Speaking Volumes: So long, and thanks for all the fish

(Published in the Business Standard, December 20, 2011.)

Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children’s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.

George Whitman, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company: “The rumour spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children,” wrote Jeremy Mercer of George Whitman’s bookstore.


Whitman had soup, dubious pancakes and books on offer for all who came; and Shakespeare & Company may be the only bookstore in the world to have its own, official song. “If you ever come to Paris/ On a cold and rainy night/ And find the Shakespeare store/ It can be a welcome sight…”

Indira Goswami: Better known to the young writers and countless friends who found shelter, companionship and a link to “home” in Assam as Mamoni Raisom, Indira Goswami’s novels and other writings defined Ahomiya literature for at least three decades.

In her Unfinished Autobiography, she wrote that all the places she loved were riverine places, from the Ahiron in Madhya Pradesh and the Chandrabhaga in Kashmir to the Thames in London, as though the Brahmaputra had marked her fiction indelibly. “Without my pen, I would die,” she said many years later.

Christopher Hitchens: It was typical of Hitchens, perhaps the true literary heir to Kingsley Amis and Hunter S Thompson, that the Twitter account he started about a year before his death from cancer ran under the flag of @hitchbitch. Hitchens was unabashedly outspoken, the last of the grand old hacks, stubbornly defending his support of the Iraq war, ferocious in his attacks on organised religion and what he saw as the iniquities of faith.

His literary journalism was of a piece with the man — laddish, opinionated, sharp. There would be no RIPs for Hitch; he had already written his epitaphs, in utterly unsentimental examinations of the indignities of late-stage cancer. Of his obituarists, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were among the best, paying homage, as Rushdie put it, to a “great voice” and a “great heart”.

Srilal Shukla: Of all the satire and fiction Srilal Shukla wrote, the one that would last was Raag Darbari, written in the late 1960s, still as trenchant and biting today, over four decades later. His protagonist, Vaidyaji, was the philosophical manipulator who knew exactly how to make a corrupt system work for him. Shukla’s Shivpalganj was an amalgam of the many places he had known and worked in as a government servant.

There was a classic moment at the Neemrana literary festival, where a TV anchor asked Shukla to step out of the frame so that they could get footage of Naipaul. The cameraman was horrified. “Don’t you know who this is?” he told the anchor, who recognised neither Shukla nor the mention of Raag Darbari. Giving up, the cameraman said in exasperation, “This is Naipaul’s baap!” But Shuklaji had already left, amused rather than offended.

H R F Keating: In 1999, the creator of Inspector Ghote published an odd, now forgotten book: Jack, the Lady-Killer. This crime novel in verse was inspired by Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, though Keating confessed he couldn’t match Seth’s rhymes. (The title was taken from The Golden Gate: “The old folks settle down with books:/ He with Tom Jones, she with a thriller/ Entitled Jack the Lady-Killer.”)

This was not the first time Keating had turned to India for inspiration. Inspector Ghote was born in the early 1960s, out of a romantic fascination with a country Keating had read about but never visited. Ghote’s name was borrowed from a George Bernard Shaw diatribe about the illogic of the English language, where you could spell “fish” as “ghoti” — using “gh” as in tough, “o” as in women, “ti” as in mention. But the real allure of Inspector Ghote, for Keating, was that the anarchy of the Bombay CID allowed him to get away from the more stifling conventions of the English detective novel.

Ghote was a good man in a corrupt world, intent on following “the proper procedure” through a delightfully varied list of cases. By the early 2000s (Bribery, Corruption Also and Breaking and Entering), Ghote had become an anachronism, and references to Keating were almost always prefaced with the word “old-fashioned”; but he is still remembered with affection.

Diana Wynne Jones: The year was a hard one for fantasy-lovers, who lost Anne McCaffrey and Russell Hoban as well as Jones. Jones’ fantasies, from the Chrestomanci series to Howl’s Moving Castle, were guaranteed free of mawkishness and predictability. She wrote for the child she had been herself; frighteningly bright, alive and alert to the world, already aware that magic might have its dark side and fairies might have their own twisted agenda. “Writing for adults you have to keep reminding them of what is going on,” she had said. “The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.”

"Why do you write?"

(Published in Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, January 02, 2007)

This column is dedicated to all the people who patiently answered the question I asked over and over again in 2006: “So why do you want to be a writer?”

There were so many of them out there. Some had done fruitless rounds of publishers’ offices. Some had been published and watched their dreams die slow deaths as the books drew sparse reviews, a handful of readers, bringing them neither the accolades nor the royalties they had imagined would be their due. Some had always intended to be writers, but had been sidetracked along the way by jobs, rent, families.

Most of them will never finish their books; some will finish the great Indian novel and struggle to find a publisher; only a few will find the satisfaction they’re looking for in the writing life. I wanted to know what made them go on, what they got out of the pursuit of a profession with such high failure rates.

Some offered honest, simple answers. “I love telling stories and having stories told to me,” wrote one woman. “It doesn’t matter if I get published or not. I do this for me.” “I read R K Narayan all through childhood and thought I want to write like this, so now I am trying.” “I love writing poetry, even if it sometimes isn’t so good, for me there is a satisfaction to making something out of words. I am in love with words. Publication [sic] is not that important, if even one or two readers like my poems that is enough.”

These, I think, are the lucky ones, and for them a small prayer: may they never lose the innocent joy in their writing, regardless of whether the work is “good” or “bad”. These are the writers who have not yet lost the pleasure of playing with words, who are still in love with what they do.

Some approached writing in the same way that a previous generation approached the legal profession or a management degree. “Indian literature is selling abroad and so this is a good opportunity for the sharp writer,” wrote one. “There are opportunities,” a young man in his twenties told me, “in so many areas if you position correctly: management fiction like Chetan Bhagat’s books is here to stay, so is chick lit and so many other niche positions. So all you need is some facility with the language, a good attitude to marketing, and you can be a writer.” “If you are lucky, then the pay-off is very high, like book advances and prize money, so it is worth it trying,” wrote one woman disarmingly.

These are the new breed, the ones who represent an India always on the lookout for the right business model, where you can learn how to be a writer in the same way that you can learn how to be a doctor—it’s a question, as an MBA graduate working on his first novel put it, of “acquiring the right skill set”. It’s easy to sneer at them, but I think of the many people in previous generations who never even tried to write because it was not a “respectable” calling. Perhaps they will produce commonplace books; perhaps they will produce the solid stuff—decent biographies, good film books, respectable business books—that any healthy publishing industry needs. And perhaps some of them will sit down to write a formula bestseller and surprise themselves by discovering that they really want to write a different kind of book.

And a few burned with an inner flame. “Sometimes I think I will never write a short story that approaches anything by Chekhov,” wrote a writer who is considered one of the best of his generation of Indians, “and I fall into despair. But I can only write like me; and I cannot help but write. I don’t do it for the money, or for the readers; I do it because I would die if I didn’t. I keep trying. I keep failing. And then to go back to my desk and face the wall and try again, and fail again.”

In 2007, we’ll see all three sorts of writers. The ones who write out of an innocent joy, the ones who write with one eye on the market, and the ones who write because they cannot help it. Readers will reject much of this work, like some of it, and love only a very few, very rare books. But I’m glad they’re out there. All of them.

[Coda: A few months later, I became a publisher, and discovered the slush pile. The rest is silence.]