#
All creative people should be wary of falling into two kinds of boxes.
#
One is a box of other people's expectations.
#
Sometimes you're unlucky enough to get early success with something you've done.
#
Well, it's because you could be trapped by your success.
#
Like a band forced to play its early hits for decades after they have moved on, you
#
could find yourself driven to do a particular kind of work because that's what people want
#
This hurts your growth.
#
The second kind of box is a box of form.
#
You fall in love with a particular form, like writing books or making one-minute videos
#
or three-minute songs, and then box yourself into that form, ignoring other possibilities.
#
This is a problem because you may have begun your journey with a love of creating or a
#
love of storytelling, but a form puts a boundary line on it, and you may stop exploring other
#
ways to express yourself.
#
This would be especially tragic in modern times when the means of production are finally
#
in our hands and we can create whatever we want.
#
So if you're a creative person, keep experimenting, keep getting out of your comfort zone, be
#
open to all forms of self-expression, like audio, for example.
#
Have you ever tried podcasting?
#
Welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
My guest today is a marvelous Manjula Padmanabhan, an artist who cannot easily be put in any
#
She's a creator of the legendary and path-breaking comic strip Sookie.
#
She's an award-winning playwright, best known for the great play Harvest.
#
She's an author of science fiction.
#
She describes herself in this episode as a forever outsider.
#
I love that term so much, and I identify with it.
#
No one who is a forever outsider will ever be a slave to conventional thinking.
#
Their work will have more power.
#
Manjula is 70, she's lived a rich life, she's created works a fan will always cherish,
#
and as you can see from her Substack, which I've linked from the show notes, she's in
#
the middle of her career as far as I'm concerned, producing work with energy and imagination.
#
I hope you will love this conversation as much as I did.
#
But before we get to my customary commercial break, here's a non-commercial plug.
#
I've been super active recently on my newsletter at IndiaUncut.Substack.com.
#
Please visit, please share if you like what you see, please subscribe, IndiaUncut.Substack.com.
#
...which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
#
A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ Compounds and check out
#
New batches start every month.
#
They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
#
ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
#
Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
#
So head on over to CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code UNSEEN.
#
Manjula, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
#
I want to start with turning away from you to my listeners and telling them a little
#
story of things that have been happening this morning, which is when I was in the taxi,
#
I started thinking to myself that, okay, when did I first meet Manjula?
#
Because I have this impression that we have met, but I couldn't remember a specific movement
#
And I also have this impression that we kind of get along and we got along in the oddities
#
when we knew each other.
#
So I had that vague, warm, fuzzy impression, but I couldn't pin something down.
#
So imagine my delight when we finally meet over here and before we start recording, when
#
you said that you remember distinctly meeting me.
#
And I was like, oh, great, please tell me, remind me.
#
And then, dear listeners, Manjula told me that she met me for lunch at the IIC and I
#
gave her a cassette full of songs that I had mixed for her.
#
And that sounded odd to me because my impression was, I knew her in the oddities, why would
#
I give her a mixtape then?
#
And also, while I did give mixtapes to people in the early 90s, it was either the person
#
I was wooing or perhaps close friends.
#
So it felt a little odd and we talked a little more.
#
And then the horrifying realization came that Manjula had mixed me up with someone else
#
Yeah, another mixtape happening right here.
#
And it was someone else she had met and remembered as me.
#
And she thought this other person had called her and invited her to the podcast.
#
So she turned to me with this horrified look on her face and said, I'm afraid I don't know
#
So then we started piecing everything together because I did look familiar to her and she
#
And it turns out that we did kind of know each other in the 2000s.
#
And I dug into my email and I realized that we met at 5.30 p.m. on December 18th in 2008
#
at Crossword and Kemps Corner in Bombay.
#
And also that I reviewed your book and that I liked it.
#
And also that you reviewed my book and that you liked it.
#
And this was, and my vague memory of all that is I had written this book that I now don't
#
I think I let myself down, I tossed it off in 2008.
#
And I remember Manjula's sister Geeta gave a really nasty review somewhere saying such
#
And I was feeling so low.
#
And then Manjula said some lovely things about it.
#
So the impression in my mind is that you're such a kind person.
#
Of course I am such a kind person.
#
And it's kind of you to still be sitting here even though you don't know who I am.
#
I'm still wondering, is he not?
#
Anyway, good to meet you again.
#
Yeah, indeed life is strange and memories are sort of strange.
#
So you know, you were also chatting before we met about how you turned 70 last year and
#
we were discussing the sort of the impact of these rates on us and you said it's a great
#
It's a great age in the sense that it's a long time.
#
I don't mean that it's a wonderful age.
#
But I have for most of my life been very unimpressed by the unwillingness most people have.
#
For discussing their age.
#
So of course I always do.
#
I always like to say what age I am.
#
And I'm never very sympathetic towards those who are shy or unwilling.
#
And as far as I'm concerned, being 70 is undoubtedly old.
#
It is a long time to be alive.
#
And it is much beyond the 54 years that is supposed to be the average for India, at least
#
And I feel one of the features of, you know, like right up to 69, I didn't have this feeling.
#
But now that I'm 70, I feel my goodness, you know, it's getting there.
#
It's like I was saying to somebody, I can sense the end credits rolling.
#
And I say that with lightheartedness in the sense that you get a sense that, okay, you've
#
The journey is getting to its end.
#
And you are starting to feel comfortable with the idea that it will be over.
#
And that you can look back and ask yourself, has it been a good trip?
#
And I can say that, at least for myself, yes, it has.
#
So it's a nice feeling.
#
It's a nice feeling in that way.
#
Being old is no great shakes.
#
I wouldn't recommend it.
#
And you also made it to 40 years past the age when you were determined to sort of when
#
you were 16, you decided I will die at 30.
#
Not 16, when I was 19, sorry, I was 19 and decided that I would die.
#
Actually, you're right, I think it was 17.
#
In your book, you say 16.
#
And getting there, whatever.
#
Yes, getting there was slightly shifted, some facts were shifted.
#
It was actually 17 in real life.
#
And yes, at 17, I decided that it wasn't really necessary to live beyond 30.
#
Because in those years, there was an idea that the brain cells begin to deteriorate
#
But more than that, I felt looking ahead to the future, 13 years from the time I was 17,
#
it seemed to me I would have reached the outer limit of what is called youth and young adulthood.
#
And that after that, I would have to, I would be expected to make responsible decisions
#
about life, need to, the society around me would be expecting me to marry and settle
#
I didn't want to do those things.
#
And I had recognized that if you want to be very alternative, chances are the society
#
around you will push against you, and that it will be unpleasant and uncomfortable.
#
And I was very committed to the idea that one tries one's best to live a pleasant life.
#
And I had had till, well, I won't say till 17, I would say till my pre-teens, I'd had
#
And I was very happy with it, except for a few things.
#
I didn't like school, for instance, and much of one's childhood is taken up with school.
#
So there was the annoyance of school.
#
But aside from that annoyance, which I'm smiling because of course, it's a huge annoyance at
#
But yes, aside from that, I had what I believed and I think I can even say objectively was
#
a really rather nice life.
#
And I didn't really want any of the grown up stuff.
#
I wasn't interested in it.
#
I didn't want to, I certainly didn't want to marry.
#
I had no interest whatsoever in the domestic world.
#
And because we didn't live in India for most of my childhood, I didn't have the sense of
#
pressure from family until we'd returned to India.
#
And that was when I was 16 and a half, which is a terrible time to suddenly feel that sense
#
of pressure of attention from the family.
#
And that attention was not friendly.
#
It was not positive attention because everyone I met seemed to think that I was a little
#
weird and a little difficult.
#
And of course, I didn't think that.
#
I have always taken the stand when people try and tell me that I am strange.
#
I just disagree and think it's the world that's strange, not me.
#
Beautifully said and I'll double click on a lot of your childhood a little later.
#
But first, a related question about age.
#
Like I turned 50 recently, as I said, and it was horrible.
#
I think I was going through all kinds of mental anguish for months for a number of different
#
reasons and perhaps impending sort of age had something to do with it, how quickly the
#
years pass, your youth is gone.
#
And, you know, there are friends of mine who hold the view and a justifiable view that
#
people of my age will live to 120 because of medical science and advances.
#
And I was like, listen, no, you know, because that might mean 50 years of dementia and who
#
wants that. But there's a term now along with lifespan called healthspan that you can be
#
healthy for much longer.
#
And a friend of mine who's 58 told me, Amit, you have decades of work ahead of you, which
#
sounds exciting, but I'm not sure entirely by that.
#
But the question I want to ask you is this, that over time, how has your perception of
#
Because like when we are young, like when you were 17, 30 would have seemed a long,
#
long way away. You can live a rich life until then.
#
And then, yeah, you know, 40 year old people must have seemed terribly old to you.
#
And as we grow older, we find that it kind of expands, you know, like looking back today,
#
you know, the distance between your birth and now is the same distance as, say, I mean,
#
the 1857 rebellion ended a few years, you know, if you just minus 70 from 1953.
#
So do you look at time differently?
#
And in that regard, do you look at your own life and what you want out of life and what
#
brings happiness differently?
#
Well, going back to the decision at 17 that I would die at 30, one thing that happened
#
as a result of imagining that I would be dead in 13 years is that I lived those 13 years
#
very intensely because I was very, I mean, I have met one or two other people who have
#
had similar life plans.
#
That is, they're going to die, in quotes, young.
#
And because I had that idea that I didn't have long to live, 30 didn't seem, especially
#
when I crossed 20, 21, 13, 30 did not seem that far away.
#
And I felt I had to pack in a great deal of living to make it worthwhile to be quitting
#
And it may seem funny or bizarre that I honestly believed that I was going to do it.
#
And I didn't often speak about it to friends because I knew that I had, of course, realized
#
that people become irritated and disbelieving and you have pointless kinds of arguments.
#
So I didn't feel the need to justify, to carry on about it.
#
Of course, in my book, Getting There, I talk about it.
#
But your question is about perceptions of time.
#
Thinking that you're going to die at 30, by whatever means, we will not go down the path
#
of discussing the means, by why I thought.
#
And I have often looked back and thought, my goodness, if I had suddenly had a fatal
#
accident at 28 or 27, my first thought would be, wait, another three years ago, this is
#
So for some reason, at the time, it never occurred to me that something might happen
#
And right up till 30, my birthday is in the middle of the year.
#
Right up till that date, I kept thinking, you know, I can still do it.
#
But the sense of waning intention, because it's also, again, I think we won't go down
#
the path of discussing means and methods because that can, for many people, can sound grim.
#
All I can say is that it isn't.
#
I don't feel a sense of doom, even though that was what I was thinking about the whole
#
But because of that plan, my sense of time after I crossed 30 was, my goodness, I have
#
my whole life and I have nothing planned.
#
I don't have any concept of how I will live more responsibly or be more practical because,
#
I had decided that I'm not going to live long, therefore it doesn't matter what I do.
#
I can make every kind of mess in my life because I don't have to care what people will think
#
of me because I won't be around for long.
#
If you can convince yourself of that, I'm not suggesting that anyone listening to this
#
podcast should convince themselves because it can be a little gloomy sometimes.
#
But realizing that I suddenly had a huge, potentially a huge lease of life, as I said,
#
it did not seem to occur to me that I could die suddenly, unplanned.
#
And from all of this, perhaps it is clear that I lived in a sort of bubble where I didn't
#
really see much of standard life in the sense that I didn't, because we lived away from
#
the family, I didn't see deaths much in the way of deaths in the family.
#
We heard of events, birth and death, but we didn't actually see them.
#
I was neither familiar with old and aging people, nor with very young.
#
I was not used to small children.
#
I didn't especially like children, and I didn't have any in my immediate neighborhood.
#
And my nephew and niece, that is my sister, Geetha's son and daughter, were in a sense
#
the only children that I was initially exposed to.
#
And no one in my family was so careless as to leave me in the care of any children because
#
it was very clear that I was not equipped.
#
So in a sense, by the time I was 30, I had a very strong sense of time, of time passing
#
and of time being something that you can a little bit play with, that you can think about
#
it as something that you have to be very conscious of, because again, most of my 20s were spent
#
in desperately trying to make enough money to pay rent, because at 20, there was a very,
#
I would say, serious decision I made at 21.
#
At 21, I said to my parents, I have finished my degrees.
#
I had done a BA in economics and an MA in history.
#
I was never a good student, but I did, I seemed to have just kind of bumbled my way through
#
I sort of got through them.
#
And as soon as I was done, that is at 21, I said to my parents, you no longer need to
#
So I was no longer accepting money from them, and therefore was not, and I said, since I'm
#
not accepting money, I'm 21, I can live on my own, and I will.
#
I wasn't staying at home.
#
I was staying as a paying guest in a small apartment, just in a room in Bombay, and then
#
later in two or three different places.
#
And my only fixation was how to pay my rent, because I was very stubborn and very unwilling
#
So I was determined never to ask my parents for money, and I didn't.
#
So all that tells you is that I spent my entire 20s and much of my 30s struggling to make
#
money from being an artist, an illustrator, cartoonist, and occasionally a writer.
#
And anyone, again, anyone listening to this who has attempted to do that for a living
#
will know that it's a very poor living.
#
You don't make any money.
#
And I used to earn all of 75 rupees for a small drawing in the Times of India.
#
And that was not a small, in fact, it was a three-column drawing.
#
It was the most I got for a drawing.
#
And when, with my comic strip, I made 300 rupees a week, it seemed like a lot of money.
#
Of course it wasn't, because I was paying, whatever, 1,200 rupees for my rent.
#
And it never, and that, you know, I also needed to eat and have money for taxis because I
#
So it was, you know, as I keep saying, I was not, and still I'm not practical.
#
I preferred to spend whatever I had in my account rather than try and save.
#
Again, this is where dying at 30 was helpful because then I didn't have to think about,
#
you know, saving for a future that I believed wouldn't happen.
#
But after 30, then it all began to kick in, oh my God, I've made no plans.
#
And then, you know, if you are temperamentally impractical, then it just becomes another
#
And you just do what you can.
#
But time had become something I was very conscious of.
#
I have to meet a deadline, I would meet my deadlines.
#
So I would say that the passage of years has been very conscious.
#
I've been very aware, and also I have two older sisters who are seven and ten years
#
And through their lives, I have had a sense of the passage of time, what they feel, what
#
It strikes me that, you know, setting, assuming that you have that fixed point at which you
#
will no longer be here, can also be liberating in the sense that it can then liberate you
#
Like, I think too many of us when we are young, we make the mistake that we set goals for
#
ourselves, whether it is a goal in terms of building a career towards something or whether
#
it's a goal in terms of, oh, I want to write so many books or make so many films, etc.
#
And those goals can become traps, because in the end, the only thing that actually I
#
think gives you happiness is just the process of figuring out what you like to do and just
#
And there need not be a goal attached to it.
#
And I think that's a trap that, you know, people can often take a long time to get past.
#
And it seems to me that that may not have been such a trap for you.
#
Because one, you're going through the everyday experiences of whatever you're doing and meeting
#
the rent and your sort of horizon is much shorter than that.
#
And equally, when earlier you spoke about, I wanted to pack in as much as possible, I'm
#
assuming you meant in terms of packing in experiences and not packing in things that
#
I will do per se or goals that I will achieve.
#
So is that kind of the case that you were never goal-directed and you could just...
#
No, listen, because I had, for some reason, I mean, maybe we can, we meaning, maybe if
#
I felt like I could analyze why exactly, but by my mid-teens, I had grown completely unimpressed
#
by other people and other people's opinions.
#
And it never mattered very much to me if people didn't like me or didn't approve of me because,
#
as I think I've already said, I seem to have, I mean, I can't say I was born like that.
#
But somewhere along the way, I seem to have had such an extraordinary sense of myself
#
as being entirely self-sufficient.
#
I'm not needy emotionally and don't feel the need to be loved or even approved of.
#
It's as if I have placed on myself a giant tick mark and I don't, you know, if someone
#
doesn't like me, okay, poor them is what I feel.
#
But it doesn't, I wouldn't, this might sound, and if someone wants to think that it sounds
#
horribly arrogant, maybe they're right, maybe it is horribly arrogant, but I don't think
#
of it as arrogance, I just think surely anyone can make the same, it's a decision.
#
It's not because I think I'm wonderful, I don't think that, I don't think I'm particularly
#
smart, I'm often told that I am, I used to be told that, but I don't pay any attention
#
I don't think I'm particularly smart, I, you know, I make lots and lots of mistakes,
#
I fail a great deal, and when people introduce me as, you know, the well-known, for me that's
#
all completely ridiculous, it has very little meaning, and I don't, this is what I mean
#
when I say I'm not interested in other people's opinions of me, because my opinion of myself
#
is what counts, and my opinion is middling, I think I'm not bad, that's all.
#
And I don't wake up every morning thinking, you know, maybe there are people who do that,
#
you know, people who are actually very successful in their lives, and so they wake up with a
#
kind of, you know, the sunrise behind their heads.
#
I don't, as we said earlier, I don't wake up easily at all, I struggle to get out of
#
bed because I have, again, I laugh about this because it seems ridiculous, but I have wonderful
#
morning dreams, I dream a lot, and I have charming dreams, so it's like, to struggle
#
out of whatever the main feature of the morning is, is not easy, and if the room I'm in, and
#
in fact the room in Delhi is like that, if it is dark, then I have no incentive to wake
#
If I'm in a room where the sunlight comes in, I'll wake up easily, but that's not the
#
case in Delhi, because we're on the ground floor and, you know, there's a driveway right
#
outside my window, so it's curtained off, and so it's very dark, and the thing I detest
#
the most is if someone puts a light on.
#
I hate being woken up with a bright electric light.
#
I like a soft, anyway, all of this is a way of saying that I am, in a sense, easily satisfied.
#
I don't ask much of life, and in a sense, I haven't actually got very much.
#
I have a tiny cupboard closet of clothes.
#
I've never had much of an interest in clothes.
#
I don't have much of an interest in possessions.
#
I am, to many people's surprise, actually married, but I never talk about the other
#
person because he's very private and hates being talked about, and he knows that I talk
#
a lot, so I try to be respectful and not talk about him.
#
So I would say, you know, it's not when I say that I'm satisfied with my life, it's
#
not because I have very much.
#
Maybe that's why, you know, it's like there's not very much to lose.
#
Have you read this excellent book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker?
#
I will send it to you because a couple of interesting things I learned from that book,
#
and one of them is that he talks about the importance of sleep and divides it into his
#
different parts, and the revelation there is that, you know, you have light sleep, you
#
have deep sleep, and you have REM sleep, and deep and REM are super important, and REM
#
is that phase where we dream, and REM is actually bunched towards the end, right?
#
So I actually have a watch that tracks my sleep every day and tells me how I sleep and
#
etc., etc., and REM is bunched towards the end, and that is when we dream, so it is actually
#
not unusual that you dream in the mornings because it is always going to be in the last
#
part of your sleeping that you dream, and the other thing that I've learned about sleep
#
is that sleeping in darkness is super important because the light, even if your eyes aren't
#
open, gives a signal to your body that it's time to wake up, so long may you sleep peacefully
#
in the dark without people waking you up, and also, you know, what you said about not
#
caring about others strikes a chord because A, I think is not at all arrogant, you showed
#
a lot of humility by saying you don't think you're particularly smart, frankly, I've
#
had a lot of great achievers on this show, and they all have this humility, you know,
#
it is really the mediocre who wake up thinking the sun shines out of their ass, so I'm not
#
at all surprised, but I actually envy that sense of not caring about what others think
#
because I think that is really a fundamental human anxiety that holds all of us back, I
#
think it took me well, well, well into my adulthood to, you know, begin to even recognize
#
it and then start to lose it and start not caring, and yet it is kind of instinctive,
#
so I really sort of envy that, but let's get to biography now, so, you know, tell me about
#
your childhood, which was itinerant, you were traveling around, tell me about your childhood,
#
your parents, what growing up was like?
#
So, you know, I was born in New Delhi, and we traveled very soon after that, my father
#
was in the Foreign Service, we went to Sweden for two years, Switzerland for three years,
#
Pakistan, Karachi for three years, and then, as far as I was concerned, for the first time
#
returned to India, in the sense that I was, you know, I didn't have, obviously didn't
#
have much of the way of memories of being born in India, so we lived in Delhi for three
#
years and then Thailand for three years, and then my parents, my father was, in Thailand
#
was posted there as ambassador, and his final posting was in Iran, and it was a time in
#
Iran's history where they were celebrating 2000 years of the Shah's, the dynasty, the
#
Shah belonged to the Pahlavi dynasty, and it was, it was a time in Iran when they were,
#
they believed they were at that peak, so it was a very glittering and fun time to be there.
#
I, I, at that time went to boarding school in Kodaikanal in South India, so I visited
#
my parents in Iran, it was wonderful, I loved Iran, but it's like, you know, it's not really
#
very meaningful to say Iran, because what I saw of Iran was the very limited and glittery
#
side of living with my parents and the embassy, and that sort of very, in one sense, very
#
superficial life of being in Tehran, but I did love their food, I did like the people,
#
beautiful people, I mean, it was, to me, it was really startling how handsome they were,
#
men and women. Anyway, then my father retired, and I experienced what I have often spoken of
#
as reverse frog-prince, from being something like a princess, I became a frog, I became
#
completely and frighteningly ordinary in terms of my social life, because my parents retired
#
with, in the same way that many government officials retire with a kind of very modest
#
living, and I was not mentally and emotionally equipped to make that change, and I didn't
#
consciously think that this was my, this was all that remained, you know, it seemed to
#
me that my life had to be on a different trajectory, and of course, you know, like any young person,
#
I hope to make it happen, but remember, at 17, I was planning to, so it's very possible
#
that the change of life from the very pleasant traveling life of my childhood to suddenly
#
be stuck in India in a kind of reduced circumstance was a good reason to feel that, you know,
#
there's no reason to continue doing this for too long, and I would, so, you know, after
#
boarding school, I was in college for three years in Bombay, Elphinstone College, it was
#
quite, it was a challenge to me to be suddenly surrounded by people similar, but not very
#
much the same, because the people around me were from, especially in Bombay, you know,
#
Bombay is a commercial city, and I had never really met people from commercial backgrounds.
#
I remember in my boarding school, which was, as I said, in Kudai Kunal, presentation convent
#
Kudai Kunal, for the first time in that school, I met people whose values were based on money.
#
I had never met such people before.
#
I had hardly ever used any physical money in my life, and the closest I came to actually
#
using money was when playing Monopoly as a child in Thailand.
#
I loved Monopoly, but as I have said in years since then, as an adult, I can't bear to play
#
Monopoly, because it's too much like real life.
#
Every time you go around the board, maybe you get $200, but most often you've paid
#
ghastly rents, and none of your properties are earning anything, and it's just the pressure.
#
I can't, you know, even on a game board, I can't face it.
#
But in Bombay, it was, I have a few friends from those years, and they were good friends,
#
but they were, in many ways, their lives and my life were clearly very different.
#
In a sense, the minor sense of alienation I had always had, you know, if you travel
#
as a child, and you're always a foreigner, you are used to the sense of alienation.
#
When you come back to what everyone tells you is your own country, you should settle
#
into what is your country, but what I realized was that I was much more alien in my own country,
#
because I didn't speak any local language.
#
I didn't speak Hindi, and I specifically also never spoke my supposed mother tongue.
#
I say that English is my mother tongue because I learned English from my mother.
#
I never learned to speak what would be my ethnic language, which is Malayalam.
#
I don't know it at all.
#
I speak terrible Hindi, but I don't speak any Malayalam at all.
#
So in a sense, you know, when people say, because of my, a recurring conversation is
#
people hear my name, my surname Padmanabhan, which is my birth name, and it is immediately
#
assumed that I'm Tamilian because that is a Tamilian name.
#
And they will say, so, oh, you must be, you know, and I say, no, I'm not from Tamil Nadu.
#
And then they will say, so, you know, where are you from?
#
And I used to say, I'm not from Tamil Nadu, but I'm from Kerala.
#
But latterly, I've decided, I've begun to think that that is, it is really, it's kind
#
I can say that my parents were Mulyali, but what am I?
#
You know, I'm certainly not, I've never lived there.
#
I'm very fond of my relatives.
#
I like a certain amount of Mulyali food, but I like all kinds of food.
#
I think it's, people like to put others in a, in a pigeonhole.
#
And it is convenient to say, oh, you're Mulyali, but I'm not.
#
And I think, in fact, there are very many Indians who fall into this category, but very
#
many of us choose not to accept that fact.
#
We choose, we prefer, and maybe it's a sense of security, I'm not sure.
#
I think for me, it's easier to think of myself as a permanent outsider and just sort of,
#
I don't feel a sense of rootedness and I also don't feel a longing to be rooted.
#
I just, it's like that transistor is missing altogether.
#
I learned this, you know, great phrase, rooted cosmopolitanism from an episode I did with
#
Sugata Srinivasaraju, and of course it applied to him and many others he was talking about.
#
And I feel in my case, again, the rootedness is missing.
#
I'm cosmopolitan, but I don't really feel like I'm from anywhere.
#
And throughout my life, I've kind of felt an outsider in the various fields that I've
#
dabbled in and I've come to terms with that a bit.
#
But I also, sometimes you feel the sense of loss that where is home really?
#
That do I have a community?
#
Who are my people, quote unquote, you know?
#
In your case, it was never that sense of loss apart from the alienation you said you felt
#
I mean, my home is wherever I am and I don't, I imagine one amongst the determining factors
#
If you have very particular food needs, then it's possible that you will always hanker
#
after something or the other.
#
It's very possible that going to a boarding school kind of cut off the desire or the need
#
for a particular cuisine.
#
I suspect it is something much more basic, that I am lazy about needs and I prefer to
#
be comfortable rather than be needy.
#
Therefore, rather than yearn for something I can't easily get, I enjoy things that are
#
easy to get like toast and butter.
#
I like very simple food and I very rarely have a need for anything particular.
#
And most of the time, if you don't have very particular needs, you can easily be satisfied.
#
So I think, as I said, it has something more to do with being lazy.
#
I would characterize myself as extremely lazy, indolent, and that in my preferred mode, I
#
don't want to make an effort to be comfortable.
#
So if I were the kind of person who was very particular, especially about food, I would
#
probably be very uncomfortable because typically people who have special needs spend a lot
#
of their time hunting for just the right thing, which, you know, when they get it,
#
then they're really happy.
