voices, it was hard to keep the past and the present-day narratives in track, to make sure the tension was maintained. Also, towards the end of the book the “cuts” between Sarita’s narrative and Jaz’s narrative get much quicker as their stories converge, and the challenge there was to plot the action in such a way that one character can logically pick up where the other character left off; I didn’t want to find myself in a situation where Sarita, for instance, is describing an event she isn’t privy to.

I was also unsure whether to have an actual Devi figure in the book, but then I decided to do it in such a way that it would be completely unexpected for the reader. The idea was the same as in my first novel The Death of Vishnu, where the “Vishnu” figure is someone drawn from the bottom rung of society. That was challenging to pull off too.

In an interview we did a few years ago you mentioned that you had written 150 pages of your next book and thrown away 100 pages of them. What changes did this novel see over the course of its writing?

My agent told me that what I had originally written – with Jaz’s story set in the US, Sarita’s in Mumbai – read like two different novellas, so I changed the focus. You have to be prepared to do that as a writer. I saw it as a way of making offerings to a goddess of writing: here, take this and give me something good in return! But it can be wrenching to work for a year and have nothing to show for it, which is why I’m glad I never quit my day-job as a math professor. It makes a big difference to have something else occupying your mind.

Now that the trilogy – or triptych – is over, what next?

I’m working on two things. One is a novel with real mathematics in it, which I’m thinking of as an enhanced E-book, with videos. Given the rate at which I do things, it will probably take five years to be finished, and who knows if physical books will even be around by then. Also I’m working on a plot for a last novel connected to these three books: I might call the whole thing The Trinity Quartet!

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[Also read: the piece Suri wrote about his Helen dance for my anthology The Popcorn Essayists - you can read the piece here, and watch the drag-dance video here]

A great collection of film photos - the Nemai Ghosh Archive

Movie-lovers in Delhi, do try to go for the Delhi Art Gallery’s excellent exhibition (January 8-28) of Nemai Ghosh’s film-related photographs, many of them taken on the sets of Satyajit Ray’s movies from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968) to Agantuk (1991). This is the culmination of a vast restoration project involving thousands of images - especially vital for a country that has a poor record of cinematic archiving and preservation. 

I wrote an essay on Ghosh and Ray for the exhibition catalogue, which means I got to see most of the photos in Jpeg form a few months ago (you can see some of them here) – but seeing them at the exhibition promises to be a much richer experience. Below are just two of my (many) favourites, these from the Shatranj ke Khiladi set: Amjad Khan, one of our most photogenic and regal actors, as the melancholy Wajid Ali Shah, trapped in history’s coil:

And two more photos I like: Smita Patil with camera on the set of Sadgati; and Jaya Bhaduri and Amitabh Bachchan early during their courtship, circa 1973:

[Details about the exhibition here]

Spring thunder - Lal Singh Dil ki ajeeb dastaan

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

Contained in the 165 pages of Poet of the Revolution – a translation of the memoirs of a celebrated Punjabi poet, one-time Naxalite and a man of many idiosyncrasies – are different perspectives on a single life, so that siphoning out the “real” Lal Singh Dil can seem an exercise in pointlessness. There is, naturally, the main text of the autobiography itself (originally published as Dastaan in 1998, nearly a decade before Dil’s death): a lucid, episodic account of a story that began in a chamar family near the town of Samrala in 1943, its contours defined by social discrimination and injustice. There is also the original Foreword by the editor-publisher Prem Prakash, who describes one of Dil’s letters as brilliantly conveying the feelings of “a militant poet losing his mental balance”, and observes that though editing was done on this manuscript, “the incoherence remains, manifested in a feverish intensity that we wanted to retain”. And there is the elaborate, thoughtful Introduction by the memoir’s translator, the journalist-poet Nirupama Dutt, who was Dil’s long-time friend and shared with him what she describes – channelling the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz – as a “dard ka rishta” (bond of pain).

