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This episode of The Scene and the Unseen is brought to you by Intel.
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How do we see the world?
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A glib answer to that is differently.
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You and I can stand at a crowded intersection and look out into the world and see totally
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Indeed, we could look at the same rock and see two different rocks.
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The world is the scene and the unseen, and the scene is such a small part of it.
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This is why I love reading literature.
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Books open windows for us into other worlds, even when they are set in the same world as
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For those who don't read, you have one life to live.
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For those who do read, there is no end to lives and to seeing.
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Now while I do read a lot, my biggest complaint about myself is that I don't see enough.
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I go places, I do things, but I remain stuck inside my own head.
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But a writer has to learn to see.
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How else can you build worlds for others?
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This is why I enjoy chatting with novelists on this show.
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Each of them sees the world in a unique way.
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And when they share some of that with me, I can also see a little better.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Sarah Rai, a writer, a novelist who straddles multiple languages and multiple
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Sarah is a granddaughter of the great Munshi Premchand, the giant of Hindi literature.
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But she doesn't often like this fact mentioned because hey, she stands out as a literary figure
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and as a person in her own right.
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She's equally at ease with Hindi, Urdu and English.
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And all her fiction, in fact, is written in Hindi.
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But she's translated writers like Vinod Kumar Shukla into English, as well as some of her
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I met Sarah when I agreed to be on the jury of the JCB Literature Prize this year.
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And Sarah was the head of the jury.
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So our jury meetings would happen on Zoom.
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The five of our jury members would gather to discuss a fixed number of books every week.
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And Sarah would lead the discussion by talking about each book in detail.
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For me, and I think for all the other jury members, it was a jaw dropping experience.
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She would talk about each book with such depth that she taught us not just something about
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the book all of us had read, but also something about reading itself.
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I figured that whenever we could meet in person, I simply had to record an episode with Sarah.
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So finally, in the second week of November, we made it happen.
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She was passing through Mumbai, I invited her home for lunch and a recording in my home
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And we had the conversation you will hear now.
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I loved having this conversation.
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And I loved listening to it again later, because I love books and writing.
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And Sarah reminds me why.
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I think you'll like it as well.
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But before that, a quick commercial break.
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My listeners often ask me, how do you manage your time?
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How do you manage your workflows, your search, so on and so forth?
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This is also a question I often ask my guests, we are limited by our brains by the organic
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matter we are made up of.
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And there is only so much energy and bandwidth we have to use in one day.
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Sarah, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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I'm so pleased to be here and so nice to meet you finally in person.
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I've kind of been waiting for a long time to record this episode.
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But one of the things that I wasn't very happy about while researching for the episode is
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that there's so little of your writing actually available in English.
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Like I read a couple of great stories by you, which we'll talk about and also this wonderful
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essay you wrote for Caravan, which was so rich in impressions and ideas.
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But as you came in, you just mentioned that you've also got other essays in the pipeline,
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including one that talks about memories and the layers of memories that builds one's life.
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And you kindly offered to read it out for us.
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So I'm going to take you up on that offer.
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Tell me a little bit about this essay and then go ahead.
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Amit, basically it's going to form the preface to my book of autobiographical essays that
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The book is almost done.
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I think maybe one more essay left to write.
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And it's basically a family memoir kind of thing, but it's not actually a linear thing.
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Like all the essays are separate.
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They are usually about a place, a house or a person, various people in my family.
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So they are all interconnected essays, but they are not necessarily one continuous narrative
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So this piece that I wrote, which is quite a short piece, really, I mean, I intended
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I'm still not very sure whether I should use it as a preface.
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But it's basically about living in a house, which is a family house in Allahabad in Raman
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In it, the house is also a character.
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The house is a character in the sense that, I mean, it describes the house, the rooms
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inside and how people lived in it and my memories of those people who are not there anymore.
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So it sort of starts off like that.
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So that's the beginning of my...
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I can't wait to hear it.
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So should I read it out now?
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So the piece is called Palimpsest.
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And well, anyway, I'll just read it out.
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I mean, I'm not going to explain what it is about because the listeners will get the sense
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It's called Palimpsest.
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There is something melancholy in the act of writing about one's past.
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This is especially the case if most of that past has taken place in the same house in
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It is your family home, the same house where you have always lived, and yet it is different.
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There were people who lived here, but many of them are no longer alive.
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Absent, they are still palpable.
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The air is saturated with their presence, their invisible script written upon each corner
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You pull the door and with a creaking of springs, it opens.
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The rooms are all there.
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You feel the volume of the space.
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You know the pictures that were on the walls, the exact position of the furniture, the objects
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Nothing has changed, but everything feels changed.
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You remember the way light fell from the skylights, some of which are now blocked up or have disappeared
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in changes made to the house.
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There are cobwebs hanging from ceilings too high to be cleaned.
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Not that you want to clean them.
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There are termites too, that swarm out of the ground and make mud tubes, reaching the
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most unlikely of places.
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You can, if you listen hard, hear the quiet clicking sounds they make as they move and
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munch away at the woodwork, hidden from sight.
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You want to disturb nothing.
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Each space in the house has a history, and it's as if everything in it casts a shadow,
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has a sort of ghost life.
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You try to catch the shadows, to pin them down, but it is not easy.
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The harder you try, the more elusive becomes the business of shadows, and you come away
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You become obsessed with mirrors.
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Some mirrors are blind and reveal nothing.
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There are others in which you look and find in your face your mother or your grandmother.
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You see resemblances and patterns you had not noticed before.
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You hold up your hand to the mirror and look at the blue veins on your hands that taper
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into the fingers with their neatly paired nails.
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The prominent, busy lines intersect and connect with the lesser ones, like so many rivers
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meeting with their tributaries on the triangular delta of your hand.
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With a start you realise that it is your mother's hand you are looking at.
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It is then that you know that you cannot ever be separated from your history.
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Your past is embedded in your body, but sometimes mirrors are false, distorted, damaged or askew.
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These are the abstract mirrors, mirrors that you have imagined into being, and that can
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There is a patch of black chilies in the garden, black leaves, deep mauve flowers, and the
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little chilies like black tongues.
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They look mysterious, with a hint of virulence about them.
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Watch out for those black tongues, they can put a hex on you.
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The black tongues curse, and the curse comes true.
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You think of the chilies when you look at a photograph taken on Norose in the year 1971.
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White was the colour for that year, it was the year of peace.
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Everyone in the photo is dressed in white, and all the food on the dastarkhan is also
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You look at the faces in the photo and realise that all of those twelve people, except for
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you and your sister, are dead.
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There is nothing strange about that.
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This is no narrative of loss.
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Dying is merely a function of living.
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But then you see your mother, she is wearing a white saree printed with a paisley pattern
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Short-sighted she always wears glasses, and these particular ones have an onion-pink frame.
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The family has gathered round the teapot in the front veranda of the house.
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Uncharacteristically she does not participate at all in the conversation, while a mysterious
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smile plays on her lips.
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Quite suddenly, with an absolutely impassive face, she winks.
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Only then do you see that the lens from that side of her spectacles is missing.
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It is a comic moment, and everyone laughs, but it also brings home to you that there
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is much that you do not see.
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Your father comes to you when you are not thinking about him.
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His laughter is loud and resonant, and the whole room rings with it.
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It flows down the stairs in a stream of gushing sound, and it gathers in a pool at the bottom
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It rests on the laburnum that is in full bloom, startling into flight a flock of roosting
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His body shakes, his eyes filled with tears.
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It is not clear whether the laughter is happy or despairing.
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One day you enter a room, and you find your brother sitting there.
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He leans back and closes his eyes, as he does when he does not want to listen to what is
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She is always speaking.
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A complicated web of lies floats just beneath her skin.
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For twenty-six years he has tried to get to the meaning of what she says, but the truth
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can just be glimpsed in flashes, for it can be found only in what she has not said.
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None of this happens, of course.
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It cannot, because none of these people are here any longer.
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It's the mirror again, your personal mirror that keeps reflecting the past moments of
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which your life is composed.
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It invents some of those moments too, and you can never be sure if something really
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The strange thing about living in the same house all your life is that you cannot go
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back to it, because for you are still in it.
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And yet you keep going back.
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It is not the house that you are returning to, but a time.
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The house merely holds the accumulations of the years, evidence to the many layers of
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living in it that are transposed, one upon another.
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You turn the things of the house over in your hands, curious objects, threadbare fabric,
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rusty biscuit tins holding loose clattering buttons of all description, old watches that
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stopped long ago, opaque lamp chimneys, issues of Lilliput magazine yellowed with age, and
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you don't want to let go of anything.
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For those things, unbeknownst to you, have become part of who you are.
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Sitting on the terrace, you look about you.
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The Algeria nervosa has spread its abundant foliage all over one side of the house.
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It's the elephant creeper.
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So quickly, in fact, that you feel it has grown another tendril or two in the moment
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You wonder if its roots go as deep into the earth as the plant does into the air.
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It has the house, and you, firmly in its grip.
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You shake yourself and try to leave.
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You've been trying to leave for years, fearing that in this stationary town with its two
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rivers and its narrow roads, you'll become a pumpkin or a gourd.
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You look at other houses in other cities.
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Other lives flash across your mind.
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Hypothetical lives lived hypothetically.
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For you know that you will never go away.
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The house will never let you go.
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That's so beautiful and very moving.
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And I love that image of a pumpkin or a gourd in this small town.
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This reminded me of a poem by Constantin Cavafy called The City.
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Oh yes, I love that poem.
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It's one of my favorites.
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Let me read it out for my listeners.
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This was so reminiscent of that.
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You said, I'll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than
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Whatever I do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead.
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How long can I let my mind molder in this place?
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Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life here, where I've spent
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so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.
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And now there's a stop quote within the poem and the narrator continues.
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You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
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This city will always pursue you.
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You'll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these
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You'll always end up in this city.
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Don't hope for things elsewhere.
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There's no ship for you.
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Now that you've wasted your life here in this small corner, you've destroyed it everywhere
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It's such a lovely poem.
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Cavafy is also one of my favorite poets.
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Out of the other poems, I like this one too.
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Yeah, I kind of love this one the most actually out of all his work because it speaks so much
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So, you know, one of the things that I think all our listeners would have noticed while
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you read that passage out and that I constantly kept noticing when I read all your essays
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and your stories and I'll come back to that, you know, as we reach those particular pieces,
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is your power of observation, like all these little details that you're coming out with.
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Like one thing I tell my writing students all the time is avoid the abstract, go for
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There's a lot of richness there.
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Now I'm kind of curious about is this power of observation something that was always part
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of you or is it something that you felt the need to cultivate as a writer?
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Because another sort of journey you've spoken about is of being a young writer, like, you
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know, you've spoken of the bungalows of Allahabad and how they were all so far away from each
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other and you were like an island and you had no sense of that larger society around
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So you were like a writer without material.
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You knew there was a writer inside you, but you had no material, which is how when I look
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back on my 20s, it was kind of exactly like that, that you want to write, but you haven't
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So this acute power of observation, has it always been there even before you had this
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consciousness of wanting to write?
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Amit, I think the power of observation also comes from dullness.
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I know it sounds like the complete opposite of what we are trying to get at, but it's
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the dull, dull day on which nothing is happening.
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You are there quietly by yourself and you're looking around, you're looking at things.
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So you tend to notice much more because your mind is not distracted.
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And I mean, what you said about the bungalows and how I lived, I mean, I spent my early
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years and I still do in fact live in the same bungalow, though the city itself has changed
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But my early years were very quiet years in the sense that nothing was happening.
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These bungalows, Allahabad is a city of bungalows that had been built by the Brits long ago.
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And many of those bungalows have now gone, they've been demolished.
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But ours is one of the few bungalows that remains.
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So my life in those bungalows was one of solitude, I would say, even as a child, I mean, there
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were not many people to be met and neighbours were far away and we were not really particularly
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interacting with the neighbours.
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So it was a lot of space around you and you could sort of wander about in that space,
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climb trees, I even chewed leaves to find out if they're poisonous.
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Yeah, so I survived that.
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But I mean, there were all these experiments that could be done and you could just observe
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nature and observe, I mean, it became like examining everything under a microscope really,
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because I mean, nothing else was going on to take your attention.
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There were birds, bird calls, all these things you were noticing.
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So it was, in a sense, an idyllic life.
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But of course, it was far away from other people.
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So while writing stories, one also has to know those people.
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And in India, that already comes with a challenge, because all the names, for instance, of people,
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they come with their background, you know, Mr. Jhunjhunwala or Mr. Gupta or Mr. Srivastava,
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Mrs. Dhondi or whatever, you know, these people all have different sets of geographical and
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also cultural sort of features.
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So you already don't have that, which was what I found difficult in the beginning when
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I started to write, that living in a bungalow like this, basically, you don't really, I
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mean, there's the linguistic aspect also of it, which is that in the kind of house that
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I grew up, there were many books and books in several languages.
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And the languages that I heard around me, like we spoke Hindustani at home.
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In school, it was English.
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And we were supposed to be fined if we spoke in Hindi, so that never really happened.
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I mean, we were not fined and people spoke in Hindi all the time, but that was the thing
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that they did not encourage speaking in Hindi in school.
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And at home, we were embarrassed to speak in English because our family had a sort of
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I did not sort of, nobody, none of us spoke in English at home.
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And then there was the Awadhi that was spoken around us, like people, the servants, for
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instance, they spoke Awadhi and other people around who had a rural background, they were
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My grandmother spoke Bhojpuri because, I mean, she came from, I mean, from that side, further
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east UP, Banaras was my, I mean, Lamahi, actually that's a village called Lamahi, which is
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about three miles away from Banaras, and there's Bhojpuri spoken over there.
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So she would speak Bhojpuri.
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And Bangla, my father was a fluent Bangla speaker, and well, he spoke Bangla quite often.
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If he found out that you knew Bangla, he would always prefer to speak in Bangla and not in
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But he spoke to his mother in Bhojpuri.
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So there was all these sort of sounds sort of falling, kind of multilingual sort of thing
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that was constantly, and that's not my situation, particularly in India, because there are many
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people who would have a similar experience of many languages being spoken around them.
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So there was this thing of which language to write in.
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When I started out writing, I mean, I wondered because English, I was quite fluent with English,
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my reading was in English, in school we were taught to write in English, so it seemed that
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perhaps one should write in English.
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But then while speaking, I was more comfortable with Hindustani.
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So there was this whole struggle going on, groping for language as it were, which language
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to write in, and this sort of lack of a language, and then the lack of material because I didn't
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really know anyone around.
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So all these kind of added up to a sort of angst about writing, which I was not able
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to overcome for a very long time, and this flight of writing from writing fiction pursued
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me for a long time, long, long time.
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And I think finally in my 40s, I started writing something like that.
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So I'll take your point about dullness being a factor for noticing, but the point is, generations
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of people went through the similar dullness and didn't emerge with, didn't have those
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powers of observation, frankly, I mean, I kind of didn't, I mean, that is, if there
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is one thing that I think I lacked, it was this looking at everything with that acute
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Very often I've kind of eaten a meal and you could ask me later, what did it taste like?
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And I wouldn't have noticed because that mindfulness is just not there.
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So a lot of threats to pick up on.
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But when you spoke about languages, like elsewhere, you've spoken about how your mother, Zahra
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Rai, and her sister, Mogul Musud, you know, they used to write in Urdu and then they used
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to publish it in Hindi because of, you know, easier to get published that way.
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And they would tell each other stories and they would add a f sound, F sound, so that
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other people couldn't make out what they were saying because this one consonant would
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be really prominent and all that.
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And I imagine that that would lead to a heightened mindfulness of language itself, like, what
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You know, what, how are the different sounds interacting?
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How does something sound?
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How different kind of words come together?
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Like the exact same example that I mentioned about food could be a very bad habit for a
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writer if you're not mindful of language at all.
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And of course, most of the writing one does is kind of an autopilot.
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But you arrive at that autopilot and you build that reflexive style by first being mindful.
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So was there a sense when you were kind of growing up, was there a sense where language
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Were you thinking of language differently from, say, you know, the people you went to
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school with at St. Mary's or whatever, was there that kind of close attention to what
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words are being used, how a story is being constructed and so on?
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Well, actually, in my family, language was one thing that was constantly spoken about.
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I mean, people, if there was some word, for instance, that appeared that you did not know,
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immediately a dictionary would be fished out and the word would be made clear and also
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sometimes go into the root of that word, whether it was coming from Arabic or Persian or whatever,
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you know, depends which language the word belonged to.
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So there was this heightened consciousness of language in my family.
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And as you said, I mean, my mother and my aunt both wrote their stories first in Urdu,
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which was their primary language.
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And then because of ease of publication and just wider reach of publication, they switched
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and they wrote their scripts out again in Hindi.
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And they were constantly, I mean, their early education, they did not go to school.
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The Malvi used to come at home to teach them.
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And of course, they had many tales about how they used to give the Malvi the slip.
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Like he would come and Malvi Sahab was very fond of his opium.
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So he'd come and he'd sit down and he'd set them the work for that day.
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And he'd put on, have his opium and then he'd fall into a deep sleep.
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So these kids, I mean, they're really wicked kids, I think, I mean, they were sort of pretending
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to sort of move backward and forward, learning their Farsi and learning their poetry and
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And then they would go to the kitchen and pick up this huge tin thali from there and
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bang on it with a huge stone.
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So this sounded like the bell that came from the town hall at 12 o'clock or whatever.
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And then sort of the Malvi Sahab would wake up suddenly and say, oh, what was that?
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As the gajar baj gaya, you know, gajar baj tha tha.
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So gajar baj gaya meant that his lesson was over.
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So ha ha Malvi Sahab, hum do toh ek gante se par rahe hain, you know, and whatever.