#
It's possible, and I'm very willing to accept this, that for someone like myself, and of
#
course I'm not unusual, if you don't have very particular needs, you're, and as I said,
#
I think this is true of me, you don't experience the intense joy of getting something that
#
I think I don't have very strong emotions up or down.
#
I don't get angry much, and I don't experience great highs.
#
I'm very middle, in the middle, and very steady.
#
So when people go through that process of kind of coming into adulthood and finding
#
I find that there are two sort of journeys they make, two kind of anxieties they deal
#
with, and one of which we've already discussed, and you said you didn't really care about
#
it, which is you didn't care about what other people thought of you, and that came very
#
early, and that is something that young people have to kind of deal with, and there is this
#
great phrase I learned recently from psychology called the looking glass self, where you kind
#
of form a conception of who you are from the reflections in the eyes of others, and you
#
start doing more of what they approve of, and you start trying to fit in, and I guess
#
that's one journey that is not so relevant, but one journey that surely is, is the process
#
of figuring out for yourself who you really are, and what you want to be, and so on and
#
so forth, and you know, in the protagonist in getting there, and I'm saying the protagonist
#
in getting there, even though it's a memoir, but you know, as you said, some things might
#
be shifted around, and the protagonist in getting there is particularly at the start
#
of the book facing that in terms of weight, that she just wants to lose weight, she hates
#
the way she looks, and yeah, something I can relate to now as well, and later on when that
#
need to figure out who she is and to be someone else expands beyond just that, at one point,
#
she is saying to her boyfriend, I've got to go through with something, it's something
#
I'm trying out, a person I'm trying to be, it's like trying on new clothes or a new costume,
#
I don't know what I look like at the end of it, I don't know if I'll stay that way or
#
come back to what I was, and I found this very poignant, it's just this process of not
#
knowing who you are, perhaps at some level not being satisfied with what you are, maybe
#
trying something else, a new way of being, etc, etc.
#
So what was that process for you like, like I imagine to some extent, the art and the
#
writing would have played a part in it, but just overall, what was that journey like in
#
those years, where you begin to settle into the shape of what eventually becomes you?
#
I would say the years between when I was in boarding school, that's 14, 15, 16, I was
#
in boarding school, and from the time, that means from the time I kind of returned to
#
India, 13, 14, and then went to school, boarding school, and then till the 30s, you know, till
#
the kind of virtual death.
#
So in a sense, it's possible that for me, that sense of crossing 30 was a kind of rebirth
#
into another person, and that from 13, 14, which for many people is a time of terrible
#
confusion anyway, but for me, it was made complex by the fact that we'd been in Thailand
#
Thailand was a difficult place for a young person to be because the Vietnam War was going
#
on next door, and I was in an international school, which again, I expected that.
#
That's how I lived much of my life.
#
But the sense of being at the brink of things because of the war next door, obviously we
#
didn't see the war in Thailand, in Bangkok, but we saw troops, American troops in the
#
city all the time, and this culture of continuous sexual activity and the nightlife, which you
#
would not expect a school child to know about, but of course, it was there the whole time.
#
And in the shops, in whatever you saw, even in tourist shops, the sense of the sex trade
#
going on continuously all the time, and you couldn't not be aware of this other kind of
#
raucous nightclub life going on.
#
And meanwhile, the Thais and their very delicate and beautiful and traditional culture are
#
struggling to keep up with all of this other stuff going on, and the Americans in school
#
with me, who were all the children of troops.
#
I mean, obviously they were stationed in Thailand, so they were the children of officers, but
#
they were very different to what I was seeing on TV, American TV shows.
#
The children in school were from lower middle class families from America, and the parents,
#
the fathers were out in the field.
#
So from that to come to a very quiet and elite boarding school, these were huge shocks.
#
And as I said, despite my sense of centeredness about myself, I was, of course, under continuous
#
pressure from the outside, coming back to India meant meeting the relatives who had
#
not been there all through my early life.
#
When you say that it's one of the pressures that most people feel, they feel it because
#
most people are embedded in their families.
#
I have a huge family, but they were not actually with me.
#
So I couldn't, I didn't feel that overbearing sense of uncle this thinks that, and aunt
#
this thinks that, and you know, everyone thinks you are cross-eyed or whatever it is that
#
And I would hear these things, but they wouldn't because you need continuous exposure for it
#
to have a deep effect on you and to actually begin to distort your sense of yourself.
#
Because I didn't have that to start with, coming back into it as a teenager and then
#
all the years between finishing, ending school and then college and the pressures of struggling
#
to live in a world which didn't have spaces for people like me.
#
All of this, I was able to circumvent in part because I didn't speak local languages.
#
I didn't speak Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam.
#
So I didn't, you know, when people are sarcastic, it is nearly always in the mother tongue.
#
If you don't have a sense of those cutting remarks that people, if you don't have a sense
#
of what they mean deeply, then even when someone insults you in some language that doesn't,
#
you know, you might physically know, might literally know the meaning, but it doesn't
#
actually hurt because it's, oh, this is what it means, but it doesn't touch you.
#
And I would say that might be one reason that I was sort of immune because none of the things
#
that people might say actually touched me much.
#
But it still took a while to settle into something personal rather than external, an external view.
#
And this part of what was happening in getting there was struggling away from the shell,
#
the various shells of personality that the world places upon you, an expectation that
#
you'll marry, an expectation that you'll settle down with a particular guy, that you'll live
#
a, you know, if you've had an upper middle class life that you'll continue in that way.
#
All of that was what I was struggling to make sense of without any examples outside of myself
#
of people, other people who were similar to me.
#
There was no one like that.
#
I mean, the closest relative who had done something unusual was, and very unusual in
#
her case, was my great aunt whose name is E.K. Janaki Amal, who is a famous botanist
#
and a botanical geneticist who won all kinds of honors.
#
She was born at the end of the 19th century, and I knew of her, and of course I also met
#
her a few times in my life, as amongst my entire constellation of extremely respectable
#
and straightforward or straight livings, at least superficially, aunts and uncles, one
#
my great aunt, that is my mother's aunt, who didn't marry, who at 15 told her family that
#
she was not going to marry, that she was going to wear saffron, be celibate, and become a
#
And the fact that not only did she get her way, but she made a huge mark for herself,
#
a name for herself, as a complete renegade.
#
It's like I could have chosen from all my aunts and uncles, but I chose that one to
#
Of course, when I would say to my mother, well, you know, my aunt, your aunt didn't
#
get married, she would say, but she was a great scientist.
#
You, on the other hand, are nothing, you know, because my parents were not impressed by my
#
desire to be an artist.
#
They knew, I mean, my parents were both interested in art, they bought a lot of art.
#
In the course of our journeys, my mother had a very good eye for art objects, but, and
#
of course, both my parents were, you know, my father was in the Foreign Service, he was
#
an LLB, so he, obviously they were both, and my mother was a BA in English literature,
#
everyone in the family was very educated.
#
The idea of making a living as an artist or writer, this was not considered successful,
#
So if I wanted to do something to impress my parents, I would have had to be a professional
#
of some sort, which I wasn't going to be.
#
So I didn't impress my parents much at all, but leaving home at 21 meant that they couldn't
#
manipulate me much, not that they were wonderful parents, they were, the best part of them
#
was that they left me free to think.
#
They didn't try to control my thoughts or my ideology or idealism at all, but on the
#
other hand, I didn't actually live at home, so they couldn't control me directly.
#
I don't know if I've wandered very far from your question.
#
No, no, all my questions are aimed at finding out more about your life, so you're right
#
in the center of it, and I don't think it's possible to wander far.
#
At this point, I'll remind my listeners and myself that this is really the late 60s and
#
early 70s you're talking about when you're in your teens and late teens, and there is
#
not only no internet in terms of access to knowledge and picking up different frames
#
about the world, but when you speak of having no examples, that sort of brings me to thinking
#
about then, apart from having that one aunt, you know, what are, how did you form your
#
frames of thinking about yourself and the world in the sense that, again, your protagonist
#
in getting there and therefore I assume you, has a disdain towards traditional notions
#
like marriage and having kids and that life, and I guess most people by default would get
#
sucked into that notion of what they're expected to be in life, so the men will think I'm going
#
to be doctor or engineer or whatever it is, and I'm going to then get married and have
#
kids, and the women will also think it's that way, et cetera, et cetera, but you had clearly
#
pretty young sort of formed a frame that is different from that.
#
I'm wondering if maybe the Thailand experience has something to do with that in terms of,
#
you know, the relations between men and women seeing the instrumental side of that and perhaps,
#
but maybe not, or like, were there, what kind of reading were you doing?
#
Had you actually done any feminist reading by that time?
#
What were the books that influenced you?
#
Well, I think very early in my life, the questions my mother in particular was always asking
#
the three of us, myself and my two older sisters, was what do you want to be when you grow up?
#
There was never any, for some, I'm not for some reason, I know very well what the reason is.
#
My mother had always wanted to be a doctor and had been thwarted in her desire, and doing
#
a BA was the best, was the closest she could get to an academic life, which she would have preferred.
#
So very possibly, I was influenced very deeply by a mother who did not have an interest in
#
traditional family life.
#
She didn't, it's, you know, she may not have realized that she was instilling that desire or
#
lack of desire in me, but clearly that had been, that was a deep impression early, left in me very
#
early. And my sister's, one sister went on, you know, she, one sister got married early, but the
#
understanding was that her education would not be interrupted.
#
So she went from being married straight into her BA, and the second sister was pressured, I'm
#
smiling because my mother was closest to that, the middle sister, my sister called Surya, and was then
#
able to get Surya to become a doctor, which was what my mother, you know, considered the highest
#
possible profession. And with two sisters who were achievers and who had done what parents wanted of
#
them, I didn't feel the pressure to follow suit at all, because okay, they'd gone that path. And
#
since my life was quite different to theirs, for all kinds of reasons, just in part because I was
#
much younger, and the influences I was faced with were different to what theirs was, because part of
#
what forms a person is this family life, the way that one is affected by all the relatives who know
#
you. If you're not affected by very many relatives, they're just, they're nice people whom you meet and
#
who are nice to you, but they don't get in your mind, they're not in your brain. And I think for
#
many, especially many Asians, it's all across Asia, the sense of your, all your massed relative
#
sitting in your brain telling you what to do and frowning at you if you do the wrong things, if you
#
don't have that, then you make choices based on what you read, what you, so you asked me about
#
reading. So I was a voracious reader till my late teens. And I, of course, you know, movies were only
#
things that you went to cinemas to see, and I saw a lot of films, even as a child, one of the things of
#
being in Thailand was that there was no rating, there was no censorship, so anyone could see
#
anything. Of course, I was a child, so to get to a cinema, I would need to go with others, I wouldn't be
#
able to go on my own. But there was nothing to stop any of us from seeing whatever we wished and which
#
we sort of did. And later, so cinema was very important to me. And of course, much later, when I met
#
people who were knowledgeable about cinema, I realized that what I call cinema was just what
#
they sneered at as, oh, my goodness, commercial cinema. That's not cinema, etc., etc. That's a
#
whole other debate. But it was very important also to understand that what I had liked was just, you
#
know, Hollywood commercial films and that there's a whole other level. But that was for much later
#
in life. You ask about feminism. So in my late teens, I became conscious, as did many people,
#
of the feminist movement, and it was very important to me. I read not so much books,
#
but magazines. I was a subscriber, my sister in the U.S. My sister by then had, the middle sister
#
had earned her degree, gone to the U.S., was living there, and she sent me material, such as Ms.
#
Magazine. I had a subscription to Ms. Magazine. So in the late teens, early 20s, I was, as I say
#
in getting there, I was quite passionate about being a feminist. But even by the middle of my
#
20s, as I say in getting there, I was starting to have some very deep doubts about feminism as an
#
idealism to, ideology to live by. I still, I continue to think it's a very useful ideology
#
to help one, help a young person, particularly young women. It helps women to think about
#
themselves and the place of women in the world, in the world that we have rather than the world
#
that we would all prefer. At the same time, for myself, I began to draw away from hardline feminism
#
because it seemed to me that it wasn't working too well for me. Because again, then we get pushed,
#
pulled back into the opinions of others, of what a woman should be, can be, ought to be,
#
whether it's in the West or in the East, these views are very hardwired. And society has,
#
all societies, have very fixed, rigid opinions. And I would say today's movements towards
#
transgenderism of various kinds, the fact that in today's world we acknowledge a number of different
#
genders, is actually a reflection of the fact that society has rigid views for men and women
#
as if we were a completely separate species. Whereas in fact, as I believe, and I'm not alone,
#
it's a spectrum, maleness and femaleness is a spectrum. And most of us fit close to the one or
#
the other end, but very few of us are fixed puritans on either end of the spectrum.
#
And some of us are very much closer to the middle. Now, I would not say that I am
#
confused about my gender, but I clearly don't fit at the female end of the spectrum, not clearly,
#
because I don't live a feminine life. And I don't have any difficulty placing myself
#
in today's parlance as cisgender woman. You can call me that, but I still don't actually
#
live a woman's life. And I'm sometimes very conscious of that. I see other women and the
#
struggles they have, and I sympathize, but it's not my struggle. And so, however much I might
#
sympathize, I'm also very conscious that I haven't lived that life. And my ability to sympathize,
#
is it? I worry, is there a terrible edge of condescension there? And to what extent am I
#
truly able to report? What am I reporting on? What am I writing about when it's not
#
from the same base that most women are experiencing?
#
When you say, I haven't really lived a woman's life, isn't that question itself with reference
#
to the stereotype of what a woman's life is, and with reference to the stereotype of what femininity
#
is, or what women must do, and all of that? And therefore, almost meaningless by itself?
#
Yes and no. Because what it does is, one can say that. But what it does is, by and large,
#
when in any group amongst other women, my experiences are not the same. And then if you
#
keep making groups, then my experiences are, of course, not the same as men. And then which
#
group will I easily belong to? And no, it's not easy to define that. Again, it doesn't upset me.
#
And then there is another issue. A lot of these questions become settled as one grows older.
#
And older women are all much closer to a particular norm of behavior and attitude.
#
Except that, of course, if one has not had children, then an entire world of experience
#
is outside my range. And my not having children is because I had no interest. I never wanted to
#
have children, never felt. And I mean, I don't even own a plant. I'm not good at looking after
#
living things. So it's not at all that I felt any desire to belong to that world.
#
It's and again, I don't feel this. I never feel a sense of abnormality.
#
I just feel there must be others like me. And I have been fortunate to get away with being the
#
way I am without being stigmatized much. No one really attempts to tell me that I'm odd. I know
#
I'm odd. It hasn't affected me. Yeah, I actually don't think you're odd,
#
number one. And number two, what I kind of meant was that just because you don't conform to the
#
stereotype of what a woman is expected to be like doesn't mean you're any less of a woman or doesn't
#
mean that, you know, I mean, then we are defining that category too sort of rigidly in a sense,
#
I think. I mean, people are what they are. Why does it make a difference?
#
It starts to make a difference. But I mean, you know, I live around all the
#
barriers. So most of the time, and you know, I can, unlike someone who is actually transiting
#
or is feeling unsure and so on, I'm not, I easily tick the mark that says male, female, I tick the
#
mark. You know, I'm not pretending. But I would say that there are certain
#
differences and that sense of oddity if I don't feel it, it's because I live outside the norms.
#
I don't, you know, I never go to weddings. I hate weddings. I hate situations where the sexes are
#
are highly underlined as being this is the male side, this is the female side, and you know,
#
God forbid that you're somewhere in the middle. I don't go, I don't experience any of that.
#
And I don't, I'm not usually in a situation where I have to, with some embarrassment, say, well,
#
you know, that doesn't apply to me. Obviously, I'm not trying to stand out. So I don't, it's not as
#
if I wait for moments when I go, oh, that's not me. I don't say that. I don't need to.
#
Just yesterday, I recorded an episode with Ira Pandey. So she related this incident from the
#
early 1980s. Her husband was an IS officer in Chandigarh, and he had committed to going to a
#
party with her on the very evening when there was going to be a critical episode in Hamlog
#
where Nanhe was going to die. So she was like, I can't go. Nanhe is going to die.
#
And he was like, no, I have already committed. You must come. So he takes her along. And then
#
they go to this party and she sees that it's all men. So she says, Hey, you brought me to a
#
stack party. I'm taking the driver. I'm going home. I want to watch Nanhe die. And then Justin,
#
the host says, no, no, no, no, madam. All the wives have also come. And then he takes her into
#
this room and all the women are sitting there in front of a television and she sits with them.
#
And they all watch Nanhe die together in that sort of seminal episode of Hamlog. And they all cry
#
together. So when you mentioned men and women being in like distinct rooms, I totally remember
#
that. And if I was at the party, I would have just liked to go out and be away from the men and the
#
women. I imagine you would too. Let's talk about your art. And you've described yourself elsewhere
#
as you've said you thought of yourself when you were very young as a writer who could draw.
#
But later the artistic impulse took over more because it was easier to sell in the marketplace
#
and all of that. But obviously in your mind, there's, I mean, nothing is primary. Both of them
#
are things that you did. So, you know, with whichever of those journeys you'd like to start
#
on first, take me through that because especially like when it comes to art, I'm just thinking you
#
didn't actually receive any formal training per se. You had to pick up whatever you did, partly
#
from instinct, partly from just looking all around you. As you said, your parents were
#
interested in art. But again, you didn't have the unlimited glories of the internet to feast on
#
different sort of, to build an LLM for yourself as it were. So take me through, you know, whichever
#
of those journeys would like to start with how you got into it and so on. Right. So 11, 12, 13,
#
when we were in Thailand was a time when I had much more time to myself than in previous years.
#
And both my sisters were very gifted. So being able to draw was not considered any big deal.
#
Everyone in my family, I have lots of cousins, 33 first cousins. Do you remember all the names?
#
No. I mean, if I have to. But I know some, certainly some families more than others,
#
but most of my cousins are also very gifted, very talented. But I am one of the very few who
#
has built onto that talent, the huge majority who can all paint and write and so on. I haven't done
#
that for a living. Of my larger network of family, one of my, it's not a cousin, but a cousin's
#
daughter is a very well known painter. But that's very rare. I mean, in that large network,
#
she's one of the very few. Being able to draw was therefore something that it expresses itself more
#
than writing. But I still have essays that I wrote as a 12 year old, 11 year old from that school.
#
And I had tremendous belief in myself, as I keep saying. It never even occurred to me that there
#
was any doubt about, you know, I had not heard that writers don't merely write something and
#
then get published. That there was any review process. I had no idea of that. It just seemed
#
to me, you know, people have an ability, they produce books, they get published. The idea that
#
there is a struggle did not occur to me. And in that sense, art is a little bit easier because
#
it's instantaneous. You can see it. And either it does or it doesn't work. And in that sense,
#
it was easier to get a certain kind of attention for ability because, you know, I can, I could draw.
#
And because my sisters and parents had high standards, it wasn't enough to just produce,
#
you know, a mark on paper for everyone to gasp and say, oh my goodness, that's fabulous. No,
#
my mother would say, yeah, but you know, that it's just, it doesn't work. And it could be better.
#
And there was no easy acceptance. And also, it was not enough ever to just get attention.
#
My parents were busy. Their social life was extremely intense in Thailand and Iran.
#
So it's not as if they were hovering over me at all. And I had, you know, a huge range of
#
influences to choose from. And I only ever chose from the classic artists of the European world.
#
So if you are measuring yourself against Michelangelo, your standards are going to be high.
#
They're bound to be. So, and that is what I did. These were my great heroes. I had no time for
#
Picasso. I thought he was a complete worthless type. And it was, you know, all the impressionists
#
were okay. It took me a while to warm up to Van Gogh. But my favorites were Michelangelo. I used
#
to copy his work to get us, you know, to get a closeness to that way of seeing. And in that
#
sense, perhaps it's a good thing that there was no internet. Because then you're, in today's world,
#
it is so easy to get praise. It's so easy to get people to admire some very worthless little
#
something that you've done. And I'm, I mean, you know, people feel good. So that's great.
#
But my standards are based on another very different norm. And it took a while, of course,
#
to realize that, yes, you might be able to draw, but that doesn't mean you can make a living.
#
That continues to be true. Everyone I meet is, I would say, most people acknowledge that I am
#
gifted, but I'm not successful. And I still haven't been, despite having admirers, despite
#
having people who claim to like my work, both as an artist and as a writer. But that further shore
#
of actual success, that is not mine. And at 70, I acknowledge it might never be.
#
That might be true if you define success in a particular conventional way. But if you succeed
#
in doing the kind of work you wanted to do, I guess you're successful. And that's the end of it.
#
No, I don't think so. No, no. How do you define success? I think if your success does not, I mean,
#
let us just look at writing. If your abilities, however much they might be admired,
#
do not actually touch a lot of people, then you have not succeeded. And it's not enough to get
#
a little scattering of praise from people who already like you. If you have something to say
#
that goes beyond your own horizon, and I think much of what I do is like that, then if I don't
#
find an audience, it is a failure. And it might be my failure. It might also be the failure of the
#
market I'm in. It might be any kind of thing, but it is a failure. And the other day, someone
#
was, someone raised the possibility that I'm doing this on purpose. That is, I am on purpose,
#
maintaining a kind of comfortable low. Maybe that's true. But you're looking a little
#
surprised by that. But what I mean is, there is a certain pleasure in being the forever outsider,
#
the one who doesn't ever make it to the inner circle, because there's a kind of maverick
#
otherness. Well, you know, I could say, yeah, maybe. I think you can be a forever outsider
#
and still be successful, because I won't define success as making it to the inner circle. Like,
#
there's this phrase I first learned from Sam Altman. I think Paul Graham first coined it,
#
and it was in the context of advice to startups. But I think it applies to artists as well. And
#
I've certainly embraced it, which is that it's better to build something that is loved by a
#
few people than liked by many. And I think in the case of Sukhi, and of course, we'll talk about all
#
your work later. But in the case of Sukhi, it certainly strikes me as something that is loved
#
by a few people, perhaps by some definitions, even loved by many people, but may not be an
#
incredible breakthrough. And I can see sort of that sense of what you mean by not successful.
#
And you've spoken elsewhere about how getting there kind of just felt like a failure. It just
#
came and disappeared and all of that. And I understand that. And one thing that I also
#
wonder about is when I look at all your science fiction work, which is audacious ideas, so well
#
written. And I just wonder whether there's a tremendous streak of luck there also in what
#
we call conventional success, that, you know, in a different place and a different time,
#
the same books by Margaret Atwood may not have made it. And she might be just, you know, one of
#
many. And if you're in the right time and the right place, you make it. And as far as mainstream
#
success is concerned, it does seem to me that, yeah, fine, you weren't in the right time and
#
the right place in those senses. But nevertheless, I think as far as that phrase, which is resonant
#
and means so much to me that it's better to be loved by a few than liked by many, you achieved
#
that, didn't you? Yeah. Yeah, so you're successful.
#
Yeah. But yeah, I'm not, I'm comfortable with where I am. But there is a little disc, you know,
#
a little discontent. And that discontent pertains to the sense that, in particular, you mentioned
#
the science fiction novels. So there are two. One is called Escape and the other is called The
#
Island of Lost Girls. And I am working on a third because I had, in fact, wanted to write a quintet.
#
I don't think I'll make it to a quintet. But trilogy, I think, not I think, I'm working on
#
the third. What I can see of the world that I have built so far, and because I know what lies ahead,
#
I think it is an interesting and complex world. And it irritates me that it hasn't found the,
#
never mind market, it hasn't found the audience that would find it interesting. Because I think
#
there are a lot of interesting ideas in both books, but especially Island. And there is a
#
certain freedom that comes from knowing that you have an audience that is interested in more.
#
So it's like you're building for an author who has a good audience. Then it's like, you know,
#
creating stepping stones for yourself. If there's an audience, the stepping stones are in place.
#
For me, I'm always placing my next stepping stone myself, and no one is helping me do that.
#
And there's no sense that there is any, I mean, this is not boohoo. It's just how it is.
#
And I mean, there are two kinds of freedoms. One is when there's an avid audience just waiting
#
for the next thing. That can also be a pressure because they want you to say things that they
#
will enjoy. I have nobody waiting feverishly for the next book. A small scattering of people might
#
be interested, but therefore I am free in one sense. In this other sense, there is no real
#
expectation. I can go anywhere. And I know that the next book is going to be very much more
#
challenging because the character who has been a young person in these first two books, that is
#
Meiji, will in the third book have a voice. In these first two books, she hasn't had much of a
#
voice for various reasons. She's been a child, and in the second book, most of the half the book,
#
she's sort of mute for one reason or the other. But in the third book, she'll be much more
#
independent and will have a lot more to say. And since gender has apparently become one of my
#
subjects, and about this, I have something interesting to say. So,
#
escape and island, I refer to it as island for short, were both written at a time
#
before the terms for transgenderism were common. At the time I wrote them,
#
I had no idea in my mind that I might be regarded as an author who deals with transgender issues.
#
It was never part of my intention. But it is certainly true that in the Island of Lost Girls,
#
there are two characters who are actually transgender. They would now be called that.
#
At the time I wrote them, that term may have existed, but it would not have occurred to me
#
to use that term. I was contacted by an academic, and in this particular case, he's editing a double
#
volume of essays about transgender science fiction, which seems to be a very, very specific
#
sub-genre. But according to him, there's a lot being done. And I was astounded that he got in
#
touch with me, because as I said to him, we talked on the phone, I said to him, he's American,
#
and the cache of authors will be from around the world. And I said to him,
#
you know, I don't, I'm surprised that you asked, because I would not characterize either of these
#
two books as being transgender fiction, science fiction. They are science fiction. But okay,
#
what he wants me to do is to write the foreword. So this is not the introduction. Introductions are
#
long. Forewords are not long. They, you know, five, whatever, 2,500 words, 2,000, 3,000 words.
#
I said, I'm not sure at all that I have the background for this, because I'm not a scholar
#
of transgender studies, doesn't particularly interest me as a subject of study. But now that
#
you mention it, yes, it is true that there are these two characters who are transgender characters.
#
And in that sense, I admit that I have some awareness, but it's awareness outside the field
#
of transgender studies and those interests. So I'm not sure that I'm a good fit. And he said,
#
I think you're a good fit. I think he was saying that in part because it becomes interesting
#
if a person from a traditional culture, i.e. someone like myself, who is at least on the
#
outside, apparently a cisgender woman, has written two big books, at least the second one is bigger
#
than the first, okay, in which there are characters who are crossing gender norms. And I didn't even
#
know that. I wasn't even particularly conscious that that was what I was doing. But with that in
#
mind, then yes, the third book is certainly going to be very much more conscious of
#
the new realities in the outside world. So I'm aware that my work is entering,
#
you know, it is breaking new ground. And in some ways, the lack of attention is freeing.