It is Dutt who really puts Dil’s life and times in context, especially for the reader who does not know much about him beforehand. She supplies a few incidental details, comments on the frequently contradictory aspects of his personality and describes his unfailing gallantry towards her. (This is interestingly supplemented by Amarjit Chandan’s account of the poet’s “platonic attention to women”.) Describing a tranquil moment in Dil’s house, she observes, “No matter how harsh life might have been, there was still room in it for a few green leaves, a flower or two, a child’s smile and some sweetness.” And in a reminder of how ephemeral even the most intense revolutions can be, she presents an affecting view of a man who had once been in a maelstrom, but who went on to lead an unassuming life as the world around him moved on: “The comrades of his revolutionary days were now editors, executives, professors, businessmen or expatriates. The spring thunder was over and everyone had returned to the comfort zone of their class structures.”

Moving past these preludes to the memoir, the first thing one notices is how quiet it is – almost anticlimactic, if you’re expecting a radical, angst-ridden treatise. It begins on a lyrical note, as Dil recalls “following a Brahmin who resembled Tagore” into a bathing area for upper-caste boys (he was thrashed for the transgression), but there is a banality to some of the early episodes. “My childhood was full of dangers”, he says, before recounting incidents that might have happened in any little boy’s life. Reflecting on the violence of his play with his friends, he asks “Were we fighting each other or was it our anger at being children of a lesser God?” There are small moments of frisson (he is picked to play the part of Lord Krishna in a play, until then “someone whispered something” and he was dropped), but on the whole these are homely, not particularly revealing anecdotes.

The story becomes tauter when he begins associating with Leftists and Marxists and discovers that caste prejudice (or something akin to caste prejudice) can exist even in these groups. Or when he describes Russian literature as “waste paper [sold] to Indian buyers”, or reflects on the changes in his own personality over the years. The more dramatic passages concern his participation in an attack on a police station with his associates, and there is much self-presentation in his account of this time: he likens himself to a wounded tiger, describes bantering fearlessly with the police after his arrest. While being tortured, he is conscious that he should cry out “bravely”, not like a coward. “When I heard my first cry, I was not disappointed. It was like a bull’s angry bellow. Anyone would have recognised it as the cry of a warrior.”

Reading all this, one can’t help wondering if some of it is embellished – a question that must inevitably be asked about Dil, given that he once claimed that Chairman Mao had regretfully announced his arrest on Radio Beijing! But perhaps it is a mistake to search too deeply for literal truths in a self-conscious memoir like this. Dil was, after all, best known for his poetry, and it is in the book’s final segment – around 30 pages of his verses – that one gets a more immediate look into his mind. The poems are sparse and it is possible that some of the raw cadences of the original Punjabi have been lost in English translation - but even so one feels the pain when reading, for instance, a piece that begins on a sweet, idyllic note, with young girls picking berries, and eventually transforms into a cry of horror for what their lives will become; a cry of indignation directed at humanity itself.

This is not a book to be read for an in-depth understanding of the Naxal movements or the larger political and social contexts surrounding them (for that, I recommend Rahul Pandita’s excellent Hello Bastar). The view of Naxalbari one finds in Poet of the Revolution is a worm’s eye one, experienced by people who aren’t steeped in far-reaching ideologies – who are, in fact, often confused and wavering in their beliefs – but need to find ways of dealing with personal injustice. One sees a trace of this in Dil’s intriguing decision to convert to Islam, a religion in which he finds greater tolerance of “low-caste” people (but also greater certainty and sense of purpose – “the Muslims considered it a virtue to teach their religion, unlike the Hindus who did not do so”) and which he somewhat bizarrely likens to communism. More than the story of a man immersed in a specific movement or creed, Poet of the Revolution is the story of an itinerant in constant search for himself. A popular song from Dil’s favourite Hindi movie Dil Apna aur Preet Parai went “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” – the words can describe his own life, but this book also lets us see how they can apply to the life of any sensitive, marginalised person, attempting to engage with the world and to understand his place in it.

An old woman and her dogs

Just to spread the word about one of the most amazing people I know: an old woman who lives in a small makeshift shanty next to the PVR Anupam complex in Saket (near the entrance leading to the main parking lot). Pratima Devi – called “Amma” by most of her acquaintances – has been looking after street dogs for years now, on her meagre earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage. She feeds them, gets them sterilised through Friendicoes or other local organisations; dozens of them sleep huddled together in and around her little home – it’s a truly wondrous sight for anyone who knows how territorial street dogs are, and how aggressively they keep newcomers from encroaching on their spaces.

