Jeet Thayil and Ruskin Bond
Ghosts to protests, the trigger to write to the craft of writing - Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet 2015, in association with Victoria Memorial Hall and The Telegraph discussed all this and more.
As the sun slipped behind the Victoria Memorial dome and darkness enveloped the edges of the Kalam canopy, a chill different from other evenings descended on the gathering. That's because on stage Ruskin Bond sat discussing ghosts, black widows and charsis with Narcopolis writer Jeet Thayil, moderated by debut author Sandip Roy. The eerie ambience was, of course, peppered with chuckles and cackles because well, when it's Ruskin Bond on stage, can humour be more than a shadowy presence?
Bond, who always quips that he writes ghost stories when he runs out of people to write about, cracked up the audience with his deep knowledge of the ghosts of the plains, as opposed to the ghosts of the hills, who often happen to be British sahibs who couldn't bear to leave! 'The plains have a large variety of spooks - bhoots and prets and mischievous ones that live on peepul trees and jump down your throat if you leave your mouth open or yawn....' These, he said, were particular to rural areas.
'I don't know, Calcutta must have its ghosts. Right now, who knows, Queen Victoria might be roaming around, watching over this monument. Ghosts are around us, even if we don't always see them,' the author said.
The first ghost stories Bond encountered were when he was around 10, a collection of stories by M.R. James, who he calls the 'guru of all ghost story writers'. He's been on the lookout for a good ghost story ever since, he said. Not ghosts though, he laughed, 'but they come looking for me! And the most prevalent of them is the lady who tucks me in at night. Sometimes I have a restless night and the blanket slips off my bed and I am conscious of someone picking it up, putting it on me and tucking me in and when I put the light on, there's nobody there. I've always thought of it as a motherly ghost'.
Among his favourite ghost story writers, Bond mentioned Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare and Satyajit Ray.
Thayil said as a child he had no relationship with ghosts at all, but now he's a firm believer. But rather than as evil, he views ghosts as helpless, full of regret and longing. 'The kind of ghosts I am interested in writing about, and the kind of ghosts I am visited by are those with a reluctance to leave the land of living.'
'Is it harder to scare people now with ghost stories?' wondered Roy. Bond said yes, it was, because the horror story had taken over. Thayil agreed, adding it was the horror movie that had really taken over.
When questions were invited, one audience member got up and indignantly pointed out that the brochure promised a discussion on 'ghosts, black widows and charsis', so what about the other two?
After much laughter, the speakers sportingly got down to business, Bond talked about his novella Susanna's Seven Husbands, which is about a woman who marries and kills off husbands in innovative ways, which was later made into 7 Khoon Maaf by Vishal Bhardwaj. Thayil took on the topic of charsis with a rhyme, which is entirely and eloquently unprintable.
Shereen El Feki
Protest down the ages
From protests in the Sixties' and Seventies' Bengal to the protest at Tahrir Square - it was all discussed at Kalam's first session on a university campus. The venue: Presidency University.
Swapan Dasgupta, senior journalist and one of the panellists, felt there should be a coma imposed on learning and protest.
Zaad Mahmood, professor of political science at Presidency University, said protests have always been and still are controlled by a handful. 'So the ethics of protest and learning from it are often missing,' he said.
When a third-year student of English, Sreya Mallika Datta, asked whether 'apolitical' also defined a particular political position, Shereen El Feki, British journalist and author, spoke about how she looked at revolution from the bedroom and sexual context. 'I look at revolution in a very different context. During the protest at Tahrir Square in Egypt, one of the things I was interested in looking at was whether these young people who were the vanguard fighting and dying on the streets against the authoritarian regime, made any connection between what they were aspiring to in the political domain - these grand calls for freedom, justice and dignity and what that might mean in their personal lives. I asked few students 'these principles that you are fighting for, what would that look like in your personal life and in particular in your sexual life?'.... They turned to me and said 'No! No! No!'' she recalled.
'We all face protests. Does it come from learning? Does it come from spontaneous reason, which is local to a few people or does it encompass a larger group of people? This is what I wanted for my students and I am glad that they all engaged in it today. There should be more debates in the future, not just about protest but all issues those effect students,' said Anuradha Lohia, the vice-chancellor of Presidency University.
The session was chaired by Deboshruti Roychowdhury, dean of students at the university.
My story
Devdan Chaudhuri, Abhijit Gupta and Mira Jacob got together to discuss their debut novels and the reflections of themselves in their books.
Amina, the protagonist in Jacob's The Sleepwalker'sGuide to Dancing, is not necessarily a version of the author. She is, in fact, a 'frustrating character', a photographer who has the ability to see things as they are and captures the awkward realities of life. Jacob claimed she is not at all like that but admitted her novel is not without autobiographical elements. It is set in New Mexico, where she grew up, and Amina's dying father turned out to be Jacob's own father, whose health started to fail around the time she started writing the story. Jacob resumed writing only after her father died and found herself painting him into her novel.
The title of her book reeks of hope, she explained. 'Events unfold a certain way because a particular character sleepwalks. But what if he were to dance instead of sleepwalk?'
Gupta's book, The Copper Sky, according to Sumit Ray, bears anti-British tones, bordering on racism. Gupta grew up in a pre-Independence era where history books were a one-sided account and heroes like Tipu Sultan 'were made to look like pygmies'. He recalled being made to feel as though everything Indian was second class. In spite of being born into a nationalist family, Gupta found himself at London School of Economics. The resultant dichotomy he faced, spills into his narrative through the protagonist, Amar, who also attends LSE.