#
I'm not, there's no one carefully studying what I'm doing and trying to control what I do,
#
because very few people are paying attention. So I hope you do go on to write at Quintet. Why
#
only a trilogy? You know, you're going to live till 120. Oh, no, no, no, I'm too old for that.
#
You have to be younger to live to 120. Well, at least, I mean, long enough to write the Quintet.
#
So let's kind of keep that going. No, and I just remembered one thing. So, you know, the story at
#
the start of the episode are both our memories. And when we were discussing this outside, you said
#
that, you know, in Bombay, somebody, I invited you to launch the book Escape, but somebody else
#
launched it. Well, guess what? So I just went on my blog, and I did a couple of searches. And I
#
realized that I only launched it. I'm referring to you and I being in conversation about the book.
#
And I've written a few paragraphs about the book as well over there. And I've linked to J.
#
Arjun's review and Elejna's piece. This is like 2008. Okay, good. We have wonderful memories,
#
both of us. Neither of us remember this, that I was in conversation with you at CrossFit Camps
#
Corner about your book, and neither of us remember this, which is mind blowing to me. Yeah,
#
well, we've obviously been smoking a lot of weed, which is not true. I don't smoke. I
#
have asthma, so I kind of asthma, so I can't smoke. Neither can I, in case the authorities
#
are listening. No legal substances have been consumed. And, you know, while blogging about
#
that, I found another post I wrote about you where I quoted from the speech you made, apparently
#
somewhere. Let me see. This was a speech you delivered at a cartoon Congress in November 2008.
#
In Nepal? In Kathmandu. Yes. And this para now strikes me, where you say,
#
this makes a cartoonist similar to a lion tamer, or as I would put it, a demon tamer.
#
Our profession requires us to live with the demon of mortality changed to our drawing boards,
#
chained to our drawing boards. And every morning, we give it a poke in the ribs,
#
make it stand up on the dining table and sing a silly song for our readers. But the demon does
#
not much like this treatment. So it snarls, claws at us, and in general reminds us that in the end,
#
it will win. Stop quote. And I'm also wondering here about, you know, what you said earlier about,
#
you know, the way that you learned art, you set high standards, you sing Michelangelo. And later
#
on, of course, you did appreciate modern art and all that, as you've pointed out. But there's
#
another quote from Getting There, a para that struck me, and I'll read it out, where you say,
#
time is also a kind of fuel, except that it can't be stored. Nevertheless,
#
I could feel the rolls of unused hours lying in unsightly heaps across the sagging belly
#
of my days. In the time that it took my fellow illustrators to complete a whole book,
#
I might get one small drawing done. I could not force myself to produce anything if I wasn't in
#
the mood. And getting into the mood might take hours or days of just lazing about, waiting for
#
inspiration to dawn. Stop quote, which is which I identify with so much because I'm exactly,
#
you know, I have hours and hours accumulated just sagging away. So my question here is drawing from
#
both of these. Is that tell me now about that process that fine, you're talented, so many of
#
your cousins, but then you hone it. And then you build your ability, you turn that talent into
#
ability. And I'm sure that requires countless hours of work. And then you are actually working
#
professionally, you have deadlines, sometimes you don't have a choice about what you're going
#
to draw, you're given an assignment and you're doing it. You know, Ranjith Hoskutei would,
#
in a recent episode, call that sort of thing, dancing with chains, which is a phrase that I
#
love. So tell me about that aspect of it, that, you know, if you go beyond the art and even beyond
#
the craft, in a sense, and just talk about sort of the discipline, the act of getting, sitting down
#
and actually doing stuff. What is that like? Tell me about that journey for you, where it goes from
#
being something that you love doing to something that you have to force yourself to do to some
#
extent, even if you love it. Oh, very much force. Whip, whip, whip is the term. You have to keep a
#
deadline. If you want to earn that carrot, you have to keep a deadline. So there's always that
#
sense of needing to finish something so that I can deliver it in the morning, was instilled all
#
through the early 20s when I was very much struggling. And what can one say? You know,
#
it is the same state of mind with which one completes an essay in school. You do it. You
#
find the time to do it and you do it. And you become better and better at finishing certain
#
things. I mean, one of the, I don't draw like that anymore, but one of the techniques I taught
#
myself early was what is called stippling, where you use a fine tip pen to make little dots. And
#
by varying the density of the dotting, you get dark and light. And you learn that by seeing
#
other work, which is like that. And you figure, well, okay, this is how you do it. And you make
#
little dots and you discover that you can get a certain effect. And like I said, because my
#
standards were high, because the people whose work I admired produced very detailed and beautiful
#
work and I wanted those effects. So then my, and I had very strong prohibitions about
#
copying work to use. I was very willing as a young child to try and draw from Michelangelo's
#
paintings, but it would never occur to me in the sense that I would consider it utterly wrong to
#
copy someone else's drawings and pass them off as my own. And if this sounds horribly, you know,
#
sissy, well, that's the kind of person I have always been. I wouldn't do that. And so I would
#
see a certain line work and want to be able to produce that type of line work. And then it
#
becomes a challenge like anyone who pushes themselves to run a mile or to climb Everest
#
or whatever. Fortunately, I have no ambitions at that level, but just sitting in a room with
#
the materials for producing a bit of work, you can do it. And once I was drawing my cartoon strip,
#
then all the standards were based on my setting them. And you learn very quickly how to
#
get something done in time. For instance, when I was drawing Suki, my cartoon strip,
#
very, very quickly I realized that if I put a lot of effort into the first frame,
#
that is, if I draw someone wearing, let us say, a jacket with a checkered design on it, then I have
#
to reproduce that by hand in all three. And therefore you leave the checkered jacket out
#
at once and you just don't put that in so that you can easily draw another three. And similar,
#
I mean, that's a very simple, straightforward example, but that quickly becomes the way you
#
learn how to do things. I mean, that's what I mean about the learning curve. Within the first strip,
#
I would know, well, I'm not going to be drawing that character again, or else they're not going
#
to be wearing that jacket because it takes too long to draw. And I have to finish it by tonight
#
because I'm delivering it in the morning. So for that reason, I say that leaving home at 21,
#
when I was 21, and supporting myself without having a clear notion of what that would require
#
from me, again, this is because I didn't have examples ahead of me. There was no one to tell
#
me, no, it's very hard to do that, just don't do it. As a result of that, I thought, well,
#
people in the West do it, so I can do it. Not realizing that, no, it's not really the same.
#
It's not the same because societies are very different. For instance,
#
living as a paying guest in Bombay, it just so happened that I didn't for the first one or two,
#
in the first one or two places, I wasn't even thinking about food because for whatever reason,
#
I was eating at work or eating at my sister's house. But at some moment, I realized we had
#
lost our cook, there was no cook in the house, and my landlady went out to work. And I realized,
#
oh, well, I might actually have to buy and make food myself. I'd never done that. I'd never
#
really done that. And at most, I could make a sandwich, but I had no interest in making food.
#
And I hadn't, you know, I didn't really know. Of course, when I say don't know,
#
it's also a willful lack of knowledge. It's an unwillingness to find out.
#
Now you really sound like a man.
#
But, you know, it's true of anyone who grows up in a kind of privileged way.
#
I read just the other day, I read a book, charmingly titled, How Not to Boil an Egg.
#
And it's by a woman who was a very lovely, charming woman called Mary Newman. She was
#
born in India, many stories. But as she tells the reader, as a young married woman returning
#
to England after spending many years in India, when she was placed in a situation where thrown
#
in amongst other women who are all running some kind of, I forget what it was, some reason for
#
which she was told, oh, you just go and boil some eggs. Well, she guessed that you put the egg in
#
pan of water and you put the pan on the heat and it'll cook. But she had never seen this being done
#
and had therefore no idea that when water boils, it bubbles. And she thought that, oh my God,
#
something terrible is happening and turned it off. And of course the egg was not cooked.
#
And I saw, I recognized a little portion of myself there because, whereas I had a similar
#
experience in that, I knew that the difference between a fried egg and a boiled egg was that one
#
was made in water and the, oh no, not boiled, but a poached egg. They look sort of vaguely the same.
#
But the poached egg is made in water. And I knew how to fry an egg, but someone had asked me to
#
make a poached egg and had not, they were running out of time and they just wanted the egg. And
#
I knew that it would be a bit odd, a bit awkward for me to ask how about a poached egg.
#
And so I figured it's nothing, boil the water, put the water on the pan on the fire,
#
just like this lady, put the pan on the fire. I knew it would bubble, that much I knew.
#
But I broke the egg into the water and immediately realized, no, the egg has now disappeared.
#
I don't see any part except the yolk. I can see the yolk, but no white. And I was wondering how
#
do cooks make the white become nice and firm and a little bundle of white around it. And of course
#
it doesn't happen. You have to make it happen. There's a way to do that, but I only realized
#
that a thousand years later. So this lack of sufficiency was something that, it's not casual.
#
It doesn't just happen. Those people who want to be practical, who want to know how to survive,
#
they learn quickly. I did not learn quickly because it was never a priority. It's not
#
something I wanted to do. And I think being able to cook is marvelous. I admire people who can,
#
and I regret that I'm incompetent, but there we are. I am very much more accomplished now
#
than I used to be. Do you poach eggs on regular basis? I don't go down that path at all. Scrambled
#
eggs are good. On that note, let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of the
#
break, we'll talk more about different kinds of eggs. Okay. Hey, the music started and this
#
sounds like a commercial, but it isn't. It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love,
#
a YouTube show I am co-hosting with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah. We've called it
#
Everything is Everything. Every week we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about,
#
from the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday. We range widely across subjects
#
and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand the world. Please join us on our
#
journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Amit
#
Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. The show is called Everything is Everything. Please do check it out.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Manjula Padmanabhan and you know,
#
we have just about reached what you described as the struggling years, your years of struggle
#
or something of that sort, where you know, you leave home at 21 and now you have to
#
create art for money, which sounds so delightfully romantic. Yeah, not at all. Tell me a bit more
#
about what those years actually involved in terms of, you know, how did you start? How did you approach people?
#
Well, if we look at those years, so that was 21, I was in Bombay and living in a paying guest
#
accommodation and it's funny at this moment I cannot easily remember which of the various ones
#
I do believe it was in, yes, it was in Colaba and I had lived for two and a half, three years in a
#
hostel called the Working Women's Hostel in Colaba and then after that I went to a paying
#
guest accommodation close by and that is the location of getting there. So those years from
#
20, 21 to 25 where I would say the peak years of struggling with meeting deadlines, which were
#
hard to meet because of my, the slow pace of work, you know, I knew that for instance
#
Amrishitra Katha, cartoonists, comic artists, they earned 125 rupees a page, but they were able to
#
put out that page quickly. If I had to draw a page of, you know, dotting and very carefully drawn
#
and so on, I would take a whole week to produce one page and that wouldn't work because they had to,
#
obviously you get 125 rupees a page for, this was many, many years ago, I'm sure it's much more now,
#
but you have to finish the whole comic, you don't do one page at a time. So I knew that I couldn't
#
go down that path and at the time, you know, I was, I think that was the era in which I drew
#
a book called Tales of Birbal, which was 64 pages in color with 54 pages of which were
#
in print. And so 54 pages of text in a 64 color page book meant that the publisher wanted color
#
on every page, but there actually wasn't that much space for drawing. And the way I worked out that
#
book, which was my first full book that I was supposed to be designing and drawing and filling
#
and even doing the paste up for that entire work, I was going to be paid 5,000 rupees.
#
And I remember it as I remember it with particular bitterness because I took maybe eight or nine
#
months. And at the end of it, all I was going to get was 5,000. I had paid a lot of money just to
#
get bromides to make repeating designs and all kinds of things. I knew that this was not working
#
that it was and yet I couldn't get out of it. You know, I just had to put in so much work. So
#
for me, those years were the years of maximum difficulty in attempting to make a living from
#
my work. Then I went to Holland for, I mean, I went to the US, Germany and Holland for what became
#
eventually was written up in getting there many years later. So going to Holland and that entire
#
episode, going to the US and then to Europe was about nine months. It was a whole nine month
#
cycle of a little more than that, probably a whole year. And it really changed my sense of self.
#
I would say that whenever I'm talking about my life, which seems to happen a great deal these
#
days, this is another feature of being older. You know, there's a lot of life to talk about and
#
people are starting to ask questions about, so what did you, how did you, etc. So I would say
#
that I very frequently talk about turning points. There have been very many turning points, important
#
points, important beachheads. I would say that the trip to Holland was a huge beachhead because
#
of all the things that I had attempted to do before going to, I say going to Holland, but it's,
#
as I said, it was a much longer trip. It was to the US for four months and then I went to
#
Germany. I spent a month there and then three or four months in Holland. And because of the
#
the purpose of this trip was very vague. It was the, it was not that I had an overwhelming
#
ambition to get a certain something done. I wanted out, I wanted to break out of whatever
#
life I was in. I seemed to be quite happy. I had a boyfriend who was very, very nice, a very good
#
person, but I could see that he, both he and the world around me was conspiring to make it look like
#
a marriage. And I was dead keen to not marry and specifically not marry in, well, it, you know,
#
at that age it was, I was not in a position to say I didn't want a particular kind of
#
not marriage. I just knew that it's not what I wanted. And yet I liked him. I liked being with
#
him. I liked the life we had together, but I didn't want it to change. And I could see
#
that it has to change and that I was realistic enough to see that it couldn't remain where it
#
was because it wouldn't be, I have to say it this way, it wouldn't be fair to him.
#
And what I wanted was not clear. He knew of my ambitions about a shortened life and so on,
#
but like everyone, he assumed that that was some kind of childhood joke. And when looking back,
#
yes, it was. But for me, it didn't work. It didn't work that he, being an extremely nice person,
#
wanted a standard nice life. And I didn't want that. I didn't want a nice life in that way,
#
in quotes, nice. I didn't want a nice life. I wanted an interesting or dangerous or exciting.
#
But all of this within the fact that I am a comfort loving, lazy person who is not
#
interested in trekking across the Himalayas or anything like that. I wanted a comforting life,
#
a comfortable life, but not the standard life. I did not want a respectable two bedroom apartment
#
with 3.5 children. And I didn't want any of that. As I said, I didn't want children at all. So
#
I didn't want to be in any way connected to someone whose family, however nice, they were very nice,
#
would kind of expect that. And if we didn't have that, then everyone would look a little bit sad.
#
I didn't want any of that. So I needed something extreme to lever me out of a particular groove.
#
And that's what going to Holland in that extremely irregular way did. The fact is, I went
#
without telling my family where I was going. I had very little, as all of this is written in the book,
#
I had very little money. I had a one way visa. And that expired very quickly. So then after a while,
#
I was in Holland without a visa. And being from a foreign service background, I was very conscious
#
that this is, in quotes, a bad thing. And that people who get discovered in countries for which
#
they don't have a visa will then be, in quotes, deported. And all of these, I come from enough of
#
a respectable background. All of this was terrifying for me. And yet I did it. I did it because
#
I couldn't argue my way around the imponderables of my life. And it has to be said, I had also
#
in the maybe two years before the whole Holland experience, I had read Carlos Castaneda.
#
And if you have read Carlos Castaneda, so then it's so what I read was Journey to Ixutlan.
#
And I read that while on board a train from Bombay to Madras. And in those days, I used to take the
#
Dadar Madras Express. I would always contrive to whatever my actual seat was, I would exchange
#
with anyone to seat to be on the upper bunk. And then I would just stay there for the entire 20,
#
whatever, 21 hours or whatever it was, and just kind of chill. And on that occasion, I was reading
#
Carlos Castaneda from Dadar to Madras. And it was by the time I got off the train, my feet were no
#
longer on the ground. I was barely able to talk straight because I was not on any drugs, but I
#
might as well have been. My mind was completely blown away. I was in another dimension. I was no
#
longer seeing things the same way. And it was because of being so altered by that book,
#
the sense of needing to leave everything and also to leave things in an unplanned way, which is what
#
that book suggests we have to do if we want to learn. And my friends, the two Dutch guys that
#
I met in Bombay, whom I then used as my reference point to get to Holland, they had also read
#
Journey to Exitland. So we were both on this, we all three were on this other dimensional journey.
#
And it seemed the right and proper. So it's very hard to explain that for the purposes of the world
#
around me, everything that I was planning to do, which I didn't, of course I didn't reveal,
#
was completely wrong because I was lying to people about where I was going. I was betraying the trust
#
of my friends, my family, to go completely outside the boundary of what is known. But if you look at
#
what I had been reading, then I was doing exactly the right thing, that I was running blindly along
#
that is in total darkness. I was running along the edge of a cliff and being, it's not trust,
#
it is you run in the dark along the edge of a cliff, heedless and unafraid of the consequences.
#
And maybe you'll fall, and maybe you won't, but you run without fear. The whole point is without
#
fear. And if you are brought up in a middle class, upper middle class atmosphere, you live with fear
#
the whole time that your car will not come, that you will miss your flight, that you will fail your
#
exams or whatever. So you're continuously, you're brought up in a constant cauldron of various vague
#
fears. And you cross each one of these like hurdling, not high hurdles, you just get through
#
everything pretty much, because you can. And you choose your hurdles in these lives, and you don't
#
really test yourself. That is the whole feature of middle class life. You think you're being tested,
#
but you're not. What I was doing was going outside the hurdle field all together to places where
#
there are no hurdles, but where you don't know anything. I mean, there are no cars, no trains
#
to catch. You are just in the kind of vague abstract of doing, in quotes, what you want to
#
do. Then you are faced with this issue. What do you want? I think that is the whole point of what
#
I did in Holland, by going to Holland. I was stuck with, okay, I've got what I wanted. I have traveled
#
away from my entire family. They don't know where I, for three months, my family didn't know where
#
I was, and I wasn't communicating with them. They didn't realize that. I mean, they didn't realize
#
that they didn't actually know where I was. They thought I was in Germany, but I wasn't. And
#
having done that, then I faced this ultimate question. Is this really what I want? Is this okay?
#
And if it's not okay, then I have to fix it. But how do I fix it? I don't have the
#
means. It was very much like the high trapeze without a net, which is, of course, very
#
Carlos Castaneda. That's the whole issue. If you have a net, then it's not working.
#
You have to fly without the net. And to the extent that people like me who are still in,
#
I could just make a call to my sister. I could. So it's not as if there was no net, not really.
#
But it felt like there was none. And for all practical purposes, there wasn't because I was
#
stubborn and obstinate enough not to call. I only called when three and a half or four months had
#
passed and it was getting cold. And I had finally sold something. I sold a poster and made a little
#
bit of money. Not a huge amount, but I made some money. And that gave me the confidence to say,
#
well, if I want, I could stay here and do this, but I'm not going to. I've proved a point.
#
I've made everyone terribly uncomfortable in the house. The family with whom I stayed, they were
#
not happy with me, but we built our bridges. We made up. By the time I left, we had all made up
#
and were smiling at one another again. And I was friendly with the younger brother of the person
#
that I chased after to get to Holland. And that friendship, this is actually now I'm crossing a
#
lot of time. That friendship has remained solid. I have remained friendly with that younger brother.
#
And it has, I mean, we didn't communicate for 20 years or something, but just like four years ago,
#
we got in touch. We've talked. They're still living. He's still living in that house. And
#
it's fabulous to be in touch. That's the Simon character. Yes, the Simon character. He has read
#
Getting There. He and his wife both love it. And he's still living in that house and has said,
#
you know, come back and stay with us again. And we have a good toilet this time.
#
Towards the end of your book, you have these memorable lines, court, the sense of, and before
#
I read this out, I must give a little bit of context to the listener that somewhere at the
#
start of the book, somebody asks you what your favorite animal is. And you said tiger. So the
#
court is the sense of being in some fundamental way, a loner and an outsider to humanity never
#
left me, but I don't feel oppressed or caged in by circumstances in the same way as I used to.
#
I don't test the bars. I don't try to run away. I draw and I write. I breathe. Sometimes when
#
the jungle is quiet, my whiskers feel shiny and upper. Beautiful lines. And my sense of reaching
#
the end of the book is that this person may not even now really know who she is or what she wants,
#
but she knows who she is not and what she doesn't want. And in a sense that there is
#
some kind of liberation there as well. Is that an accurate way of-
#
I would say so. Absolutely. Because I really broke very many boundaries by not just
#
pretending to go away, but actually going away and certainly at a certain level, putting myself
#
in a certain type of danger. It may all seem very minor at this distance of time.
#
And even when I was in Holland, at one point I was talking to someone who was not a friend,
#
a much older man who was the friend of a friend and an American who was in Holland for some
#
reason or the other, forget what. And I said, I'm really outside, living far from my family,
#
and I'm on a kind of adventure. We had talked enough that he could make the statement that
#
he made. He laughed, he gave a kind of dry chuckle and he said, you went to an elite
#
finishing school, you went to college, you're traveling for a few months away from your family,
#
staying with a well-heeled Dutch family. It's nothing. You're doing nothing.
#
And he put me in my place and it was one of many little slaps I received from life to show me that
#
yeah, it is nothing compared to what happens. And I mean, in the world since then, I have
#
reminded myself again and again, compared to what refugees are facing around the world and people in
#
war zones and children who are damaged by blasts and who lose everything, their parents, their
#
family are left on the road. What have I faced? Nothing. It is nothing. And all the so-called
#
discomforts that we might face because the power is off for 20 hours, big deal. I have a roof,
#
I'm overweight. I'm not worrying about my next step. So most of us, when we complain, it's about
#
nothing. And my little adventure to Holland was frightening for me, was a challenge. But even at
#
the time, through little reminders such as this person who said this to me, the realization that
#
it's very little compared to what challenges people can face and do face.
#
And then to come back from that, it was tremendously releasing to come back from that,
#
not to run away so efficiently that I would no longer be the same person. I came back
#
to the same life in some ways, but also in many other ways, a very, very different life.
#
And because I had actually done something, I had broken something. It's like the difference,
#
I'm guessing, because of course I was not in the military. It's like the difference between
#
play acting, being a soldier, and then being out in the battlefield. You come back changed.
#
And in that sense, I had really done something that other people of my class, I have to use that
#
reference, would not do. And you could say that I wasn't very damaged. Nothing terrible happened
#
to me. I didn't get raped or I didn't become pregnant or get... It's like the big three
#
terrors that people have, getting pregnant or raped or catching a venereal disease.
#
None of these things happened. And you could say then that, I mean, people reading Getting There
#
have, to my amusement and amazement, said, nothing much happens. And I think,
#
yeah, if you expect that something that happens has to be some dreadful
#
misfortune, well then yes, no terrible misfortune overcame me. But I would say that
#
psychologically and philosophically, I think a very great deal happened. And that I
#
challenged myself. In many ways, I wagered my whole life and the wholesomeness of my
#
previously very middle-class life in a way that was foolhardy. But in the Castaneda sense,
#
I had to do. I had to. It was not a choice in that sense. I had to do it in order to be,
#
in the Castaneda sense, a warrior. That's what he talks about, to be a warrior. And in that sense,
#
I did that. I will vehemently disagree with anyone who says nothing happened in the book. A lot
#
happened. But in a sense, you're comparing you to Chekhov, because an early criticism of Chekhov
#
was that nothing happens in his stories. So like, well done, Getting There. My sense of reading that
#
book was that it's a very unusual kind of journey, because it seemed to me that this protagonist was,
#
it wasn't that she was looking for something and not finding it. It was that she didn't know what
#
to look for, that she was just adrift. And in a sense, when the book ends, she is still adrift,
#
but in a different place and in a better place. So, you know, one, is that reading correct? And
#
two, when you sort of came back to Bombay, how did you view yourself at this point? Because on the
#
surface, I'm guessing it would appear that, oh, you went away for a while and you come back and
#
you're doing the same thing. You're living in PJs, you're doing illustrations. But, you know,
#
what had kind of changed? Well, the biggest thing that changed was that I knew that the relationship
#
with the boyfriend, whom I still was very fond of, he's a very nice person,
#
was over. You're still friends with him? No. What I said to him was,
#
we can stay friends, but I'm fundamentally different. And I won't talk about what happened
#
on this trip. And he said, I won't ask. Fair enough. And, you know, thank you. But I said,
#
let's give it a year. If at the end of a year, to the date, we can't make it work,
#
then it's goodbye. And it was exactly to the date, a year. And we said, okay, here it is,
#
and it is goodbye. And by then, I think he was ready to go. And I was sad, but also ready.
#
Sad because it's a tremendous comfort to have a partner. And I acknowledge that. I like having a
#
partner. But it couldn't be the two of us. And it was a hard reset, like in computers. It was goodbye
#
and over, out, nothing. And I think that left him free.
#
And it left me free as well, because I don't have regrets. He went on to have a happy life.
#
And I know that because my sisters remained friendly with him and stayed in touch and
#
they maintained a relationship. I don't feel that need. And being changed, being no longer partnered
#
in a year after returning, hugely changed my approach to the world. Because right up from,
#
say, 21 to 25, I was with this person. But a year and a half, I was away.
#
And then another year we were in this twilight. So that was from 26. And the clock was ticking,
#
30 was coming up, four years away. So I was in that mood of, okay, I'm now loose in my shell, and
#
I can think about what to do next. But
#
what happens as time moves along is that if you're gathering some rolling stones, roll and gather
#
moss. So I was gathering a lot of moss in the way of abilities. I could be going to Holland,
#
coming back from there, and the work, whatever in quotes, work, because I hardly sold anything,
#
but just that one poster. But I had produced a lot of ideas and other types of work, other types
#
of personality. And the sense of having something to offer was growing. And again, this will sound
#
as if it's rehearsed and it is, because what I'm about to say, I've said many times.
#
When I say that I wanted to die at 30, it was because at 17, I felt a kind of no person self.
#
I was all potential and I hadn't done very much. What happened at 30 when I knew I was actually not
#
going to pull the cord on myself, I had in a very deep way begun to like myself. I didn't want to die
#
because I liked myself. And it was a very genuine and very warm and comforting feeling that I felt
#
I was worth the expense of staying alive. And it was a great feeling. It wasn't a sense of defeat,
#
oh my God, I made this plan and now I've not fallen through. What a failure. But I didn't.
#
I found something. I found a reason to be alive, which of course many people scream about how they
#
don't have a... But I discovered I liked myself. So I was happy to continue breathing.
#
What did you like about yourself?