I’ve only actually known Pratima Devi for the past six months, though we have both been in Saket – living five minutes apart – since 1987. I was vaguely aware of her existence over the years: when passing her side of the PVR complex on winter nights, I would see a couple of charpoys with dogs on them, a bonfire burning nearby. Once or twice I saw her looking very dishevelled, yelling at someone in what seemed an ill-tempered way, and I may have formed the impression that she was a belligerent nutcase who communicated only with animals and didn’t like people.

There was a story with a very interior, contemplative tone that I read as a child in one of our Hindi textbooks – I forget the title, but the premise has stayed with me all these years, long after much of what I learnt in school has been forgotten. It was told in the voice of a privileged man who sees a poor person and wants to go across and talk – to try and understand something of this person’s life and circumstances – but finds an invisible force holding him back; some combination of self-consciousness, social conditioning and perhaps an internal prejudice that makes him believe meaningful communication with someone from such a different background is impossible.

Whatever the case, though I was intrigued by the “kutton waali amma” who was often spoken of in our colony, I didn’t make an effort to come close or get to know her. That changed last June, after Foxie went. Driven by an urge that overrode all our hesitations and procrastinations, we went across and said namaste to Pratima Devi, and were relieved to find that she was extremely warm and friendly, and most happy to talk – not just about the dogs but about her life, and ours.

As we spoke to her over the next few days, many little details emerged. She left her village in West Bengal’s Nandigram in the early 1980s, she told us, mainly to get away from her husband, a lout and wastrel. She once worked as an ayah for the family of the actor-model Rahul Dev (and is still in occasional touch with them). A tea-stall she ran in the spot where she currently lives was shut down by the MCD; later she set up a little temple against the wall near her shack – it has, in a way, legitimised her presence, made it more acceptable to the people around (including the many youngsters who park their bikes nearby and are unnerved by the dogs). One of her sons lives in Sangam Vihar, working as a mistri – she has the option of staying with him (I’ve met him, he seems a kindly, concerned chap), but she can’t leave her dogs, and besides one senses that self-sufficiency is important to her. She was awarded a Godfrey Phillips prize for “social courage” a few years ago and proudly shows photos from the ceremony to anyone who visits her. She has applied for an Aadhaar card but is puzzled by the complications of the procedure; a card was once despatched but never made it to her because she has no fixed address. (I’ve seen the application form – it simply says “Near Saket Shauchalay, PVR Complex”.) Many of the dogs have film-star names - Raj Kumar, Dharmendra - which they live up to with their strutting and preening.

Every week or so I go across and check on Pratima Devi, take some food, but hardly ever has she given the impression of being in need. When I show up and ask if I can get some bread and milk for the dogs from the nearby Mother Dairy, she nods with an indulgent little smile, as if she is doing me a favour (and of course, in a post-Foxie world, she is). Or if the evening’s ration has already arrived, she asks me to come after a day or two, or to call her beforehand to check. On one occasion my mother, cradling one of the new pups, remarked aloud that she felt like adopting this one. You’d think that Pratima Devi, given her hand-to-mouth situation, would be only too glad for people to take dogs off her hand, but she practically jumped up and said “Nahin nahin! Abhi yeh bahut chhoti hai – isse mere paas kuch din aur rehna do.” (“No, she’s too little now – let me look after her for a few more days.”)

But it isn’t my intention to paint a rosy picture of her life. One often hears clichés about the “warm smiles” of the poor – clichés built on the sentimentalising of poverty, on the self-serving myopia of the well-off person who chances to see poor people in their moments of relative comfort and tells himself “They have nothing, but look how happy they are.” I have felt strongly about such hypocrisy for a long time, so it came as a jolt to me one day when I realised I may have been adopting a similar attitude to Pratima Devi; taking for granted her apparently infinite capacity for cheerfulness and optimism.

It happened on a day I went to see her after more than a week. She was with a couple of her associates – a parking attendant and another garbage-collector – and looking more depressed and agitated than I had ever seen her. The previous few days had been particularly hard: she had been laid up with a bad fever and cold, had been unable to work or to go to INA market to buy meat for the dogs, and it happened to be one of those phases when hardly anyone had come across to see her or offer help - her son wasn’t in town either.