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And then he'd shuffle off and the lesson would be over and then they'd be free to do all
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their little pranks all over the place.
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So I mean, so they never really had a formal education in that sense.
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But even so, they were really well versed in their Farsi and their Urdu and they knew
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And for every occasion, they'd come up with, you know, a suitable couplet.
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So all this whole thing of many languages was already there at home.
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You know, one could hear this and these languages sort of went into a sleeping pool of languages,
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I would say, inside me, which never emerged at that point.
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But there's this whole mysterious thing about writing that when you sit down to write, it's
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like one word follows another.
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And somehow what emerges is what you may have felt, say, 40 years ago, and you don't know
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which bird it was singing in the pine tree on which particular Sunday or which line someone
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said that is suddenly going to surface when you're writing.
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And you will not be able to think of that when you're actually not writing.
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So it's a very mysterious and a very magical process.
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So language too is part of that, you know, the words for these things come when you're
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actually writing them and they are somewhere in your submerged memory and you don't remember
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If you consciously try to remember them, they will not come out.
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So that's how languages have worked for me.
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It's something, it's more a process of absorption, you know, it's just something that is going
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inside you and is waiting for that time.
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So I mean, when you put it down on paper, it's just something, it's like when you put
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this lemon juice on, you know, if you write something with lemon juice and you iron it,
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then the writing appears.
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Otherwise it's invisible.
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So it's a bit like that, you know.
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So these things are already within you.
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And when you write, they just, you recognize them rather than remember them.
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So the writing is already there and the process of writing is like the act of ironing.
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I'm also fascinated by a sort of another thread that came up when you were reading that piece
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that comes up now, that comes up in your other work, which is sort of the thread of memory.
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Like I did an episode with Aanchal Malhotra, who had done a very fine book on partition,
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you know, just looking at the objects people carried with them during partition and the
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memories that they carried.
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And like while researching for that, one of the things I realized was that how memory
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works in the brain is that when you remember something, you're remembering what happened.
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But every subsequent time, you're remembering the last remembering of it.
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And therefore, over a period of time, your memories can grow richer or can fade or can
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have other layers painted onto them by whatever, which is why, you know, sometimes if you shared
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a memory with someone 20 years ago, and you both discuss it, you might find that both
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of you remember it completely differently, while one would assume the instant after it
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happened, it would have been the same thing, but over time, it's kind of changed.
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And what I find in your essays and so on is that there is a lot of very deep remembering
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and I say deep remembering, not just in a sense of events, but also all these impressionistic
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details that are kind of all over the place.
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I saw my father struggle with Parkinson's before he passed away, and his memory was
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kind of going before that for a few years.
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And one of the things that one of the common phenomena in people whose memory goes in all
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day age, and which I saw in my father, was that the edges remain very stark.
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So you remember what happened yesterday, and you remember what happened when you were 10.
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And it's those middle periods which kind of tend to go.
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And I remember once he asked me that, you know, what were you like growing up?
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Because I don't remember.
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I think about that because when I look back on my own process of remembering things, you
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know, some people that never had meaning suddenly have meaning because of the way I have changed,
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or just the nature of memory changes and one forgets so much.
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So since you have both been someone who is playing around a lot in that pool of memories,
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both in your writing and I'm sure in these autobiographical essays as well, which I can't
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wait to read, and as someone who is deeply self-reflective, what are sort of your thoughts
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Like, is there a sense in which your life at 10 is being more richly lived now than
#
it was when you were 10?
#
I think that is true because actually, I have always thought, in fact, I wrote about this
#
in my novel also, that the past actually never dies.
#
The past becomes present for you when you remember it.
#
So in a sense, there is no past.
#
I mean, everything at the moment of remembering, you are living it, right?
#
I mean, sort of, it's just there for you.
#
And also memories changing, you said that you may remember something and last time it
#
was completely different.
#
And I think that's what fiction is all about.
#
Perhaps life is a fiction, you know, because you live things and later you remember them,
#
it's something else you remember and when you're writing about it, some other thing
#
You know, so it's all part of this whole mysterious universe of words and memories
#
and how words recall those memories, which keeps changing.
#
And if two people have, say, been through some incident together, their remembering
#
of it can be completely different.
#
It's also the individual perception of things that comes into play.
#
And people, some person may remember a certain thing about that day, the other person may
#
remember something else.
#
So it just becomes like that, different memories.
#
So it's these various layers and various sort of submersions, I would say, and things
#
that you come up with that just add to the whole persona of the writer, I think.
#
I mean, it's just people do a lot of detective work.
#
For instance, when you're writing something, you publish a story, so people, oh, this is
#
about this one, you know, people say, and it's a very irritating question for any writer,
#
because when I'm writing, for instance, the story has to be grounded somewhere.
#
You can't base it in some fictional place.
#
It has to be a place that you know, and you can write the details off.
#
But the story itself, when it's put into that background, into that ground, rather, is a
#
So, I mean, it's not about so and so, or you know, people always try to find parallels,
#
especially people who know you try to find parallels in your stories.
#
But I think that's a completely sort of not a good way of looking at sort of writing like
#
But I think we live our lives largely as fiction, you know, and the memories that get created
#
are also fiction from that point of view.
#
Yeah, fascinating to think of it like that.
#
Tell me a bit more about your childhood, because, you know, got this collection of your grandfather
#
Munshi Premchand's collected stories, which had an introduction by you.
#
And in that introduction, you wrote, and I'll read this bit out, a mention of Babuji would
#
crop up in conversation, the simplicity with which he chose to live his life, his idealism
#
and high moral standards, his loud and infectious laughter, his writing at odd hours of the
#
night early in the morning, often by light of a hurricane lamp, his commitment to the
#
oppressed and downtrodden, his belief that money corrupts, the notion that being poor
#
is somehow spiritually exalting, a little hypocritically permeated the atmosphere in
#
our well-to-do home, so much so that as a child, when asked once what I'd like to be
#
when I grew up, I answered that I'd like to be poor.
#
His inability to clear a qualifying entrance exam for college because his maths was weak,
#
the particular vegetables he'd been advised not to eat because of his poor digestion,
#
talk about him was frequent and he was never far from us, hovering benignly in our consciousness,
#
a somewhat larger than life figure in the family cupboard to be thought of with pride,
#
How was it sort of like growing up in Premchand's household, who's outside the household of
#
course is a legend and much loved by people in a very visceral way as you go on to describe
#
later in the essay, but at the same time, like your sort of answer about how I'd like
#
to be poor when I grow up, I guess, did that aura of Premchand and also did the sort of
#
– your family was very literary, both your parents were artists and they were accomplished.
#
In fact, your grandmother herself was a very formidable person and I'll ask you more about
#
But growing up then, as you did, what was that like?
#
Did it set you apart from everyone else?
#
Did you have this sort of feeling that I have to live up to this?
#
Like earlier you mentioned you were scared to speak English at home because hey, you
#
know, the greatest Hindi writer is home.
#
So tell me a little bit about how that played out.
#
It was actually a fear of standing apart, you know, I mean, because in school, I mean,
#
in the Hindi book, obviously, I mean, every year we would have a Premchand story in the
#
book that we were taught and I would sort of think of it with dread the day when that
#
story would be read because the teacher would point me out at once, oh, that's her grandfather
#
who wrote this and everyone would turn around to look at me.
#
So it was a moment of pride for me, but it was also a moment of dread.
#
I was a very shy child, I was a pathologically shy child and then to have everyone notice
#
you and, you know, maybe talk about you, think about you.
#
So all that somehow made you stand apart.
#
And it was not something that I quite enjoyed.
#
Inside I was very pleased.
#
Look, my grandfather was so great that everyone knows about him and all that.
#
But it was his very largeness, the very, you know, his greatness outside the home that
#
made him somehow out of reach for me.
#
I mean, of course, I read the stories, firstly, we all went to an English medium school.
#
So Hindi was not a language that one was reading on a regular basis.
#
Of course, one read the textbook and all that.
#
But I actually came to reading Hindi much later.
#
I've also discussed this in that essay that I wrote when my father was choosing stories
#
for Kahani and all these whole bunch of stories would come and, you know, there were too many.
#
So he'd asked me also to sift through some of them.
#
So then I started reading Hindi.
#
But Hindi literature as such, as far as Premchand went, I had not really read very much Premchand
#
And also there was this feeling somehow that I'm related to him, you somehow have inhaled
#
his writing without having read it, you know, this very peculiar feeling.
#
And then slowly, of course, I one became aware of the writing and I read it much later in
#
And when this Kahani thing happened and one was reading more comfortably in Hindi, and
#
I actually tutored myself to read in Hindi and to write in Hindi, because, I mean, when
#
people used to ask me, even when my collection of Hindi stories had been published, that
#
did you write them in Roman?
#
How did you write them in Hindi?
#
So it was always this linguistic kind of migration that was happening all the time in me.
#
I mean, I was thinking in Hindi or sometimes in English sometimes and, you know, the reading
#
and the writing were crossing and the whole process of translation, for instance, also
#
began as a sort of groping for language and which language is to find which language was
#
I was the most comfortable in.
#
And that process has never really changed.
#
You know, I still fumble, I think maybe this will be better in English, that this will
#
The knowledge of Urdu also complicated it a little bit, because then there's Urdu also
#
to be reckoned with, you know.
#
So I mean, it's all these, but I don't think of them as a disadvantage, rather they contributed
#
to a kind of richness of voice.
#
I think if you know other languages, they are always pushing up between beneath the
#
language that you're writing in.
#
So you get a sense of a larger sort of linguistic culture when you're writing, say in Hindi,
#
I like to write in Hindi because things around me are happening in Hindi.
#
You know, I mean, everything that's taking place is happening in Hindi.
#
And Hindi also has the advantage that you can lace it with things from other languages,
#
like registers are important.
#
For instance, if there's someone who's swearing or some vendors calling out, you know, little
#
phrases like that, which are impossible to translate in English.
#
And English already has a sort of middle class feel to it.
#
I mean, it seems to me that middle class homes, only people in middle class homes mostly know
#
English and that is the world that they know.
#
So when you write about a person walking on the street, you can't do street speak in
#
Sorry, in English, because the speech is actually much more colorful in the colloquial language.
#
So English has that disadvantage.
#
I mean, it has sort of, the reach is not as great as the regional languages, I think.
#
So I mean, it's a whole world that is closed, in a sense, to the writer in English.
#
I feel, I mean, of course, people are writing, but somehow, I mean, I feel that the languages
#
can get that much better, Hindi, for instance, which is why I decided and my father, of course,
#
wanted me to write in Hindi.
#
So that was also one reason why I started writing, started thinking about writing in
#
But there was this whole lot of other reasons too.
#
Yeah, I think you mentioned in your essay that your father had this belief that whatever
#
is the language of your birth, your mother tongue, you must write in it.
#
Now, you know, Premchand once said that he wrote Hindi in the morning, Urdu in the afternoon,
#
And he also used to take notes for his stories in English, because it just seemed to lend
#
itself to that, the kind of economy of the language, the precision of the language and
#
And it just strikes me as someone who's only really good at one of these languages.
#
The others, I, you know, other languages, I understand, I speak, but English is the
#
only one I've really thought deeply about and written in.
#
And it just strikes me that they're all fundamentally so different from each other that there are
#
things you can express in one that you just cannot express in the other, for example.
#
So is it then the case that the language that you then choose to use at a particular moment
#
is what is appropriate for that task?
#
Like I imagine if you were writing, say a business like email to your bank, you would
#
of course do it in English because you're just putting down a bunch of points.
#
But if you want to capture the ambience around your local panwala, you cannot capture that
#
You have to do that in Hindi.
#
I just find that, you know, being multilingual myself, at least at a sense of speaking these
#
languages, I feel that I'm more fortunate than people in the West who might only know
#
one language because it's kind of richer this way.
#
So is that something you feel at all?
#
And has there been like a process where you've come to peace with knowing that you have all
#
these languages with all the different flavors for all the different uses and not have to
#
think about this is my language?
#
I don't know if the question of which one is mine comes into it because I mean, these
#
are all the languages that compose the universe that is around me, you know, and then even
#
if I'm for instance translating the language that I choose to translate in will also even
#
if it's English, it will have different registers from what I have absorbed from my surroundings.
#
So all these languages compose the environment where I come from.
#
So I don't really sort of think of it as this one is mine and this one is not, you know,
#
it's just something that you have grown up with and something else that has become part
#
So all these languages are part of me.
#
English is something that I have read a lot in most of my reading, in fact, has been in
#
This has also been an advantage in the sense that it has shaped my sensibility in a certain
#
way, and when you read something and it also kind of hones a kind of critical register
#
So when you read something else, for instance, in Hindi, and you know the horizons that are
#
there in Western literature, which is, you know, many other languages, which of course
#
we get those in translation, but even in translation, I mean, you can get a sense of all these other
#
worlds that exist outside India.
#
And you sort of use that lens to look at what is around you, what you are reading, even
#
in the languages what you're reading.
#
So you get a kind of critical faculty and your sensibility has got shaped by the reading.
#
So reading has been very important for me.
#
I mean, reading has been one of the primary things that I have done.
#
I mean, I've been more of a reader rather than a writer, I would say, because I mean,
#
I've been reading from the age of, what, five or whatever it is, I'm very young age, and
#
you know, you sort of go through all these authors and you sort of pick up something.
#
And like when I was eight years old, I think I wrote my first story in English, which I
#
was modeled on the Enid Blyton stories that I would read.
#
And it was picked up by Arvind Mehrotra and my cousins Alok and Amit, who died later.
#
They were bringing out this magazine called Damn You, it was on the pattern of the New
#
York little magazine called Fuck You.
#
So they named it Damn You, and they were all a bunch of teenagers themselves then, they
#
were in university, Allahabad University, and they decided to sort of bring out this
#
So they used it in that because they were running out of material, who's going to give
#
the material to these bunch of teenagers.
#
So anyways, they were looking for material at that point.
#
Of course, it became very famous later and now it's become part of this world sort of
#
magazine thing, you know, so but at that point, so my story, the early story in English was
#
published in that Damn You.
#
So my journey, in a sense, started with English.
#
But then of course, as it went along, there was a huge gap in my writing.
#
It started at that age, but then I wasn't writing very much for a long for many years.
#
And for all these reasons that I was groping for a language and just thinking and agonizing
#
about how I was not being able to write and looking at the shape of my hands, for instance,
#
or looking into my eyes in the mirror and think, oh, this looks like a writer, but I
#
could not somehow, the writer and I could never meet, you know, it was like having a
#
You know, you couldn't meet the writer and I were just, you know, away from each other.
#
So anyway, so and in that time, I came to this, there was this, there's this word Shabd,
#
which in Hindi means sound and it also means word.
#
So this somehow created this bridge for me.
#
It was, it came to my, I mean, I thought about it in that way, that it's a bridge between
#
the heard and the written, you know, because it's a sound also and it's Shabd is a word
#
also, so it's the written word.
#
So that somehow seemed very important to me at that point.
#
It became like, it created a kind of bridge between the heard and the written literature.
#
I mean, there was this language of sound, I thought, which had no meaning behind it.
#
For instance, the whistle of an engine or the sound, the chak-chak sound of the pump.
#
I heard it in the village where I went once, or the sound of the bullock cart wheels grinding
#
These are all sounds and it's a kind of language of sound, but it leads to nothing else, but
#
the language of words leads somewhere else.
#
So I mean, I don't know how, but it created this thing that there's something, the writing
#
can be auditory as well as, you know, something that is written down.
#
So that was an important moment for me.
#
And gradually all these sort of, all this thinking about language finally led to my
#
I think I must have been in my early forties, something like that, when I wrote the first
#
story, which was in Hindi.
#
So that's how my writing career started and I started quite late.
#
I'm a slow writer also, so, you know.
#
So I have like three or four questions arising from here.
#
And one of them is that, you know, you've spoken about how a lot of your early reading
#
was English and it blighted and then by the age of 13, you discover satra and all the
#
Russians and Catherine Mansfield and so on and so forth.
#
Now it strikes me that the different literatures, different world literatures evolved in different
#
ways to be something completely different and to have different sets of values, right?
#
Like for example, David Rubin in the world of Premchand wrote about Premchand himself.
#
He wrote quote, to Premchand belongs a distinction of creating the genre of the serious short
#
story and the serious novel as well in both Hindi and Urdu, virtually single handed.
#
He lifted fiction in those, these languages from a quagmire of aimless romantic chronicles
#
to a high level of realistic narrative comparable to European fiction of the time.
#
And in both languages, he has in addition remained an unsurpassed master.
#
And elsewhere Sheldon Pollock kind of expressed a view that Premchand believed in social realism
#
and he kind of looked down on what he called the feminine quality, the tenderness and emotion
#
of contemporary Bengali literature.
#
And even at the level at which Premchand was writing that he's, you know, and I'm taking
#
Rubin's words for it because I haven't read enough to come to my own judgment, but even
#
at the level at which he is writing where he has lifted it to more serious, it is still
#
very different from the European literature that you read.
#
Like when I read your stories, for example, you're using details and actions a lot.
#
So it's all show, don't tell in a sense, whereas if I look at a story like your translation
#
of Premchand's Idgah, for example, the second last paragraph, when the grandmother realizes
#
what the boy has done and it's all tell, Premchand is just describing her emotions and the way
#
she feels, whereas a more modern writer, a more Western writer would show her doing something
#
and you know, with more economy, just through actions and a detail bring out the same emotion
#
These are different values at play.
#
And again, one doesn't want to make a value judgment on these different values.
#
These are literatures evolving in different kinds of direction.