#
I thought it was a nice person and interesting. And I had done some stuff and that I had
#
to share my ideas and that I had genuinely managed to live an interesting life already
#
at 30. And I had understood that 30 is nothing. It's very young. And that I felt that I had
#
more to offer. So it was a nice feeling. And it was not a pat on the head from anyone else.
#
It was from fate. And that childhood sense of confidence that many children as children are
#
very confident. And what happens in puberty is this terrible battering down of all your peers and
#
the bullies that you meet in school and they all batter you down. And then of course, because your
#
body changes and you begin to look like your adult self and that may or may not conform to whatever
#
society tells you should look like. So it can really burst your bubble and make you feel
#
little and small and so on and so forth. So what happens in what the character says in getting
#
there about not knowing what my true appearance is and how that can really change and damage in
#
some ways a person's ability to relate to the world. Well, by the time I was 30, I was very much
#
more confident. I recovered the sense of a childhood confidence that I don't have to care what people
#
think of me. Once more, I was in that zone. You know, whatever I had felt in parts in the
#
intervening years, I recovered that sense of ease that I am sufficient and I don't have to
#
look outside myself for a referent. So at this point, I want to sort of go back to the subject
#
of your art and how it was evolving. You mentioned elsewhere that earlier than this,
#
you worked for a while in Farciana and that was, you know, formative for you in terms of things
#
like attention to detail and other aspects of the craft. It was much more than formative. It was
#
the first actual job I had and I was just, I was out of school, but still in college.
#
And when I was recruited for Farciana, not Farciana, but Farciana, and it is a small
#
magazine aimed at the Parsi community. And when I started with it, it had just changed
#
ownership to a dynamic and very idealistic journalist called Jahangir Patel, who came
#
who came from, in the sense that he had studied and done a degree in the US, but
#
more than anything else, he had been impressed with classic American style journalism of the
#
old school, which is very idealistic and very austere in a certain way. And he wanted to bring
#
that training and that idealism to India and to, well, to certainly to Bombay. And ultimately,
#
he found that the only way he could continue to be the person he wanted to be and the kind of
#
journalist he wanted to be was by owning his own. In this, it turned out to be a small magazine,
#
but within that small magazine, he maintained a universe of high standards. Now,
#
if you are very young, and I was, he wasn't, he was, I forget, I don't know, maybe early 30s
#
or something like that, I forget. But I and the two other people working for him were very young
#
and impressionable, yes, up to a point, but more than anything else, it was the experience of
#
working with someone who was very focused on what he wanted. And it was never enough to just
#
produce something that passed muster. It had to reach some very high standard of excellence,
#
regardless of the fact we were a tiny magazine with a minute and very focused,
#
community-focused readership. Nevertheless, he kept us to a very high standard. Now,
#
the other two people, one, I mean, we all did this, all the, we all performed all the tasks,
#
we stuck labels, we went to the press to read proof, and these were the days of lead type,
#
so linotype and zinc plates and so on. But we all did all those things,
#
but I was the only one who could draw. So very early on, he wanted little drawings in his
#
magazine because it seemed to suit his, his knowledge of what makes, what makes and gives
#
a character to a magazine. So I still have the drawings I did in those early days, and you can
#
see within maybe a couple of weeks, a couple of months, the change from very kind of, you know,
#
vague, unfocused drawings to a kind of snap into focus. And it was because he couldn't draw,
#
but he knew what he wanted to see. And my favorite story on this subject is how he wanted a
#
caricature of himself. So a little caricature, a small thing, but two inches high, and, you know,
#
two inches by one column. So it's a tiny thing. And he wanted to show himself wearing the traditional
#
Parsi undershirt called a sadra. And needless to say, I'm not Parsi, so needless to say, I did not
#
particularly know what that looked like. So he took a shirt off in the, in the office, he took a
#
shirt off and showed me what it is, a muslin undershirt, like, like a vest, but muslin. And
#
it's held, there's a waist, a cord around the waist, which is called a kasti. And a child who's
#
entering the Parsi religion when they have their first, what would be a kind of first communion,
#
they are taught how to tie that. It's a reef knot. And they, I then did a drawing. And when I showed
#
it to him, his remark was, the stitching is wrong. Now the drawing is only two inches high.
#
And the idea that I, I could improve the stitching, the detail of the stitching on this shirt was
#
hilarious. But as soon as I did it, I realized, of course he's right. And, and it certainly looks
#
better. And it certainly looks more precise. And the thing is, working for someone who,
#
as I said, he couldn't draw, but he had a very keen eye. His ability to appreciate,
#
his willingness to appreciate something finally done was a huge source of inspiration for me.
#
It helped me to, to home in on a standard that I also could appreciate. If he had been the kind
#
of person who said, yeah, yeah, whatever, I would have produced whatever work. And in the larger
#
world outside, I soon realized that people outside in the other world, outside of Parsi and as very
#
cloistered atmosphere, people were often telling me there's too much detail here. This is too much.
#
You know, we don't need that. And, and the sense of I was putting much more time and effort and
#
energy into things that were not desired, were not required by the people asking for my work. And then
#
they didn't ask for it because clearly the time and energy I put into it, they weren't going to
#
be paying for that. And they didn't want to. And another very telling moment in my youthful life,
#
when I was doing some, maybe a couple of years later, I was writing a column for Eve's Weekly.
#
And at that, at that time, the editor, I mean, she was assistant editor, so she was in, you know,
#
she was commissioning. So she asked me, her name was the well-known author called Amu Joseph.
#
She commissioned me to write a column and I had a page to myself and a little cartoon.
#
And at the time she commissioned me, now I've forgotten what, let us just say it was 500 rupees
#
for the page. And after three months, it was once a month. So after three months, her, her general
#
editor or whatever, the publisher called up angrily and said, I see that you're paying some
#
contributor 500 rupees for a page, but 500 is what we paid for three pages. Why are you paying some
#
one person? And she said, oh, but that person is also doing a drawing. He said drawing. And she
#
told me this. He said drawing, but that's just 10 rupees. And it's, instead of being insulted,
#
what that told me was how very low in the, in the value system of the world I was in
#
was the worth of a drawing. He was not at all interested in the drawing itself. It could be
#
a bus ticket as far as he was concerned. It is that he didn't want to pay more than 10 rupees for
#
it because it didn't have worth for him. And it had more importantly, the realization was for people
#
in the publishing business, the pages of the magazine with creative work, that's just ad
#
revenue, which is being wasted on creative work. And if they could only fill it entirely with ads,
#
that would, they would prefer that, but then no one would buy it, just read ads.
#
So they've got to, how boring, put in some creative work. And that is just to support the ads,
#
which are between. So it cleared my understanding of what, what people's values, what the values of
#
the world were. And it also gave me a clear impression of what I was up against, that there
#
was, there was no, no interest in the quality of work, whatever I did outside of the hallowed halls
#
of Parsiena. Parsiena was, was from a single room or two rooms in a small establishment in the
#
Fort area. So it was very central, but a small place. But what we experienced there in the way
#
of high quality was streets ahead of everything outside in the much bigger corporations and
#
magazines and newspapers. So it was a tremendous education for me, the education I didn't get in
#
any college, I got from this one person because he, he channeled my willingness to improve
#
because I knew I could, I knew I could, but as I said, I keep saying, I'm lazy. I would never
#
have made the effort if I didn't know that there was somebody wanting something better.
#
So here's a question, but before the question and anecdote about one of my favorite tweets of all
#
time, there's a person on Twitter called Derek Guy. He's known as a menswear expert basically.
#
I think his handle is dye workwear. I'll link it from the show notes. So he will pick random
#
photographs and get really finicky about them and also give a lot of lectures on fashion and
#
it's very illuminating. So at one point there was some random right-wing guy who had become very
#
popular in Britain, some 24 year old who was poor, who posted a picture of himself in a,
#
what he claimed was a bespoke suit. So Derek Guy took the picture and pointed out with some
#
detail in why it is not a bespoke suit, obviously. Now the other person then put out a tweet and
#
response to that and said, no, that, you know, it is a bespoke suit just because you disagree
#
with my politics. You are, you know, criticizing a poor tailor somewhere. And Derek Guy's classic
#
tweet, the response was, I got my info from your tailor and from the photos you posted,
#
I called him to ask him about his process. Like he actually called this guy's tailor. And what he
#
discovered, you know, the flaws that he pointed out, how he realized it's not a bespoke suit
#
was how the label was stitched on from the stitching. So when he said stitching,
#
I thought about that detail and I just kind of loved that. So that's so much. And I just really
#
respect people who care about detail that much. And here's my question to you that, and there are
#
two aspects of this. One is you point out that, you know, you speak about the going to the presses
#
and the lead sort of the lead type, the lino type, et cetera, et cetera. And how you all of you had
#
to immerse yourself in that as well. And you also speak about, you know, then Jahangir's attention
#
to detail into the finer things. And I want to ask you about the importance of these in developing
#
you as an artist, because today often there is an impression that with so much computer aid and all
#
that, you can take a lot of shortcuts, which earlier were not possible. In one way it is good.
#
You might cut out some drudge work so you focus on higher order creativity. But in another way,
#
I think it's a problem that only when you go through all the rigor of, you know, these sort
#
of hard yards, I think they play a formative role in helping you understand your art and your form
#
a little better. And both that immersing yourself in these brass tacks, both that and also that
#
attention to detail give you a sense of values. And then if you have a sense of values that creates
#
a virtuous cycle, but throughout your life, you are applying the same rigor to something like my
#
guess is that, you know, once Mr. Patel gave you that sense of values, the details matter,
#
the stitching matters for the rest of your life, you are looking at the stitching. And that
#
is making you a better artist. So tell me a little bit about how your values as an artist kind of
#
developed and what they were. Well, it's exactly as you said, a sense of
#
worth built up because as I, you know, as I have said in several different ways, I already had a
#
very hard sense of self-worth. Jahangir definitely broke it down and made me aware of how completely
#
minor I was. And the willingness to make the effort to do, to get his approval was important,
#
but very soon it was not, I mean, there was a wonderful, we had a lady called Mini Botwala,
#
who was a wonderful designer. She was older than any of us, but she had a tremendous sense of design
#
and getting approval from people who had high standards was very attractive, very worthy of
#
working towards. And what, going forward, what that did for me was, this is yet another example of,
#
I didn't pay attention to people who told me they liked my work if I could see that the other things
#
they liked were rubbish. So then it would make no difference. I mean, if it makes no difference to
#
them, why should I bother? But the two other editors who had a huge impact on my life were,
#
unfortunately, are both no longer with us. One is Daryl Demonte, who was a wonderful editor at
#
the Times of India, and the other, of course, is the greatly beloved Vinod Mehta. And they were both
#
people who had a keen eye for the visual world. This is the thing that many editors don't have.
#
They have kind of vague views about, they leave that to the designer. But these were two people
#
who liked the visual world. And Daryl, he commissioned a number of illustrations for the
#
Sunday magazine. And he liked the fact that I didn't go take a literal path, that I worked
#
with ideas, I was able to give a visual dimension to an idea that was being sought. And later on,
#
when I worked with Vinod Mehta, who bought Suki from me, he was my first editor for Suki,
#
he never looked, he never even glanced at Suki. He let me do it. Once he had accepted that I
#
had a strip to make, he gave me the space and just let me do it. And I had the sense that if I ever
#
did something inappropriate, eventually I would hear about it from him or from some lucky. But
#
it never happened. And the sense of being trusted with that space, it was almost a quarter page of
#
the newspaper that is for Suki, was tremendously encouraging. And I think one of the points made
#
by the doctor at the diet clinic, to go to that diet clinic, you had to do some kind of
#
personality test and then supposedly they would find a path that would suit each patient.
#
In my case, I think what he realized was that I was the kind of patient who did not want to be
#
told what to do. So that principle colored many other areas of my life that I preferred to be
#
trusted with a particular responsibility and then be allowed to just do it. And I think the
#
understanding was I would find my level and that I would maintain that because I liked to do it.
#
It's not that I wanted to get away with whatever. I never did. And when I saw the work of other
#
artists, like say Amarjit Rakatha, which as it happens, I detest Amarjit Rakatha. I mean,
#
the artists who work for, who have worked for it, for the, for ACK as they call it,
#
they do a great job. But it's the kind of work that I would never want to do because it's so lacking
#
in, what can I say, culturally and sociologically detailed, focused detail. It's not, you know,
#
it's the exact opposite. They're aiming for something general and that generalness, you know,
#
if everyone looks kind of pale and the pale skinned and general hair, general build,
#
everyone looks sort of vaguely the same, except if they are villains and they're dark skinned,
#
all that complete lack of any ideology, which comes from above. It's from the publishing house
#
and also aimed at an audience, which is also unconcerned about issues. Well, I was, I would
#
not have been able to, I would not have been happy at that kind of job. But of course, I was not
#
feeding a family. I was not having to do something because I had to earn a living. And I became very
#
conscious that if I, if I was taking liberties with how much I earned, it was also because I
#
didn't have to be terribly responsible. But the, you know, the tuning of the work, which is,
#
you're trying to get at process, all I can tell you is that I would, I wanted to maintain a certain
#
standard just for myself. And I happened to work for people who appreciated that. So, you know,
#
the saddest part of getting there for me, the saddest part was the details of the diet. Because today
#
we know that eight meals instead of three is a disaster. That that whole dogma of small frequent
#
meals as being, you know, healthy for you is terrible. It is exactly the opposite. You get an
#
insulin spike every time you meet, eat anything. So today we kind of know that, you know, intermittent
#
fasting is a way to go. And, you know, and, oh my God, I read about that eight meals a day. And I
#
said, this character is not going to lose weight sustainably, which, you know, through the book.
#
We spoke about that early part of your twenties, you know, up till the point that, you know,
#
you're a freelance illustrator, you're a PG, then that trip happens, then you end your relationship
#
over a period of time. And you're still kind of an illustrator doing the things that you're doing.
#
Take me through the rest of your twenties up till that important year of 30.
#
Well, there was a big turning point again. So that second, I mean, one of many turning points was a
#
huge turning point was when I was invited to go to Bhutan to illustrate a series of English language
#
textbooks. So the deal was this. There was a British educator. He was very much an alternative
#
thinker and kind of, he had alternative views on education. Living in a village outside Bangalore
#
with his family, he had earned a name, quite a reputation for himself. His name was David Horsborough.
#
He was very well known as an unconventional, but very creative thinker in education,
#
in educational circles. And Oxford University Press had a deal with David Horsborough,
#
which involved a grant from the British government to the Bhutan government,
#
using Indian talent to illustrate. And one can just imagine the worth of it to the British
#
government and the OUP because an Indian talent meant it didn't have to cost as much as a British
#
talent would. So, you know, one can just imagine why this particular triangular relationship
#
developed. Now, I was introduced to David through a friendship I had, a very warm friendship I had
#
with the artist Anjali Ilamanen. And we became friends because I used to write reviews. I wrote
#
a review for one of her shows. She liked my review and we became friends. And because of that
#
friendship, she introduced me to David, who was connected to her. Again, there's some, I know what
#
the connection is, but anyway, very warm, close connection between them. And one thing led to
#
another. And I went to Bhutan in 1981. And it was a huge watershed for me. Again, in part because it
#
took me out of my familiar range. And I was away, I was supposed to be away for one month. But OUP
#
in its wisdom did not send me a manuscript. And to illustrate, they sent me there in order to
#
work on the manuscript that they would send me. They never sent me a manuscript. And they said,
#
oh, you can use the previous one and then we'll make changes. And I thought that was completely
#
idiotic. And from the time that I was in Bhutan, I spent four months there eventually. And I lost
#
any interest in who was paying for my trip. As far as I was concerned, I was having a wonderful time
#
because I was in this unusual and beautiful place. And more than anything else, it was
#
a vision of otherness. It was an Asian country, but so different. And I had been exposed to
#
Buddhism in Thailand, but this was Mahayana Buddhism, which was so other. It was so transcendent.
#
It was so full of light. And it may sound like some kind of hippie, crazy stuff, but it really,
#
it was like another kind of castaneda. It just blew open my mind. And I remember the moment
#
of transition. As you can see, this happens kind of often. So when I arrived in Bhutan,
#
I was tired. I was sneezing. I was immediately bitten by a million fleas. I had burnt my hand
#
in the transit hotel in between and reached there in a very bad mood. And feeling that sense of
#
where have I come? Why have I come? Why am I doing this and all of this? And in two weeks,
#
I transited to a state where if the room boy had not brought a tray of tea at four o'clock,
#
which is when I might have asked for it, instead of calling angrily and saying,
#
but where's the tea? I would call and say, is the football game over? And do you have
#
time to bring the tea? And that was the state of things in that both in that hotel and in that
#
country. You just don't bother to get angry. That's so ridiculous. They're playing a game
#
and the waiters are playing a game and they will come when they're ready. And it was such
#
transcendental shift from every other thing that I had known about how to be. And another great
#
moment of revelation was both in the plains and in most other countries.
#
If there is a convention of polite smiling, you say hello, whatever, you say,
#
I'm so glad to be in your country. And they say, yes, it's wonderful to have you, whatever it is.
#
And these are all completely and utterly hypocritical, nonsensical statements that
#
you just make to be polite. Well, what I noticed in Bhutan was that nobody ever bothered with that.
#
They didn't smile at you out of just out of politeness. There was never any polite
#
smiling. It was like a completely solemn smile lessness, but not ultimately one realized it's
#
not that they're either in a bad mood or not smiling. They're not being hypocritical. They're
#
not dissembling. They're just being themselves. This is how they look when they're at peace or
#
at ease. And that there is a way of being where you just say hello and you don't have to grin.
#
And it was incredibly releasing to be in a culture that should be familiar. It's very close,
#
and yet it's not. We might as well have been on Mars. And the beauty of that culture, their clothes,
#
their crafts, the way that I shift my perceptions shifted. Whereas when I first went into one of
#
their craft, so-called Emporia, it was, you know, the shells were quite bare. There were only a few
#
items. But when my vision had shifted, I realized that what items they were were highly valued
#
because they took a lot of time and one person's effort was not put out by some kind of craft
#
machine where everyone is working for horrible wages and angry and unhappy. This produced by
#
people who loved what they were doing. This is all, you know, 40 years ago. I don't know what it's
#
like now. But at the time, this sense I had of humility towards a small culture that had pride
#
in itself and its people had pride in themselves was huge. I was overwhelmed and overcome with the
#
sense of impression, you know, of high, of a very good impression of that small culture.
#
And the sense that, okay, I come from this, you know, this giant culture to the south,
#
that is to the south of Bhutan. And that by contrast, we are so degenerate in our
#
understanding of values. And it was very powerful. So coming back from four months of that
#
and then returning to all the usual stuff. And I remember a moment when we came down and
#
there were about five or six people in the same vehicle. We came down, there was some problem
#
in the engine. And I was sitting in front and the two Bhutanese, the driver and his assistant,
#
they were looking into the front of the car with a mechanic from whatever small village we were in.
#
All three were looking in. The mechanic was an Indian and, you know, it was tragic.
#
That man, he was so beaten down by life, that mechanic, that sense of being burdened
#
in so many ways that it showed on his skin, that showed on the grease on his skin, his hair was
#
unwashed. Whereas these two Bhutanese, who were just ordinary people, just the driver and his
#
assistant wearing their traditional clothes and kind of peering in, their faces were radiant.
#
They were, maybe they were just thinking, oh God, how are we going to get out of this?
#
But the difference in their faces, it was like watching some kind of morality play, you know,
#
this is what can happen if you believe in transcendence and are not weighed down by
#
the inevitable cycles of birth and death and all the horrors and sorrows and so on.
#
It seems silly to say this, but that it was like seeing a visual example of something like that.
#
So coming away from Bhutan, which was, again, I was edging ever closer to the 30s, and I think
#
that was 28 or 29 or something like that, and that made a very big difference in my life.
#
And it made a difference as well because I earned a little more money from that
#
entire experience than I had, than I typically had. So I started to get a little more money,
#
and then that helped in many ways. I mean, it helped shore up my sense of self-worth.
#
So that kind of began to move forward, you know, the sense of self-worth.
#
Yesterday, after my recording got over, I was taking an Uber back to the house of the friend
#
I'm staying with in Vasanth Kunj, and for a while there was some traffic and the car kind of stopped
#
at a bus stop, and it was there for a while because, you know, there was a jam. And I was
#
looking at all the people who were sort of waiting at the bus stop, and I remember thinking that they
#
all looked so desperately sad. Beaten down. Beaten down is exactly the word. It was almost
#
heartbreaking. There was just no spirit left. And of course, and I wonder if that's also a measure
#
of the kind of life you lived at, how do you feel at 4 p.m.? You know, and, you know, Thoreau's
#
phrase of lives of quiet desperation applies so much more here than it would have in his own time,
#
perhaps. And that was sort of very poignant. The other thing that happened in your 20s was also
#
the beginning of Sukhi. You know, in 1982, Double Talk happens because Vinod Mehta commissions you
#
to do that. Take me a bit through that because now it's not just about art in a sense. It is also
#
about storytelling, about creating characters, about, you know, learning how people talk and
#
learning dialogue, which, as you mentioned, helped you in your playwriting later on.
#
We'll come to that. So take me a bit through the, you know, the birth of Double Talk and
#
how did you approach it? What were the kind of lessons you learned as you were doing it? What
#
were the processes you had in place? So what had happened just prior to that era was I went to
#
Bhutan. I had a little more money, I was a little more confident. I was no longer attempting to die.
#
And I had a strong sense of wanting to establish a more regular source of income. And I had been
#
thinking that one of the ways would be to set up a comic strip and I'd had one or two ideas.
#
Sukhi came into being just in that way that things that, you know, you use,
#
many artists are like this, you use whatever material is closest at hand, which, of course,
#
in my case would be myself. I'm there. And initially, Sukhi was loosely based on myself.
#
Again, this is something I've said many times over that originally Sukhi was kind of based on
#
myself. I had shoulder length hair, it was kind of bushy, so I did a caricature of myself. I
#
always believed that I drew a fat person and then one of my friends said,
#
she's not fat. You are, but she's not. Thank you. What a cruel thing. Yeah,
#
right. My friends were good for me. Yeah. So at the end of 82, it's not that he commissioned me.
#
I sent Vinod, whom I had met through a friend, I sent him a proposal of what brilliant things
#
Sukhi would be doing in his newspaper. And the thing is, I already knew that he was interested
#
in local comic strips because he, unlike the average Indian editor, was actually interested
#
in comic strips. And he was, we've not even touched on Modesty Blaze. Modesty Blaze is a huge part of
#
my life. Okay. So he's a Modesty Blaze fan. And I knew Modesty Blaze from Bangkok from the time I
#
was 11. And that's where I first encountered this comic strip. Knowing that Vinod was publishing
#
Modesty in his newspaper was a huge kind of key to feeling that I could approach him. So when I
#
approached him with a panel of a kind of self-recommendation letter in panels,
#
he said yes. He just said yes, sure. Gave me a space and I was on. And because he didn't try
#
and tell me what to do, it was entirely up to me. And if you see the progression over the weeks of
#
first few weeks, and initially I hand drew all the frame lines. I hand wrote all the
#
text. It was minute. It was unreadable. Little by little, things change for many reasons.
#
Amongst them, it's quicker to do big lettering. It's quicker to not have a lot of detail.
#
It's quicker to have fewer frames, not eight frames. And fewer characters. And also,
#
if one of your characters is a frog, then it takes up much less space. And so on and so forth. There
#
are many little gimmicks that cartoonists can use to ease their way. Because of course, doing a comic
#
strip and being paid on a monthly basis was certainly not paying my full rent. But I had
#
to do other things. And finding time to do Suki and then sometimes at some point it switched to
#
color. And getting it painted in color just before deadline. Sometimes the paint was wet en route to
#
the office and would throw it down and run away. I have the originals. So I would always go back
#
the next week and collect the one that was from the week before. And little by little, these
#
abilities begin to smooth out and become streamlined. But slipping forward into
#
electronic aids. As far as I'm concerned, I now work almost exclusively in Photoshop.
#
And when I do a drawing, let us say, for six years I had a later version of Suki as a comic strip.
#
What I do is I make a drawing in pencil. I ink it. And then use Photoshop. I scan into my computer
#
and then use Photoshop to do the boring stuff like filling in black space, black or color or whatever.
#
It's just that much quicker. And if people think, oh, well, you know, you're using a computer,
#
I don't care. If you think that the computer is doing it, think it. I don't care. It's not.
#
But it's a huge help. I can do so much more. And there's a lot of work that is much easier to do
#
because you don't then have to complete something in black and white or in color on paper, then scan,
#
then resize. All of those things have been made easier by doing things on the computer.
#
So I'm very happy to use a computer. But there's a huge difference between what is produced on
#
paper. There's a quality change. And I think something that readers or viewers sense without
#
perhaps even understanding what they're sensing, when you see something painted or drawn
#
in the real world and not electronically, what, and if you're buying it, what you're buying is
#
that artist's time. You're buying a certain chunk of time. And when the artist has
#
shortened the process by using some electronic method, which I have, I mean, with some of my
#
children's books, the more recent ones, I would never be able to produce a children's book in
#
four months if I were not using some electronic aid. But it does mean that the
#
level of the time element that goes, you can see in the early work where everything was on paper,
#
is missing. So of course I know that there is a quality qualitative difference.
#
I don't know if the readers notice, but the fact that people
#
return repeatedly to earlier books suggests to me that they do notice. They know that there is a,
#
but they don't know why. Why there's a difference.
#
I probably first read Souki in the pioneer years, so perhaps in the early 90s, 92, 93.
#
That was ink. That was ink. That was not electronic.
#
Yeah. And I remember thinking even then that it looks so different from all the other typical
#
syndicated comic strips that there were. It was just different. I mean, the content was different.
#
The style was different in a good way. And what often happens when you encounter something new
#
is that you don't know how to respond to it. It happens with, I have had restaurateurs on my show
#
who speak about how when they experiment with food, the initial reaction is just hostile.
#
It's not even uncaring. It is hostile. And then it takes in a few years that kind of gets normalized.
#
And even with Souki, you mentioned in the past that you did get a certain amount of criticism
#
One letter writer said, she gives me dyspepsia, whatever that process is like. So how did that
#
make you feel? How did you deal with it? Well, it was yet another turning point. So Souki had
#
been appearing in the Sunday Observer for several weeks. And as I said, I didn't connect
#
with Vinod or the office. I never had any dealings except to go and drop it off.