Moaning through a backache, describing how one of her pups (a tiny Dalmatian, abandoned by some heartless sub-human) had a festering wound and was being treated by a local doctor for an exorbitant Rs 100 a day, gentle Pratima Devi muttered and fumed, half to herself, half to us: she used maa-behen gaalis as she spoke of a man who had promised to help her secure an electricity connection through the MCD, but who had then made off with more than a thousand rupees. “Gareebon ka sab phaaydaa uthaate hain,” she wailed, her face showing no trace of its characteristic warmth and openness. She wondered aloud what would happen to her dogs after she passed on. (It’s a thought that worries everyone who knows her; though these are street dogs, they are more pampered and loved than many house pets. When she’s away even for an hour or two, they get restless and start chasing after passing autorickshaws to see if she has returned.)

This encounter was a bucket of cold water in my face. I have seen her many times since that day, and she has mostly been back to her upbeat self – but that one day, when the mask slipped, is not something to forget.

I didn’t intend this post as a call for aid, but Pratima Devi has had more bad days than good ones recently (being old and living on the street as the Delhi winter gets worse will do that), and she could always do with some help, even if she doesn’t ask for it. So do go across and see her if you are in Saket sometime, and if you like dogs. (I wouldn’t normally put in that second proviso – Pratima Devi is well worth meeting even if you aren’t an animal-lover – but one must be practical and spell out these things; if you get within 10 feet of her you’ll have to contend with a few dogs first growling softly and then, when they know you mean no harm, sniffing or nuzzling you.) Or if you’re interested in meeting her but would prefer a sort of “introduction”, send me an email and I’ll take you across.

P.S. must say this, though I wish I didn’t have to. It infuriates me that people sometimes come by in their cars and leave their animals with this poor old woman, treating her like a fully funded animal shelter – which she emphatically is not. (Not that registered animal shelters have it easy either.) Her heart is big enough for all these dogs (her son tells me she holds the compassionate but highly impractical view that she should get bitches spayed only after they have had one litter of pups), but it increases her burden enormously, as well as adding to her worries about the future. So please, DO NOT use her as a dumping ground for unwanted pets.

P.P.S. Here's a photo of Pratima Devi with two of her friends at an event held to mark Anti-Rabies Day; Abhilasha went with her.

Net gains: on the trials of the self-promoting author

[Did a version of this for GQ magazine]

“I have no trouble simulating entire galaxies on my computer,” Biman Nath tells me, “but when it comes to putting up a status update on Facebook I freeze in terror.” The first part of that sentence might sound megalomaniacal - if you don’t know much about astrophysics, which is Biman’s area of expertise – but he is one of the most likeable people I’ve met. He is also the author of the historical-fiction novels Nothing is Blue and The Tattooed Fakir, and we are speaking about how writers interact with their readers in the cyber-age. Apparently the social-networking world can be a Great Vast Unknown even for someone who routinely works on the scale of light years and constellations.

Biman and I were exchanging notes just before a panel discussion we were in, at Samanvay, the Indian Languages Festival in Delhi. The topic was “Where’s My Reader?” and one of its talking points was that in a busy literary world – with publishers producing hundreds of books each year – mid-list authors end up doing a great deal of their own marketing and promotion. Some are comfortable with this; others, not so much.

There was a time long, long ago when writers were mostly seen as reticent, unsocial animals, but these days the continuum is much bigger. There are still many authors who slave over a book for years, drafting and re-drafting and re-re-drafting, and then feel caught in the headlights when show-time arrives and they have to sell the “product” – but there are just as many who get the actual writing done reasonably fast and seem to come into their own when doing the self-promoting. (A wag might suggest that some of the latter are really marketing people at heart!)