#
So then the thing is that as someone whose sensibilities are shaped by Western literature,
#
by the precision, the economy, the sort of all the values of Western literature, would
#
you have to slip into a different mode while reading Hindi and Urdu literature?
#
As far as Premchand goes, I mean, the reason why he's doing this, firstly, he's coming
#
Secondly, Premchand was in a hurry.
#
I mean, he had a mission.
#
He is trying to change things.
#
I mean, he has this mission and so very often he's writing at great speed and he died early
#
and he's written so much.
#
I don't think anyone in the world have been thinking about it.
#
I don't think any writer in the world has probably written sort of so much.
#
I mean, he's written short stories, he's written novels, he's written plays, he's written
#
letters, he's written essays, he's done translations.
#
I mean, there's a whole huge range of what he's done.
#
So it's, I mean, I'm constantly foxed by this.
#
I mean, how can a man who is in ill health, he has poor health throughout, he dies at
#
the age of 56, how has he managed to write so much?
#
And he's like fired with some kind of creative instinct and he has to change things.
#
He just believes in change and he just writes and he's seen all these things around him.
#
So he's writing about the reality, which is still pretty relevant actually, because nothing
#
much has changed in the countryside.
#
So he's writing and he's writing across a whole range of things.
#
He's also not just a social realist, I think.
#
There are many stories that are not socially realist stories.
#
There's one tiny story, I don't know, we, Arvind and I have translated that.
#
In fact, we've been working on that project too, which is, we've done about eight to
#
ten stories, we want to do some more and then maybe find a publisher for them.
#
So in that story, it's called Darwaza in Hindi and it's about a door and a little child.
#
This man is sitting with a little child and this child is just looking and he's chasing
#
a bird, he's doing this, that and the door is open all the while and the child is not
#
bothered about the door.
#
And then suddenly somebody goes past on the road and he's selling sweetmeats or something
#
he's selling and the child wants that.
#
And this father who he's sitting with refuses to buy him that.
#
So he gets into this temper and he wants, he rushes to his mother or mother.
#
But the door, which has been open all this while, has suddenly banged shut.
#
And the child who so far had not been bothered with the door is now suddenly very anxious
#
So he starts crying and he runs towards the door and it's a very tiny story.
#
It's about, I think, two pages or something like a very, very short story.
#
So it's not about social realism at all.
#
I mean, it's a very moving, very lovely story.
#
In just a moment, he's caught this moment of this child.
#
So he's written a whole range of things, many other kinds of things also.
#
And even if he sometimes uses, he uses all sorts of devices to get his point across.
#
So I don't know whether it would be right to call him primarily, he is primarily a social
#
realist, but there are other examples of stories that are not in that mode.
#
I didn't mean the example as criticism of Premchand or anything of the sort and we'll
#
discuss him more, but I will just kind of leading to the question of how these different
#
kinds of literatures, how does one look at them?
#
Does one look at them with different lenses?
#
My next question was also, for example, going to be about languages, which is a related
#
question that languages also seem to have qualities of their own, which lend themselves
#
to a certain kind of expression.
#
So it's always seemed to me that say Urdu and Bengali are very expressionistic languages,
#
whereas languages like say Japanese and Korean are much more minimalistic.
#
And you see that in the kind of literature that emerges from these languages and English
#
is in a kind of a middle ground.
#
So if you just do a direct translation, say like a lot of translations of Tagore, for
#
example, and I'm half Bengali, so I know a bit of Bengali, fail completely to me because
#
they are gorgeous and beautiful in Bengali.
#
But if you just try a literal translation, it simply doesn't work because it just seems
#
too overblown and purple and all of that.
#
So as someone who looks at literature, and you've presumably then imbibed all the values
#
of the Western literature that you're reading.
#
How does one adjust one's lens?
#
Of course, one adjusts it for context.
#
If someone like Premchand is writing in the early 20th century, there's only so much you
#
can expect, only so many influences that he was open to.
#
But apart from that, how does one sort of…
#
I think possibly we generalize too much about literature.
#
Because Western literature is also hugely sort of different and Indian literature too
#
So to say that these are Western values and we're trying to apply them to Indian reality,
#
that also does not work.
#
I think because Indian reality comes from a particular milieu.
#
So you have to look at it from sort of you base yourself in that milieu and then look
#
So for instance, a writer like Vinod Kumar Shukla, where is he coming from?
#
He's writing about these small towns, a very ordinary day, some man is walking down the
#
street and some other man is observing him and he thinks, oh, this man went this way
#
and again he's going this way without having come back even once.
#
So there's this absurd kind of quality to it and it gives a sort of space to very lower
#
middle class lives that are normally, one would think are very cramped and living in
#
very sort of poor circumstances, whatever.
#
But I mean, he adds this kind of very sort of almost playful element to the whole thing.
#
So I mean, he is one writer, I mean, there are so many writers who are writing different
#
things even in Hindi or in Bangla, there'd be possibly many more and because Bangla is
#
sort of very well developed literature, Malayalam, as we have seen, has so many different registers.
#
So it's very hard to say that we can train a particular kind of lens to look at these
#
It's hard to adapt to what is being written and where it's set and you judge it on its
#
It happens like that, I think.
#
And also this whole thing of languages being expressionist or minimalistic, okay, Japanese,
#
one can say, yes, it is minimalistic, but for instance, Urdu, I think Urdu is so difficult
#
to translate because I think it's one of the languages in which the form is the content.
#
I mean, the way you say a thing is what it is, it's just, there's nothing else.
#
So that form is very difficult to express in another language.
#
It's a very light, it's a very weightless language.
#
And it has these very fine sentiments, a lot of subtlety.
#
For instance, I was telling someone just the other day that there's this person I know,
#
the son of my famous, I mean, the writer I'm very fond of, Nair Masood, whose book you
#
So he's my absolute favourite in Urdu.
#
So his son is called Timsal.
#
So I wondered what Timsal meant.
#
Then someone told me that it means a crack in a mirror.
#
So I wondered where that came from.
#
So I went into it a little bit and found out that this boy is so beautiful that when he
#
looks at himself in the mirror, the mirror cracks.
#
So the subtlety of that thought, mirror can actually crack when someone is looking into
#
it because it can't take the beauty.
#
So that's a thought that comes in a language like Urdu.
#
I don't know which other French possibly, I mean, some language would have to have a
#
It comes after years and years of thinking and feeling and delicate sensibility.
#
So there are examples in all the languages that prove the other example to be untrue.
#
So one can't really generalise my whole take on this language thing.
#
Another thing you said about Premchand is that he was a man in a hurry and obviously
#
he wrote more than a dozen novels, 300 stories, essays, editorials, letters, plays, biographies,
#
blah, blah, blah, all of that.
#
And actually one writer I can think of who's more prolific, but obviously a complete outlier
#
is a French writer, George Simonon, who wrote some 400 novels.
#
Yeah, but he wrote only novels.
#
Yeah, but 400 of them is...
#
400 novels and they are completely, I mean, like quite a few of them are mystery stories.
#
I mean, at least the ones that I've read.
#
A bunch of them are the May Gray books, obviously.
#
Yeah, the May Gray books.
#
But his serious stuff is really good.
#
I haven't actually read very much of Simonon except these and I think one more which is
#
But I wouldn't put them in the same category.
#
Because I mean, and I think of say, for instance, Charles Dickens, all the major writers of
#
the West, Dickens or Maupassant or, you know, people, I mean, they've all written very fine
#
stuff, but nobody has actually written such a lot.
#
And so Premchand is not just a writer, he's an influencer of that age.
#
You know, he just, he's forming that age.
#
You know, he's like shaping the times.
#
The times are shaping him and he's shaping the times.
#
And one of the reasons that you mentioned in that lovely essay at the start of that
#
book, The Historic Selected Stories, which you edited, is you speak about how he saw
#
art as always having a purpose, his writing as having a purpose.
#
And like in 1936, he gave the speech at the Progressive Writers Conference where he was
#
a chairman, which is called the Aim of Literature, where he spoke about, you know, how these
#
social aims are so incredibly important in, you know, showing the lives of the underprivileged
#
and exposing oppression and all of those things.
#
What you sort of feel about that, because Milan Kundera, of course, among so many others,
#
has written about how that the moment literature goes towards polemic or goes towards having
#
a particular political purpose, it ceases to be literature, it ceases to be art.
#
And in your own writing, the very little of it that I've read in English, though I plan
#
to kind of read all of it soon, in your own writing, you show no signs of that.
#
Your own writing show an interior life of the characters that they are.
#
And they do to me what, you know, I think great art does is that it awakens something
#
It captures a little bit of the human condition to use that slightly pompous cliche.
#
So what is your conception, therefore, of literature?
#
Like people will often ask that, like, on the one hand, I, you know, tell my writing
#
students, for example, that be an indiscriminate reader.
#
If you enjoy reading something, read it.
#
Don't pass value judgment ki yeh pulp book hai and yeh serious literature hai and all
#
But at the same time, you know, there is literature and there is non-literature.
#
And I find it hard to kind of define that.
#
So what would your sense of that be?
#
Like, where does your sense grow?
#
Like, as a kid, of course, you're reading indiscriminately as all of us who grew up
#
in India before a certain year did, because books were so hard to get hold of, we read
#
But at what stage does, do you begin to realize that this is something called literature and
#
I want to do it and this is how it is different?
#
And do you feel that Premchand's sort of having this sort of social objective as part
#
Do you think it affects that in some way?
#
I think, you know, Amit, I think it's the literature is also very influenced by the
#
age in which you are writing.
#
I mean, he's writing at a time when firstly, there is no literature in Hindi, which can
#
be called serious literature.
#
And then he's writing at a time of great social unrest.
#
He's sort of trying to, you know, sort of oppose the British.
#
And he's trying to, you know, he has his literature has a purpose.
#
He wants to do something with that.
#
So he and he wants to write a lot.
#
He wants to, you know, hurry through it when you forward towards his mission.
#
So I think that changes the tone of the whole thing.
#
So it's a different sort of literature.
#
I wouldn't say that this is not literature and that is literature because Milan Kundera
#
or somebody in the West, I mean, they have grown out of the circumstances that they have
#
So it all depends on that and also depends on what you're trying to do with it.
#
So he has a very definite purpose.
#
And I think it's very fine literature.
#
Premchand is very uneven.
#
Some of his things are much finer than others.
#
But on the whole, I would say that he writes something that for the common man in India,
#
I mean, you go anywhere, everybody has read something of Premchand.
#
So for him to touch some kind of deep core in such a vast, you know, part of Indian society
#
So there has to be something in it.
#
It can't just be, this is not literature, there's something else that is finer.
#
I mean, this is a much later thing when you talk of Kundera or talk of the writers of
#
This is a later thing, this whole development in this thing of writing.
#
How does it take place?
#
I mean, the writing itself becomes much more dense.
#
You're spending more time over it, you're sort of thinking about things in a different
#
So it comes from there.
#
I think it's hard to compare the two.
#
I mean, there's this, you know, the situation is completely different.
#
So let's get back to your growth in this period of time where you grew up in this atmosphere,
#
you're reading a lot, you're observing a lot, though you said it's with, you know,
#
it's because it's so dull.
#
But I don't completely buy that.
#
But you're observing a lot, you're growing a lot, you want to write, you've written
#
I think Lucky Horais or something.
#
Yeah, it's just a copy of one of the Enid Blyton stories I'd been reading at the time.
#
The title sounds very Enid Blyton-y.
#
Yes, I mean, it's not, I don't call it my first story, actually, it was a discovery
#
that I could write rather than a story that I wrote.
#
I would put it like that.
#
I mean, of course, this was something unstated inside me that I would write, that I would
#
I mean, I never said it to myself, but somehow that knowledge was there because it was just
#
something that one did, it was just something that one fell into, I would say, because everyone
#
In my entire family, my mother wrote, my grandmother wrote, my aunt wrote, on both sides, my uncle
#
wrote, his wife wrote, I mean, everybody was writing.
#
So it felt like this is something that one does, you know, this is what one will do.
#
And then when I started reading, it also sort of sets off something we knew.
#
So at a point when I was reading and trying to decide which language to write in, and
#
it came to me very late that I could actually write in both.
#
And also the reading set off this thing, I could be reading about something set in Paris
#
or in New York or wherever, but somehow the story, the universal story was the same.
#
So I just felt that all these stories are about me, you know, they are like about me.
#
So it was a very peculiar realization at that point, you know, this was my journey of reading
#
in my school days or college, early college days.
#
So I would just spend days reading.
#
There was nothing else to do.
#
We did not have television and thank goodness we didn't, you know, we didn't have TV or
#
any other screen to look at.
#
So you either read the world or you were outside or you read your book, you know, so it was
#
basically a choice between the two.
#
I mean, I looked around me, the house and the plants and the insects and whatever, so
#
this thing of nature became very strong in me and plus reading all these other books
#
that were set in different places, but I felt that they resonated with me and they were
#
And at some point they generated the thought that perhaps I too can create a world of my
#
own like these people have written, I can also write, you know, so I thought about these
#
things when I was not writing.
#
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I think about current times and I wonder how the sensory overload
#
of the modern times affects us as people.
#
Like if I was growing up today, I don't know if I'd become the kind of reader I did become.
#
I read a lot as a kid, that's a habit I lost as an adult, but you know, today you're surrounded
#
with so many things, there's always YouTube, there's Instagram and it's very fleeting.
#
Like an observation that I think Jonathan Haidt once made is that you would imagine
#
that today because of the internet, you have access to all the knowledge, all the art of
#
ages past, which, you know, people like us didn't, but the counter to that is that what
#
most people are consuming most of the time is something produced in the last three days
#
Whereas I think, you know, that you and I growing up, you know, a decade and a half
#
apart but whatever, a couple of decades apart would still have lived in a time where you
#
read whatever you could get, where you didn't have smartphones to look at all day and 300
#
television channels and so on.
#
No, while we were having lunch earlier, you know, I told you an anecdote and then you
#
told me about the short story that you read that you remembered vividly and I think it's
#
called Jealousy, I'm not very sure, but I think it's called Jealousy, yeah, possibly.
#
Great, I'll look it up and link it in the show notes if it's available anywhere.
#
Yeah, but please check the title because I don't remember it so well.
#
I think it's called Jealousy if I seem to remember.
#
So whatever I link from Prost is.
#
I'll get back home and tell you what it is because I probably have the book somewhere
#
So my question here is, is that even I find sometimes that things I remember really vividly
#
in terms of books that I have read or stories that I have read or, you know, movies that
#
I have seen are things that I saw at a particular phase in life where I won't remember something
#
I saw five years ago so vividly, but something that I saw when I was 15 or 20, I still remember,
#
even if it didn't move me so hard then, it's something that I'll still kind of remember.
#
Like recently, I was chatting with a friend and I suddenly remembered this and I read
#
all the Russians when I was a kid and I remember this very powerful story which didn't strike
#
me so hard at the time, but I suddenly remembered it and I was like, wow, by Leonard Andreyev
#
called The Abyss, which if I remember correctly, and now I'm remembering from memory, is about
#
a guy who goes on this hike with a bunch of friends.
#
They find a girl and they rape her and they kill her, but he doesn't participate.
#
And then later on, he goes back alone and he has sex with the dead body.
#
And that's a whole story.
#
And it's a very interior kind of story, you know, these bad details don't suffice.
#
And it's such a sort of powerful memory, even though at the time, I kind of didn't notice
#
Who were the writers who sort of…
#
Well, I mean, your recounting this story actually put me in mind of another one, which is fairly
#
not very similar, but fairly similar.
#
I mean, like there's this, it's by Raymond Carver and it's called, I think, So Much Water,
#
Have you read that story?
#
I definitely have, but I don't remember the specific story, but I'm a big Carver fan.
#
I think it's one of the stories Robert Altman also made in his film Shortcuts.
#
So this one, this group of friends, I think three or four of them have gone out for a
#
picnic or they've gone out for an outing, fishing, I think.
#
And when they are sitting there, they see that there's a dead body which is sort of
#
stuck on a plant, on a tree somewhere there.
#
And they look at it and they wonder who it could be.
#
It's a woman, clothing torn and all that.
#
And they wonder who it could be, but they don't give much attention to it.
#
And they carry on with their fishing and their little picnic and all that.
#
And they spend the time that they were there for and they go home.
#
And then this guy tells his wife that there was this woman that they found on the tree
#
So this wife, she's completely stunned by what these people, how they could still have
#
gone on fishing and with this woman there.
#
And she begins to doubt the kind of person and she begins to think that what if they
#
have killed this girl or if he has killed the girl.
#
So all sorts of doubts get created in her mind.
#
And I think the story goes on like that and then there's too much that that thing comes
#
between them and it sort of splits them up.
#
I think it ends like that, that they split up or I mean, I don't remember the ending,
#
I seem to forget endings, something like that.
#
I think they probably split up or there's certainly a great coldness between them after
#
But of course, I mean, it's got a similar theme of, you know, Kawa is great at that,
#
you know, he's just so, I mean, he writes in so few words and he just puts it across
#
like, you know, just get straight to you.
#
And there's a wonderful poem by him, which is called, I think, Limits, have you read?
#
So Limits is this poem, his poems are also like his short stories because his short stories
#
are like poems, they are short and the poems are long.
#
This one certainly is longish and it's like a short story.
#
So in this, these people have gone out duck shooting and these two friends have gone duck
#
shooting and they're shooting and shooting and they're killing and all the ducks falling
#
around them and they are, they still have so much shooting left in them, but they get,
#
you know, they want a meal, they are hungry.
#
So they go to this farm which is there and the farmer has this barrel in which he has,
#
it's a goose actually, they're not ducks, but they're geese.
#
So this farmer has got a goose in that thing and the goose can't get out and it's just
#
been given food and it's just stuck there, it just stays there always.