#
So it was a shock for me to see in the letters section, because he loved to maintain a big
#
letters, a half page of letters from the readers, an angry letter complaining about Souki.
#
And I was a little taken aback. It was quite nasty. And then a week later, there was another one.
#
And so maybe two or three such episodes later, I was starting to feel a little hurt and a little
#
sorry for myself and no one was loving me and so on. So I wondered, you know, what does Vinod feel
#
about this? Is he starting to, because they were saying things like, why are you wasting good,
#
expensive newspaper columns on this rubbish? And so I thought to myself, well, maybe he's asking
#
himself that. And if the readers hate Souki so much, of course, they're hating me. Of course,
#
I know that. I went to him and I said, you know, what do you feel about this negativity? And he
#
said, this was the turning point. He said, you know, when you stand in a public place, what he,
#
the word he used was coconut shy. When you stand in a public space, you're going to be hit.
#
So if you can't take it, don't stand in a public space. But if you want to stay in the public space,
#
take it. And as for myself, he said, I love to get negative critiques because it means that
#
someone cares enough to put a stamp on a postcard and put it in the, in the post box. And it means
#
it's a certain kind, it's negative, but it's a certain kind of passion. And it means that they
#
care. And he said, I can't tell you if you want to stop, I won't stop you. And I went home and I
#
thought about that and I thought, he's right. It's like one of these moments, you know, and
#
into battle, you know, so I persevered and I found that it was, it was cool to get the more
#
I got angry letters, the more fun it was to kind of play with it, you know.
#
And in your mind, how did Sukhi evolve? Like when you mentioned that some readers will go back to
#
the earlier strips, but for you, what is, what are the phases that you like? What did you feel about
#
it? Because I imagine in the beginning, it's a learning curve. You are awkward. You would be a
#
little awkward in your drawing. You'd be a little awkward in your storylines. Then it gets much
#
better as you find a certain assurance, but then you find a rhythm, you know. So what are, what are
#
your feelings? Well, there were many, there were certain phases in Sukhi. The first phase was when
#
she was supposedly based on me. And so some, a lot of the, in that early phase, the things I did
#
were the things that she did, or my friends would sometimes turn up in the strip and there was a
#
certain amount of irritation. Then one of my friends really didn't like the way he appeared
#
in the strip. So he was dropped. But the great break between Sukhi and myself happened when I
#
had been away on a trip and she remained away in the strip. And I was back in Bombay and walking
#
around and someone said, you're here? I thought you were still in the US. And I said, no, that's
#
Sukhi. And that, the split happened. That's Sukhi and that's not me. And she became very much her
#
own person and not someone who, she didn't, she's never particularly liked me. And she has very much,
#
she's always had her own, she's a very unruly in the sense that there is no specific characteristic
#
that you can place on her. She's, she does what she likes, which is mostly nothing. She doesn't do
#
very much. She has opinions. They are usually not very political. There's once in a while.
#
So the Bombay strips were very much more abstract. There were aliens. There was a visiting alien.
#
There was her. She had a friend called Miss Maidenhood who was a Burkha-clad cabaret singer.
#
I don't think I would get away with that now. And it was very easy to draw Miss Maidenhood
#
because it was just, so I loved drawing her and she was very feisty. And she would say that she
#
was performing nude in her Burkha. Delightful and you're giving away too many of your tricks.
#
Yes. So there are those who say that early Sukhi, that is the Sunday Observer Sukhi, was
#
the high point. Personally, I really liked the development in Pioneer Sukhi because that was six
#
days a week. And so it wasn't just that I had to finish it before Sunday and throw it in, but I had
#
to do it for, sometimes I would do it the day before, but usually I would do six days at a time
#
and had worked out a way of the panels appearing on an A3 size and then be reduced. And I never
#
gave the originals. I gave reproductions and that is photocopies. So I would take an A4 sheet,
#
which I'd reduce down so that it would be the right size and take that to the Pioneer.
#
And because of the continuity, the six days gives you a lot of time in which to build a story.
#
And it gave me tremendous experience for writing dialogue because she would interact with whoever
#
and the effort of drawing characters repeatedly the same way. Of course, any strip cartoonist
#
has to be able to do that, but that's why so many strip cartoonists, they usually have only
#
three fingers, not four. Sukhi has four fingers and a thumb, but many cartoonists have the
#
convention of three fingers and they're rounded and there's no nail. And this is just to cut down
#
on the repeats. You have to repeat so many things each time you draw that character.
#
So I would say that for me, some of the ideas of the Pioneer strips in the middle years were,
#
I think, my favorite years. But there was a terrible falling off towards the final year
#
and a half of Pioneer because Vinod went away to outlook. And the people who hated the Pioneer
#
after that, I'm not even going to try and name them, just didn't have any interest and they also
#
stopped paying. That's a very big and useful reason for starting to hate to do anything,
#
is they just stopped paying. And I was stubborn enough to just continue producing it and they
#
continued to print it, but they didn't pay. So in the Sunday Observer, I got a lot of,
#
mostly hate mail, but I did get a little appreciation. And then some of the hate mail was,
#
I realized in the Sunday Observer meant to be kind of jokey. And they realized, some of the readers
#
realized that if they write something really extreme, it'll get in print and they wanted to
#
see their names in print. So they would do that. But in the Pioneer, no response at all for six
#
years. Nothing. I think in six years, I got one piece of mail and didn't make it to the
#
letters page. They physically gave me a piece of mail. In the end, I wasn't getting paid
#
and I wasn't enjoying it. So then why do it? You know, so I stopped in 97.
#
Tell me about the impetus towards writing, especially playwriting.
#
Like you already mentioned that you got better at dialogue because you were doing dialogue in
#
the strip and your first play, Lights Out, was based on a story you were told by a friend,
#
a true story. But why a play? You know, why not a short story?
#
No, this is another, it was not a turning point. It was just one of those things that happened.
#
A friend with whom I was in conversation, we were talking about something or the other and she just,
#
she said, you know, the other day, and it obviously had not happened
#
recently. It had happened a year before the time we were talking. She said, I saw something,
#
something that left a terrible impression, not surprisingly. And what she saw was a gang rape
#
outside a window from the flat they were in. And I'm not going to go into any details here
#
because it is detailed in Lights Out. And she told me this and we were both very, obviously,
#
she was shaken, but she had not talked about it since the time that she had seen it. So
#
she had internalized what she had seen, but what she told me was in great detail.
#
And it left me very, very shaken. So of course, as anyone associated with the press might do,
#
I immediately went to Vinod and I said, you know, I heard this incredible story.
#
And he said, yes, it sounds awful, but there are no details. It's happened not recently,
#
it happened a year ago. That's what I said. And there are no witnesses willing to come forward.
#
Again, I knew that the person in whose house it occurred, from which they saw the site,
#
wanted no attention, so they would never speak. And there weren't, of course, no address or
#
anything. So it's not a news story. It's just say so. And he said, you know, if I wanted, I
#
could write that as some kind of, if I can link it to other stories. I wasn't at all interested
#
in doing that. The one thing led to another. And then I talked to a friend called Rekha Khanna,
#
who was at that time going to be editing a magazine for India Today. India Today had an
#
idea of starting a women's magazine called Woman Today. She was going to be editing that,
#
and she was sitting at her editorial desk. And I told her about this. I told her what I had heard.
#
And she said, you know what? Why don't you write it as a play? And it's like a kind of
#
buzzer in my head. It's like, hmm, this is an idea. Why not? Maybe that's the thing to do.
#
That is to write, not to become a playwright, but to write a news story in the format of a play.
#
So therein, a whole story begins. And it happened.
#
So I was reading the play today morning. And for the benefit of the listeners, it's collected in
#
a book called Blood and Laughter, which is a collection of your long form plays. And what
#
struck me while reading it is how brilliantly it works as a metaphor, even for these current times.
#
Like what essentially happens in the play without giving much away is that you have a bunch of
#
people who are meeting for a dinner party, and they hear some noises outside. And clearly,
#
it's noises that the hosts have heard before, so they know what it is. And they tell the guests,
#
they don't bother to look. It's just a religious thing. It's a religious ceremony and et cetera,
#
et cetera. And eventually they look, and it's a gang rape which is happening, which is described
#
in some detail in the play, but never shown, obviously. You avoid that aspect of it. But it's
#
described. You can make out what's going on. And at first, they explain it away, oh, it's a religious
#
ceremony. Then you realize, oh, it can't be a religious ceremony. It's a rape. Then somebody
#
says that, oh, maybe she's a prostitute. Maybe she's consenting for this, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You know, the whole thing plays out that way. And did you intend it as a play that is just about
#
this one disturbing incident? Or was that larger comment, which frankly is a timeless comment and
#
applies as much to this? It was very much my intention because when I attempted to write it
#
as an account of an incident that is not a news item because I have no other,
#
I have no newsworthy details to offer, realizing that I'm going to have to present it as if it were
#
fiction, but I'm going to also say it's not fiction. It seemed to me pointless to just provide
#
an audience with a tale of horror or nastiness. For what purpose? I mean, the sense of purpose
#
became embedded in the desire to write it as a play, that there has to be a purpose. But what
#
is the purpose? Why do I bother? Why will anyone bother to buy a seat to watch a performance if all
#
I'm going to say is something nasty happened in Santa Cruz? It's not enough because something
#
nasty is happening somewhere, everywhere in the world. So that's not enough. A piece of fiction,
#
or a piece of, dare we say it, literature has to go beyond that. But what? I certainly am not going
#
to have a group of actors on stage shaking their finger at the audience and saying, now don't do
#
that. You don't want that. You want the audience to come away with something other than, oh,
#
we shouldn't do these bad things. That's not enough. I mean, I'm saying it's not enough.
#
An author, a playwright, and anyone who puts something out in the public domain, as I said,
#
that remark from Vinod, which is, if you do something in the public domain, be ready to be
#
critiqued, to be hit at. But stand by what you're saying. He didn't say all of that.
#
He just, his remark was very brief. But the idea that if you put, if you have people paying for a
#
seat, give them something, something more than just a little lecture on, don't be bad. Baba,
#
don't be bad. Now you go home and be good. That's not enough. You have to have something to offer.
#
And again, to go back on the issue of age, I think at 15, I wouldn't have had anything to offer.
#
But at whatever I was, 30 plus, I felt I had something more to offer than just, now don't
#
do that. Yeah. And what I had to offer was questions, not answers. That I wanted
#
the audience to go home with a terrible sense of responsibility for crimes of this nature,
#
where it is not the crime itself. Who knows why, what was going on outside. We'll never know that.
#
That is something we never know, neither before nor after, nor at any time in between.
#
I have no idea what was going on or why. What I do know is that people have opinions
#
about why women get raped. Why, I mean, so many now, of course, with all the developments,
#
since there are so many ways and opinions people have about what people should or shouldn't do
#
and think and feel about assaults on men or women, but certainly women.
#
But part of what I want people to think about is what effect it has on all our values for life
#
and self-esteem when women are told repeatedly that it is their, the way they dress or the way
#
they behave, or even their having desires that people think they shouldn't have,
#
which causes them to be in danger. And what it does, what words like slut or whore do to demean
#
someone who might not deserve to be demeaned? After all, one of the points one wants to make
#
in the play is one of the characters says, do you mean to say if she is a whore, she can't be raped?
#
And the two guys say, of course, I mean, what is a whore? But someone who is, you know, just,
#
they don't say the words, but they're suggesting that, well, where's the question of decency?
#
And the character asks, and if there's no purpose, if whatever a woman does,
#
she's vulnerable to assault, then what is the point of being decent? And then, of course,
#
the others say, now you've completely lost it. You've lost the case here.
#
So there are no answers to questions of this kind. These answers can only be sought by the audience
#
about themselves, what they really feel, what they feel about, because that much deeper question
#
that lights out only slightly touches upon, which is, what are the rights of a whore, a prostitute?
#
Do we ever allow ourselves to think that there are rights, that anyone in the business of
#
providing sex, they're not just machines who have no feelings or no thoughts or no rights.
#
Even there, there are rights. And our unwillingness to look in that direction,
#
because after all, some people are their customers. So what are we saying, you know, that
#
it's a free for all? It can't be. They are just people, ultimately. And if we're not willing to
#
look there, then we can't really have any right to look at rape and issues of assault. We have to
#
look at the whole spectrum, which we don't. We tend to only look at, oh, some woman has been,
#
modesty has been outraged, and we have to all feel angry about it. But we don't look at the
#
foundation of the outrage, of the anger, where does it arise and how.
#
And for me, the part in the play also lay in the fact that beyond all these questions,
#
it also goes into something fundamental about the people in the drawing room, like the sense
#
where I got at the end of it is, okay, the real crime is looking away. Yes. You know,
#
the real need of the moment is to think about all the things that we have normalized because
#
we are refusing to look outside that window. So for me, it just felt incredibly powerful. And
#
what is even more remarkable about that play is that it was actually performed. Tell me a little
#
bit about. So it continues to be performed. It was just performed the other day in Bombay.
#
Yeah, but like you pointed out, for 16 years after this was performed,
#
none of your plays was performed. Right, for a long time. In that sense.
#
The thing is, to perform a play that is going to leave the audience shattered,
#
and it does, I'm laughing, but it is true. The audiences for Lights Out come away
#
kind of gray with tension and because most of us are primed to think that you go out for an
#
evening of theater and you come away somewhat, you know, entertained and feeling kind of good.
#
And even if it's many, after all, a lot of drama is about dramatic things and things that raise
#
you up and emotions and anger and sorrow and so on. And then it leaves you all feeling
#
relieved at the end. Well, Lights Out does not leave you with anything tender at the end at all.
#
And what does happen is, which is what I have suggested to people who perform it.
#
So at the end of the show, come out into the audience and encourage discussion. And if anyone
#
wants, then engage in a group hug. And people like that. They want that. They want that connection.
#
They want to be told that, well, you know, they were awful people back there, but we're okay.
#
But it does leave people shaken. And the question that is asked at once is,
#
did it really happen? You know, what can I say? I was told it did. And I mean,
#
the other thing is, these kinds of things are happening and maybe not so extreme. What made
#
this extreme is that people watched. But does a violent assault take place? Of course, we know it
#
does. And what do we do? What do we think? How do we react? And more than anything else, why is there
#
so little compassion in the room? There is no compassion for anyone. I mean, the idea of just
#
going and beating up someone with no idea of why they're doing what they're doing and what you
#
might encounter if you're actually face to face with the assailants, that's not even, you know,
#
there's no time in the play, of course, to discuss any of that. So the lack of compassion and the lack
#
of accountability is what is really being discussed. So I always push away the, of course,
#
it will always be described as a play about rape. But it is truly a play about apathy,
#
about public apathy and a lack of civic responsibility. But of course, these are not,
#
you know, these are not juicy words. So it's easier to say, oh, it's a play about rape. It's not.
#
So with this play with, you know, with Lights Out, which, as you point out, gets performed within a
#
few months of it coming out. On the one hand, it feels like you have found another powerful calling
#
that you know now that you can write plays that you can think of yourself as a playwright.
#
But on the other hand, in the ecosystem, you're still the forever outsider in the sense you are
#
a playwright writing plays in English with a particular kind of sensibility. And most of the
#
playwriting scene is all your Hindi playwrights and NSD and blah, blah, blah. So did you still
#
feel kind of on the outside? Did you feel that there is a world that you can belong to? Or did
#
you feel that, no, essentially, I am still like an army of one and I just have to do what I'd,
#
like many of your plays you mentioned, all your plays you mentioned, you've basically written
#
alone. Even if you know that a particular troupe is going to perform it with you,
#
you hold yourself up and written it alone and so on. So tell me a little bit about that. And
#
was that frustrating that having found this new calling, you know, the scene is not so receptive
#
at all. There is no Vinod Netta for your plays in a sense. Of course it's frustrating. But
#
certainly by that age, it was 1984, I wrote Lights Out. Naturally, by then I had grown very
#
used to the state of this condition. And I would, it would just intensify, you know. So I wrote,
#
I forget the exact sequence, but I wrote, I think straight after that was The Mating Game Show,
#
which The Mating Game Show is a play that had a lot of potential and a lot of, at least two or
#
three groups tried to or wanted to perform it. But ultimately it could not be performed because
#
it was a big, expensive, it would have been a big, expensive production. And then Govind
#
Nihalani commissioned it as a screenplay for a 12-part series. And that was supposedly for BITV,
#
and there was tons of money and everything collapsed and BITV collapsed. And we actually,
#
I wrote that, so 12 episodes, I don't know how many, a huge cast, it got performed, it got filmed,
#
it's in the cans, but never seen. And, you know, all of that certainly produced a sense of
#
futility in doing things, in the worthlessness of making the effort, because it's not going to
#
result in a performance and therefore, of course, no question of any money. And I can only point to
#
my continuing willingness to chase down hopeless quests, that I continue to do things. And perhaps,
#
if I hadn't, one way or the other, continued to survive, sort of. I mean, it was always
#
notional, there's always scraping together. So in the middle, I worked for India Today for a couple
#
of years, and that stabilized me. I moved to Delhi in 85, I wrote Lights Out in 84, I moved to Delhi
#
in 85, I worked with CSC for a few months, maybe a year, then straight after that. So I was getting
#
a little more in the way of regular money, very little, but I was getting some. And then for
#
India Today for a year and a half, and then I freelanced a little more. And then we're edging
#
towards Harvest. Now, obviously, Harvest was the other giant watershed in my life.
#
I went to, two or three things happened all at once. In 91, I went to Bhutan. In 91, I married
#
the person I met in Bhutan. And obviously, there was a change of life, but not in terms of money.
#
I'm not dependent on him, and have never been. And so for me, the need to be self-reliant
#
remained the same. But in 95, I went to China as part of the UN Women's Conference. The UN has a
#
women's conference every 10 years or something like that. Anyway, in 95, it was the big, big
#
women's conference that was held in China. 35,000 women from around the world came to China.
#
It was the first time that China was opening up. I was not there as a delegate, I was there as a
#
cartoonist. So it was, for me, a very charming otherness. I was not part of the main conference,
#
I was part of the NGO conference, which was not in Beijing, it was in a resort called Huayu.
#
It was a wonderful, again, but it is not what I would call a watershed moment. This was not
#
a watershed, it was just a wonderful excursion. And it also introduced me to a larger network
#
of people, but the same old story, which is, people think that I, they like my work, everyone
#
thinks I draw well, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't actually make much of the way of a living.
#
And in 91, end 91, I started a new cycle of Suki. So Suki was running in the Pioneer from 91 to 97.
#
So whether I had gone to Australia or to, because somewhere in between I went to,
#
that's the whole point. I think I'm losing track of the years, but at some point I went to China,
#
and then I went to Australia. And Australia was one of the big moments, because in Australia,
#
I saw a little, a small theater journal, and I went to Australia again as a cartoonist. There was
#
some feminist book fair, something, something international feminist book fair was held in
#
Australia. I was invited to it. I went there with Suki and so on and so forth. Okay. All of that was
#
going on. But in Australia, I stayed two weeks with a friend. He had a journal in his house,
#
a 16 page theater journal out of a small theater group. And I asked him to subscribe for me. So I
#
got four copies. And that was in, as I said, I'm losing track, so I'm not sure. So I must have
#
gone to, this is it. I went to Australia in 94. In 95, I went to China. In this, between 94 and 95,
#
I got four copies of this. This is relevant. So in the final copy I got, which was in 95,
#
I saw a very tiny advertisement for an international play competition, but sponsored by
#
the Onassis Foundation. Now, I knew of Onassis because as a child growing up in, outside India,
#
was very conscious of Jackie, Jackie Kennedy marrying Aristotle Onassis. It was such a big
#
scandal and so on. And so I knew the name Onassis. So it caught my eye. And I thought, because I was
#
now really desperate for, I just didn't have, I felt I was not surviving my life well. And
#
I saw that sum of money and I thought, that's the kind of sum that I would find very useful.
#
It would be really great. And I do write plays, so why don't I try? So I saw that in 95,
#
in the middle of 95, and the submission date was the end of June in 96. I wrote the play
#
and sent it. And I didn't, as everyone, as the rules specified that you, it should be an
#
unpublished, unperformed play. I didn't tell anyone, not my sisters, not my friends, not anyone.
#
So I wrote the play between March and June and sent it. And to cut a long story short,
#
because there was an incredible year-long wait. In July 97, I got a call from Greece to tell me
#
it had won. So in that twinkling, my life changed and it became a different life.
#
And in that sense, a life that was no longer at the edge of struggling the whole time.
#
I'm still struggling, but not the same way. What did that do to you? Because, you know,
#
it's completely life-changing and I don't think there is a single writer, a single struggling
#
writer or artist in India who hasn't dreamed of something like this, right? Oh my God, if I had
#
that kind of money, you know, everything is taken care of, I can just, you know, etc., etc. So what
#
do you even do? How do you plan for that? Two or three things can easily be said now,
#
since so many years later. I was 44 then, I'm 70 now. And I can say two or three things. One is,
#
yes, everything does change. Part of what changes is the way people look at you.
#
Suddenly there are like Scrooge McDuck, you know, dollar signs in the eyes. They're looking at you
#
like that, like you're suddenly made of money. Of course you're not, because what you realize
#
almost instantly is, yes, it's a lot of money, but there's only a certain amount of things you
#
can do with it. If you buy a house, for instance, you don't have any money to live on, so you can't
#
buy a house. So there's, you know, it's like, you don't even think of buying a house when you have
#
only 5000 rupees in your bank account. But when you have a lot more, then you discover the things
#
you can't do. All that you do know is the universe has smiled on you and you are grateful.
#
And if it happens late in your life, which at 44 it is late in your life, you don't take it for
#
granted. A lot of time has gone into making, it is not just the lottery. It feels like the lottery,
#
but it isn't. And you realize with humility that it can, it need not have happened. It happened,
#
but it's by such a hair's breadth. And you feel humbled by the nature of reality that
#
it could so easily not have happened. I mean, I was told that it was one of the last plays to get in
#
under the door in time for the deadline. And you feel grateful, you feel responsible for, you know,
#
to the power of chance. And you realize that it's, I mean, it's great, it's wonderful, but
#
you can't, you can't be irresponsible. You can't take it lightly. You also can't do very much.
#
You know, you can't, it will support some things, but more than anything else. And this is what I
#
said at the time, and it is a hundred percent true. What it really did was it freed me to
#
do what I already do without having to fret about never mind paying the rent. Okay, right. I still
#
have to pay rent now and then. But I can continue to do what I want to do with less of the sense of
#
the wolf at my heels. The wolf is still now down the road. Now the wolf looks different. The wolf
#
is mortality. And, you know, how much can one do before age and health and so on catch up? But
#
the sense that for all the things that can go wrong, sometimes things go right. And
#
I think it's, it's, it's very positive. It's very reassuring that you can take a chance and it can
#
work. And that, of course, there are many people who go crazy and they, you know, buy yachts and
#
things like that. But, you know, as I said, very soon you realize, no, you can't do very much. You
#
can do what, you can do the things you couldn't do before, a few of those things, but not very
#
much more. What I love about this story is a perfect storm that had you not gone to Australia,
#
had you not visited that friend, had you not seen that magazine at his place and taken that
#
subscription and gotten that fourth issue and looked inside it and found this. And being
#
optimistic. And then optimistic. But there, there is a wrinkle that I haven't even mentioned.
#
This friend, how did I know this friend? But actually it's a little bit x-rated, so I will
#
not go there. Okay. No worries. I met this friend in Germany a million years before,
#
and what can I say? Sounds juicy. It's not really, it's not really, but there was a reason we stayed
#
friends, whereas I was friendly with a number of other people and I didn't stay friends with them,
#
but with this one I did. Well, thank God for whatever that x-rated reason is, frankly.
#
And the big lesson in this, I think, and a lesson that I should also learn and put in play is that
#
sometimes it's important to increase your surface area of serendipity,
#
you know, and traveling does that. You know, you travel, you meet this friend, you pick up the
#
magazine, you are enthusiastic, you say, subscription chahiye, you get a subscription, you notice that,
#
you're optimistic. All the time you're increasing your surface area of serendipity, whereas if
#
you're like me, you're moping in your flat, you're not going out. I'm an introvert anyway,
#
you don't meet people, you know, and shit doesn't happen. And the big lesson in this is that
#
you have to, you know, and this is also another reason traveling helps and just putting yourself
#
out there helps, even if it is sometimes an effort, not for a particular purpose, but you're just
#
increasing the number of good things that could possibly sort of happen to you. How did people
#
look at you differently after this? Because Indians, we suffer from this post-colonial
#
nonsense that foreign validation means so freaking much to us.
#
Right. Well, it had a negative effect as well, because what can happen in, again, in India is,
#
if you get, if you are regarded as of no consequence in India, then if someone,
#
some outside agency decides that you are of consequence, in India, it translates to, oh,
#
well, you know, she must have done something silly to get that. And it doesn't have to touch us at
#
all. So there was no immediate concept that maybe the play is good. No, the first thought was, oh,
#
it, you know, it makes sense to foreigners, but for us, it's nothing. And it was, Harvest was very
#
much treated as not, you know, it's what was said in so many words is it works on paper, but it
#
won't work on stage, on the page, but not on stage. And what can I say? I can't do more than write the
#
play and then send it, and it wins a prize. And if you think it's nothing, then what can I do?
#
I can't do much. I can't convince you otherwise. And the fact is, I am not part of the theater
#
community. And there are a couple of sad stories I can tell, but they're not worth telling because
#
it's like, yes, you know, people everywhere behave badly. So before Harvest, people behave badly.
#
After Harvest, people behave very badly. But right now I can say there's been a very recent
#
development where it's being translated into Hindi. And there may be in a year a Hindi
#
stage production of it. I'm thrilled. And the person who's doing it, his name is Nikhil Mehta.
#
And we're all feeling very hopeful. Congratulations. That's great. Yeah.
#
And so here's an interesting thing that we kind of have in common, though I don't deserve to have
#
this in common with you, that after my book came out, which you reviewed so kindly, Govind Nihalini
#
got in touch and he said, hey, I want to make a film with this. It's because of me. You put him
#
onto the book? Yes. My God. And I find out now. I find out now in the middle of a recording. Thank
#
you so much. I was so kind of you. But what eventually happened was that we did a, I did
#
a treatment with him and he couldn't get funding in Bollywood. And then he said, he said the Marathi
#
film industry, this was circa 2009 is like the Hindi film industry of the early 1980s. And I
#
wrote a treatment for him where the store setting changed to Pune. And then I just had a feeling
#
nothing would happen. And I think I just became apathetic, like the people in the drawing room.