It is fun to have diverse author types in the same space during a public conversation, because their body language and the things they say are very revealing. Thus, Biman is mildly discomfited about writing becoming a “performance art” – during the talk he joked good-naturedly about that ultimate ivory-tower artist, the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, “who wrote the last sentence of his last book, put it down and then promptly went and committed Hara-kiri”. (What better example could there be of someone letting his work do all the talking?) On the other hand, Madhuri Banerjee – author of the Penguin Metro Reads novels Losing My Virginity and Other Dumb Ideas and Mistakes Like Love and Sex – said she often uses online media to promote herself. “I update constantly because if I say something on Facebook that someone finds interesting, that might be a potential new reader.” Madhuri was a little defensive about the snobbery directed at “mass-market” writers – the kind of snobbery that condemns entire genres without looking closely at the individual books in them – but she was also assured enough to joke about how she constantly bullies her marketing team, even calling them up every day to check how many copies have been sold. “I want it to touch a lakh copies soon, okay?”

Self-promotion can be a two-edged sword. There is something pleasingly egalitarian about the fact that the distance between authors and readers has reduced (it’s usually possible now to get in touch with a published writer through Twitter or an official website), but dealing with a relentless stream of feedback can be difficult when you’re trying to get your writing done. Even Madhuri was clear that however much she enjoyed interacting with readers, she didn’t let their suggestions influence her stories and characters beyond a point.
 
Occupying a middle space between Biman and Madhuri was the fourth member of our panel, Palash Krishna Mehrotra, author of the short-story collection Eunuch Park and the narrative non-fiction The Butterfly Generation. Palash is not exactly a social-media veteran, but he made the point that some of the best reviews of his work come from Netizens who aren’t professional critics. “On the internet I can find readers who engage with my writing more deeply than the poor sucker working for a newspaper, who might not have read any of my earlier books but gets given the new one to review on a four-day deadline.”

The lazy “speed-reviewing” he alludes to often entails reading a book’s jacket description and flipping through the first few pages to get a very basic sense of what it is “about”. This is dishonest at the best of times, but it can be especially problematic in an age when books come with simplistic labels. There is a growing perception among authors that publishers are over-eager to put their books in sweeping categories so that they are easier to market; The Butterfly Generation, for example, is a collection of vignettes about young urban Indians – mostly from the milieu that Palash himself is familiar with – but the international publisher, expecting a wholesale “India Book”, looked at the manuscript and wondered where the chapter about software engineers was. (“Even software engineers are fed up of reading about themselves!” the author snapped back.)
 
Given these and the many other complications of the publishing boom, authors are left with little choice but to look for their own ways of reaching people who might be interested in what they have to say. After all, even official book launches are usually seen as vanity events for the “inside crowd”, not really geared to selling books or tapping new markets. “They ask me to arrange a celebrity in every city who can come and do the reading,” said Palash, who emerged as quite the sit-down comedian during our talk, “and I tell them, you know, I wouldn’t mind reading from my own book for a change!

“There are times when I go to a book event wearing a kurta and looking all serious, and then discover it has turned into a dance party.” Little wonder then that the virtual-world tango between writers and readers is becoming increasingly spirited; sacrilegious though it might sound, if Mishima was part of the cauldron of contemporary Indian publishing, he may have been tempted to tuck away that seppukku sword and click on the "share status" button.

The Dibakar Banerjee files

The new issue of The Caravan has my profile/interview/general-reflections piece on director Dibakar Banerjee. The first thing – quite possibly the only thing – you will notice about the story is that it is Very Long. (The first draft was more than one-fifth the size of the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book.) But it could have been even longer, and at some point in the not-too-near future I may put up an extended/modified version here (or the full transcripts of conversations spread over many days). Meanwhile, here’s the Caravan link again.

Update: I hereby excuse myself from responsibility for any insane grammatical errors in the piece (I just noticed one, in the single excerpt I've read, and there must be more). Pity, but such oversights often happen with pieces of this length, involving a long-drawn-out process of revisions and overenthusiastic/hurried proofing. (It happened with the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book, where the Harper Collins desk blithely introduced errors into the copy at the last possible stage.)

Transgressions in Indian cinema - at the Apeejay Kolkata lit-fest

A reminder about the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival - the schedule of events (PDF file) is here. I'm moderating a session titled "Transgressions: Essaying the New in Indian Film" with Shyam Benegal, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Onir and Mira Hashmi on January 10, so do drop in if you're around and interested.

And here's the schedule as a Jpeg. (Click to enlarge.)