#
And it's a great decoy for the other geese to come and they're just thinking that these
#
geese come and they get a good shot and all that.
#
So but this sight of that goose gets him thinking, this person who's writing the story, the narrator,
#
and he thinks of limits, that if a person can be limited in that world and it can live,
#
it can survive, then you can survive anything.
#
You can just, you know, so it's so beautifully done, that poem, that it's just about the
#
limits of human endurance, limits of endurance that can also become human endurance.
#
That goose becomes a metaphor for endurance.
#
So I found it wonderful, that poem, I mean, it just stayed with me because it just affected
#
me very deeply when I read it.
#
I mean, Cathedral is a particular favourite and the interesting thing about Kawa is that
#
some of the credit for his short stories during that golden period, you know, what we talk
#
about when we talk about love and cathedral and that whole period is given to his editor
#
at Esquire Gordon Lish, if I remember correctly, who was apparently a great editor and would
#
really cut cut them down and make them sparse.
#
And Kawa, after he split from Lish, couldn't quite repeat that same kind of magic, which
#
Yeah, but apparently, I mean, the stories are there because of his editor and the stories
#
originally written by Kawa are just not like that at all.
#
So in a sense, half the credit goes to the editor also for this whole thing that Kawa
#
is known for is, you know, brevity and all that.
#
So actually, that is the editor doing that, because his own stories apparently were not
#
as short and pithy as they are now.
#
And in a sense, that also speaks to the art versus artist debate, where in this case,
#
the art is just standing on its own anyway.
#
You know, what is Kawa but a name, you know, who cares if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's
#
So the question I was coming at was, who are the writers who affected you greatly when
#
I won't say influence, because one really never knows somebody's influence for a long
#
But who were the writers you really liked then?
#
Was there ever a period of time where you read someone and you said, I want to write
#
Well, childhood, I mean, there were, of course, many of these books at home that I read without
#
You know, there were all these, like you said, Rampal Satra and people like that, I mean,
#
who one could not make sense of at that time, but one felt good that one had read them.
#
And then, of course, I discovered the Russians, Chekhov, Chekhov is a particular favourite.
#
And then as I grew older, that Kafka became a great favourite of mine.
#
I loved Kafka completely, you know, just, I used to search out books, I used to, there
#
was in the library at college, there was this picture book of Kafka's Prague, I used to
#
sit somewhere in the behind the shelves and just to pour over it and just hours and hours
#
So he was one of my favourite writers at that point.
#
And I think he may have tried to copy him.
#
I mean, I certainly put on that stance, which I wrote about in my essay, this despairing
#
stance, you know, Kafka, and it was completely absurd in my situation.
#
But I mean, one tries to emulate some people that one begins to admire.
#
So Kafka was one of those writers.
#
And then of course, there were many people I read, it's very hard to remember, I became
#
Sebald at one place, Sebald, Zebald, I don't know how you pronounce it, Zebald, I think.
#
Yeah, so anyway, I became very fond of him.
#
And this was also because I came across his books when I was in Norwich, I went there
#
on residency at the University of East Anglia.
#
And my room had this whole collection of Zebalds displayed there because he had actually taught
#
at that university and he had died just the year before.
#
So I came upon him and I just loved the way he wrote.
#
I mean, it was a very kind of textured writing.
#
And using photographs and all that as well, which is very interesting.
#
And he's sort of the way he could encapsulate a whole civilization in a walk.
#
I mean, like he's walking, I think the book is Rings of Saturn, I think it is, and in
#
which he's taking a walk along the East Anglia coast and how he's the thoughts in his head
#
and how entire civilizations are covered during that walk.
#
So it's that, this whole, the largeness of his concepts.
#
And the same thing I came upon in a very different way in Proust also.
#
Like he's describing a woman's sleeve, the sleeve of a dress, which is sort of very loose
#
And how he describes the sleeve, it's a sentence goes on for pages and pages as Proust often
#
And he starts somewhere and he ends up somewhere completely different.
#
So and in the middle, he's covered this entire lifetime and entire sort of whole gamut of
#
things he's just covered in that one description of a dress.
#
So it was fascinating to me how these things can be done like this.
#
And it's not written in a particular experimental style or anything.
#
This is the way his thoughts have gone.
#
And I realized that writing is actually just what it is, a way of thinking.
#
You write like that, you know.
#
So there are no limits as Kabir says.
#
So these have been some of my favorites.
#
And of course then Urdu Nair Masood, who's staring me in the face right here, I'm really
#
In fact, I was thinking of translating him also and I went and met him once and he was
#
very keen that, yeah, but he was, he wanted his stories more in Hindi rather than English
#
because English already had been done by Umar Mehman, who's his great friend and editor
#
So he was very keen that they should come out in the Hindi script because people here
#
couldn't read his Urdu.
#
So I thought of doing that too, but then, I mean, I even took along a contract.
#
Harper Collins had given me a contract to go and get it signed.
#
He said, oh, you just put what you like in it and sign it.
#
But as it turned out, it was a very daunting task because his stories are very difficult.
#
I don't know if you've read any Nair Masood or...
#
I mean, not in the original, obviously.
#
Yeah, because he's very, very, in fact, a bit Kafkaesque.
#
Maybe that's why it appealed to me in the first place.
#
But his thoughts are very, very like a distillation.
#
I mean, there's something going on and they are always set in these very sort of lower
#
class Muslim localities and the kind of things he describes are almost read like magic realism
#
because we don't know that world.
#
So that and his thoughts and very, very subtle, like there's this story called Essence of
#
Camphor, which is the Itre Kapoor, it's called in Urdu.
#
And it's about the whole process of making perfume and how the vapours rise from it.
#
And it's just he describes very kind of abstract things and he links them up with something
#
So he has this wonderful feel.
#
So Nair Masood was also one of the people I was reading.
#
And Ismaa Chukhtai, in the Urdu writers, Ismaa Chukhtai is fantastic.
#
And we also have like Alok, my cousin, and Francesca, I don't know if you know Francesca
#
She's also a close friend.
#
So when she comes, so three of us form an Urdu reading group.
#
So we pick up these and Francesca usually brings something nice along from England.
#
And then we sit together and we read these Urdu texts.
#
So one of the things we read was Umrao Jaanada, and I did not know what a wonderful book it
#
It's just absolutely fantastic.
#
I mean, it's set in that time, 1857, it captures the events of that era and it's so, I mean,
#
And so that was one of the things we read.
#
These are the Urdu books I'm talking of.
#
Then Hindi, of course, my favourites have been Vinod Kumar Shukla and Jyotsana Millan,
#
I don't know if you've read her, but she's a fine writer.
#
My friend also, she was my friend who died a few years ago, sadly.
#
Hindi also, there's enough to read, there's plenty to read in Hindi and Urdu, of course.
#
This is sort of the other thought that strikes me and it struck me a lot over the last three
#
or four years, because before that, for most of my life, I've assumed that, hey, it's
#
a globalised world, it's open, there is an internet, everybody can read everything.
#
Everything is open to me in a sense, it's accessible to me.
#
And I've realised recently that that's not true, it's an illusion that English-speaking
#
elites can sometimes have, because they think that, you know, English is the centre of the
#
universe and it's got everything and, you know, in past episodes, I've realised that
#
there is, you know, for example, just moving for a moment to politics, I've understood
#
that Ram Guha had written this excellent essay about how there are no right-wing intellectuals
#
And that's something I broadly believed in.
#
I thought that everything that you see from the right is bigotry, which is cloaked up
#
in a kind of pseudo-intellectualism.
#
But I have since kind of been convinced by friends who've been on the show, who've done
#
their reading in Hindi and other languages, that there is an intellectual tradition.
#
One may disagree with it strongly, but there is a coherent intellectual tradition of ideas
#
which English speakers are kind of missing out.
#
And sort of moving back to literature, I had that same sense where I was trying to read
#
things by you and I read a couple of, some of your essays and a couple of stories in
#
the magazine Prathalipi, which I'll link to from the show notes, which I absolutely
#
loved and I'd also like to discuss.
#
I mean, everything else is in Hindi and I can read in Hindi and I intend to start reading
#
more in Hindi anyway, so I will get down to reading them.
#
But that world is close to me.
#
You know, when someone sits there and they talk about writers who write in English and
#
have you read so and so and have you read so and so and I've generally read them.
#
You know, I've read Sebald, I've read Kaur, I've read all these people, but I haven't
#
read the other names that you took in the other languages.
#
It's like that world is completely close to me.
#
Now my question is, is that world in a sense then lost or is there hope?
#
Because you know, how do we kind of reach that more and more what you have is sort of
#
a homogenization of cultures and societies and economies.
#
Like even in English, Snigdha Poonam, the journalist had been on the show before, she's
#
written a book called Dreamers where she writes about how in small towns there is this craze
#
for everyone to learn English.
#
At first just at a functional level, but there is this kind of craze and also there is this
#
kind of snobbery, the reverse of what you probably felt at home, where people are embarrassed
#
to talk in their vernaculars and their specific, you know, I had a question from a friend of
#
mine who had done my writing course where he said that he writes in Kannada, but he
#
writes in a particular dialect of Kannada, not the mainstream thing.
#
So he's saying that should I write in that because that's what comes most naturally or
#
should I try to write in proper Kannada?
#
And it's a, I don't know how to answer that because part of me says that no, you've got
#
to be authentic to yourself and write in that dialect where everything is coming naturally
#
It's authentic, but you also want to be read and maybe that's a dying language.
#
Is this something that you kind of think about?
#
I have thought about it quite a lot actually, but I think it's something to do with our
#
I mean, like we are not taught any of our own texts, you know, Sanskrit or Farsi or
#
We are not taught at the school level, we should have something like that.
#
And the texts that they do prescribe in Hindi, for instance, is one language that they do
#
have texts in, but they are so boring.
#
They are so utterly boring, which child will read, you know, Jagomohan Pyare or something
#
like, I mean, you know, one of those things, why would they read all these moralistic and
#
weird sort of narratives or like lives of patriots or things like that?
#
I mean, you have to have interesting material for children to start with.
#
I mean, you are doing the language a service if you have something interesting.
#
And they could have Sanskrit texts, you know, there's so much erotic literature in Sanskrit,
#
There's so much poetry, there's so much nature writing, the Kalidas, I think of Kalidas and
#
Meghdu Tham and you know, things like that, we are completely cut off from that.
#
All because of, I think, our education system, which is all skewed and which is very heavily
#
weighted in favour of English.
#
And the lower middle classes who do not have access to that education are still reading
#
very widely in the languages in Hindi.
#
Like when I started writing in Hindi, I used to get so much, so many letters from everywhere.
#
I got a letter from Goa jail, I remember.
#
People are reading these things and they are probably not buying their own books, but they
#
are circulating the same books.
#
So much is being read, I think it's a problem of the middle class rather than other classes.
#
And middle class is a small class, but still it's the most powerful class.
#
And English is perceived as the language of success or power or whatever, you know English,
#
so the whole world becomes open to you.
#
So I don't blame these people, I mean, it's just, I think we should introduce some of these
#
nice texts at the school level, so that people don't grow away from their languages.
#
I mean, they behave as if Hindi is a foreign language, you know, they behave as if they
#
are sort of native speakers of English and Hindi has somehow come in and this is some
#
foreign language that they have to learn.
#
So the education system, I think, has to be overhauled in a very big way for people to
#
develop an interest in.
#
I mean, it's not the same situation for Marathi or Bangla or Malayalam, I mean, people are
#
doing work, they are sort of being read, I mean, it's not the same.
#
It's the northern India, the Hindi belt, I would say, Delhi, UP, you know, all these
#
places where English is against primacy for other reasons, I think, than literary.
#
So it's just, I think it can be fixed if, I don't know, I mean, if they'll have to
#
really sort of do a hack job, hack it job, hatch it job, whatever you call it, hatch
#
it job with the education system and overhaul it completely.
#
I have no hopes of top-down interventions working or even the education system necessarily
#
I'm more interested in how things happen in a bottom-up way through the culture and
#
all that and there's an interesting sort of anecdote you mentioned in your essay in
#
the Premchand book where you talk about how you went to the village where he was born
#
for his 125th anniversary in 2006.
#
And while you were waiting for things to happen and all of that, you noticed that there were
#
so many people sitting around everywhere, you know, under shelter, not under shelter,
#
sitting on the ground, just waiting for this whole thing to happen.
#
And at that point, your musing is that, okay, I know why I am here, but why are these people
#
And you pointed out how some of them, obviously, many of them must be Premchand readers and
#
some of them could in fact be characters out of his stories, as you said.
#
And that struck me as, again, something interesting to explore because I think there was a time
#
in our culture where individual figures could play that kind of a very profound part in
#
people's lives, where people are reading a writer, in this case, Premchand, and finding
#
so much to identify with that, you know, it becomes something that is important for them.
#
And what has happened in modern times, I think, and tell me what you feel about this, is that
#
in my view, what has happened is that this kind of thing is becoming less and less possible
#
in the sense that one, there is a lot more art and many more artists, which is a good
#
But also, whatever experiences we're having are very fragmented, in a sense, so it won't
#
just be one writer who moves me with his five books, it will be many, many writers who snippets
#
I'll read on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, which will have an effect on me.
#
And the whole sort of thing kind of gets broken down, leading me to wonder whether another
#
Premchand is even possible today, or maybe another Premchand is possible in a new medium,
#
like vlogs or, you know, Instagram, for example, I mean, what would an Instagram Premchand
#
Maybe like the Humans of New York blog that took off a few years ago, but I'm just thinking
#
So what's your thought on the changing nature of the role that writers play within a culture?
#
Or I'll say, in a general sense, I'll say artists or creators, whatever term you'd like
#
to use, the role that they play within a culture, and is that diminishing, partly because there
#
is less dullness, people have so much to do in their lives that they don't have to read.
#
It's no longer the one entertaining thing that there is for them, there is so much else
#
What's your sense of this?
#
Well, I think as far as I mean, you mentioned all those people who had come for Premchand's
#
ceremony that they had.
#
But that had also something to do with the fact that Premchand actually established the
#
common man as a valid character in literature.
#
After that, the stories were not about the common man, and people could not identify
#
And these people are almost, they are vindicated in some sense, that they have been, the existence
#
had been noticed, their lives are worthy of being written about.
#
So it's a moral value that he brings to those writings.
#
And this question also ties up with the later one that you asked about writers, who can
#
replace Premchand, that kind of thing.
#
But I think it's a moral universe.
#
The moral universe has completely, radically changed.
#
And the role of the writer has also changed, correspondingly.
#
The role of the writer, the image of the writer has also undergone a sea change because of
#
I mean, earlier writers, like we perceive the writer as someone who's hiding away in
#
some corner scribbling his things, and he's committed, he lives in poverty, he lives hand
#
to mouth, very much like the figure Premchand is.
#
And now, but now that has changed, writers are no longer like that.
#
Writers like to be seen.
#
I mean, you see them everywhere, you see them at literary festivals, you see them when you
#
get a prize for that prize ceremony.
#
I mean, everyone is visible, there's so many cameras, there's so many lights, there's so
#
much flashing thing going on, writers are much more in the limelight.
#
But in a sense, I mean, I know I'm making this horrible generalisation, but it's like
#
people are becoming clones, you know, very kind of many books that you read feel very
#
much like the other book, you know, there's not much.
#
It's because there's a lot of emptiness, I think, in books that are being written because
#
they're being written in a hurry, they are being written for a particular reason, they
#
are being written maybe because they can get a prize or maybe they can be published.
#
So they are being, I don't really understand the need for this kind of frothy writing.
#
And creative schools, creative writing schools, I think, have maybe contributed to this, to
#
a certain kind of writing, which is the same for everyone, you know, they have this smart
#
writing which comes from there, you learn how to show, not tell is the typical phrase
#
that is used now in the West.
#
So that on describing things and, but sometimes you are, you search for a single insight in
#
a book, you don't find it, you know, there are lots of descriptions, very authentic stuff,
#
and they're very much related to what is going on outside in the society.
#
But somehow it just lacks that spark because they don't give any original insight.
#
Many books, of course, there'll be many exceptions to this too.
#
But this is what I have found that there's a certain sameness to the writing that's happening.
#
And maybe it's because of the hurry or because, I mean, everyone is absorbing similar stuff
#
around and writing in English definitely can only come from a certain class because a lower
#
middle class person is never going to write in English.
#
So it reflects that last background too.
#
So well, that's I think.
#
It strikes me that there are really two kinds of writers and one kind of writer is in love
#
with the notion of being a writer, everything that it involves, I will write these kind
#
of serious literary books, and I'll get longlisted for the booker and blah, blah, blah.
#
And I think the kind of writers I end up liking are just writers who just want to write.
#
And therefore, there is less artifice in that there is, you know, it's not contrived, they're
#
trying to write a particular kind of book, which is in vogue.
#
I want to sort of double click on a phrase that you used at the start of your answer,
#
which was moral universe, where you pointed out that the moral universe has changed and
#
therefore so has a writer within it.
#
What do you mean by that?
#
Well, moral universe, I suppose I mean that the world is much more complex now.
#
And it's not so easy to chart out a course in which you can know what is the right thing
#
You know, I mean, there's nothing really, it's in a sense, much, much more fragmented
#
than the times that Premshan lived in, when there was a definite goal that we were trying
#
to achieve independence and stopping the oppression of the farmers, of the poor people.
#
So all that has changed.
#
And I mean, I presume we are talking only of English, writing in English just now.
#
Whatever sense you meant that in when you spoke of moral universe?
#
Yeah, moral universe is, I think, just this, you know, just the whole urban mess that we
#
It's very, very fragmented, very diverse, there's too much happening, there's not enough
#
You know, so it's, it's a very confused world.