#
And I stopped replying to his emails and I inadvertently ghosted him. So if you ever meet
#
him, tell him, I'm really sorry. He's not doing well. He's not doing well. Let's not go further
#
down this. Yeah. So it's, but the point, what I was coming to next was that he made a film out of
#
how it was called The Harm. So tell me about that sort of process and you know. Well, the thing is
#
by then, I think that was 2002, he made the film and it was all, you know, it was
#
very, you know, what word can I say, heartwarming or, you know, but
#
you know, the film, I had already realized that
#
that page to film is not much fun for the writer because the film is entirely the director's baby
#
and it, you see your work being sort of packaged and used by someone else. And
#
it, I had, I was not, you know, I was not feeling possessive about Harvest. I'd seen it performed
#
on stage here and there. You know, Harvest is performed every once in a while on stage somewhere
#
and I've seen it a number of times now. I don't watch because I find it hateful.
#
Hateful in the sense that I've, I don't enjoy it. I'm glad that they do. I must say I'm kind of
#
hoping that the Hindi Harvest will be great, but I, by and large, I don't really like to watch
#
because, okay, they're doing it. They're getting something out of it. But for me, it's past. It's
#
over. And of course, Dahem was in 2002 and it was still quite fresh for me, but it was still not
#
my play. It had become somebody else's film and I, you know, I was glad, but
#
kind of gotten over it. There's this old cliche in India about how if you put, you know, crabs in a
#
bottle, all the crabs will pull, any crab tries to escape, the other crabs will pull him down.
#
And I can't speak for other countries because I've only lived here, but what I have seen here is
#
very often, especially in the artistic community, there can often be a lot of bitterness and
#
resentment against people who have done well. Like a friend of mine who went on to become a
#
novelist told me once in the late nineties that every time a friend of mine does well,
#
a part of me dies. And I just found that I was, yeah, he was trying to be clever and he's been
#
clever all his life ever since. But I just felt that that was such a terrible, horrible thing to
#
say. But at the same time, it also felt true to me. It also felt that, you know, instead of
#
celebrating each other's successes too often, we are trying to push them down. We're trying to find
#
reasons in our head that, you know, they're not what it's cut out to be. And some of the responses
#
that you got to harvest also kind of indicates that there is jealousy, there is envy. Yeah,
#
there was, but you know, the thing is when you have gotten out of that glass bottle, it doesn't matter.
#
Yeah, and I can't be, you know, they can say what they like, they can feel what they like,
#
all in the past. Is this more of a tendency with us? I don't know.
#
I think it's always, it's the case with any small community and many literary artistic communities
#
are small, but so some of it will happen. But I think one reason that it is more noticeable
#
in a large country like India is that however large the country might be, the artistic communities
#
are small and people are still hungry. Even very wealthy artists and writers are still,
#
they behave like poor people in that they are not generous. I mean, in fact, the poor are generous,
#
but the people in the many variations of the artistic community are not generous with one
#
another or they'll be generous to people of their own community. There'll be a lot of parochialism.
#
And in all of that, someone like myself, who is already an outsider, I'm not there. What would be
#
my community? There's no community to support me. It's not as if, you know, because I don't
#
perform as a, I mean, it's unthinkable that I would ever do that, but it's not as if I behave,
#
I say, you know, I'm a Mulyali and I'm proud of being Mulyali. I can't possibly say that
#
with any honesty because I don't even speak. So I can't have a sense of community support
#
from whatever is my ethnic community because it's not real that way. And I come across as
#
an outsider even from the way I speak, the way I behave, the way I look. And then of course,
#
I appear to be living outside the country and it's not as if I have some kind of foundation
#
there or anywhere. The fact that I'm not actually supported by anything is merely one more feature
#
of my outsider existence. But like I've been saying all the way, all through, it's become
#
my identity. It's become mine. I've said this in other places. It's become my nationality
#
to be an outsider. And there are people like this. There are others like me.
#
Of course, we don't belong to one another either. We are all tiny nations.
#
Yeah, yeah. Beautifully put. I want to ask you now about the auties, the post-Ravistrias. And I'm
#
particularly fascinated by the fact that you were actually in America at the time of the 2001
#
World Trade Center attacks. And part of the reason is that we live our lives assuming that
#
there is a certain normal. We define it in a certain way. This is the shape of the world.
#
This is how things are, et cetera, et cetera. And in a sense, we are lucky to be living in times
#
where there is not much reason for that to be shaken too much. In previous times, there would
#
be invasions and conquests and natural disasters, and the world is going to hell every few years.
#
But in a sense, 2001 was a big moment of rupture when the normalcy is suddenly broken, when those
#
two great buildings kind of fall down. So tell me a little bit about that period of time, because
#
you were actually in America when that happened. How did that make you feel? What were those times
#
like for you? Well, I don't think I have especially set up the way other people in my life
#
where they were situated. For instance, it's important to recognize that my two sisters,
#
my two elder sisters, have always been a very important presence in my life. So one of them
#
lives in Madras. Her name is Geetha Doctor. The other one lives in the U.S. Her name is
#
Surya Narayanan, and she immigrated to the U.S. as a doctor very many years ago in the early 70s.
#
And in many ways, these two, my two sisters have been like my anchors. And certainly in the U.S.,
#
the fact that I had a sister living there in Pennsylvania, not in New York or Boston,
#
but in a small town in Pennsylvania. Part of why she's important to me is that she made it
#
possible for me to come and go from the U.S. When in 2002, I became an immigrant, I was now required
#
to spend a certain length of time in the U.S. So my sister's presence there made a big difference.
#
But I also very often was living with other people as a guest, as a longtime guest. Now in 2001,
#
it was a difficult year for my tiny family, that is myself and Ethan, to whom I married,
#
and his father, Joseph Allen Stein. And in 2001, the three of us traveled to the U.S.
#
to stay with very dear friends in the small city called Newport in Rhode Island. It's on the East
#
Coast and about an hour and a half from Boston. And we traveled there knowing that Ethan's father
#
was not going to live very long. He was in his 90s. And it was expected that he would pass away
#
while we were in the U.S. And we had traveled there with that understanding and that knowledge.
#
So at the time of 9-11, the three of us were not in Newport, but in North Carolina,
#
further south from Rhode Island, and staying in Ethan's brother's house.
#
So it was a tense and difficult period, you can imagine, for all of us, because a great person,
#
that is Ethan's father, was slowly passing away. And like many people talk about,
#
they ask that question, where were you when President Kennedy was shot? So for another
#
generation, this event of 9-11 was going to be that question that people would ask,
#
what were you doing and where were you when the towers fell? Well, I and Ethan and his father
#
were in his brother's house, Ethan's brother's house in North Carolina. And because we were
#
guests and we couldn't have a large TV in the rooms we were in, I had a tiny handheld TV,
#
if you can believe it. It was like a large cell phone. It was that small. It was a tiny TV.
#
I was on the phone talking to my sister for my morning call with my sister, because we communicated
#
every day. I was holding this little TV and we had been talking and something came in over the
#
radio, not even the TV. And I then flicked on my little TV and she and I were both watching and
#
she said, are you seeing this? Are you seeing this? Something has happened. A plane has flown
#
into one of the twin towers. And it was one of those moments. I called out to Ethan. He was in
#
the other room saying, have you been picking this up? Anyway, I don't need to go further down this
#
path because it was the experience of so many people. There were so many stories exchanged,
#
horrified stories. But like you said, it was that moment when the picture of the world we'd had
#
till then suddenly cracked and we began to have to adjust to a new reality that none of us was
#
prepared for because of course it was a completely unfamiliar experience, particularly for people in
#
the U.S. who had not, I mean for the longest time, had not experienced anything like an attack on
#
their own soil. So when we were at this time, which was in a personal sense very difficult for us
#
because we were having to face a big loss and big adjustments in our lives, then when we were moving
#
back and forth across the U.S. to go to Newport and then we went somewhere else, I forget. Oh,
#
we went to Vermont to get over the loss. All the traveling was made strange because of the sudden
#
security. Again, in India we had for many years been used to seeing people with machine guns
#
at airports. In the U.S. it was completely unfamiliar and people were, other people, not us,
#
but other people were reacting strangely with kind of discomfort and trying. There were signs saying
#
do not make jokes. There were regular signs at the airport saying do not make jokes. This is a serious
#
situation and the security personnel were themselves very awkward. They themselves didn't
#
know how to function, how to behave. I mean everything has of course changed hugely. Everyone
#
is kind of blasé and also very strict and tense. They wear these big black uniforms and so on,
#
but that was not the case then. So it was a huge shift and for those of us who write science
#
fiction it was like, wow, this is kind of, oh, this is happening. These things that we write about
#
are happening. Seeing those towers come down was one of those experiences. It's like,
#
you know, if you've read the comic of The Watchmen, there are scenes towards the end
#
where people are running away because it is a manufactured crisis that this fellow in the
#
Arctic puts together, but the scenes of people screaming and running away from this huge cloud
#
of smoke, it absolutely anticipated the visions that we had from New York at that time. So it was
#
one of those cataclysmic events and of course we have all moved away from that time so
#
you don't think of it in quite the same way because we have all adjusted to it. It became
#
the normal later on. So all of our plans to relocate to the U.S., which was for me a kind
#
of vague notion. I wanted to do it but wasn't sure and it's not ever easy to relocate
#
and for most people the decisions to relocate are made by other events in that person's life,
#
the events such as a job or going abroad to study and then you get used to a place and you settle
#
down. For me, as I've often said to friends, the decision to go to the U.S. was based on
#
I like it there, not because I had a job and not because I can afford it, I can't really afford it
#
at all. And we still essentially can't afford to be there because it, as anyone who has tried to
#
relocate to another country knows, it takes a lot of not just energy and effort, it also takes a
#
lot of money. As I continue to say to friends who, at least in the past and certainly immediately
#
after Harvest, began to look at me as if I were suddenly a millionaire, I kept having to make the
#
point, you know, it's not really that much because what that sum of money did for me was it helped
#
stabilize an incredibly unstable situation, but it did not mean that I was suddenly fine,
#
you know. And as I very often, it's something I say fairly often because by now, by the age I am
#
now, which is 70, and I know I keep talking about age, most everyone I know owns their home, they
#
know where they're going to live for the rest of their lives, even if they travel a lot. I don't,
#
and I still don't. And in a sense, I think the point could be made that it seems as if both
#
Ethan and I are living, still living a kind of young person's life, we are still searching,
#
but it is still uncomfortable. I can also say that. It's not really by choice. It's because
#
from then onwards, I mean, including post-Harvest, it's still difficult to find
#
a place that I'm comfortable and really happy to settle down in. And certainly for Ethan, who has,
#
Ethan in many ways has a stronger link to Delhi. He grew up here. I didn't.
#
So he speaks Hindi, he speaks Hindustani. As he says, when he's in the US, he doesn't
#
recognize the bird song and it hurts him. Whereas here, he knows every plant, he knows all the birds
#
and he misses all of that when he's there. I, by contrast, because I grew up in different countries,
#
I don't really miss places. And I'm happy in the US in part because being an older person and a
#
brown-skinned person in the US makes you absolutely invisible. And I love that invisibility.
#
I love being completely anonymous. I walk on the streets on the, if I, not that I walk a whole lot,
#
but when I'm walking around, I have this feeling of being like a kind of cross-cultural spy because
#
I can see things. I see things with the whole of my history, but I know that on the street,
#
I look like a completely, not just anonymous, but a kind of non-person who, if I were in a movie,
#
I would be one of the completely unrecognizable crowd elements. And I love that sense of being
#
filled with another dimension inside me, but wandering around as if I were a lamppost,
#
completely ordinary. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm very conscious of not being ordinary
#
and yet living and looking as if I were. And it's a fabulous disguise. And I like that sense.
#
Whereas in Delhi, anyone who is even slightly above middle-class, you're not ordinary on the
#
streets. And certainly if you are an older person and a woman and walking around in the streets in
#
Delhi, you're an unusual feature because everyone else is different. Everyone else is much more
#
kind of local and look as if they belong, whereas people like me routinely look as if we do not
#
belong. And that sense of being other in what appears to me or by any existing standards of
#
belonging, this is supposedly my country, but I'm not on the streets. I'm not regarded. I'm not
#
treated as if I were just an ordinary element on the street. So there's that odd irony that I feel
#
at one level, I'm much more at home in the U.S. because I'm much more invisible.
#
So all of that happened post-harvest. And the gradual shift from living in Delhi and visiting
#
the U.S. took place between 2001, 2002. By the end of 2002, I was officially an immigrant
#
and needed therefore to spend not more than three months of the year away from the U.S.
#
So I needed to make a shift in how I was spending my time. But I didn't actually commit
#
to paying rent and lived as a guest out of the homes of friends and of course, my beloved sister
#
and her daughter, who was again, I mean, everyone has always been extremely kind to me
#
to have me as a guest. And I have over the years become something of a professional guest.
#
I like, I'm happy to be living in other people's homes. And it's in some ways,
#
again, I'm doing that everywhere. I'm practically a guest in my own home wherever I live. But in 2010,
#
I formally rented a space. And I lived in that space from 2010 to just last year.
#
And last year, there was a crisis. I can now laugh about it. But anyway, that was just last year
#
and very recent. So all of these years from 2001 to 2023 have been somewhat nomadic because
#
I have continued all along to have a home in Delhi that I come to every so often. And all of the work
#
that I've been producing between these years has been done in this, always in the spare time,
#
the spare spaces between moving around and finding and trying to organize a secure base
#
while doing a whole lot of other things. I would say that the artwork suffered the most
#
because to be an artist, really, you really do need a settled space.
#
And I did, I began in the early 21st century to be using my computer a great deal more for producing
#
artwork because it was much easier to do that than to be struggling with physical paper and
#
paints and ink and things like that. So it was a constant juggling of resources to see how and
#
where I could produce things. And for the years that I had a comic strip, which was from 2016 to,
#
no, actually I'm forgetting, it's from 2006 to, I forget, 2012 or something like that. It was
#
around six years. I was drawing, I had got myself to find a way to make a drawing on paper and then
#
scan it to the computer and then finish the artwork on the computer. So that's what I did
#
with Suki for many years. I functioned like that. I think I'm getting my dates completely wrong,
#
so ignore the whatever 2016. I have to be looking at the dates. I don't know. I've forgotten what
#
they are. I continued, I would say I continued to write more easily than I was able to draw.
#
So even when I had a rented home in 2010, it would be very many years before I found myself
#
able to paint and to produce artwork on a regular basis. So I'm sorry, Amit, I've been
#
kind of hopping around with dates and I'm not holding a clear line of progression
#
because you had asked what were the post-harvest years like in terms of work.
#
When I look back, I guess there was a long period of uncertainty.
#
In that period is when I wrote Escape and then eight years later followed up with
#
The Island of Lost Girls. All through that period, I was perhaps writing,
#
I was always writing some small things like columns and so on all the time.
#
But I think the artwork dwindled to just my comic strip when I had it and then the
#
children's books again when I could afford to do them without having to take up a lot of space
#
because I was constantly shifting around. So there was very little continuity.
#
So Marvellous, let's take a digression and I'll begin the digression with an
#
anecdote and sort of a question. Any anecdotes you mentioned, you know how the airports had this
#
sign, do not tell jokes. So I was in, I traveled through Pakistan in 2006. I was covering India's
#
cricket tour there. So at one point, me and another cricket journalist, we were taking
#
one of those fancy buses from I think Lahore to Islamabad if I remember or Islamabad to
#
somewhere else. I've forgotten the exact where we were. So anyway, so there was this luxury bus
#
and we bought our tickets and as they put our suitcases into the hold, my friend happened to,
#
you know, show off his sense of humor and he joked that, hey, we are from India. How do you
#
know these bags don't contain bombs? And instantly they hauled our bags out, you know, made us stand
#
outside the bus, made us open our bags, checked every little thing. And meanwhile, I was like
#
grumbling to this fellow that this is not the time for a sense of humor, you freaking idiot.
#
I'm deeply moved by what you mentioned about what Ethan said about bird songs that, you know,
#
I don't recognize a bird song there. And it is, I think such a beautiful metaphor of something in
#
the external world that is nevertheless internal to you and it sort of makes you feel that comfort
#
and peace. And so I want to ask you a broader question, you know, which in a sense, in the
#
context of not being able to feel at home anywhere, you've already kind of answered,
#
but in terms of what brings you comfort, my question is, what is your bird song?
#
That's a nice question, but coming as it is from the ether,
#
From the Amit. It's very hard to say, Amit, because I suspect that the traveling childhood
#
made me internalize the idea that wherever I am is home, and also it's not home in the sense that
#
home can shift. So the sense of being grounded wherever I am, in some ways it's my suitcase,
#
it's certain things. I have noticed that I identify a certain number of physical objects
#
as my things for the moment, and they will be things like my handbag or, of course, my computer,
#
the few gadgets that I must always have with me. And when I am in transit, I have an account,
#
you know, that's like I have six things. I must always keep track of those six things,
#
must be with me when I'm in transit. There's a science fiction story, it's not my story,
#
I read it many years ago. It left me with a kind of a gadget, which does not actually exist,
#
but it's a gadget that I identify as being one of those grounding gadgets. And what happens in the
#
story is that the protagonist, he's throwing things out, he's downsizing his personal belongings,
#
and he notices that he has a large commemorative coin of some sort, so a large coin. And he decides
#
he's going to throw it away, and he tries to throw it away, and it bounces on, he throws it out of
#
the window and it bounces on the wall and comes back in. So it begins to be established that he
#
can't throw it away, it remains with him. The story goes to a very different space. The space
#
it goes to is that this object is actually a type of recording device for a movie, a kind of,
#
they're called lifeys, being made by an organization or a film company in the future
#
that uses certain gadgets to track the characters that they use for making lifeys in the future of
#
the past. So if you, as the protagonist discovers this, he finds a way to connect with this future
#
production company, because it turns out that his role is growing a bit unstable,
#
as it would, because he has discovered this thing. Anyway, the point is he then tries to influence
#
the course of his life, because he realizes he's going to be phased out. Now, the only point,
#
of course, so there's a story, there's whatever happens. What I began to think of was there are
#
things that I've owned and have been in my possession all my life, and it has something
#
to do with this moving around. And certain things become what you're calling my bird song, certain
#
objects. And just today, I gave away one of these objects, I gave away my guitar to Amartya.
#
And it's, you know, there are other objects like that. But the guitar has been with me since I was
#
12. I'm not musical. I never learned to play it. But I had it with me all these years. So there,
#
I would say for me, the bird song is not something local, it is something that sits with me.
#
It's quite often, certain items of jewelry, I'm always wearing a certain,
#
two or three things I'm always wearing. And when I have tried to, I tried, for instance,
#
to give away a pair of earrings I had, I did give them away. And for maybe a year and a half, I
#
didn't wear my, you know, it's like, I can't be bothered to change my jewelry. I just wear the
#
same pair of earrings all the time. I never take them off. And I was, I got a slight infection and
#
I had to remove them. And then thought, why, you know, why am I wearing these things? Why,
#
I don't need them. And they are not part of my identity, surely. So I can give them away. So I
#
did. I did give them away. And it left me uncomfortable for a year and a half before I
#
finally recognized that I'm not liking this. I'm not enjoying the fact of having to keep
#
changing my earrings or either not wear them, not wear anything. Again, none of these things were
#
sitting comfortably. And, you know, ultimately you do in your life, the things that, I mean,
#
you can find some ideological reason, perhaps. For instance, I don't wear any makeup. I stopped
#
wearing makeup in my mid-20s. And those kinds of changes were freeing. They released me from
#
the particular trap that, at least in my opinion, some women get into of looking a certain way and
#
then having to maintain that appearance. And that was freeing. But I found to my mild dismay
#
that not wearing earrings, that is the, you know, little ear studs, it continued to bother me.
#
And then I began to say, well, to myself, if it bothers me, then it's not working. It's not freeing
#
me up. So, however pointless and silly it might be, okay, then I'm going to be wearing earrings.
#
And I'm comfortable. It is no longer, so for me, those things are what you're calling,
#
what you're referring to as birdsong. These small objects that I keep with me. And then,
#
because as to refer back to being a writer, if you're a science fiction writer, you are,
#
at least some part of your mind is constantly streaming the stories that you might write or
#
that you might become part of. And since we live in a world of tremendous insecurity and
#
uncertainty, especially political uncertainty, it always strikes me that if I were ever incarcerated,
#
one of the things I would lose is these little objects that I consider part of me. And it would
#
undoubtedly be terribly disorienting. So, it would be one of the reasons that I'd like to avoid
#
incarceration. If you are ever incarcerated, I promise you that Amartya and I on your behalf
#
will file a habeas corpus petition asking not that you be relieved, but that you be allowed
#
to wear earrings inside the prison because if you have your birdsong with you, you are after all
#
free. I must point out to my listeners here that the Amartya you referred to is the excellent Amartya
#
Ghosh, the musician who's overseeing the technical aspects of this recording for us. I will link his
#
music from Spotify. So, a deserving recipient of your Hoffner indeed. And I did a recent episode
#
on the YouTube show that I do, Everything is Everything, where our theme was kind of declutter.
#
Everybody talks about declutter. And I came up with something, you know, pretty similar to what
#
you just said, that there was a time that I would be attached to physical objects, to particular
#
physical objects. But I've reached the stage where I am deeply attached to physical objects that I
#
use as tools of my work, like my laptop and my mics and my Zoom H6 and my beautiful headphones
#
and all that. But they're all replaceable. So, if they stop working, I won't cry. I will instantly
#
order. Amazon will deliver the next day and I will continue with my life. So, what I am in love with
#
is those particular functions. But I will take the risk of throwing another question at you out of
#
the ether as it were. And this is something I asked a bunch of friends recently when I got together
#
with them and the answers were really fascinating. And I'll tell you my answer also to set you off.
#
And the question is, can you think of one physical object that sort of represents you or means
#
something to you in a particular kind of way? Like to clarify what I mean by that,
#
the object I came up with was, you know, my dad was in the IAS and every year in the 80s and 70s
#
and all that, Sarkari people would get all these diaries and all that. So, at one point, when those
#
diaries would come in January or the end of December, he would give them to me and say,
#
right, you want to be a writer, write in this. So, in 1986, when I was 12 years old, he gave me this
#
maroon diary and said, write in this. And recently after he died a couple of years back,
#
we were clearing out his house. I found that diary and I've kept it with me. And that diary
#
is poignant because only the first couple of pages are filled and the rest of it is empty.
#
And for me, I think about how that is my life, the one thing I wanted to do and the fact that
#
it was undone. And, you know, so it's an object that kind of fits me, like that's me right there.
#
And I can't, you know, obviously share the answers my friends gave, but some of them were moving and
#
very different ways. But is there something that you can think of that kind of sums it up for you?
#
I mean, because one should respond with the first thing that comes to mind. So,
#
for me, the first thing is a little pouch. I always have, it is not the same one,
#
but I always have some little life-saving pouch. It often has a number of useful items in it.
#
I'm constantly trying to update it so it just has what it needs. I keep trying to have
#
changeable pouches, you know, so that there's not very much in any one so that I can shift.
#
But nearly always it settles on one and then I wear it out and I get a new one. And it actually
#
links back, all the way back to when I was maybe, I'm going to hazard a guess and say maybe seven
#
years old. I had a pencil box and I often had quite structured pencil boxes with slots into
#
which you could fit things. And I, at that age, began to fantasize and it was a long-standing,
#
I mean, it wasn't a dream. It was a story fantasy in which I had a pencil box in the shape of,
#
for some reason, in the shape of a washing machine. And it was a tiny, it was a tiny thing.
#
And in that tiny thing could be fitted any other object, any kind of other object,
#
including clothes and shoes and maybe a dog or two and anything could be fitted into that.
#
So many years later, and I built on this theme quite rigorously in the long-standing,
#
long-running fantasy of this little object. So many, many years later when I read The Hitchhiker's
#
Guide to the Galaxy and there's the universal thing that, in which they can, I mean, the
#
the guide itself, you can put things in it. You can fit any kind of thing into it. And I thought
#
that's, that's my thing. That's my tiny washing machine come pencil box from when I was seven.
#
So I would say that the little, the various little pouches, that sometimes I have them custom-made
#
for me in leather. I like real things, like I prefer leather to plastic. So I sometimes have
#
them made, but they all wear out eventually and I replace them and they, you know, they would,
#
they have that function for me. And I'm constantly trying to, I stuff them full and the strap breaks
#
and then I tell myself I must downsize and not have, I used to have gigantic small pouches. They
#
became bigger and bigger and then, okay, downsize. But I want to go back to this issue of objects
#
that matter to one. So I have what might not be, I mean, okay, so it's a story of something that
#
really did happen. And it's a two-part story. The first part has to do with when I returned from my
#
vanishing to Holland and returned after what for my parents was a five-month absence from their lives
#
and family and no one knew where I was for, in fact, they thought it was only a month,
#
but in fact, they hadn't known where I was for five months. And when I returned from there,
#
there was a kind of celebration. I mean, people weren't sure that they were furious with me or
#
happy to see me, but anyway, here I was back and I seemed to be all right. And so we were sitting in
#
my parents' home in Madras and my family, my sister and niece and both my parents were,
#
I'm not sure if both my, yes, both my parents were there. My mother had made what was at one time
#
supposedly a favorite dish. I don't really have much in the way of favorite dishes,
#
but she knew that I liked a certain kind of freshwater mussel curry, mussels, M-U-S-S-E-L.
#
And so it's difficult to clean mussels, so it's not a curry that people make lightheartedly.
#
It requires a lot of effort. And this was made supposedly, and it was made for me,
#
but everyone else also liked it, of course. So we are sitting at table and eating this mussel curry
#
and I was at the other end from my mother and I bit down on something. And because I am,
#
this is a sign of what type of optimist I am, I bit down on something and thought,
#
oh, it might be a pearl. And it was a pearl. Wow, my God. It was a little pearl. And mussels,
#
freshwater mussels do not necessarily, they like oysters, but they're not known to produce pearls,
#
but they do occasionally produce pearls. So it was a beautiful little pearl. It wasn't spherical.
#
It was a tiny cone-shaped pearl. And so I took it out of my mouth. I showed it to my mother and I
#
said, see, mom, this is a sign from God that I'm okay. I'm looked after. And she made one of those,
#
oh yeah, sure, whatever. But she did set it in a small ring. She set it as the centerpiece of a
#
small ring. It was a modest ring in gold with six turquoises around it. The turquoises are important.
