When a man is born in a library, make him an engineer or teach him business management, write he will! This and much more emerged during a chat with author Kunal Basu. Over black coffee with a dash of brown sugar, the 55-year-old South Pointer spoke about his new book The Yellow Emperor’s Cure [Picador India, an imprint of Pan Macmillan India], about suffering science and about his mother having to deliver him in the library of their home in Shyambazar as she hurriedly tried to finish a manuscript before going to the hospital.

How did The Yellow Emperor’s Cure come about?

I had gone to a museum for traditional Chinese medicine during a visit to Beijing some years back. And there were these glass cases with strange ingredients, quite gruesome, you know, like intestines of animals, giant mushrooms and such things. I started thinking that, if in the 21st century, I am so surprised by all this, just imagine how surprised a 19th century outsider would have been! What if he was a doctor? But why would a doctor be interested in Chinese traditional medicine? May be he was trying to find the cure for a disease. What disease would this be — all this was happening while I was walking through the museum. I thought, it had to be syphilis. So many people that we know had died of it, so many had suffered… it’s like AIDS of today….

People that we know as in…?

As in Beethoven, Vincent van Gogh, Guy de Maupassant…. The root of the story was born in that museum — young European doctor comes to China in search of a cure for syphilis in the 19th century. And because I am a visually driven writer, I saw this young Portuguese doctor, Antonio Mario, receiving his training from a Chinese teacher in the Summer Palace.

And you made him fall in love with a Chinese girl, Fumi. Was that because you love writing of romance within the framework of historical fiction?

(Laughs.) Well, I wouldn’t necessarily categorise it as that, because The Miniaturist [2003] did not have romance as a factor. I am moved by the classics. What moves me about them are intricately woven stories about relationships cast in the backdrop of great social turmoil.

This novel is about the personal quest of Antonio. He is hell-bent on finding a cure for syphilis, because his father is a victim. Antonio is also a man’s man, he is a playboy… a work hard, play hard alpha male. This journey to find a cure becomes a metaphorical journey for him. And all this is cast in the time of the Boxer Rebellion, where a great social turmoil is enacted outside the tranquil pavilion where he is learning Chinese medicine. So, there are several threads. And one of the threads, definitely, is love.

In the last few years, much has been written about China and opium in fiction — you wrote The Opium Clerk, Amitav Ghosh is writing the Ibis trilogy and Julia Lovell came out with The Opium War. Is it because of the global interest in China?

For me, it had nothing to do with people writing about opium. I was the first — The Opium Clerk came out in 2001 and I had thought about the story completely coincidentally. I was trekking with my wife and daughter on the border of Thailand and Burma quite a few years ago. I picked up this dog-eared paperback on heroin trafficking in the golden triangle (Burma-Laos-Thailand). As I was turning pages, there was this line that said that in the 19th century, Calcutta was the capital of the world’s drug trade. I said, but this can’t be true! I am a thoroughbred Calcuttan but never in our history books, never in our popular discussions had opium ever cropped up.

I started reading up on the history of opium and suddenly, the plot emerged in my head.

so, I’ll tell you this... we as Indians, not just authors, when we think of outside India, our eyes point West. In post-colonial India, the eyes look even further West, towards America. But I grew up with Bangla books. Sarat Chandra’s Pather Dabi and children’s books had dollops of the romance and the mystery of the East… pirates in the South China Sea and all of that…. So, I have an in-built excitement towards not just contemporary East but also the history of the East.

Speaking of the East, let’s talk about The Japanese Wife and Aparna Sen’s film on it. Did the movie change things for you as an author?

I am in love with cinema. And as a medium, cinema has more viewers than books have readers. Take for example Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. A brilliant novel, but when an Oscar-winning film was made on it, it got a lot more attention. It is the nature of cinema to get more appreciation. I don’t make too much of it, or too little of it.

Any talk of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure being made into film?

Just before I left Oxford to come here I had an enquiry from Hollywood. It’s too premature.

If it does become a film, any choices for the lead actors?

Oh, I’d love Johnny Depp! Because, you know, Antonio Mario is like that, he’s arrogant, he’s a playboy but he also has a vulnerable side. For Fumi, the Chinese actress I’d absolutely love is Gong Li. She acted in Raise the Red Lantern. They could set fire to the screen.

You studied engineering, did a Phd in business management and now you teach marketing at the Said Business School in Oxford. How and why did writing happen?

Well, I grew up in a house full of books, my father [Sunil Kumar Basu] was a very famous publisher, my mother [Chhabi Basu] was a very well-known Bangla author…. Books and writing were foremost in my consciousness while I was growing up, along with art. I was also a child actor in Mrinal Sen’s films [Punascha and Abasheshe], I also acted on stage….

But I was side-tracked and distracted because of the demands of a career. The Calcutta I was growing up in as a middle-class boy of the Seventies, was very different from the Calcutta you’ve grown up in… there were very few options before educated Bengali girls and boys. And, I took the most boring option — mechanical engineering. Hated it, totally hated it! Then I did a Phd in business, which again is not a subject that I’m attracted to.

My writing reflects the most dominant passion of my life, whereas my career reflects the accidents of my life (laughs)!

You studied at South Point and then JU. Your memories…

Yes, I studied at South Point all through. We had wonderful teachers, and I think they also shaped my taste for the arts. Kamal Kumar Majumdar, the great Bengali author, was my teacher there. Unfortunately I studied science and my later years in school were not all that pleasant.

The most dominant impressions that I carry from Jadavpur University are politics — I was a political activist during the Emergency — and because I was not interested in engineering at all, I took every diversion possible, so there was theatre, literary magazines, writing.... Jadavpur enriched me culturally, politically; unfortunately not so much academically.

Any advice for youngsters on following their passion?

I sometimes despair as to why I did not study the subjects that I love, like history or literature. So, it’s not an advice but I’d like to say that wherever possible and however hard it might be, it’s very important for people to know what they love and to pursue that love with great vigour. Don’t do something else because that is convenient. I have suffered as a result of that….

Who are your favourite authors?

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay is my favourite of all time, also Manik Bandyopadhyay and Rabindranath. In world literature, there’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad…. In contemporary times, I admire John Coetzee… his Waiting for the Barbarians is an immensely powerful novel. I am very fond of Michael Ondaatje’s writing because of the spare lyricism that he has, then Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Laureate and of course, [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez. I mean, who doesn’t love Marquez?!

And that one favourite book?

Oh, that’s very hard. But if there is one book that I wish I had written, it’s One Hundred Years of Solitude [by Marquez].

Your favourite city?

Calcutta, undoubtedly!

What do you like best about Calcutta?

The people. We have heaps of problems, we all know that. But here people are willing to engage with you. Calcuttans are not needlessly polite. So, at a book reading, people will ask you questions — sometimes uncomfortable ones, sometimes interesting ones — it’s this kind of human contact that I think is the most powerful aspect of Calcutta.

If you could change one thing about Calcutta, what would it be?

Well, I wish book shops on College Street would go back to selling more books than study notes!

Are you working on a new novel?

Yes, it’s based in Calcutta in the present times, including all the paribartan that’s happening. I will be spending a lot of 2012 here.

You are participating in the first ever Calcutta Literary Meet (January 26-31)…

Yes, I will read at the Calcutta Literary Meet. I am very, very hopeful and optimistic about this. I mean, look, the Boi Mela is the largest book fair in the world, and it’s a reader’s book fair, not a business book fair. So, if the Calcutta Literary Meet is successful, then it will be a very different kind of a literary festival than what we are used to seeing.

Samhita Chakraborty

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