#
So I mean, to find something of value is, can be a struggle in this kind of world.
#
And I'm not sure that every many writers are up to it.
#
You know, I don't know, I can't give you concrete examples just now, but I have my
#
feeling is that there is nothing that we are striving for as such.
#
You mean in an individual sense, a social sense?
#
In an individual sense, in an individual sense, there is not what is, one has to have some
#
kind of thing that one is trying to achieve when you are writing a book.
#
Yeah, in the in the sense that you mean that Premchand very clearly did in terms of the
#
Yes, social messaging, he's trying to reach some thing he's trying to, you know, anti
#
colonial fighting, colonialism, fighting, whatever, you know, all that stuff is gone.
#
So now we have this, of course, there's much fine writing happening even now, as we have
#
recently discovered, but there's, there's much more writing going on.
#
And I'm not sure that all of it will is worth the read like that.
#
I'm just thinking aloud.
#
Another way of thinking of that is there's something called Sturgeon's law, which basically
#
it was first, I think, meant for science fiction, but it applies to everything eventually.
#
And Sturgeon's law is that 95 percent of everything is crap.
#
And what happens sometimes is that we look at the past and there's some selection bias
#
creeping in, because obviously what we remember of the past is all the good stuff, the highlights.
#
But when we look at the present, it's all 100 percent that is out there.
#
So it seems like, oh, those were golden times, but these are not.
#
And I think that one, there must have been as much crap back then.
#
And two, a lot of the crap wouldn't have got published because it was so much harder to
#
get published in terms of gatekeepers.
#
While today without reference to anything that we might have gone through in the recent
#
past in terms of the reading we've done without reference to that, I think publishers are
#
a lot more indiscriminate in that they'll put out anything.
#
And in a sense, that's a good thing, that the barriers of publishing are much lower.
#
But you know, so therefore you will simply have more of the crap and that five percent
#
just seems to be so little when swimming in that sea.
#
And a lot of it lost to people like me because I might be restricted to reading one language
#
So I never discovered that, right?
#
And we also don't have the advantage of time.
#
I mean, like if we were to look at the same stuff, say 50 years down the line, we would
#
probably the good names or whatever names that we remember now from the past, the similar
#
names would have dropped up then.
#
But we don't have the advantage of that because we don't know that will only show itself with
#
time in the classics or whatever you call them.
#
You know, the good books of this time will only pop up, you know, later.
#
So how do we, I mean, who has withstood the stand of time?
#
We can't find that out now, you know.
#
So in the interest of following the digressive nature of this podcast, the thought that just
#
comes to mind and I'll throw it at you.
#
I was watching this vlog by this fantastic musician called Rick Beato.
#
He's a 59 year old guy.
#
He does this thing on YouTube where he'll talk about music or he has a series which
#
is called What Makes a Song Great, where he'll break down a three minute song and talk about
#
different aspects of that.
#
One of his recent videos was this complete rant where he completely lost it because he
#
came across an article this guy had written where this guy said that, you know, Paul Simon
#
will not be remembered 200 years from now.
#
And he was saying that, listen, let me tell you something.
#
The people who will be remembered 200 years from now, we may not have heard of them today.
#
And he gave the example of Johann Sebastian Bach, the classical composer, talking about
#
how in his own lifetime, he wasn't a particularly big deal.
#
After his death, there was a kind of Bach reclamation or something, I forget there's
#
But that made him the legend that we think of him today as in his own lifetime, he was
#
And that seems a fascinating thought to me that someone who is a great artist today may
#
be somebody we haven't even heard of.
#
But 200 years later is regarded that way, not that it necessarily makes a difference
#
to an artist how he is regarded 200 years later, he wants it now.
#
And the other thing is also the role of happenstance in getting noticed, like someone recently
#
put up this long thread about Billy Joel, that when Billy Joel's first album Piano
#
Man came out, it was completely unnoticed.
#
It wasn't selling anywhere, radio stations weren't playing it.
#
And the music company decided not to do anything with it and they were washing their hands
#
But there was one listener who felt passionate about it, who happened to have a copy.
#
And he went to radio station after radio station after radio station, trying to make them
#
And eventually did a quid pro quo with a radio station RJ and made him play it.
#
And then it became the sensation that it was.
#
And Billy Joel would probably have gone back to his day job if that hadn't taken off.
#
So the role of happenstance is so incredible.
#
And I think that's, I mean, somebody should do a separate project on this, the making
#
How do legends get made?
#
Because I mean, if you go into individual lives, I mean, what is it that has brought
#
I mean, to a layperson like me, one song or one piece of music would perhaps sound very
#
much similar to the other one.
#
But I mean, there's something about that one that is better than this one.
#
And of course, how does how does it happen that some some people get noticed and some
#
There's so much fine writing around, but only some gets noticed.
#
No, and it's not even that the fine writing gets noticed and the non fine doesn't.
#
Like, I think there was a social science experiment a few years ago, where people gave a whole
#
the subjects in the experiment, these apps, which have and I'm kind of paraphrasing it.
#
So obviously, the mechanism was slightly different.
#
In principle, it's like this, but all these people were given an app with like 2000 songs
#
And they had to listen to whatever they wanted over a period of time, except that in some
#
of them were shown a chart of what is popular and what is not.
#
And they were all shown different charts.
#
And in these different mini universes of these users that they built, different songs rose
#
to the top or went down just depending on pure happenstance, you know, five people could
#
accidentally listen to something and like it and not have noticed something else.
#
And suddenly just by those five people liking it, the algorithms take over and it goes to
#
So it's all a bit of an accident, really, I mean, everything's an accident.
#
So let's go back more to the accident of life itself, in particular yours.
#
So you know, you're a prolific reader, you've written this story, Lucky Horace, at the age
#
of eight, and gotten published.
#
And then you next, right, when you're late thirties, forties, whatever, much decades
#
pass almost, what's happening during this period of time?
#
And also, what is your conception of yourself and how is it changing?
#
Because you've said that even if you didn't articulate it to yourself, you felt that there
#
was a writer inside you, it was natural.
#
Tell me a little bit about the young Sarah Rai, for example, what did you see yourself
#
Well, at that point, I mean, I don't know if I was having any very clear thoughts about
#
what I am or where I'm headed or what I'm going to do.
#
It was all like experiencing things as they came along.
#
I mean, as far as literary pursuit goes, I think my first experiment apart from that
#
story was I also wrote a few horrible poems, which I've completely, I've hidden them away
#
and I've thrown them and nobody has seen them.
#
So that little thing happened.
#
And then after that, I suppose the translation was the next thing that I tried to bring my
#
And it started with, I think, Premchand story, first story that translated was Bade Bhaisahab
#
or one of those stories years back, I mean, when I may have been in my 20s, early 20s,
#
So it's been a long process of groping about for a language that I could write in and the
#
translation was also a part of that, you know, because translation and fiction or your own
#
writing comes from the same place.
#
I mean, it's the same storehouse of words that you have inside you.
#
So in one, you're trying to fish out from that storehouse and extend it by translations,
#
which are someone else's work, but they become intimate for you because you have been interacting
#
And the other is your own writing.
#
And the translated stuff is also expanding your own vocabulary, your own thoughts, you
#
I mean, like someone else's voice that is allowing your own voice to come out, you know,
#
you get, I mean, that happens a lot with reading as well.
#
I mean, when you read something and you feel, oh, this is something that I have something
#
like this in my own life.
#
So you begin to write something which has been set off, a spark has been set off by
#
So this, I see it as, I mean, what I have called it, I think somewhere is your life
#
is a series of organic moments, like when you feel lit up by something, you see something,
#
you experience something, and you feel that there's something special about that moment
#
and you get a kind of lit up is the word I can think for it.
#
So that is somewhere being stored inside you.
#
And when you're writing, those moments fall together somehow, and they come out.
#
And then the style also depends on what you're writing, so the style will be geared to that.
#
And the language too will be geared to that.
#
Like if I'm writing the atmospheres, say if I'm writing about a Muslim family, like
#
my story, which is called Ghul Bulayya, it's the labyrinth which is set inside this, it's
#
So it's a very old town, and there's this very old house in it, and a very old woman
#
living inside that house.
#
And so it's a whole thing of labyrinth, various kinds of labyrinths, like the town itself
#
is a labyrinth because of all those gullies and all those little bilanes, and it's a very
#
complicated sort of map, geographical map of the city.
#
And the house which is also very old is about two or three hundred years old, this is actually
#
my mother's home, as it used to be.
#
And that is also a very big house with many rooms, many sort of courtyards and passages,
#
and it goes back, I've written about that too in the autobiographical essays.
#
So it's that house, and there's this old woman who's dwelling on her memories.
#
So she's caught in the labyrinth of her memories.
#
So it's a very kind of interactive sort of labyrinth, which is town and house and old
#
So I developed a style for writing that, which is not a linear style, but it's like a shell,
#
I mean it goes around, she remembers the past and then she's in the present.
#
So it's all structured like that.
#
So the structure of a story and also the style, the language is also dictated by the material.
#
That's what I started out saying.
#
And in the meantime, I've forgotten your question.
#
I've also forgotten it because I got lost in my answer.
#
So let me move on to kind of quoting you on the writing process, because this was such
#
a lovely passage and I think all my listeners will really enjoy it.
#
Again from your essay where you wrote quote, it took me a long time to realise that the
#
process of writing begins much before one has put anything down, that one has so to
#
speak always been writing.
#
It was while chasing butterflies in the garden as a child or watching a tortoise shell cat
#
slink away into a dark alley that the writing has taken place.
#
Like an invisible letter written with lime juice that only shows up when a hot iron is
#
The impressions that have been written onto the memory all the while that life is being
#
lived are revealed in the catalyzing moment where Ben meets paper.
#
The city buried underground and long forgotten about is chanced upon and not without a shock
#
So it was that years after the house of my childhood had slipped into oblivion, I found
#
myself writing stop quote.
#
And I'm fascinated by what you also said about the act of translation, because the act of
#
translation is obviously an act of creation itself, because in one sense, you know, any
#
language must be impossible to actually translate into another, like you said of Urdu.
#
So while translating, did it help that you were looking closely at both the languages,
#
the language that you're translating from and the language that you're translating into?
#
I would imagine that that act of mindfully looking at each sentence and figuring out
#
how to get something across, that act of mindfulness itself shapes your own writing.
#
And then does that, to take a step further, shape the way that you look at the world around
#
You know, like if you see Proust, for example, going into these deep observations and just
#
doing, you know, does that sort of shape the next time that you are going into your description
#
Do you feel that translation therefore played an important part in helping you find your
#
Well, actually, to put it in a very broad sense, I think even when you're writing your
#
own fiction, you're translating because you have seen the world and seeing the world and
#
absorbing it is itself an act of translation.
#
I mean, you're seeing visuals around you, you're not seeing it in words, but to put
#
that world in words is already an act of translation.
#
So in that sense, a fiction writer is always a translator.
#
And that can be said for any medium of art, I suppose, I mean, poetry or fiction or whatever,
#
you know, it's the same thing.
#
I mean, you're seeing something and you're in your head, the pictures are being formed
#
into words and those words are then formed into sentences and then you are sort of working
#
And even those sentences, when you are translating them into, say, English, then your English
#
is also going to be changed by the way you have been brought up, the kind of social class
#
that you belong to, where you have grown up, the regional and the cultural parameters of
#
that would affect the way you write English also.
#
So there are many factors that go into it.
#
And it's a constant process of which is ongoing, you know, there's nothing that you can say,
#
I look at this sentence and I think I wonder how to translate it.
#
It's not like that really for me.
#
I mean, a translator has to look beyond the text, you know, you have to sort of absorb
#
the text that you have read.
#
And then you have to because very often a sentence to sentence translation will absolutely
#
So you have to get somehow creatively transmit what you have read.
#
And even if it's not exactly what you read, it's a kind of, you know, distillation of
#
what you have found in the original text.
#
And you are going to describe it in your own words.
#
So I think translation is more a thing of absorption, you have to absorb it in a particular
#
And you have to get a sense of the language that you're translating from and the language
#
you're translating into, because the way both languages are structured is very different.
#
So one thing may work in this language and it may not work in the other language.
#
So it's, you just have to have a kind of, I suppose, you have to look at it in a particular
#
way to be able to get it right, or there's no question of right or wrong.
#
But I mean, to make it work, I mean, it has to, there are many factors that are at work.
#
Also, you know, earlier you spoke about how literature is so sort of dependent on the
#
context of the times and the circumstances and all that and somewhere you've written
#
about how just being a woman closed you off to a set of experiences, like you can't go
#
walking the streets of your city at after midnight and you know, there are certain experiences
#
you just won't have that if you go to a paanwala and you're just hanging out, everyone else
#
is conscious that there's a woman there and therefore they are behaving differently.
#
So there is a limit to what experiences are open to you.
#
How has your sort of way of seeing the world evolved over a period of time, in the sense
#
that just speaking as a man, it strikes me that there is a layer of social interaction
#
that was completely invisible to me till a few years ago, which is really that extra
#
layer of awareness that women have to carry with them, you know, as a man, like I can
#
go out walking after midnight, I can enter a lift with five other people and not think
#
for a moment about who they are, you know, whereas women have to carry this kind of extra
#
layer of them and just becoming aware of that layer then just opens one out to more kind
#
Now, it seems from your writing that you're very self reflective, right?
#
So there's nothing in that sense.
#
There aren't so many unknown unknowns, there might be known unknowns, like what is a city
#
like at night, but they aren't unknown unknowns like there was for me when I didn't realize
#
that people had this other layer of awareness they had to go through.
#
So how has your gaze, your way of looking at the world in all its aspects, you know,
#
not just from the point of view of gender, but just how has your gaze overall of looking
#
at the world changed through your life?
#
And I ask this not just in a writerly context of the things you write, but just as a person
#
I think women in general do carry a lot of baggage that men don't carry.
#
But then men also carry some baggage that women don't.
#
So I don't know whether we can sort of draw some kind of thing there.
#
But women, I think, live with a lot of anxiety.
#
I mean, if you're traveling on a bus, for instance, you're traveling on a train, you
#
constantly have to be aware of who the next person is, why that person is that person
#
Because they tend to, especially in a bus, in a crowded bus, I have experienced, I don't
#
think there'd be any woman possibly who has traveled on an Indian bus and not been groped
#
or not been, you know, sort of.
#
So that kind of experience will never be a man's experience or never be or sometimes
#
it could be a man's experience too.
#
But I mean, it's the norm for women.
#
So it's that kind of anxiety plus there's so many other anxieties or even as a writerly
#
I mean, if you're trying to write, there are so many things that crowd your mind.
#
Even if you say get four hours a day or that's luxury.
#
But say two hours a day.
#
But your mind has to be empty for you to be able to write.
#
But the woman will often have the kitchen or the children or something else like that,
#
domestic worries on her mind, whereas a man, I think, from my sense of it, if a man gets
#
say two or three hours, then the mind can be free of many other things, unless of course
#
there are other worries in the world that you are worried about or your bank stuff or
#
something else, you know, which you're worrying about.
#
But otherwise, these domestic worries are not a man's worry as such.
#
And then people say, well, you did get that much time, but somehow that my mind space
#
has always been crowded by other things.
#
So in many ways, women do have a much more difficult time of it, especially trying to
#
do something like writing, which needs hours and hours and hours of time.
#
And you may not produce a single line at the end of it, you know, people will not understand
#
that you spend so much time and what were you doing all this while if you didn't write?
#
You know, that's the normal question.
#
So but that, of course, is the same for both men and women.
#
But I mean, women will often have this worry about other things on their minds when even
#
And one of the things writers do is just using the power of imagination.
#
They can obviously come out of their own skin, get into someone else's skin, transmit that
#
And the reader experiences herself in a different way because that has happened.
#
And I noticed this particularly, how well you've done this in your story, Other Skies,
#
which you published in Patalipi, which you translated your own story basically.
#
So I've obviously read it in English, where the character is a guy called Altaf Ahmad.
#
And I was very struck by this bit where it's after 2001, the riots have happened in Gujarat.
#
He's far away from that.
#
But you capture his interior life so well, where you talk about how he sees a woman in
#
a burqa and he starts thinking about how long it would take for the burqa to burn.
#
Or when he sort of when somebody asks him his name, he stammers while telling his name
#
because he is so aware of it.
#
And I absolutely loved that story because it started off with this dark interior life
#
of this guy and then went into this really magical place.
#
And I won't give a spoiler alert, but there were these sort of two sort of introductions
#
of magic within the story, which just took it to another different level.
#
And in some ways, I mean, I was also going to saving a question for later about whether
#
you've read Murakami because it seemed almost Murakami-esque what you did with that story.
#
But to get first get back to the question where you've entered this character's head.
#
These are not thoughts you would have had.
#
You would never have had to stammer while saying your name.
#
You would not have wondered about how long it takes a burqa to burn.
#
So what is that process then like of being able to do something like this, of widening
#
Is it something that came to you with age?
#
Is this something you would have been able to do at 20?
#
Or is it the therav of being a little older and well, yes, you are, you're right.
#
I mean, I do get into the character, but I mean, this is something I mean, I don't know
#
if it's particular to me.
#
I think everyone was like that.
#
Not just writer, I mean, that was a time when this was very much a topic of conversation
#
People were discussing the Gujarat riot and what happened and this so and so happened.
#
This is what somebody felt on the train.
#
This is what somebody walking down the road experienced, you know, so constantly there
#
was talk in the air of this thing.
#
So I mean, it was not very difficult actually to get into that person's shoes.
#
I mean, after all, I mean, what would a person with a Muslim name at that time be thinking?