#
So some years later I went to Bhutan. And Bhutan, again, was a huge watershed moment for me
#
because it changed my life in many ways. One of the ways was I became aware in a real sense,
#
in the sense of actually being there, became aware of the, you know, I had been exposed to
#
the southern type of Buddhism, that is the Hinayana school, which is the path of sorrow.
#
But the transcendental Himalayan version is the path of joy. At least that's, I'm calling it that
#
because in the Himalayan version, you can gain enlightenment in this life. Not that everyone does,
#
very few people do, but you can. I think this is the important thing. You can. And it seemed to me
#
then that as a result of that, that tiny country and the people of that country had this extraordinary
#
elevated sense of something indefinable. And anyway, okay, so Bhutan did a lot. I met Ethan
#
in Bhutan and I spent four months there when I was supposed to be there for two weeks. Anyway,
#
while I was there, I had this ring with me. And one of the ladies, the senior ladies in the ministry,
#
I think in the Ministry of Education, but I could be wrong. She was a very charming,
#
delicate, featured, slight and rather beautiful older woman. And she was fascinated by my ring
#
because of the turquoises. The Bhutanese and many Himalayan cultures are fascinated by
#
turquoise. And she said, I really like your ring. And she said it in the way of someone who's
#
actually saying, I would really like to have your ring. So I took it off and I gave it to her.
#
And that did not sit well with me. And so for some, maybe two weeks, I found it annoying at
#
myself. No, no, no, that was wrong. That was a wrong thing to do. That ring is mine in a deep way.
#
So I approached her and I said, you know, that's not working for me. I wonder if you could give it
#
back to me. And she said, yes, I understand. And she gave it back.
#
So this issue of objects that have a connection, and I don't believe me, I don't wear it. It's
#
gold and I don't like to be wearing gold these days. And haven't for many years, I don't wear
#
gold. And at least not in any obvious way. My earrings are gold. But anyway, that ring was a
#
little showy and I never wear it. But it's with me. It's mine. So these things matter. So if I'm
#
incarcerated, I'm afraid you will not be able to ensure anything. But I think it's enough if
#
you and the few people who will listen to this podcast are aware that there are objects belonging
#
to me somewhere and they still belong to me, even if they're not actually physically on myself.
#
So there is a virtual belonging. I have learned how to own things and to keep them with me even
#
when they're not physically on me. They're still there. This is such a lovely story and I have to
#
put a statutory warning at this point to all my listeners. Please do not put your dog in a washing
#
machine. You know, this woman does all kinds of things. Do not put your dog in a washing machine.
#
That was such a lovely story and especially the mention of the gigantic small pouches.
#
So delightful and also the ring. You know, I just came across this video yesterday,
#
which I rather like. It might also be kind of kitschy, but it's this Instagram video by
#
this young woman who is saying that, you know, whatever you think is important now means nothing.
#
Imagine life a hundred years from now. In the year 2123, somebody else will be living in your
#
house. If your house is there at all, you know, nobody will remember who you are. Do you remember
#
your grandfather's parents? No one will give a shit. No one will remember who you are. And all
#
your things, wherever they are, will either be decayed or they will be thrown away by people who
#
have no idea of their significance. And that includes your rings. So there's, you know,
#
when we talk about mortality, it is not just a person, but it is a significance of all these
#
things which are suddenly stripped of meaning. And yeah, that makes me really sad. So let us
#
move to a happier subject. Before we go to a happier subject, I just have to share a moment
#
of a kind of scary hilarity that occurred when at the time of 9-11 and when we were finally,
#
we had been in the U.S. for, I don't know, whatever, six months, and we're finally returning
#
to India. And as I said, security had become really extreme and they were also very nervous.
#
So they didn't know how to deal with people and so on. So all of that, you know, telling people
#
who were not white to stand aside was a bit, everyone was finding it awkward and difficult
#
and trying to pretend, oh, it's not because you're not white. It's because, you know, you
#
bought your ticket in Delhi or whatever it was. And so, but both Ethan and I had been told to
#
stand aside for special screening. Okay, fine. Now, and another feature that I have not so
#
far mentioned is I typically always have some kind of cutting device, a box cutter.
#
Always have a box cutter with me. I used to. I do not at this moment have a box cutter
#
because I have gotten out of that particular habit. I mean, I always have at least three or four.
#
And one is with me, one is in the top pocket of my suitcase, and one is in the other suitcase,
#
as always, you know. Okay. So we had not yet been trained to not be carrying objects,
#
but we'd been told what we should not have. And I had it, I knew it was there. And it was in my
#
pouch, in the little sling pouch, which as I said, I often have. So I had my backpack, I had my little
#
pouch and the woman who was checking my things said, do you have any sharp objects? And I said,
#
well, I'm an artist and I often have sharp objects with me. So I was trying to cover my
#
backside in case she found something. And then I realized, and I reached to unzip and she said,
#
no, you can't touch it. Okay. So I stood back, I was standing back like this and I had given her
#
my pouch. And as she was looking in the little pouch, she had turned to her colleague and was
#
saying, this lady says that she often has cutting devices in her possession. And I was watching her,
#
she was carefully searching my pouch and she did not find it. It was there.
#
And I was standing there with a kind of, I'm, you know, completely innocent. I'm not a terrorist
#
look on my face. And she zipped everything up and gave it back to me. And I kind of sailed onto the
#
aircraft thinking, my God, I have taken a box cutter onto the flight, even though she searched,
#
even though she searched, which means there could be a terrorist on this flight.
#
Anyway, I have since then stopped doing silly things. It's silly. I mean, why do that?
#
You know, why do that? And it's not, you know, it's not an offense. They just take it away.
#
But I no longer therefore carry box cutters in my pouch.
#
My storytelling brain is telling me that, you know, once you are in that plane and you've gotten
#
away with the box cutter, you feel it is now your moral responsibility to hijack the plane with the
#
box cutter because fate has brought you here. But I had, by that time, even then, because,
#
you know, hijacking had been taking place well before, so we were all familiar. So from the era
#
of hijacking, there is a very, I think it's a funny joke, but it's also very silly. And it is this,
#
if you from that era, when it was bombs, not box cutters. So the way to ensure that there is no bomb
#
with a terrorist, there's no bomb and a terrorist on board your flight, is to yourself carry a bomb
#
because the chances of there being two bombs is very low.
#
Let's plot thinking. Yes, yes, of course. I know I studied statistics.
#
It's a droll, nevertheless. I mean, you can, if you're caught with a bomb, you can say,
#
I'm just doing this so that nobody else carries a bomb. Mine won't go off.
#
Right. Yes, exactly. And I'm not a terrorist. I'm just carrying it for statistical reasons.
#
I'm also curious about what that shift and that gradual settling in as an immigrant in America
#
means for your work. Because how we do our work is either we shape the texture of our days around
#
our work, or we fit our work into whatever that texture is. And I'm guessing that that texture
#
now changes dramatically in this new place, because life itself is different. So A, how do
#
your habits change? Is it difficult for you to build that kind of discipline, do the same kinds
#
of things? And also, how does your art change because of the shift? I imagine that had you
#
just stayed back in Delhi and never shifted, never gone there except to visit, there would have been
#
some subtle differences in what you write about, how you write about them, and perhaps even in the
#
quantity of your work. So tell me a little bit about the effect of that on your work, if one
#
can possibly disentangle. It's hard. Obviously, it's hard for me to be doing that. And there was,
#
because as it is, I'm hugely self-referential in the sense that I have a different stages,
#
had long running column, I've had a comic strip, I had written Getting There, which is a personal
#
memoir. And, and of course, I had written Escape, which is when one thinks about what happens in
#
escape, which is about a country which, of course, I do not name the country. But in fact, in my mind,
#
it's not that it's India, it's really sort of South Asia, in which group of vicious,
#
cloned generals has decided on behalf of their entire nation, that the world will be better off
#
without women and have actually destroyed all the women of that culture. And there, the book
#
involves one little girl who has remained hidden and the, the effort made to get her out of that
#
country, of that region. And this could some level be seen as a very abstract version of what,
#
certainly I, but in some ways, what many authors attempt to do, which is to escape
#
their circumstance in order to live another life or hopefully a better life.
#
But what happens in Escape and the novel that follows it, which is called The Island of Lost
#
Girls, is to begin with, it's hard to escape. And then the middle portion, because there will be,
#
I'm writing the third book of the series, the middle portion is the real is the terrible
#
realization that when you've escaped, what do you escape to? It's not as if there is some paradise
#
outside. There never is. And you, you, by, by changing everything about
#
your circumstance, you, you are left with this, this giant question of who are you anyway,
#
when you're not speaking, you're speaking not some language that is not your language,
#
in whatever way you're speaking it. Because of course, in the books, there are translation
#
devices, but it's like she therefore is speaking in a way that even she doesn't particularly
#
understand. And in fact, she's been, at least in the first three quarters of the second novel,
#
she's been divested of her memories. So she, she really deeply doesn't know who she is. And she is
#
so different from all the others, because all the other girls, all the other young women in the place
#
where she's been taken for her protection, those women are so damaged that she who has not had,
#
not barely, she doesn't really even know what it means to be female, because she has grown up
#
in a, in a context where there are no other females, she's the only one. And therefore,
#
she doesn't know what she is. And the others who in their response to her are hostile,
#
because she is so unfamiliar, she's so unused to the abuse that they have, they know as their only
#
life. That as someone who is, who has never been abused, she becomes a different kind, a kind of
#
reverse victim. And that, in a sense, these two novels explore, if I can be allowed to say this,
#
they explore the otherness that in a sense, I have internalized as, in some ways, my life.
#
Because I think, by whatever means, and without actually choosing it, I have lived a somewhat
#
protected, I mean, protected in very many ways, life in a world where very few people are protected,
#
especially very few women are protected. So I have grown up without a sense of fear,
#
and without a sense of being oppressed in a world where most women are,
#
even extremely privileged women. So it's a kind of, you, one could say it's a kind of positive
#
othering, but any othering is, has the effect of reminding you that you are not like others. And
#
you know, you might find, you know, you might find many ways to be adjusted to that.
#
But it is, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, which of course I don't, you could tell yourself
#
it's lonely. In another context, there's a kind of othering that has possibly reduced in recent
#
times, which is the othering of science fiction, where people will often think of it as, oh, it is
#
a genre, while I more and more think that it is science fiction above everything else that engages
#
with the best, with the most important questions of our times, and comes up with the most striking
#
metaphors, like even in your own book, you speak about that question that comes after escape, you
#
know, in the second book about, you know, what do you escape to? And that is such a, a much larger
#
and much more resonant question. And, you know, all the way, you know, right from Atwood and
#
Ursula Le Guin, and all the way to modern times, with people like Ted Chiang and Ken Liu, and the
#
kind of work they do. I think the best science fiction, I think the best science fiction,
#
the kind of work they do. I think the best science fiction is actually the best literature,
#
because you're engaging with those questions in a way that, you know, other forms possibly aren't.
#
And, and I want, like, what drew you to science fiction to begin with? What was it this aspect
#
of it that you can explore these big questions? And would you sort of get attracted to the story
#
and come to the larger question and the larger theme later? Or would you begin with the larger
#
theme and then the story would suggest itself? Like, is there a sense of that? Or is that also
#
hard to disentangle? I can only say that my interest in a certain kind of strange story
#
began when I was 11, 12, 13 in Thailand. And again, I can't disengage whether the experience
#
of in the previous three years, when I was eight, nine, 10 in Delhi, when we had returned to Delhi
#
from other places. And I came to understand in a very precise way because of suddenly being thrown
#
into school with Indian children who were not used to people who had spent time outside India. So I
#
was regarded as odd. And it was always difficult for me to establish firm friendships. I was much
#
more comfortable with my parents, my sister's age group, whereas people of my age seemed to be,
#
seemed to be much more rigid in what they liked and what they knew. I remember when we would play
#
these certain kinds of childish games, these written games where you make lists of things
#
and you have to name three colors, three animals. So the colors, it's like,
#
the fact that I even continue to remember such a silly thing, it's like the others were naming
#
colors like yellow, blue and red. And I would be going to scarlet and magenta and indigo. And
#
this was regarded as weird. Why was I doing that? And how do you even spell the stupid words? And
#
this sense of always being slightly outside the loop. And I imagine that one type of person
#
yearns to belong, but I did not yearn to belong. I was very happy. I was constantly
#
attempting to get others to be like me. And if they wouldn't be like me, then too bad.
#
And the knowledge that in a short while we'll move in any case, so it doesn't matter.
#
There were all of these other trends. So when I became aware of a certain kind of odd story,
#
which was when I was 11, 12, 13, and in Thailand, and I had access, I think I already mentioned it
#
to a huge library. The kind of stories, and I also had access to huge stocks of comics,
#
comics of the not, you know, what remains from that era is comics like Archie. But in that era,
#
there were certainly two or three different trends. One was the superheroes with Superman
#
and Batman and the Justice League of America and Green Lantern and all of these kind of mostly guy
#
types superheroes. And then there were all the cute, funny characters like Casper, the friendly
#
ghost. And Casper had a buddy who didn't always appear with him called Hot Stuff, a little cute
#
little devil. And there was many child characters called Little Lotta and Dottie and all kinds of,
#
and very many of them. And you could get them easily. They were available and, you know,
#
easily available. And in fact, we traded them in school, we shared them. And this range of
#
Imagineering, which you can see in that, because very many of them were very standard everyday
#
lives like Dennis the Menace and Tweety and Sylvester and all of, they all showed a certain
#
extreme middle-class home in the U.S., not locally to where I was. And some of them, and again,
#
I remember very specifically certain episodes on TV, in TV cartoons or in these comics,
#
where something surreal would happen. That would interest me. And that looking for that surreal
#
moment, the thing that, oh, something has happened outside of physics, began to attract my attention.
#
So I was following up with an interest. I had, I adored Tarzan, Tarzan, both comics and the books.
#
There's a fabulous series of written books. So then I followed the other books by Edgar
#
Eisparas. And that, you know, then one is leaning in towards science fiction. And then, of course,
#
on TV, there was The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and Lost in Space. And these, you know,
#
what does one choose to watch? What does one, in fact, I watched everything, whatever there was on
#
TV. But these were the things that I especially didn't want to miss. So that interest began early.
#
It began with things read and things seen. But I remember in my boarding school, when
#
we had very little spare time when I went to, in the school I went to in Cote Canale,
#
Presentation Convent in Cote Canale, it was in that era that I began tiny, when I say tiny, I mean,
#
two in small exercise books, maybe two or three page weird stories. And I can remember them,
#
kind of open ended, with no real purpose, but a feeling of strangeness, which I enjoyed.
#
And I guess the early urge to write was to repeat that pleasure with strangeness, a sense of
#
being outside of the normal and being comfortable with it, settling down with it.
#
So I don't know whether I have wandered too far away from your question for it to actually matter
#
anymore. You might have a marvelous imagination, Manjula, but you cannot wander too far away from
#
my question because your whole purpose is to make you wonder. Tell me also about,
#
both in the context of your drawing where you already mentioned it, but also in the context
#
of your writing, how computers change the game. Because again, I imagine that when you started
#
writing in the 70s and so on, you're writing by hand on paper and et cetera, et cetera, the same
#
way I started. And then at some point you go to maybe typewriters, I don't know if there's a
#
transition, but you shift to computers and computers are really different because there is a backspace,
#
whereas writing on a piece of paper forces you to go at a certain slow speed.
#
On the one hand, it forces you to think more slowly and in a more considered way, but on the
#
other hand, it might even cramp your style and not let you think as fast as you want. Computers are
#
a whole different ballgame. So tell me a little bit about how these changing forms sort of change,
#
I mean, is that something you ever noticed or thought about in the context of both the drawing
#
and the writing? And was there also a change in the writing, not just because of the change of
#
your instrument, but also because of the change of the shape of your day? Like in modern times,
#
especially, and I hope you're not as much prey to it as people like me have unfortunately fallen,
#
but in modern times, you're always looking at the smartphone and, you know, we are constantly
#
distracted and have to kind of battle that. And the thing is, when you are like that, the rhythm
#
of your thinking changes you that sometimes you're in danger of losing that terror and have to figure
#
out ways of finding it. So give me a sense in terms of your work on both the tools and just the
#
texture of your day changing, how that has affected your work? Well, I made the transition to
#
typewriters very early because when I began working for the first magazine for which I worked,
#
which was called Parsiana, so I was 20 or 19, 19 and a half. I straight out of BA when I started
#
my MA, I began working for this small magazine and the editor Jahangir Patel absolutely forbade
#
anyone working for him to work with paper and pencil. So we had to start to think on the
#
typewriter. Now I loved machines. I was very happy to work, to be working with a machine and I had
#
as even before that as a child when I was alone, I spent a lot of time alone in Thailand and there
#
was a big old Dremington in the house and I had attempted to start an in-house, that is just for
#
that house, newspaper of occurrences and incidents in the house. So I had started to use it to type
#
up stories which were immediately destroyed by anyone else who happened to come across them.
#
But so in Parsiana, I was very happy to make the transition and you quickly learned the
#
techniques. I remember the shift to computers began when I was in Delhi and working for the
#
Center for Science and Environment and we were all being trained how to use the big clunky
#
computers and I remember the sense of dismay that your hand keeps going for the return
#
and there's nothing and the sense of because with that with the early software
#
you had to format the machine to begin with even to accept any commands and then when you have a
#
blank space and you see the cursor blinking, it doesn't mean that the rest of the space that you
#
can see is available to you. You can't move the cursor down except by the space bar or you know
#
all of these adjustments which were disorienting but I was very ready because I liked I was very
#
electronic ready. I was very fond of I liked machines. I liked working with them. I liked the
#
sense of the gradual sense of awareness that the machine begins to have. I invested
#
all kinds of gadgets with personalities. I had a sense of you know not being rude to my equipment,
#
not being unkind to them and being careful how I looked after things. The sense of you know the
#
room is alive with little objects that are either watching or so you can see that in some of my
#
cartoon strips. The telephone is self-aware and it sometimes communicates with other gadgets
#
and sometimes not but the sense of an awareness in all things was something that I just live with.
#
It's not frightening to me but it's I feel contained by a sense of consciousness of other
#
things and of course gadgets because they are blinking you know there's a light there's a sense
#
of life but I have also grown much more relaxed with that sense. I'm not you know it's like I'm
#
not as respectful as perhaps I should be and I am glad that they still say please. I mean they
#
don't say please but I think the gadgets are still fairly polite. They don't they no longer
#
say as they used to what I forget the fail delete abort. Control all delete. No that's control all
#
delete but if you had messed up and the message you got was something something and abort and
#
there was a moment in the world when people said abort is a really horrible word to use
#
so you no longer see that but I kind of enjoyed the the kind of machine consciousness you know
#
the way that it was very very abrupt but also completely truthful. You couldn't you know it
#
would just tell you okay fail it's just fake. There's no please or thank you. You failed and
#
you have to reboot and it's all very abrupt and you can see that that is you know there's a black
#
screen there's green letters and it's very very basic. In that way I really really I I would say
#
that one of the as I keep talking about benchmark moments for me another huge benchmark moment was
#
playing the DOS text version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game.
#
So it's a DOS text game you have a blank screen you have a blinking cursor and it's
#
you're in you have you have no instructions and there's there's nothing to do except to keep
#
trying to get it to go beyond that blinking cursor and I can't I can't even begin to explain
#
in what you know I kind of melded with machine for the whatever length of time I attempted to
#
play to the end and and the end is completely without anything except
#
yow you have arrived on the surface of the planet Magratia that's it and and I must have spent
#
I think that final portion was maybe three hours continuously at night.