Chaudhuri's Anatomy of Life is very much a reflection of his thoughts. The book is a result of seven years of research on the history of philosophy. Most of his characters are not known by names; but by their profession. His protagonist is The Poet. The point of the novel was to 'figure out what is universal to us'. With names, there are specifics of culture and religion that he wanted to avoid. That dreams, aspirations and occupations are the essentials of our lives, is the point he wishes to illustrate.
Renu Balakrishnan and Sandip Roy
To write or not to write
Renu Balakrishnan was happy teaching creative writing at the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai, till students started asking her 'what have you written?'. She came out of her 'hiding place' - her professorial glasses - to write Four Aleys, drawing on memories of her childhood spent with parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, a great grandmother and '83 first cousins'.
Sandip Roy followed the good Indian boy's beaten track to Silicon Valley till he started 'writing on the side' and finally made a complete switch when he wrote Don't Let Him Know. He did not let his mother know the full truth. She was aware that he had changed his job but was comforted by her belief that he was still doing 'something with computers'.
Secrets unfolding within a family but not quite uncovering truth was the theme of filmmaker Sangeeta Datta's conversation with the two novelists.
family hiding devastating secrets from the world and from each other. The reluctance to reveal the truth comes from an innate urge to shield those you care about the most. With 'great trepidation', Roy writes about a young boy's exploration of his parents' sexuality. 'It is difficult to imagine that our parents had a life before we were born,' he said.The world of Balakrishnan's novel is bustling with people - a lot like her own family, where not less than 20 people sat down to have a meal at a time. She writes about four women sharing the name Aley but negotiating an unusually large and fiercely patriarchal family in diverse ways. In her own family, Balakrishnan said, there were members who probably didn't know each other too well. As a child, she sensed there were 'many things that were going on', some of which she recreated in her head to write Four Aleys.
But while Balakrishnan's 'young, free-spirited' Aley must break out of her family, oppressed by the burden of memory, Roy's family remains a place of solace one inevitably returns to, no matter how hard the blow delivered by the skeletons tumbling out of the closet. Some secrets, like a family heirloom, must remain wrapped and locked in that closet.
Zia Haider Rahman
Novel takes
Samit Basu prodded Zia Haider Rahman into opening up about the publishing world.
Rahman has been writing for 25 years but In the Light of What We Know, his debut novel , was entirely accidental. It was a novel he started writing when he had given up his job and was living with friends who had recently lost their baby. There wasn't a lot he could do to comfort them, but confronted with the question of mortality and the germ of an idea, Rahman started to write his book. It also found an agent quite unexpectedly. The novel is about 'epistemic hubris', how we claim more for ourselves than we're entitled to in terms of authority'. It is also about class.
Rahman has specific ideas about the publishing game. While writing is 'true pleasure', publishing is a 'mixed blessing'. He was quick to discover that the literary world was no different from the other walks of life, where people are flawed and fallen and the goals of everyone are first and foremost to do with advancing themselves.
Mira Jacob, also on the panel, admitted that frustration with her job drove her to write her novel and she was glad to have 'control over her own words'. She was writing an autobiography for Kenneth Cole (she got the job when she told him, upon seeing his hesitation, that he was holding out because she was 26, brown and he didn't think she could write him) but he insisted on rewriting her work, which drove Jacob up the wall. However, she is glad it was then that she started writing for herself.
Christopher C Doyle and Ashwin Sanghi
Plot thickens
The penultimate session of Kalam saw authors Christopher C. Doyle ( The Mahabharata Secret) and Ashwin Sanghi ( The Rozabal Line) talk about what sells and what gets readers' attention.
Both authors, coming from a corporate background, shared how and what made them give up their lucrative careers and start writing.
'My passion is writing, while I enjoy being a consultant as well. There are times when I have a sudden idea hitting me while I am dealing with a client but I can't write it down,' said Christopher, while talking of his struggles as he juggles between his roles as author and a consultant.
For Sanghi, writing came naturally after being exposed to various kinds of books in his early childhood, thanks to his maternal grandfather.
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Mira Jacob, Abhijit Gupta and Devdan Chaudhuri
Asked about how he came up with new plots for his books, Sanghi said, 'I believe that as a writer you never go searching for a story, the story goes searching for the writer. That is what happened to me during The Rozabal Line. I feel that if you want to get someone to read something you have to make it exciting enough for the person to read it. We are living in a world where attention span is declining rapidly. This makes the job of writers to keep the readers hooked very difficult.'
Christopher also spoke about the importance of feedback. 'I need someone to challenge me. It is important to understand whether people who are going to buy the book are going to be interested in it or not. What I really love is when readers wrote to me pointing out where I could have been better and how,' he said.
Sanghi explained how writing was more of a craft for him rather than an art. 'Writers should not think of themselves as a writer, think that you are sitting with 10 people and telling a story,' he said.
Asked by moderator Yajnaseni Chakraborty about being referred to as the Indian Dan Brown, the two authors burst out in laughter saying the comparison was obvious. 'Dan Brown was in Mumbai a few months ago and he pointed out to me during a similar session that 'I hear you are the Indian Dan Brown' and I felt I would sink into the ground! But I think this is very flattering to be compared to someone like his,' said Sanghi.
The session concluded with the authors talking about the importance of marketing books well. 'Why shouldn't I put in some efforts in marketing my book if I have worked so hard in putting it together?'signed off Sanghi.
Pictures by Anindya Shankar Ray and B. Halder