#
You know, there's a great anxiety around and there's fear spilling out of every Muslim
#
But since then, I have changed my view a little.
#
I mean, now, of course, it might be more true, but at that point, I mean, there were like
#
we went out and you often met Muslims who were not anxious at all, or possibly because
#
they had not been aware of what was going on.
#
They had not heard they were in UP and this is something happening in Gujarat.
#
I don't know, but people were saying their names, people were happily sort of doing going
#
So it wasn't as if everyone was nervous.
#
But I think the people around us, people in the middle class that gets to hear of these
#
things much more, we were nervous, we used to think like this.
#
And once you're thinking in such terms, then it's not difficult to get into, at least,
#
I think it's not difficult to get into such a person's shoes.
#
I mean, there's another story which I thought might be more difficult to get into.
#
There's a story that I wrote, which is now going to be part of my new collection that's
#
The proofs have arrived and I have not been able to look at them because I'm here.
#
So anyway, there's this story I wrote called Mujrim Farar, which is about a rapist.
#
And it's from it's written in the rapist's voice, you know, and I broadly I was reacting
#
to I read reports of the rape that took place in the Shakti Mills in Bombay.
#
And it kind of set off something in me, you know, what happens, what goes on in a person
#
who's done this heinous crime?
#
What does such a person think?
#
So I tried to look at it from his point of view and to give it his voice.
#
So it's basically written like that.
#
I mean, I shouldn't again give spoilers, but it's he's following and the whole act
#
of raping that girl is described and I've given him a certain language, which is a part
#
of UP speak and a part of Bombay lingo, you know, the filmy Bollywood lingo rather, the
#
languages language that he's probably absorbed from watching films.
#
So it's from his point of view and how he does this act and then he runs away and you
#
know, I shouldn't tell you the whole story.
#
But basically, it's trying to inhabit a rapist's shoes.
#
So that's and I'm trying to give it some kind I mean, I'm giving it a I mean, it's a story
#
of protest, basically, let me put it in a very wide sort of sense.
#
So it's that and the other stories I've written, which are also about characters.
#
I mean, somebody once asked me, do you think of yourself as a political writer?
#
I don't think of myself as an overtly political writer.
#
But I mean, if you're writing about things around you, which are happening, everything
#
is political that goes on in this country.
#
But it's also experienced through your own persona, which and I think I'm not sure I
#
approve of the completely statement, political statement type stories, you know, because
#
I think there are two different kinds of stories.
#
One is, of course, when you are trying to comment on what's going on around you and
#
sort of pick up some incident that's happened or some movement that's going on and you write
#
about it in a kind of expository sort of style.
#
And there's the other thing in which you leave yourself empty and you absorb impressions
#
and somehow your writer's voice comes out.
#
It is not your conscious voice.
#
It's something else that has been happening inside you.
#
And there's a certain logic to that writing that is not trying to make a comment on what's
#
So I've tended more to the second, second style of writing.
#
But because I live in a certain environment, then obviously what I'm writing will be political
#
because I'm absorbing things from around and how can you not be political in Indian environment?
#
So inhabiting shoes, a writer has to inhabit someone else's shoes.
#
You can't write just about yourself.
#
You have to write about someone else.
#
Which sort of brings me to this modern kind of dilemma about how the environment around
#
us is changing in terms of how people receive writing.
#
Like, I completely agree with you, a writer has to occupy other people's heads, wear other
#
But at the same time, you have people talk about things like cultural appropriation and
#
And I can totally imagine somebody criticizing you, daring to put yourself in the head of
#
someone called Altaf Ahmed and saying that that's appropriation, you know, seed the platform
#
And that's just one sort of political aspect that kind of comes into commentary on literature.
#
And I see other commentary on literature also come from political places like that, you
#
know, you're showing male toxicity and blah, blah, blah, as if, you know, I mean, characters
#
The world is what it is.
#
You know, that's it's our job to kind of write about that.
#
So what do you think about this kind of strident politics, which is so often even evaluating
#
literature through a political lens, rather than just seeing a book for what it is?
#
Yeah, I mean, I have my problems with it, frankly, because what I mean, what does cultural
#
appropriation even mean?
#
I mean, if you're going to write about something, anything, any person who is not yourself,
#
then it's cultural appropriation, isn't it?
#
Who will you write about?
#
At the end of the day, you will come down to yourself and you're only allowed to write
#
And even that is not one self, one as we know, we contain many people inside ourselves too.
#
So that too is appropriation then.
#
So where does this argument lead?
#
So it just seems to me a very, very flawed kind of thing.
#
And it's basically a political argument.
#
It's not a literary argument at all, because literature means other people.
#
How can you write literature without talking about other people?
#
It would be no literature then.
#
And so much of literature is looked at through a political lens, not just in the context
#
of appropriation, but other contexts where, you know, only a woman of color is allowed
#
to write about another woman of color and so on, things like that.
#
Do you feel that then people start approaching literature in a long way and in a sense, losing
#
something, losing out on all the richness that there is?
#
I agree with you entirely.
#
I mean, of course, we are losing out on this immense richness.
#
I mean, how can you be, who allows you?
#
Why should anyone allow you or not allow you?
#
I mean, you are a free person, you can write what you like, you know.
#
Of course, this whole hurt sentiments business is there.
#
But I mean, like Plain Chand was, I mean, now being castigated for using words like
#
Chamar and, you know, using caste names, which were just caste names simply, he is not using
#
them in a derogatory sense.
#
But I mean, there's this whole Dalit movement going on against him, that how dare he write?
#
How can he write about people whom he is a high caste person?
#
So why is he writing about these people?
#
How dare he write about our lives?
#
You know, it's the same sort of thing, which goes on in other ways in other countries,
#
like blacks and, you know, the whole rights movements, they are all sort of related to
#
As you pointed out in your essay on Premchand, he actually wrote about them with great sympathy,
#
even making them out to be victims.
#
And some people would object to even that as in why are you showing them as victims.
#
So there's no end to it, really.
#
I mean, the writer's job is to write and get on with it, rather than get stuck in all
#
these arguments, I think.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break.
#
And then when we come back, I have so much else left to discuss.
#
Do you want to read more?
#
I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up to date with
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2500 rupees, 2500 if you use the discount code
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Sarah Rai about her life, her work, her writing, and so on and so forth.
#
You know, while reading about Premchand, while reading in fact about your mom and your aunt,
#
one interesting theme that kind of came up was that how the language determined how easy
#
it was to get published in the sense Premchand started writing in Urdu.
#
He wrote for a few years for an Urdu journal, but then he shifted to Hindi and the publishing
#
scene just seemed to be more vibrant at that time for him.
#
And similarly, your mom and her aunt also, you know, would write in Urdu, but would publish
#
in Hindi because that was easier.
#
And my question here really is that as a writer, I think that there is sort of this dual imperative
#
which pushes you in opposite directions.
#
And one imperative is that you of course want readers, readers matter.
#
So you want to, you want your work to be read, you want to be relevant, and that might lead
#
you towards changing your voice in a particular way to be more accessible.
#
That might lead you to picking subjects that are more in vogue, so to say.
#
But the other part of that dual imperative is that you also just want to be true to yourself,
#
that there are things that you care about and whatever kind of comes out, whatever you
#
care the most about, you want to write about that, whether or not there are readers.
#
And of course, the danger of that is that it can be a path to self-indulgence.
#
If you, you know, and especially if in terms of the style and the idiom, you don't think
#
And so these are kind of dual imperatives.
#
The danger on one side is that you lose yourself in the quest for finding more readers.
#
And the danger on the other side is that you become self-indulgent and no one can relate
#
So is this something that you have kind of thought about or?
#
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've been asked this question before.
#
And I think it's when one is actually writing, one doesn't have a reader in mind.
#
I mean, it's, there's some kind of critic inside you, which is trying to get the writing
#
to reach a certain standard.
#
So you're writing following that voice, your own voice, and to see whether the story is
#
reaching where you wanted it to reach.
#
And the reader, of course, is important, but the reader comes in later.
#
You know, so when you are at the point of writing, if you started tailoring your narrative
#
to the reader, then you'd really get nowhere because, I mean, there are so many readers
#
and they'd all be wanting different things.
#
So at the point of writing, it really doesn't matter.
#
And in fact, if you think about a reader, then it's usually just two or three friends
#
or somebody who you know has read you or you think what would they think, you know, sometime.
#
But even that doesn't really enter at the point of writing.
#
And yes, the other thing, of course, is true.
#
I mean, if you started tailoring your narrative, then you have lost what you wanted to write.
#
And the voice also can't, you can't tailor the voice to the reader and the content certainly
#
You know, the content is, I mean, of course, you may choose the language, like you gave
#
the example of Premchand or my mothers, I like to call them both mothers.
#
So they were writing and they, of course, the fact that my father was also publishing
#
Kahani at that time, that may have played a role in the choice of language too.
#
But then, I mean, this was a Hindi literary scene that they were aware of, whereas I'm
#
not sure that they knew about what was a comparable journal in Urdu, for instance, if they wanted
#
There must have been, but I don't know.
#
I mean, I don't know whether they knew of it also.
#
So it was wider dissemination, ease of publication.
#
And for Premchand, of course, it's true that he did it because it had a wider reach and
#
he was wanting his message to go to as many people as possible.
#
So in his case, it was certainly true, and in their case too, it was with a slight difference
#
But yes, it was true that they changed the language.
#
But changing the language didn't mean that they changed the, I mean, the language was
#
the same, it was a different script, just the script was changed.
#
So it didn't really make a difference, whereas in Premchand, of course, the Urdu versions
#
and the Hindi versions are completely different.
#
And there's a whole, in fact, a lot of confusion about which work was written first in Urdu
#
and which one, because there are many of them which have both versions.
#
And you know, so you don't know which one.
#
In many cases, you don't know which version was written first and which was written second.
#
And there were also translations that he commissioned, or commissioned or he got other people to
#
do, commissioned is like a very modern word, he didn't commission them in that sense.
#
But I mean, other people were also transcribing his stories from one language to the other.
#
So we don't know which ones were done by him, he himself had done something or somebody
#
else had done it, and which one came first, which one came second, for often the versions
#
are completely different, like a lot of difference.
#
Tell me a little bit about, like you often mentioned that you write in Hindustani, which
#
I find is an important distinction.
#
And now, like you said, at one level, Hindi and Urdu are the same, you know, the same
#
At another level, they are now different, you know, driven to that difference by forces
#
of politics and so on and so forth.
#
So tell my listeners a little bit more about that.
#
I know both your uncle Amritra and your cousin Alokra have written books on this subject.
#
But you know, just enlighten me a little bit more about what this process is, because most
#
people listening to this would think Hindi and Urdu are different languages, and Hindi
#
is the language of the Hindus of India and Urdu is the language of people in Pakistan.
#
And actually, the thing is, they're both the same language and that language itself, which
#
they were, was a confluence of many, many influences and sources from all over the place.
#
So tell me a little bit about this.
#
I don't know if I'll be able to tell you so very exactly about the, because Alok has written
#
a book on it and he would be absolutely the person you should talk to about this.
#
But then, of course, politics has entered into it and Hindi becomes, you know, for reasons
#
that we all know, it starts to eliminate all the Urdu words.
#
And in fact, it's so difficult to eliminate the Urdu words from Hindi because simple words
#
like pani or stuff like that, you know, very, very basic words are Urdu origin words.
#
So how can you sort of divorce the two things?
#
But this process is going on and it's tying in with the larger politics of the country,
#
as the country is becoming sort of more and more Hinduized, let's call it.
#
The irony of it is that Urdu was actually called Hindi first, you know, Urdu was Hindi.
#
I mean, Hindi meant Urdu.
#
And then later these names became, I mean, there's a whole history there.
#
So it's like, I don't know if I'm competent enough to speak on this kind of thing just
#
But I mean, of course, there's a whole story behind it, which perhaps if you have Alok
#
on your show one day, he might be able to enlighten you.
#
I'll get you to put in touch with him and I'll also link his book from the show notes
#
for those who want more.
#
The interesting thing is like I read at the start, your uncle's book on this, Amrit Rai's
#
book on this is that Hindi was actually a general term used for people who lived in
#
So there is even like an old text which talks about how, I think Ameer Khusro's text about
#
how people under a certain emperor, if Hindus came to his attention, they would be trampled
#
by elephants, but other Hindus like the Muslims would be spared.
#
So it's interesting how words also evolved to take on particular meanings and people
#
And in fact, so much of what we consider Indian, authentically Indian and Sanskrit today actually
#
The elegant Churidar Kurtas of Modiji.
#
There's so much in the way of food, in the way of dress.
#
I mean, everything, I mean, it's such a very mixed culture, you know, it's just impossible
#
to separate things into how can you do that?
#
I mean, it's just complete bloody mindedness.
#
I think that these people are trying to push this, put down people's throats.
#
Before we get to talking more about your writing processes and all, which also I know, let's
#
take this digression into how this country is kind of changing.
#
In a sense, your own family is a great example of a syncretic India, this khichri where everything
#
Of course, you know, Premchand was progressive in the sense that he married a child widow.
#
His second wedding was to a very formidable lady and a writer in her own, right, who I'll
#
ask you to speak about as well.
#
And so on down the line, there have been mixed marriages.
#
It's just, you know, in a sense, your family reflects a khichri that India is.
#
And yet today we live in a time where simplified narratives that sort of reduce our culture,
#
that reduce individuals to a particular thing are in vogue, where, you know, Hinduism is
#
being reduced to sort of a particular Brahmanical strain of it, you know, and in some ways almost
#
carrying, almost sort of harking back to the tradition of other Western religions, which
#
are religions of the book, so to say.
#
And we of course don't have a book, it's a completely open culture.
#
But there is a sense that, you know, you're trying to center around one of our great gods,
#
which is Ram, and you're trying to, you know, reduce it down to that.
#
And similarly in terms of language, like a quick summary for readers who might not be
#
aware of it is that the politicization of, you know, how language changed really began
#
because there was a political movement to mark out Hindi as separate from Urdu and Hindi
#
in Devanagari as a language of the Hindus of India.
#
And for that, one of the idioms kind of created was this very artificial Sanskritized Hindi,
#
Shudh Hindi as it were, which I remember being taught in my school, which no one actually
#
Like your own writing is much more the way everyday people speak, the colloquial speak,
#
but there is this artificial kind of Shudh Hindiness which has come up and the Prime
#
Minister speaks in it, which is very interesting because I don't know how people relate to
#
He's otherwise in terms of polemics and speech making and all, for whatever it's worth,
#
you've got to give him credit, he does reach out to many people and he's built a cult around
#
But I don't understand how the language works there because it's a language nobody really
#
But all that apart, a lot of the change that is happening in our country in many alarming
#
ways is something which people locate in the Hindi heartland, in UP, in the places where
#
Tell me from your lived experiences of whether culturally the change is as drastic as it
#
seems or it is only vocal elements of this current time and vocal elements of this political
#
movement who make it seem that way.
#
It's very much present, I think.
#
It's just very present in your everyday lives.
#
The sounds around you have changed, the way people walk has changed, the way people laugh
#
This whole thing that's going on, this Hinduization, let's call it, it's very, very present and
#
especially in UP, because you can see even among the people who are around you who were
#
not so very right-wing, things have changed.
#
Now more people you meet are going to be, you will be noticed much more as a kind of
#
anomaly in society rather than somebody who is part of a structure.
#
And when my parents got married in 1948, it was a Hindu-Muslim marriage, and this we are
#
talking of the year right after partition.
#
And there was nothing, no furor made over it, it happened peacefully, nobody noticed.
#
Before that my uncle had also married a Hindu wife, and then too it was not.
#
Like today there's this whole business of love jihad carrying on.
#
Nobody thought of it like that earlier, it's just something very, it's a political thing
#
that's being imposed on people's lives, and it's impacting everyone, I think, in a very,
#
very obvious and a very negative way.
#
So lots of people you meet, I mean, it's just the whole experience of living has changed
#
And you kind of mentioned about how love jihad wasn't a big deal, then I did an episode on
#
the Geeta Press with Akshay Mukul, and he's written a great book on it.
#
And the interesting thing that I discovered there is issues like cow slaughter, love jihad,
#
all these issues have really been coming down from decades, since the 20s, if not before
#
there have been live political issues.
#
Like either they were underground and they've only come over ground now, or they were the
#
fringe and they've become the mainstream now.
#
And I don't know which one I'm more inclined to believe, and of course these two are subtly
#
different in the sense that underground and coming over ground would mean that many people
#
felt this but never actually said it or never expressed themselves and that expression has
#
found its place now and politics has caught up with culture, or that it was a fringe belief,
#
these were fringe beliefs and fringe insecurities that have somehow spread.
#
So which of the two do you think there are?
#
Because even I in my own life, there are many people I have known for decades, who I have
#
to look at with new eyes because they are saying things and doing things that are surprising
#
You know, you've experienced the same as everyone has.
#
So is it that they were like that all along or is it that something changed?
#
Well, this is something we talk about all the time, Amit, I mean, I can't believe that
#
this was the case always, that all these feelings were buried and now they have suddenly come
#
to the fore because suddenly we have a Hindu government in power.
#
I don't think it's that so much.
#
It's probably they are getting influenced by each other and also this whole thing of
#
power, I mean, the party in power and they tend to fall in line.
#
I think people, especially in India, have a great thing for just following, like sort
#
I mean, if someone is like that, then they tend to be like that too.
#
So it's that and of course, everyone loves Narendra Modi, that's for sure.
#
So they are following him.
#
I mean, I don't believe that they were like this always and even now in a common man,
#
if you see on the street, I mean, if they pass even a Masjid or they pass some kind
#
of somebody's grave, they will bend their head, I mean, they will sort of bow down to
#
It's not as if they are all sort of very kind of militant Hindus or something.