#
I would say that that was perhaps foundational in in getting me into this other phase of my life
#
where machines are so much a part of my life that I don't I don't really think of it as a
#
as another thing it's just an extension and making the shift from paper and to on to software
#
which like Photoshop is what I use to draw with so I use Photoshop as a drawing tool not to fix
#
photographs but to fix or to augment the the drawings that I have created on paper so I don't
#
I usually just I don't like to actually draw to produce a primary image electronically does not
#
interest me it's because I I discovered some time ago a long time ago that that there is a
#
disconnect when when my hand is drawing if I'm physically drawing on paper I can't talk at the
#
same time but my mind my mind my words cut out or my hand cuts out if I'm talking I can't continue
#
drawing I can force myself but why would I do that so by contrast I can work electronically and
#
continue to talk so I think it's using working electronically is using two different areas of
#
the brain the the speech does not speech does not allow me to draw on paper but speech and electronic
#
work is it's you know it seems to be the same area so I would say but I would say that I made
#
the transition easily and smoothly over because the the the software gets better and better
#
and it it is so I mean most people would be shocked to hear that I use Photoshop to draw
#
with because there's so many other tools but I I don't I don't use those other tools so even
#
though I know about them I feel until I'm forced to retrain the way I think because there's a
#
Bezier drawings you know where you use a kind of a pen tool to create curves so I don't I haven't
#
transitioned I know what it's like to do that but it doesn't it's because I I'm lazy and I would need
#
to retrain the way I think to use them and I haven't made the effort it's much easier for me
#
to draw on paper which I like the thing is I enjoy that I enjoy the sense of drawing on paper and
#
in recent years I have reconnected with with drawings on paper so I do a great deal of that
#
I I use charcoal I really enjoy it I started using charcoal only five six years ago and didn't
#
realize what a sensitive medium it is I always thought my goodness how do people ever do anything
#
in charcoal it is a big thick thing but I realized I realized I was wrong and and it is a fabulous
#
medium so you know I really enjoy that and just the other day someone I said something about
#
talking to people who who talk lightheartedly about how much they love to write or you know
#
to be in the midst and I was saying you know I don't even understand that because because I
#
wouldn't I would never say that I love to write because it it doesn't even occur to me to think
#
that way because it's just what I do it's not something that I would say I love to do it's
#
I am very happy at the end when I mean there's a wonderful five seconds of having finished
#
a book that's fabulous that lasts about as I said five or ten seconds and then after that
#
there's the heavy slog of getting it out of there getting to you know getting it obviously
#
getting it to the publisher is not a physical process but that whole thing of of then showing
#
that piece of work to others and and recognizing that they will either dismiss it or not love it
#
as much or whatever it is that they say or do it is altered immediately by that you know so that
#
moment when it is fresh and nobody else has seen it no one has heard it no one even knows that
#
you're working on something or maybe they do but you know they have no idea that's wonderful
#
that's a great moment but it passes and everything else is then the downhill so but the writing is I
#
I can't say that I enjoy the writing by contrast I really enjoy drawing I really like it I look
#
forward to it I budget time for it I'll squeeze it into between other things it's like eating candy
#
and again it's working towards the end so sometimes you know I will put in whatever five or six hours
#
finishing something and it'll be a mess I'll hate it and I'll sit quietly for a little while and then
#
start another one because I want that that you know that thing so they are very different in that
#
sense I didn't like your analogy of it's like eating candy because you know sugar is poison
#
and candy is also working towards the end exactly so yeah no and I I love the image of the room
#
being alive with all kinds of little objects which are like looking at you and I'm gonna try that
#
my worry is that I'll go to bed and then I won't be able to sleep because from a distance I will
#
hear my laptop call out to me and say you haven't shut me for five days there are 800 tabs open what
#
do you think I am etc etc all of this happens all of this happens all of the above
#
tell me about your rediscovery of suki because you have suki go on for a long time in the 80s and 90s
#
and then it's over and then you come back to it after more than a decade and it lasts for a few
#
years like you mentioned but what is it like to rediscover suki because through this period of
#
time you have also changed and what is that process of getting to know suki again
#
has she also changed how does that play itself out what does rediscovering suki tell you about
#
yourself well suki and I have always had a slightly complex relationship because in the very very
#
early strips you can see you can see that she the eye of suki is clearly supposedly me
#
and you can see that in this in what happens in the strips because there is that it's addressed
#
directly but maybe a year or two down the line because suki then was weekly so I had a I had
#
time in which to compose each each new episode and when it began to she began to separate from
#
me and I no longer thought of her as I but she so then she she very she developed as the you could
#
say you I mean I don't know who would make the point but you could it could be said that she
#
represents my id in the sense that she is the unregenerate version of myself where I never cut
#
my hair and it is always curly and kind of bushy and full which in fact is not and she never has
#
a job she never has to I mean every so often in the past she used to sometimes fret about paying
#
rent but it never actually came to anything she she had a very authoritarian mother who again
#
it you know the mother didn't last long in the strip and the the kind of friction free life that
#
suki lives is very much the life of my mind so it it is a friction free atmosphere in which she
#
lives and I suppose it it is in that sense she is close to my life and that is always the case I
#
mean even if she has frictions with some people in some of the characters after all I'm the one
#
drawing them and I can always draw them out and that that happens when whenever something doesn't
#
work I just no longer represent it it it ceases it ceases to be of consequence she hasn't I mean
#
the the it's one of those things that is I mean I keep saying things are hard to explain
#
it's always been a point that I've tried to emphasize I created suki as part of wanting to
#
earn a living it is it never she never existed in a
#
a non-financial vacuum she always had to be paid for and that is one of the reasons why in theory
#
even though I could in theory always be producing her I never do and I have tried I have tried to
#
produce strip because you know you can put anything online so many people upload their
#
thoughts or their diaries and begin to earn a living from doing that well I have never had
#
the slightest doubt that suki would never earn anything because the the the curious irony is
#
that I'm always told it is always it's often said not always but it's often said of me that I have
#
a highly popular comic strip this is the exact opposite it was never popular it was always
#
regarded as weird and not in not at all like the existing comic strips which are from the west and
#
which are from you know tremendously organized outlets where the the the strip is not created
#
at all in a light-hearted casual way they they may look that way but they're not and
#
the fact of being hugely supported by the distribution network makes makes everything
#
that happens in the in those comics the comics that come through syndicates they they they are
#
very very much more it's not the sophistication is not merely in the end product it's in what
#
underlies the creation of those of items that have that have been paid for
#
by small sums of money paid out by millions of newspapers whereas my product was only ever
#
featured in one newspaper so the entire commercial underpinning of that one item
#
is it's it's actually very difficult for anyone to even be thinking about what it means
#
it's it's hard to express that it's hard to even think about it because no one thinks about
#
the underlying economics of comic strips how they how they get to the daily newspapers and
#
what it represents that they the 90 95 percent of them all come out of two or three syndicates
#
in the west and what they represent in terms of a lifestyle whereas suki was always battling
#
her competitors were these incredible long-standing heroes of the little strips
#
whereas she had no audience she did not have people who supported and liked her in any way
#
except one person that is the editor who may um i mean vinod mahta was the dream editor to have
#
because he loved comic strips and he never got in my way in terms of trying to tell me what to do
#
other editors have been very kind and supportive but they i i never got the sense that they
#
they they interacted with the strip in the way of somebody who is a comic strip
#
appreciator and that is it's like there are consumers you know there are people who just
#
consume it and they don't think about it anymore there are others who understand
#
the underlying principles and they like it in a different way but there are very few people like
#
that and very few editors so for me this comic strip and suki was always a kind of
#
stand-up like like being a stand-up comedian without a room without an audience but a mic
#
in the sense that i had that space and what can i say it it was whenever i've had the strip to
#
produce it's like an area of the brain opens up like a desk opens up and there it is you know
#
to do a thing to do so it's it's an ongoing gathering process that you gather things towards
#
that that it's also gathering energy i always have to budget the time and make sure that
#
just before deadline i have the time in which to produce that thing
#
hmm i i think you know being a bit harsh on yourself and on suki like i'll go back to what
#
i said earlier that i think suki would certainly be uh you know it's in that category yes whereas
#
loved by a few but not necessarily liked by many but i would say it's actually loved by many but
#
the problem is that because of technologies of the past you don't get to hear from them you just get
#
to hear from the editor and everything else that you hear you meet someone socially they say hey
#
we really like sushi that's you know that happens but too rarely whereas today i think technology
#
and i've experienced this personally over my time blogging and over my time podcasting and also as
#
a columnist where i never heard from any readers when i wrote columns for newspapers but today
#
technology allows readers to give you a sense of the following that there actually is for whatever
#
you're producing so i would actually argue that if you were to do suki on your own today and go
#
online you would probably be surprised by uh you know the reception that you get but i also understand
#
that in one's mind one often compartmentalizes and says there are some things i'll do for money
#
though i'll do them really well and i love them but i'll do them for money and other things are
#
a labor of love and what are your labors of love wow not much your art well the art is is all yes
#
i guess that would be that but it's like it's actually mental spaces there's a certain way of
#
thinking that is the you know the the kind of pleasure thinking and i don't actually sketch
#
much i i plan to put down a to create a drawing or a painting and then when i'm it's has to do
#
with the time management because there's big time management issues for me there there are things
#
that i must do and then there are the things that i do in the hope that i it will eventually result
#
in a painting or some for instance i've i never write just like that i never do that i i need to
#
be commissioned and i mean it like i i'm starting with out with the third book of the escape island
#
series but i've already signed a contract for that so i i know it's kind of it's there
#
whereas so it would be paintings but paintings you know it's like i work towards that finished
#
product i i do enjoy it i do enjoy the process of getting it down but there is always a hope
#
that it will not be like a tree that falls in a forest where no one's going to hear it
#
this is a tree that falls in full public view i hope so i i mean i i at most what i do is i have
#
passion projects that i i hope to realize but i am always expecting that it will be something
#
whatever i'm working on will be published or will be exhibited or used in some way
#
i have grown used to that the sense that a thing i produce will actually find its way outside of me
#
so there is there is alongside all the little objects in my room that are thinking
#
there is also a team a kind of council of audience in my head who are always sitting
#
in judgment of everything that i'm doing and and i have to and i will often do things regardless
#
of what they're yelling at my at me from the gallery oh stop that stop that you know you
#
can't do that no no stop it you'll go down some other path and all of this there's that that
#
chorus is always there and that's a dangerous chorus isn't it like do you listen to it less
#
and less as time goes by do you wish it wasn't there no i don't i don't wish it wasn't there it's
#
i can't it's it's there it's uh yeah no i wish the chorus of things were telling you don't worry
#
about that other chorus just listen to us and produce work that would be so nice one of the
#
questions one of the questions you asked was about the working life i have had in the u.s
#
so you would imagine that having a space all to myself because from the largest time i've had
#
in a small place in which i lived in newport all to myself and that's where i began to rent in 2010
#
and you know authors and artists all say that they yearn for that you know for that away space
#
well i have spent hours and hours and hours days weeks months doing nothing at all
#
that is just getting the laundry done or i mean one of the one of the late life is i can't call
#
it a discovery because you know we all need to eat but i'm not i've never been interested in cooking
#
and i am still not at all interested in being a chef but whereas in the pre-rented accommodation
#
world i just you know i very rarely had to produce edible food and would just produce
#
if i had to you know it would be at the toast and cheese level in this rented space i finally
#
recognize that it can't it can't just be that i have to learn or make some effort to be a little
#
more competent and years before my i mean years before this this era one of my i have two nieces
#
and a nephew but one of the nieces got tired of hearing stories of my incompetence and she taught
#
me to make a particular kind of biryani and for many years i lived off lived off in the sense that
#
i didn't make it for myself but i would make it for other people as a sign that i am even even i
#
am capable of doing this much i can do this and it would be hugely appreciated as horribly rich
#
very tasty but of course it's a big heavy dish and i'm certainly never going to be making it
#
whipping it up for myself the thing the thing that i learned as as as a resident of the small
#
apartment i was in when i say small it had two rooms it had a bathroom and a kitchen and a
#
hallway and that's it and they were all small rooms i mean one room was the size of the studio
#
and the other room was maybe a half again bigger anyway i subscribed to a meal service called blue
#
apron where they send you a carton of uncooked food and a menu and and recipe instructions
#
and and i would sweat over this but and often produced half cooked and because i i have always
#
known that the thing that i didn't like was the sound of frying so everything would be undercooked
#
because the sound would terrify me and i would think it's going to burn down the house and all
#
these things but the big thing i'm not a good chef i still cannot i would never say that i can cook
#
but blue apron for three years helped me overcome the resistance to cooking now i will i will do
#
things i will make things i can follow a recipe i'm never going to be good at it anyway the reason
#
we got into all this was to talk about my artwork but this is the point art and writing have to grow
#
out of real things and one of the pleasures of to the extent that i've learned to cook of learning
#
to cook is the realization that millions upon hundreds and thousands of millions of people
#
produce wonderful food on a daily basis and this is their fabulous gift that i don't have
#
and that it is a real thing it is a real gift and even though part of my issue is that i don't
#
i don't have a a sensitive palate i don't have a very clearly defined sense of taste
#
and again i realized this many years ago when i when i simply didn't believe friends who said
#
things like oh there's too much ginger in this and i used to wonder how can they possibly tell
#
you can't possibly know something like that i have realized since then that yes you can actually
#
tell such things i never i it never made any any impression on me if you know it would be i like
#
or i don't like something it i could never tell something so specific as it didn't have this or
#
it has too much of that i have improved in this sense i i understand what that means and that
#
feeds back into artwork in the sense that artwork is all about detail and a sense of proportions
#
and and i have understood that it you know this extends to many features of life but for all that
#
i'm saying i began to live in this place in 2010 and it was only in 2020 that i met other artists
#
in newport until then i had not met any artists and in 2010 if you recall which was when the
#
pandemic began and everything was shutting down i was introduced i came to know of the small gallery
#
in a nearby i mean it's continuous with newport it's called middletown the gallery is called
#
debloy and it is a cooperative gallery meaning that there is no controlling you know there's no
#
office or a production company holding it together we run it and i many galleries have a
#
have a concept where they they make a show available to anyone in in the region who
#
has work that they want to show then they have what is called an open show and you
#
sign up for it and for two or three weeks your work will be featured displayed alongside other
#
people's work and you know there's a little bit of fuss about it about that show so after many
#
years of not doing anything in in the sense of an exhibition i produced two paint two drawings
#
and they got a little tiny notice and the other people the other gallery members said you know
#
they came up to me and said that was nice they really liked that work and i hadn't had that
#
experience for so very long it was like completely unfamiliar to be appreciated
#
just for the work not for who i am or why i am or anything else just the work itself
#
it was a kind of revelation and i asked if i could become a member and they said yes
#
because of course you know obviously even to participate you pay for that you you don't
#
you don't just throw it onto their walls for free but as a member you have to you it
#
you know you you can exhibit something every month so but you also have to put in hours of work
#
not long hours but you put in hours of work at the gallery doing work in the gallery and
#
all of this was a kind of extraordinary revelation because i'd never done anything
#
like that in india and of course i hadn't been to art school so the the experience of working
#
in connection not even alongside because we don't work alongside one another we
#
we're all separate we have our separate lives and our separate establishments but the the
#
the concept of being in collaboration with other working professionals was something
#
completely unfamiliar to me i had not done that before and all the others are all working artists
#
in their later years no one is i mean there are now a few younger artists but they're only 19
#
even at the moment they're only 19 and the majority of us are 70 plus so these are people
#
who have been working their whole lives as artists they're all good none of us is interested in being
#
you know event artists or in sort of very a few of us produce objects which are other than
#
and traditionally artistic they are one or two like that but the huge majority of us can actually
#
paint we are good at it so that this this wonderful sense of being surrounded or being
#
working alongside people who are all good who are who have gotten over the ego things and of course
#
everyone has some kind of ego but we're also good at working together and being supportive
#
it's just fabulous and it has made a huge huge difference to my sense of myself as an artist
#
i have produced a lot more work i sell work it's been really fabulous and i i think one of the
#
things that was most touching for me was this ease the smooth ease with which i was just accepted
#
it without any i i can't i can't say it enough it's not even at the level of where are you from
#
okay you want to be a member great sign up here we are sit down you know sit down and that's the
#
cash box and you run the you know just you're just accepted without any fuss i was just blown away
#
and it continues i mean i i say this to them it's like we laugh over it i call myself their
#
resident alien and we all laugh but it's it's also that you know i'm still doing things for them like
#
tonight late tonight so for me it'll be 4 a.m there is an a regular monthly zoom meeting so
#
i'll be part of that and it's as i said it's um it's been huge for me to work alongside
#
because all these years i've been solitary
#
i like firstly i love the mention you made earlier of blue apron like just as blue apron
#
was something that got you to cook i wonder if artists need different kinds of blue aprons in
#
their life to take them in certain directions and you know make things uh uh easier for them
#
i'm also intrigued by one more thing you've of course been an artist all your life in many
#
different ways in many different forms including writing and comic strips and so on and so forth
#
and yet this is almost feels like a new journey that you've embarked upon in a new way in the
#
sense that it's not just a solitary act now there is that sense of community and yet everyone
#
working separately but with that sense of you know there are sort of others with you and i
#
wonder in these times how one thinks about that in the context of the journeys that people make
#
like the typical impression we've had all through history is that if you're an artist
#
you know often especially if you're a musician and so on you strike it big young and then you
#
are kind of there's a danger of getting ossified as what you are of course but essentially you
#
become something when you are young and the rest of your life is a journey just refining that
#
and new journeys are seldom taken partly because of the reason that life spans just used to be so
#
low until relatively recently expectancies were so low and yet you have great cases like the person
#
i am most inspired by is Penelope Fitzgerald who wrote her first book when she was 68 in 58
#
and her first novel in her 60s and ended up winning the booker prize and writing
#
just a bunch of great novels and i find that inspiring myself that it is never too late that
#
one can redefine oneself and learn new things and it isn't just about what you were at 30 and the
#
rest of your life you elaborate upon that but there are new journeys to be taken so do you get
#
a sense of that also that there is a new manjula that you are a new person that what you have done
#
in the last few years is completely different from what you've done in the past you're creating
#
yourself again um yes and no it's just because from the time i was very young it it was very
#
clear to me that i would be an artist and then being a writer was a kind of add-on and then later
#
on it became i'll be a writer with an with art on the side and then somewhere in the midst of all
#
because all along i was attempting to earn for myself i was not supported by any foundation
#
or my parents because as i have said in the past at 21 i stopped accepting money from my parents
#
and that has been tremendously it has it has very much formed who i am the need to earn a living
#
one of the features of of being connected to this gallery in newport and where i'm living in newport
#
is the realization that all the other the of my the others other members at the at the gallery
#
are equally in this in the sense of being as being artists are equally solitary people
#
we are not people seeking companionship i mean some some of the others are young enough to
#
have their families around them all the time and others have you know their families have grown up
#
and grown away but essentially everyone is working as a as a solitary and i i'm going to make a a
#
cultural point here i have a feeling that it is not something familiar to the indian world to live
#
as a solitary person it is we are very much more collectives and artists who who make it good here
#
they kind of they are supported by their whole family and the space is made for them and but
#
they're still very much part of a network and the otherness of an artist's life is something that
#
they they do on the side whereas it seems to me both my life and the other life the other artists
#
in my gallery and artists in general in that space are people who who work for you know on their own
#
and are they form their personalities as as private private you know worlds
#
so in what has changed is i am not i it's like i would say one of the features of of living long
#
enough is a is like a constant refining a throwing off of things that are less important
#
and a constant re clarifying what one is you know i'm this i'm this i'm this
#
earlier on in the conversation you mentioned about how when you were in america it became a
#
ritual for you to have a morning call with your sister that you would make sure you spoke to her
#
every day and i'm wondering about such rituals in your life and the role of intentionality in it
#
like often there are many things that we take for granted and they get normalized and we don't make
#
intentional efforts about them whether it is with regard to our relationships or to the work that
#
we do et cetera or even to self-care and i wonder if over the years there are things that you become
#
more intentional about whether it isn't whether it is keeping in touch with friends and family
#
whether it is you know devoting a certain amount of time to practicing your art or your writing
#
or whatever or whether it is just giving enough time to yourself and to loving yourself in a sense
#
so what are the things you're intentional about i play wordel every night
#
it used to be something else twister or something like that so i i often end the night
#
actually it's not wordel i play wordel in the morning at night i play for that we always have
#
four games four boards of the scrabble version called it's not actually scrabbled
#
but it's called words with friends and my sister in connecticut and i play four games
#
all all the time so we we're not playing at the same most often we are not playing at the same time
#
we we feel we you know we play our moves on four games and then come back to it every so often to
#
see uh whether she has moved or i have moved and we continue so that is quite often the last thing
#
i do at night and i try to keep a diary so in recent weeks i have found that it's a nice thing
#
to do to not write the diary at night it's just a page but to wake up in the morning i'm not an
#
early riser in the sense that i don't wake up easily it's a struggle and one of the
#
habits that i'm trying to break for myself is the habit of waking up and even before i'm out of
#
bed checking my phone because of living in two time zones typically at night or in the morning
#
a raft of messages will come in so i have tried to stop myself from checking any electronic device
#
because i think it's not good for the eyes to not do that for about half an hour so i'm trying to
#
train my this is very recent trying to train myself to when i wake up to set up i spent a lot
#
of time working in bed that is i uh i'll make my bed but i'll sit on the bed and write i like to
#
write sitting in bed with my laptop on my lap on a cushion but i tried i have been trying to make
#
myself write my diary entry for the day before in the morning because it's by hand you know it's
#
with a pen on paper and i'm not staring at my um at any device so that's you know i will admit
#
that i'm constantly trying to improve myself so there are i've just heard that there are that
#
it's become apparently a really hot thing to do sit-ups from a sitting position it's supposedly
#
not not squatting on the ground i would not survive that but apparently the world's
#
designers of good exercises for lazy people is a lot of exercises from chairs so apparently sitting
#
up and sitting down very fast for just a count of two of even half a minute is good and if you can
#
there are various routines that you can add to that and that's all very good so i'm certainly
#
at that age when things like back aches and shoulder aches and so on are all settling in
#
for the long haul so i you know i try to always do something to you know to over to overcome those
#
issues one point that i have done one exercise that i do every single day and have for at least
#
50 years is a back exercise because many many years ago a friend a family doctor said to me
#
in reference to an observation he had made i have a very flexible back people who are flexible
#
you know when you're young it's treated as oh how nice you're so flexible you can do this that and
#
the other but that can result in early back issues and he taught me if you do these three two ish two
#
back exercises every day you will be saved the more obvious problems of back issues from being
#
sedentary so i do in fact i who am not who don't have many habits and who don't i'm a person who
#
does not follow through with most routines this is something i actually do every day
#
well that's quite inspiring and i'm going to get inspired by you every day i will sit down on my
#
chair and i will take half a minute to stand up again that's what you mean by half a minute
#
right so yeah i thought i could get away with that you know amartya could tell you we lazy bengalis
#
any you know once we are sitting why stand i mean i can imagine lying down well i'm already
#
halfway there i'm in the bed i'm i'm i'm reclining you know i look at a body of work where you
#
you have done art and illustrations and comic books and you've written plays and you've written
#
books and you've written short stories and you've written science fiction and you've written newspaper
#
columns and you have the audacity to say you're not successful hello excuse me it's it's a beautiful
#
powerful body of work i'm sure it's moved many people so uh you know please and and i actually
#
wonder if you were born in the current day what you would have done because just in terms of the
#
means of production now being available to all creators uh more ways to actually make money from
#
what they do and the the solution of forms so that you can you know just into a writer has so many
#
more options in terms of the forms they can use you know uh artists do as well in in the audio
#
visual medium also it's just exploded so you know the golden age starts now so please spend the next
#
50 years well but my my sort of uh final question for you uh for me and my listeners uh you know
#
recommend to us books music art films any kind of uh creation at all that means a lot to you and
#
that you like so much you want to share it with everyone sure so recently very recently i read a
#
pair of excellent novels by this the author's name is tan twang eng it's very difficult not
#
to want to say twang but tan twang eng and his books the two books they are not the same story
#
but they're in the same place panang and the first one is called the house of doors
#
and the second one is the gift of rain and i would very strongly recommend the gift of rain
#
they're both beautifully written i should also mention that i i listen to books rather than
#
read them so the audio the on audible these books are brilliantly read they're beautifully voiced
#
but most recently i read a book in as a book physical book called fire on the gangies by
#
radhika ayyengar an outstanding book i'm going to be in conversation with her in early march
#
about the community of uh corpse processors called domes d-o-m she embedded amongst them
#
and lived sort of lived alongside or with them and back and forth for something like eight to
#
ten years she i mean obviously not continuously but she lived very closely amongst them and her
#
reporting is warm it is compassionate and heartbreaking and also incredibly positive
#
and optimistic as well so if anyone wants to read about something that is happening in our world
#
that is it is a very indian situation that you have a community of people whose only job
#
is to process corpses for the gods in banaras and and to hear about the horrific conditions
#
under which they work and and under which they are oppressed if you read it with an open heart
#
and without without resistance to the resistance of believing that this can be happening in today's
#
world and we just all accept it but that a young woman went out to find out more is just fabulous
#
as it happens radhika wrote to me a while back uh talking about the show and asking if she can
#
send me a book and i immediately picked it up because it sounded so interesting i haven't
#
read it yet but i am moving it straight to the top of my queue after what you just said
#
films and music on the favorite movies list so i you know we all already have lists made up so
#
at the very very top is felinis amarcord i think i love that i think amarcord was one of those
#
movies which when i saw it it's it like it just i remember staggering out um of eros cinema and
#
bombay it was it was beyond now there are many movies that have done that for me and you know
#
and i'm not saying that i could watch amarcord uh repeatedly many times whereas i have in fact
#
watched there are a couple of films which i've watched like that i remember with jent and gulan
#
krupulani we watched the godfather five times in a row i think and then with another friend
#
kate kishet and a school friend called rudabha uh and amporia all three of us were in boarding
#
school together but following boarding school in ketu's house the three of three of us watched
#
that obscure object of desire beautiful yes again and again because we couldn't read the titles it
#
was too small it was videotape and we couldn't read the titles and we could not decide is it
#
or is it not a different actress and of course it is a different actress and i had come in late
#
to their viewing and they they said we've already watched it twice and we can't tell and i took one
#
look and i said of course it's a different actress then we we argued and argued that we watched it
#
again three or four times in one afternoon it was fabulous to do that and another movie like that
#
was all that jazz again with gulan and jent we watched it again and again not because we couldn't
#
get it or we were wondering about actresses but i mean there are so many great great movies
#
but when i when i'm asked for just the one it'll be amarkand but then hugely the star wars series
#
and it's like whoa they just blow me blew me away not all obviously not all and there's nothing to
#
compare with seeing that first one the first time which i saw in new york with all the you know the
#
special effects and the sound and everything and and at that time i remember i don't know
#
whether i've already said this once but i remember saying to my sister at that time you know he's
#
already told us that there are going to be nine and this is episode four and i know that i'm going
#
to die unfulfilled because i will in my last breath i will think but i didn't see the ninth one
#
so when i did see the ninth one which was last year a year before it was like okay good i can
#
now i'm at peace i'm i can i can die of course there are now other things to fret about but
#
that was one but in the middle of my in the middle years of my viewing life i encountered friends
#
who are cinema enthusiasts such as kiran nagarkar and shumantra gosal who in their very different
#
ways hugely influenced the way in which i saw films the way in which i understood the craft
#
to the extent that i understand and of course i realized that as a young person the way i enjoyed
#
movies was very very different to the way that enthusiasts like these two in their different ways
#
understood and enjoyed the craft of cinema and i certainly do even though i'm you know i'm nothing
#
i'm an amateur in in in my appreciation i can certainly recognize what they're talking about
#
when people say when cinema enthusiasts talk about what they what they admire in the craft
#
and i remember this i've mentioned this in a in an essay about cinema that i wrote for
#
jay arjun singh in his popcorn essays i mentioned that moment when i was sitting
#
next to budu gosal shumantra gosal because he had taken me to see 400 blows truffles 400 blows
#
and at the end i mean this was the moment of revelation for me that there is this other way
#
of seeing movies because i had watched it along with everyone else you know in a kind of neutral
#
way and you know enjoying what what enjoying it in the way that i had enjoyed movies before that
#
but towards at the end of the film there's this long tracking shot i can now say such things at
#
that time i would didn't have the words to say it i can say that now because i know it now
#
but i noticed that he was growing restless and he was kind of shifting in his seat you know sort of
#
reeling in the way of someone who is really uncomfortable with something and you know the
#
movie ends in a short while after this long shot and i turned to him and i said what what was making
#
you anxious and he said you know that track how how long was the track and i i didn't i didn't
#
have any idea what he meant so he took a while to explain it and by the time i mean obviously it's
#
not going to be clear right away what he means but that the camera is for the camera to move
#
smoothly alongside the side of a person's head it means the camera is on a track and that is moving
#
smoothly and that he is walking at the pace of an ordinary person's walk but the camera has to follow
#
that way of thinking about the howl had never ever occurred to me before i mean even if it had
#
vaguely occurred you know sometimes you would see the mic boom and you would say to yourself
#
oh that is really cheesy that you can see the damn mic boom but this you know this level and
#
also of noticing where the scene cuts out and you see the little the the little blinking
#
slight blink at the side of the screen this notion of thinking about where the scene cuts and where
#
the jump occurs and all of this you know it never it had never been obvious to me it didn't even
#
occur to me to think and that moment or that moment meaning that evening of discussion
#
was a it's again like so many other moments of revelation of how to see films it hasn't
#
i mean i've discussed this with friends who say oh come on doesn't that
#
how how can that possibly augment but of course it does of course it augments your perceptions
#
about the the skill required to put through to create a scene and also to enjoy the performance
#
of a scene without a single cut and you know that they're you know they're doing that they're
#
working on it and it's fabulous and if you know it like i remember seeing again with budu
#
two or three he was he was tasked with subtitling his uncle satyajit ray's i think it may have been
#
his great uncle satyajit ray's movies some of his famous classic movies and he was we were he and
#
another friend and i were sitting at the preview theater and era cinema in church gate in bombay
#
and just the three of us watching these three or four and i remember i saw charulata like that
#
and he had primed me that is budu budu had already said notice that she never blinks on screen
#
and then you you know you know that then you know you know to notice that she never blinks
#
and i mean for there are people who will say what you know what is that what what of what
#
possible consequence well it's those i don't know it's like it's a tiny insider style a little touch
#
of style and you can see that you know you can see that in so many different forms of art a little
#
signature style i mean you know dracula also doesn't blink so you can you can tuck that into
#
your pocket as well but yes so there are so many films and as for books i mean in this way i have
#
obviously there are thousands of books over these many millions of years that i've lived
#
but i always place if i'm asked i place at the very head of them the magus by john files
#
i adore the magus and of course i also hugely adore alice through the looking glass
#
and the two alice books but especially the looking glass and if you think about what happens in alice
#
through the looking glass you'll see that same element of surrealism that for me really sparked
#
it for me so in a sense they really do it for me but again so very many if i if i had to make a
#
list it would our favorite books then it would be at least 25 books long and as for music then
#
it's the beetles and pink floyd and others you know we've been talking for many hours and what
#
you haven't noticed is that in all these hours you have been like a woman walking through your
#
life and i have been the tracking camera so now i've made you it's gone on for pretty long but i
#
want to you know i i love i was about to say i i love your taste in cinema but that's partly
#
because i share your taste in cinema because some of those favorites are mine too and at this point
#
i will make a recommendation for our listeners and this goes in with the theme of age about
#
people doing some of their best work when they're older louis bunuel made his last three films when
#
he was past the age of 70 in the 1970s and i love all three of them the first of those was
#
the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie which is this beautiful film where a bunch of people
#
keep meeting all the time and they're trying to have a meal but they never actually get down
#
to having it for a variety of different reasons the next one was called the phantom of liberty
#
and that's really interesting because there the narrative keeps shifting so it's like you and
#
i walk into a bar we talk for two minutes and then amartya walks past us and suddenly the camera
#
follows amartya and hears a story and so on all the down so there's no constant character it's
#
just moving through and then finally of course that obscure object of desire which as you pointed
#
out you know has two actresses playing that one role which is again so fascinating and they were
#
all co-written with this gentleman who i think died recently jean claude carrière who went on
#
to you know co-write peter brooks mahabharata okay so uh you know and also the unbearable lightness
#
of being which philip kaufman directed so and amirkod is one of my all-time favorites in the
#
sense i am unlike many in the sense that i love fellini but not so much as concept films like
#
eight and a half and so on but the more intimate looks like eve at the loni which is about the
#
coming of age of young people in that particular town and amirkod when i it's a mid-70s film and
#
when i first saw amirkod possibly in the late 80s i thought oh my god these italian families are
#
just like bengali families but yeah but on on that pleasurable note thank you so much for spending
#
such a long time with me i really loved our conversation yes thank you so much it was
#
it's been fabulous really thank you if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with whoever
#
might be interested check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will all of manjula's links are
#
there i'd encourage you to go to your nearest bookstore offline or online and pick up all her
#
books especially getting there which i absolutely love manjula doesn't appear to be on twitter but
#
you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you can browse past episodes of
#
the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