#
They are Hindus, but they are not like that.
#
So I don't know how quite this is being transmitted, but it's certainly taking...
#
the mind of people is definitely being changed, the ways of looking at things, and they are
#
possibly being shown the way, they are being shown that, look, you have this, these people
#
I mean, a sense of hurt is being created, where it was not, it was just everyone living
#
How did this suddenly start happening?
#
It's very hard to pinpoint, and it's getting worse every day.
#
And people are not even... all these young Muslim boys being lynched, why is there not
#
You know, I mean, it's something that we see, or even those poor boys in Kashmir whose sort
#
of eyes are being... all these pellets are being shot at them, and so much cruelty happening
#
And it just reminds me more and more of the Nazi era in Germany.
#
I don't know if you've read this book called East-West Street, I forget the name of the
#
Well, it's about this, the laws that were made, all the sort of laws that were made
#
after the wars, during the wars, whatever, sort of anti-Jewish lobby, they were trying
#
to make laws to counteract those.
#
So in that book, there's this person, there's a police person who's killing a Jew on the
#
So this guy, I forget, I've forgotten all the names, he comes up and he sees this policeman
#
killing this Jew, so he says, why are you doing this?
#
I mean, have you no soul?
#
So the man sort of doesn't say anything, and he turns around and shoots the guy, and he's
#
So it's just that people seem to have no conscience left, or conscience is too sort of asking
#
for too much already, I mean, they just have no sense, maybe there's a certain blindness
#
that has taken over, different sort of blindness, because I think as a society, we are pretty
#
I mean, like the middle class is completely blind to the poor person on the street, we
#
just don't see, we just don't see what's happening, we have lost the capacity to stand
#
in anyone else's shoes, and we just can't see that this person, what kind of life would
#
this person be leading, you know, we just, we are impervious to it completely, we are
#
looking at our own little, feathering our own small nests, and you know, not looking
#
at anyone on the street.
#
So it's, this is a different sort of blindness, that we don't notice anyone else's pain.
#
Yeah, and that's so true, like the name of my show is, of course, A Scene in the Unseen,
#
but one way in which this plays out in our everyday lives is, all the things we are blind
#
to on a daily basis, like you correctly said, when I stop at a traffic signal, there might
#
be someone outside my window, but that person is invisible to me, I am in a different city,
#
that person is in a different city.
#
So, I am reminded of three kinds of social science concepts, which I'll quickly run
#
through because, hey, why not digress, and I'll ask you what you think of them, and one
#
of them comes from the social scientist Cass Sunstein, he calls it group polarization,
#
so he did this very interesting experiment, where he got a bunch of, like I forget the
#
exact ideologies in play, but let's say a bunch of democrats and a bunch of republicans,
#
and he put the republicans together in a room for a kind of group discussion, and he put
#
the democrats together in a room, and they took their views on certain subjects before
#
the discussion and after the discussion, and after it they found that after the discussion,
#
the entire opinion of the group became more extreme.
#
So that the most moderate person in the group from the results before, was more extreme
#
than the whole group had been, you know, before the thing, in kind of both directions, and
#
he called this group polarization, and perhaps there is a sense of this.
#
Okay, the other one is, I forget who the author is, but in the early 20th century, there was
#
a study of lynching, how lynching happens, how crowds work, how mobs work, and what that
#
found was that there are different thresholds at which someone will lynch someone, like
#
the mechanism of lynching typically is this, and a friend of mine who was lynched, and
#
lynched by the way doesn't mean killed, it means beaten up by a crowd, so a friend of
#
mine, the journalist Rishi Majumdar was once lynched in that way, and he lived to tell
#
the tale thankfully, and he described how it happened to him, where he was somewhere
#
in the heartland, and he was, and a group of people were arguing with him, and it was
#
just an argument, and suddenly somebody who was not even part of the argument from the
#
fringes came and slapped him, and then one more guy came and slapped him, and then eventually
#
they all beat him up, and how it works is that everyone apparently has a threshold at
#
which they start beating someone, where a complete sociopath may just start hitting
#
someone without anyone else, another person will become violent himself if he sees five
#
other people do it, another person become violent if he sees a hundred other people
#
do it, so just thinking aloud, it seems that maybe we've reached a chain of events where
#
more and more thresholds are being reached, so even someone who would otherwise have seemed
#
moderate is now getting carried away by the mob, and the third phenomenon is something
#
coined by the sociologist Timur Kurran in his 1999 book, Private Truths Public Lives,
#
which is preference falsification, which is that there are certain views at a particular
#
point in time which you keep to yourself because you feel it's not polite to say it, like
#
I'm, you know, if somebody feels a woman's place is in the kitchen, he won't say it
#
because he knows others will disapprove, but if he finds 50 other people say it, then he'll
#
feel emboldened to say that yes, that is what our culture says, and that creates what Kurran
#
called a preference cascade, like an example he gave was in the Soviet Union, where everybody
#
living in the Soviet Union would feel that they were the only dissenters because nobody
#
else was expressing, but once enough people expressed that, you had a preference cascade
#
and it was almost overnight that the Soviet Union tumbled, and I feel that social media
#
created these preference cascades where you could have had a certain amount of innate
#
bigotry within you, where you might have felt resentment towards Muslim men or you might
#
have felt resentment towards whoever the other is, and you don't say it because by and large
#
everyone seems decent, but then you have this kind of preference cascade where everybody
#
is saying it, and then you become like that, and therefore my feeling is that it is not
#
as if someone who is overtly a bigot today was a bigot yesterday or was not a bigot yesterday.
#
That bigotry was perhaps a small part of the multitudes he contains, but that has now been
#
amplified and given expression by this, and everything that is being amplified today is
#
the worst of us because that's what tends to get amplified, so these are sort of my ramblings
#
Yeah, I agree with you, I think there is something innate, which gets kind of, the flame is fanned
#
or whatever, and one person follows the other and then that starts, I mean, if it's something
#
that you think can be justified, and because there are so many other people who feel the
#
same way, then perhaps it will be easier for you to express that, the element of politeness
#
as you said, and they were too polite to express it, that has gone completely, and now you
#
feel that I will perhaps be praised for this very same thing.
#
So they are, I mean, I think it does happen like that.
#
I mean, I have often wondered at this, in a more general and a broader sense about the
#
I mean, like how, if I see a person walking on the road, does that person hide in himself
#
I mean, that thought has occurred to me, that how do you make a normal person who is just
#
leading a very ordinary life, living somewhere in a town and with his family, why does that
#
person, where does that person suddenly discover the seed of evil in him that he does this?
#
And this is a very large moral kind of question, which I am not sure can be answered that easily.
#
But it is something like that, there is, in human nature, something that can be brought
#
But it's very hard to believe that so many people always believed that Muslims are bad
#
or whatever, because, I mean, after all, if Muslims had to sort of do this or convert
#
people or whatever, I mean, they've been ruling for years and years, hundreds of years, and
#
they didn't do it and we still survive as a nation, which is pretty much a multicultural,
#
multi-religious nation up till now.
#
So how can they believe this, you know, and that's just a bit of a puzzle for me.
#
Maybe it's like Schrodinger's India that both truths can be true.
#
Like I remember I had the politician and thinker J P Narayan on my show, and I put it to him
#
that India was a deeply illiberal country and of course, our society is deeply illiberal
#
and where I'm getting it from is the way women are treated and all the divisions cast, all
#
And he said that he made an interesting point, he said that that's true.
#
But if you look at it another way, India can also be considered in its lived reality, these
#
are my words, not his, India can also be considered in its lived reality to be liberal, because
#
we are such a confluence of so many different, you know, experiences, we have coexisted for
#
so long, we've been multi-religious for so long, as you said, like I think I forget who
#
it was Gandhi or Naipaul or Churchill, whatever, one of them, who said that whatever you say
#
of India, the opposite is also true.
#
So, yes, because we, I mean, also compared to some many other societies, we are liberal
#
I mean, after all, we can get away with, you know, we can say some things and, you know,
#
still get away with that.
#
Like you and I can have this conversation.
#
I mean, so in many other places, this would not be possible.
#
So I suppose in, you know, on a kind of relative sort of thing, I mean, we perhaps would be
#
called liberal, but that is slowly, slowly or very rapidly getting eroded.
#
And we are very fast becoming a nation of intolerant people, you know.
#
I want to go back to your musing from a couple of moments ago, where you said that, you know,
#
when you pass a person on the road, you wonder, does that person carry the seed of a murderer
#
And something that I've been thinking about for a long time is how the self is contingent
#
and it's contingent on a series of accidents.
#
Like Stephen Pinker once said, nature gives us knobs, nurture turns them.
#
And both are, of course, pure luck and accident, you know, the genes that we are born with
#
and what circumstances do to us.
#
Those circumstances even include things like the chemical composition of the brain, for
#
Like one of my favorite musicians, Chris Cornell, killed himself a couple of years ago.
#
And one of the possible reason was he was on some kind of medication, which was later
#
found to make people depressive and all of that.
#
So you change the chemical composition of the person completely changes.
#
And I am reminded about this by something you wrote in your beautiful essay in Caravan,
#
where you wrote about your dad and I'll read this passage out.
#
You're describing how your father met you in 1994 when he came from a train.
#
Quote, my father's hair was uncombed, clean shaven all his life.
#
He now had a beard born of negligence.
#
His nails were long and yellow and a wilderness had taken over his eyes.
#
He would stand about in doorways, having forgotten what he had come to the room for.
#
After my mother died, he stood by her bed and looked at the quilt, bunched up on it
#
as if he suspected that she was underneath it.
#
Never interested in food, he developed a sweet tooth.
#
He ate the rasgullas that were bought for him from Heera Halwai with a focused pleasure.
#
He wiped his hand afterwards on his white dhoti.
#
This was a father I did not know, stop quote.
#
And this really spoke to me because I have seen the same process in both of my parents
#
who for different reasons became different people at the end of their lives.
#
People I almost could not recognize, one in a not so good way and one in a good way.
#
And it's something that often leads me to reflect on my own self, that I feel so confident
#
in who I am, but it is all contingent.
#
Something outside my control could completely change it.
#
And as a writer, this is sort of something that you have kind of commented on over here.
#
What are your feelings on this?
#
I mean, I also have a story, not quite like this, but it's also about a woman who sort
#
of has a dementia like thing.
#
She becomes, it's basically about these two friends who live next door to each other.
#
And it's also about the first period, about this girl who gets the first menstrual period
#
and the other girl who hasn't yet got it, so they interchange and you know, all that.
#
And then this is a description of a friendship.
#
And then both of them go their separate ways.
#
This girl goes away to study somewhere, the other one remains behind in the town.
#
And then when they meet again, she sees this other girl who has the period and this one
#
She sees her getting off a rickshaw and she recognizes her and she says, oh, I know you,
#
but I have now I have difficulty recognizing people because it's something that has happened
#
and I can think of things, I can remember things that happened a very long time ago,
#
but I can't remember things that happened, say yesterday.
#
So she's basically in this kind of state, she's got this dementia and it carries on.
#
So they meet after very long periods.
#
And the next time they meet is this girl's, the dementia girl's brother has died.
#
And this other one goes to see the, I mean, for condolence, and she sees this girl and
#
she's, oh yeah, I forgot the very crucial thing of it, that when she, this girl has
#
a first period and she tells her friend about it and she says, no, don't tell my mother
#
because I went and touched the statues of the gods while I was impure.
#
And she would be upset if you told her, so don't tell her that.
#
And then at this now, 40 years have passed, 50 years have passed.
#
And this girl is with dementia, she doesn't remember anything.
#
But she says, let me take you to my mother and she'll be very happy to see you.
#
And she just lost her son and whatever, she'll be consoled when she sees you.
#
But and she says in a lower voice, don't tell her about that.
#
She remembers that day that has now finished and it's all gone.
#
Everything is finished around her.
#
But that day is still crystal clear in her memory.
#
She just, nothing of it has changed.
#
It has stayed with her all these years.
#
And she just, that's the one thing about the friendship that she remembers.
#
So of course, this girl meets the mother and she doesn't tell her anything, all that.
#
And then she goes away and she never goes back again.
#
So that's where the story ends.
#
So this is also sort of dementia comes into that story too.
#
So it's about, well, people do change.
#
And I think it's not just chemicals, I mean, not drugs or anything that change the wiring
#
People have that condition, so many conditions, you know, you can become bipolar, you can
#
become, you know, some kind of other Alzheimer's or whatever, you know, and the composition
#
of your brain has changed in the meantime.
#
So you don't know what has caused this to happen.
#
So yes, it is, we become different people throughout our lives, I suppose we keep changing
#
and by the end of it, we probably wouldn't recognize that earlier person who we were.
#
So what do you think of the earlier Sarah Rai, the person in her 20s, like, you know,
#
when I look back on the younger me, I am kind of filled with astonishment that that person
#
managed to become this older me, I mean, I just don't like him at all.
#
It's like another person, I'm like, what?
#
And then you begin to kind of question your sense of self and say, what is it that that
#
person and I have in common apart from the name and apart from all that?
#
Have you reflected on your younger self?
#
Well, at that point, what I do think is that one was not thinking of anything at all.
#
One was just going through life just as as the days came, you just lived it and you went
#
So there was no process of thinking really about where I'm headed, what should I be doing.
#
There was no kind of conceptual framing of a life at that stage.
#
You know, and now I regret it almost that I should have done this, I should have done
#
Why didn't I read this?
#
Why didn't I write that?
#
Why didn't I start my writing career much earlier?
#
All those regrets I do have.
#
But then one was leading, you had all the time in the world.
#
Now I feel that time is finishing, I have to do what I have.
#
There's a kind of urgency that has taken over my life, you know, and then one didn't think
#
I mean, it was just a whole life stretching ahead in front of you.
#
And you could do what with it what you liked.
#
So most of it was spent just going out with friends or reading or listening to music or
#
I mean, there was no direction as such.
#
But I don't know how this whole direction business came in, in the first place, because,
#
well I was not as such, I mean, I wanted to be a writer, but I was not really doing anything
#
You know, I was not going about it with any kind of seriousness.
#
But suddenly, I mean, it did take me by surprise, I suppose, that I wrote my first story.
#
I was in Australia then.
#
And we were there, my husband was doing his research there.
#
So we were there for about six years.
#
And I wrote my first story there.
#
It was already quite late.
#
I mean, I was in my 30s, not 40s, but 30s.
#
And I sent my stories to my father, who at that point was quite all right.
#
I mean, he didn't have this dementia thing that I spoke of later.
#
And so he read my stories, he liked them, he sort of he felt sort of happy that somebody
#
had taken after, you know, whatever somebody was also writing in the family in among this
#
So all that did take place.
#
But I mean, if I had to live it all again, which, of course, I won't, I would have started
#
And I just feel a sense of waste for wasted life in a sense that you come to things very
#
And then when you realize there's so little left, it's that sadness of it takes.
#
I had a episode I really like doing with Kavita Rao, who's written a wonderful book on Our
#
And we spoke a lot about late blooming there.
#
And like her mother started learning sitar at 75.
#
And now at 77, she apparently plays it very well.
#
And I remembered, you know, Penelope Fitzgerald, the great novelist who started writing in
#
her 60s and won the Booker and all that and just lovely novels.
#
So here's the thing, you know, you start your essay in Caravan by talking about how your
#
dad when he met you, you know, made you sit down and you're already around 40 at this
#
time or thereabouts and made you write the following words, quote, Catherine Mansfield,
#
you will be the Catherine Mansfield of India, stop quote.
#
And what strikes me here is that he has a vision for you.
#
He wants you to be this and this is somehow important.
#
And equally in your words, when you talk about starting too late or feeling that there is
#
not enough time, there is sort of the implication that you have set out for yourself something
#
to do or something to achieve.
#
And you know, and I also have those regrets sometimes that, oh, I could have written 10
#
I never had this in me and all of that.
#
But also I tell myself that it is sometimes dangerous to have that one vision of yourself
#
or those big dreams because they never happen.
#
What is more important is to keep doing what you love doing.
#
And whatever happens, happens and you live in the moment.
#
And when you're gone, you're gone anyway, you know, this whole concept of a legacy.
#
I don't know what it means.
#
So what do you think about that, especially, you know, given the pressure of the sort of
#
family you came from, and if you also then think of yourself as a writer, there might
#
be the sense that, oh, I have to become X, Y, Z.
#
And even now, when you speak of, you know, not enough time, which I don't agree with,
#
there is enough time for all of us and too little time for all of us in another respect.
#
Well, actually, I think the struggle was not to become someone like, I mean, it was not
#
an ambition, not ambitious in that sense, but a desire to have a better utilized life,
#
you know, not to have wasted so much, you know, because there's so much that one doesn't
#
know, so little one has read, so much of other systems of knowledge that one is completely
#
I mean, you just what do we know of, you know, sort of Muslim learning or even Sanskrit or,
#
you know, there's so many vast sort of areas of knowledge that are completely sort of dark
#
So I just wish that I had done more with that time and one doesn't get the urgency at that
#
point of time, because one thinks that one has all the time and you're not even thinking
#
You're not thinking that I should be doing this or I wish I knew this.
#
So it was not so much of wanting to become or having written 10 books or whatever, but
#
a kind of engagement with life that could have become earlier and that started late
#
for me, I thought in a certain kind of way of thinking that I could have got into earlier.
#
And I did think and well, it was a little all over the place.
#
I thought, I mean, it could have been more focused.
#
So if you had to give advice to your younger self in specific terms, what would that be?
#
Because writing also sharpens the vision, you see, it's not just what you're producing,
#
what you're learning to see, you know, seeing is such an important part of being a writer.
#
This is almost like a sort of a lament I share about myself.
#
So let's actually now talk about sort of your writing process.
#
When you begin writing seriously, like my biggest problem is that, you know, if there
#
is a structure to something I'm doing, for example, with the scene and the unseen, I
#
know that I have to release it on Monday, and therefore I have to get the files ready
#
by so and so time and there's a structure.
#
But when there isn't a structure, like I want to write a book or I want to do this,
#
it's very hard for me to be able to discipline myself because in the moment there is always
#
something that is in the way.
#
So how have you arrived at your sort of writing discipline and writing habits?
#
And what are your sort of processes like?
#
Well, I suppose it means that you spend a lot of time at the job and say one can manage
#
to while I'm in the process of actually writing the story, then I do spend time with it.
#
I mean, I can never rush through a story.
#
I mean, and I never make drafts.
#
It's like when I'm working on a story, I keep changing it as I go along.
#
And this used to be a problem when I wrote longhand because then you have to cut and
#
slash and copy of the whole thing again, which for much of my earlier writing life, I did
#
have these registers full of stories and I would cancel them out and rewrite them and
#
But this has changed, of course, with the coming of the computer.
#
But you do spend a lot of time thinking and thinking and polishing and the thought and
#
integrating what you're trying to say with the language, with the structure.
#
I mean, I also tend to use metaphors sometimes, like the whole story might be a metaphor for
#
There's this story that I wrote called Amar Vallari, which is about losing, which is about
#
losing things like and lost spaces.
#
It's about lost spaces, really, I mean, about a space that and the space can be a metaphor,
#
you know, it can be in the story, it is a metaphor.
#
It's a space of childhood, of memory, of an actual physical space, which is now being
#
like it's set in a bungalow, which is very much like my own bungalow, which is all wild
#
and it has gone and it's in the middle of this residential sort of high-rise apartments
#
around it and now it's just this one space of wildness left.
#
And wildness, I've been kind of obsessed with wildness a little bit in my writing.
#
And wildness, not just as physical wildness, but as a metaphor also.
#
Like wildness in the sense of solitude, like there's a story I wrote called Biabanme, which
#
is in the wilderness, literally.
#
So in that you can be in a sort of mental wilderness.
#
I mean, there's a little girl in it who's sort of dumb and you've read that story.
#
And so, I mean, wildness has been kind of occupied me a lot and it has never been a
#
I think it's a space of solitude that one needs and which is very necessary, especially
#
And in solitude, it is in solitude only that the thought will come to you, the idea will
#
come to you and you will be able to see, you know, a certain clarity comes when you're
#
alone and you're in solitude.
#
So for me, the wildness and solitude has become like together, got merged together as an idea.
#
And I think it's very necessary for a writer.
#
I mean, I've forgotten how we started out.
#
Yeah, Anu, we were just sort of talking about your processes of writing.
#
Yeah, processes of writing.
#
Yeah, so it's the solitude and you need to be completely by yourself, you need to empty
#
your mind, there should not be anything else happening around you, which is always a very
#
difficult thing because something or the other is always happening.
#
So it's very hard to just do that.
#
But then you have to empty yourself out and allow the voice to take shape.
#
So often you just sit for hours and hours and nothing comes.
#
So at the end of a day, if you come up with a paragraph, that's a good day.
#
And sometimes nothing may come at all and that's a bad day.
#
So it's basically it's just that and you keep thinking and meditating and, you know, just
#
waiting for the thing to arrive.
#
I wanted to talk about it, but I don't have a particular question as such.
#
But what I loved about wilderness was, again, in a magic realist kind of sense, that moment
#
at the end, which just kind of transcends the story and just is so profound.
#
And how do you arrive at that in the sense of not in the mechanistic sense of how did
#
you think of this, but more in a sense of in terms of process, like, did you have to
#
write different drafts of the story or were you stuck at that point?
#
How do I take it forward?
#
Or when you begin the story, do you know the way it's going to end and you just know what's
#
And it's not just that story.
#
It's also other skies, for example, where that crazy end, which is again right out of
#
magic realism, and it's such a striking image, like imagine a cinematic image like that.
#
And I don't want to give any spoilers, but my listeners, we can read those themselves.
#
So how does that happen?
#
And is it then also a conscious process that you think about how in every story you want
#
to find this moment, which kind of crystallizes everything, which is like this revelatory
#
It's a bit of a mystery, actually, because it comes sort of in a flash.
#
I mean, it is not something I mean, when I start writing, there's no story as such that
#
The story as it happens, you know, it just takes over when you are writing the story,
#
you know, shapes itself.
#
One sentence follows the other and somehow, you know, the story gets created.
#
I'm also not very sure how exactly it happens.
#
It's a sort of accident, I suppose.
#
But that ending that you're talking of, that did come to me in a flash.
#
I mean, there are these two people who are locked into their wildernesses of different
#
And suddenly what can unite them and get them out of it is this bus that slowly instead
#
of moving forward, it starts rising because they also see themselves at that point.
#
They see themselves, they see the whole town, especially for the writer, who is not for
#
the little girl, but the writer who must see around her.
#
So when she's up there, she can see everything very clearly.
#
And she also finds that she has got some kind of release from this being locked as she thinks,
#
you know, she's got a writer's block.
#
So that block gets removed for her too, and maybe presumably now she'll be able to write.
#
So it's all about the writing process too.
#
That story is about the girl and it's also about the writer's own writing process.
#
So it happened like that.
#
And then the other story, I mean, I don't really have many magical moments as such in
#
the stories, in my stories, maybe just the two I've read, just the two and maybe a couple
#
I mean, I don't quite know how they how they enter the story.
#
Like there's another story I wrote, which is called Kam Bolne Wale Bhai, which is set
#
in Chhattisgarh and it's got in the backdrop some mysterious happenings that are taking
#
We know what they are, you know, when the sort of people getting killed and all that.
#
But at the end also, there's a moment in which this person, I mean, I shouldn't tell you
#
Don't give the spoiler.
#
But anyway, there's this moment in which all these jugnoos suddenly become, it's like a
#
sheet of jugnoos and they are signaling hope.
#
I mean, there's also this sort of symbolism tied in with some of the stories in which
#
a certain description will add up to hope or will add up to something that is not consciously
#
But I find that it happens, it becomes like that when I'm writing the story that I am
#
kind of in a very subtle way giving a message.
#
So it's not really a message as such, but it's tied in with the story.
#
But it does lead you to some kind of hopeful ending.
#
And how consciously do you think about technique or craft, number one?
#
And a second question kind of tied into this, which is what I have recently been wondering
#
whether art and craft are really the same thing, that art is just craft, except it is
#
craft at a subconscious level.
#
So you're doing something without knowing how you did it.
#
But it is really craft.
#
You've gotten to that point because you've done something again and again and it seems
#
magical and beautiful and it doesn't seem like there is, it seems to transcend craft,
#
which almost has a mundane implication.
#
But actually they are the same thing and one of them you understand and you can break it
#
down and the other one is happening at a subterranean level.
#
Well, in some ways, you're right.
#
I mean, one is, of course, I mean, craft is very important in the writing of a story and
#
sometimes the story is dictated by the craft also.
#
So I mean, the two things obviously very tied together.
#
But the craft and art, they are separate too.
#
I mean, firstly, I think what differentiates it is that there has to be an idea behind
#
There has to be something there.
#
It's not just the making of patterns or a making of, and there has to be something central
#
to the narrative, something integrated.
#
There has to be some kind of vision, some kind of vision to the story.
#
And for that vision, you choose the appropriate craft, you choose the narrative style, you
#
choose the structure, you choose the language, everything falls in with that central vision.
#
So if that central vision is missing, then I don't think it can possibly be called art.
#
Then it becomes just a random pattern, finely drawn, but it's a pattern.
#
So I think that is the main thing that is different.
#
And when you kind of look at the books that you've written and obviously a couple of decades
#
have passed since, you know, you kind of resumed writing in that sense after Lucky Horace,
#
what do you think of your earlier books?
#
Do you look back and you think that, oh, you know, I wish I could do it better or, oh,
#
It captured that moment where I was at that moment.
#
Or do you think that, oh, another person wrote it.
#
I am now somebody else.
#
How do you look at your past work and, you know, well, some of it I hate, I do hate some
#
of it, but I can see why I wrote it at that point and I can see the flaws.
#
But there are some things that I wrote that I like even now.
#
And I think, oh, that's that did I really write that, you know, that kind of feeling.
#
Well, there's one story I wrote, which was very close to me in my heart, because it was
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actually something that happened and I was kind of changing it for the fiction, but it
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And it was a story which of my, I mean, my collection is called that it's called Ababil
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Quran, which is the flight of the swallow.
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So it's about death and it's about superstition.
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So this, I mean, it's about this little girl and it actually happened to me.
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But obviously in a story changes, but the death of her brother, for instance.
#
So it's in the story, the brother dies and she's somehow, how can I say this without
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revealing the whole story?
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I mean, she's thinking about death and all these sort of things that come in, all these
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little details that come in, she's lying on the lawn and this brother, she comes running
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on the lawn and the brother is lying on the lawn and she jumps over him and she thinks
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it's about superstition.
#
So she's been told that if you jump over a person who's lying there, that person stops
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So she has this thing that she's killed her brother because he dies later.
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And then she thinks, oh, I killed him because I jumped over his body and he stopped growing,
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So basically there are all these superstitions that are knit into the story.
#
And right at the end, she's traveling in a train where the brother has died and they
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have not been told what exactly, because she's a child, she's eight years old and she's
#
not been told what has happened really to the brother.
#
And she's still thinking that maybe he's alive, maybe he's just hurt or something.
#
And she looks out of the window and she looks at the sky where a swallow is flying very
#
high, a bird is flying very high.
#
And she remembers that her brother, the one who has died, had told her that a swallow
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is the freest bird because it flies so high, it just flies the highest bird and even the
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So she immediately connects the two things and she thinks that if that bird is a swallow,
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then my brother is alive.
#
Somehow that gets linked in her mind.
#
And she looks at her mother and she wants to ask her that question, that is that bird
#
But then she doesn't have the courage to ask because what if the answer is no, it's
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So she's just, it ends at that moment.
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So that story, I still think it, I like that story and I still like it.
#
So that's one of the stories that has remained.
#
But yes, I mean, there are some stories that I do like still, but some of them are what
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And I can see the bulges, the bulges that needn't have been there and should have been done
#
in a crafted in a more, you know, fine way.
#
And I can feel these are unnecessary passages and they could have, why am I describing
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so much stuff like that?
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I guess all writers feel like that after a point in time.
#
So you know, before we kind of wind up, what's next for you?
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What are you planning to write?
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What are you working on?
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Will we see translations of your work anytime soon like, you know, I am in any case, I want
#
to start reading Hindi.
#
It's been something I've been saying for a long time.
#
I hope somebody will translate them.
#
People ask me, why don't you translate them since you are a translator yourself?
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But I mean, there are so many people that I can translate.
#
Why should I translate my own?
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I mean, this, this has come up, you know, that I should translate.
#
Because I loved your translations of your two stories.
#
I mean, obviously I haven't read the originals, but he's read really well and I think would
#
also appeal to international audiences for that matter.
#
Yeah, but if somebody would do them, then it's fine.
#
But I mean, I don't want to, not for the moment, because I don't know if at some point I change
#
my mind, that's something different, but I mean, not now.
#
So at the moment you asked, I mean, I'm working on those essays, I told you, autobiographical
#
essays in English, and those should be finished.
#
I think as soon as I get back to Allahabad, I'll probably need another 15 days to finish
#
it because it's all done that you just need one more chapter.
#
And, and my book, the new Hindi stories book is coming out, the proofs are waiting for
#
I have to look at the proofs and that book will be out by the before the end of the year.
#
And then I'll begin on another sort of maybe a novel or maybe another collection of short
#
Have you ever thought of writing in English?
#
I mean, except for that, the novel that I wrote, I wrote it first in English and I didn't
#
I didn't think I thought it sounded better in Hindi.
#
So maybe one day I will, but somehow I think it has to be grounded in the language of the
#
I mean, if it's, let's see, I'm open to sort of looking at things.
#
Maybe once I've got past this autobiographical essays, which are also part of it, you know,
#
it's never actually how it happened, you always add and subtract from things.
#
So maybe I could write a book of fiction.
#
But I'll certainly write another book after this.
#
One is what advice would you give young writers listening to this?
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Like I know you've already spoken about the advice you would give yourself, which is,
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you know, write more and engage more with life and so on.
#
In addition to that, you know, what are the common mistakes you see young people making?
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Well, don't be in a hurry.
#
Don't be in a hurry to publish.
#
Write something and polish it and refine it and revise it many times before you can actually
#
and don't write about things that you think that this will sell or don't write for the
#
wrong reasons, you know.
#
So write for what you actually feel, what you feel passionate about, what you're committed
#
I think that is important in writing.
#
And that is what will last.
#
So the final question, you know, listeners of the show often enjoy it when guests recommend
#
So what are the books across languages?
#
What are the books which are meant so much to you that you want to tell people that read
#
Well, because we've been through this recently, been through the pandemic and this whole thing
#
of nature and how nature is sort of rebelling against what we've been doing to it.
#
So I've been reading two or three books around nature.
#
One of them is Moth, Snowstorm by this British guy called Michael McCarthy, I think that's
#
And it's also a memoir, plus it's a rebelling in the joy of nature.
#
So it's a connection with nature.
#
And there's another one which is a similar book, but it's also a kind of memoir, but
#
it's called H is for Hawk and H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.
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That's also very lovely.
#
And it's also a memoir.
#
And it's got in fact several genres kind of mixed together in it.
#
So it's a very complex literary style also.
#
Then there was a third book which I enjoyed, which was also around nature.
#
It's about birds, the genius of birds, it's by Jennifer Ackerman.
#
And it's about how intelligent birds are and what like there's this Caleronian crow, I
#
think it is one of these birds, I forget which one it was, that hides 30,000 seeds across
#
these so many acres of land.
#
And it remembers exactly where it hid those seeds months later or years later, just remembers.
#
And they're very, very intelligent birds.
#
So this whole thing of saying, oh, this one has a bird brain is complete, complete nonsense.
#
Birds are very intelligent.
#
So I've been reading that.
#
And then the languages, of course, I read Hindi and I read Urdu.
#
So in Hindi, the writer I would recommend is Vinoth Marshukal, who's very good.
#
And I'm very close to his writing.
#
And the other one is Jyotsana Milan.
#
She's also, she's I think a very fundamental feminist.
#
I mean, she would not qualify as a feminist in what they now, the stride in feminism,
#
but she's like, she goes to the nuts and bolts of feminism.
#
She looks at what a woman is, right from, she views a woman from inside as it were.
#
And she's wonderful in that.
#
So there's Jyotsana Milan and there's Nirmal Verma, of course, who's quite well known
#
Premchand, if people haven't read Premchand, Premchand is there.
#
Then Urdu is Nair Masood, he's my all time favourite.
#
And Ismat Chukhtai, and I mean, we read this, what's the, I just mentioned that name, Umrao
#
So there are all these across languages and most of these are translated.
#
Jyotsana Milan perhaps not very much translated, I have translated one story, but there are,
#
all these others are translated.
#
So they can be found by the readers who only read English.
#
And you know what, you spoke about those three books about wilderness, different aspects
#
Have you read The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wollobin?
#
No, I haven't actually.
#
That's been on my reading list for a long time.
#
Peter Wollobin and by the forward by Pradeep Krishnan.
#
Yeah, I've just, I've got that on my list.
#
So although my final question is over, I might as well go to a final digression, which is
#
you mentioned Jyotsana Milan being a fundamental feminist and different from what it's like
#
Can you elaborate on that?
#
That's very interesting.
#
Well, she's sort of looking at the woman.
#
I'll tell you, I'll give you an example from her story.
#
There's one story of hers, again, I've forgotten the title, but I mean, there's a funeral happening.
#
This woman has died and this other woman, who's the narrator of the story, she comes
#
And this woman is right in there talking about her, oh, bichari, matlab wo toh kuch bolti
#
nahi thi, whatever you gave her, wo kapde wahi pehn leti thi, kuch usko wahi nahi tha,
#
kuch bhi kaho wo kar leti thi aur wikdam uska koi wo nahi tha.
#
She had no demands of her own.
#
But this woman, on one of the few days before she died, she tells her sister or her sister
#
in law that I feel, I just feel like strangling you.
#
I mean, mera toh mann kareg mai tumhe gala, tumhara gala gaur du, she says.
#
And then she starts fearing her own hands and that she feels that something may happen
#
to her, that there's a kind of hidden violence in her stories, which is the rage that these
#
women feel who have been depressed and oppressed and all that, and they have this kind of anger
#
So she just doesn't know it's coming from somewhere in her subconscious, because she's
#
just says these things and she's never been like that, and on the surface, she's this
#
very compliant, obedient sort of person.
#
So she's, Jyotsana kind of gets into the mind of such women, and she's sort of looking
#
at the woman from inside, she's not, you know, she's, I mean, what it is to be a woman.
#
She's looking at that, which makes her a very, very kind of, I think, a very fun feminism
#
at the very basic level, you know, she has to get to anything else, first you have to
#
get past the figure of the woman, you have to know what the woman is feeling, what she's
#
going through, all that you have to know, you know, so I call her feminist in that sense.
#
Wow, that's fascinating.
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Sarah, thank you so much for coming on my show.
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Thank you for having me.
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It's such an honour for me.
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Thank you for having me.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to the show notes, enter rabbitholesatwill.
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Sarah is not on social media, a smart woman, but you can head on over to your nearest bookstore
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online or offline and dig into her books.
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You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
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