Fornit, some Fornus - writers on writing

[From my Forbes Life column]

The American author Stephen King is too prolific to be easily categorised, but most people who know of his work from a distance think of him as a “horror writer” – he has, after all, published bestsellers about a psychotic dog, a homicidal clown, a creepy hotel with a mind of its own, and a girl who wreaks vengeance on her tormentors through her gift of telekinesis. But one of the scariest King stories I have encountered is the novella “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet”, which is about a writer’s personal hell. The story is included in the collection Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, which, along with King’s On Writing, contains many valuable insights into his profession.

The framing device for the flexible-bullet story is a literary party where an aging editor recalls his association with a once-promising novelist named Reg Thorpe. Thorpe became convinced that his typewriter was inhabited by a “Fornit”, a tiny elf that sprinkled magic dust – Fornus – on the machine and was responsible for his creativity. Which sounds outlandish, but is it? As the editor’s account comes to its tragic conclusion and the party winds up, the wife of another young writer nervously asks “There are no Fornits in your typewriter, are there, Paul?” and we get this chilling sentence: And the writer, who had sometimes – often – wondered where the words DID come from, said bravely, “Absolutely not.”

Writers do wonder. Many of them don’t understand their processes – how the “muse” emerges, how quickly it can vanish, leaving no trace of the idea or the turn of phrase that had seemed so brilliant in the middle of the night – and some of them feel a painful disconnect between the thing they had in their minds and what finally emerged on the page. (Was the Fornit responsible for the bungled prose? Could the Fornit be a double agent?) Here is Ann Patchett in her memoir This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, on the conception and gestation of each new novel: “…the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty. […] When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it.” Patchett goes on to write movingly about the experience of seeing the dry husk of her beautiful friend on the writing table, “chipped, dismantled and poorly reassembled. Dead.”

All this can sound pretentious to those who think creative people romanticise their work needlessly rather than just “getting it done” – but nearly any serious writer has experienced these feelings, and their accounts often echo each other. Consider King’s little elf in the typewriter, and then look at Mishi Saran’s description of “the dwarf clamped to my shoulder – a mini-me – hissing into my ear”. This is from an essay in the fine new anthology Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves, edited by Manju Kapur. The book has many candid pieces by novelists such as Anita Nair, Moni Mohsin and Jaishree Misra, and while some of the points made are gender-neutral, they also touch on the specific difficulties of being a woman writer in a conservative society – many of the writers mention Virginia Woolf's famous essay “A Room of One’s Own”, about the financial independence and the emotional and physical space a woman needs in order to write.

Another of the most engrossing self-reflective books I have read in the past year is Vikam Chandra’s Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, which tries to reconcile his two selves, the fiction writer and the software programmer. Chandra examines his trajectory as a reader and writer: for instance, he recounts how, as a youngster, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver).

As Chandra knows, the writer as part of his own story – creating and participating at once – is a tradition that goes back a long way in Indian literature. Look at what happens early in the great epic the Mahabharata. A king has died heirless, his wives need children to carry the Kuru lineage forward, but no one with the right pedigree is able or willing to do this. At this point Vyasa himself, the poet and composer, enters the story and fathers the children who will in turn beget the epic’s protagonists the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Now the tale can continue. Did someone say deus ex machina?

Such a narrative arc is facilitated by stories that begin with oral recitations and gradually expand over time. (Picture a spoken story reaching a dead end, the audience impatiently asking “What happened next?” and the storyteller finding a way out by introducing himself as a character.) But some modern classics have also aimed for such an effect. Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey – translated from Bengali into English as He (Shey) by Aparna Chaudhuri – has for its protagonist a man who is made entirely of words. The book was written for Tagore’s granddaughter Pupe, and includes a number of unusual adventures and creatures; but as Chaudhuri points out in her introduction, storytelling is presented here as an interactive process – the tone changes with Tagore’s moods and Pupe’s demands, and also eventually reflects the difference in her personality as she grows from age nine (when the storytelling begins) to age 16 (when it ends).

Among more straightforward, linear fiction that has an author as a protagonist, a personal favourite is Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, in which a writer tries to uncover details about the life of another, deceased writer – in particular, to understand how the latter’s literary output changed with his personal circumstances, and what the contribution of his now-forgotten first wife Rosie was to his art. The result is one of Maugham’s most delicate books, an examination of the wheels behind the creative process and, importantly, a pretty good story in its own right.

Writers do sometimes stop navel-gazing for long enough to write about other, real-life writers. Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché is a fine collection of essays on the methods of old masters (Milton, Donne, Cervantes) as well as contemporary practitioners of popular forms (Thomas Harris). More recently, there is Jonathan Franzen's collection Farther Away, my favourite essay in which – “What makes you so sure you’re not the evil one yourself?” – is a celebration of the great short-story writer Alice Munro. Franzen notes how Munro is sometimes not taken seriously enough because she writes in conversational prose about everyday things, rather than about self-consciously Big Subjects; through a brilliant discussion of a particular short story, he analyses her talent for uncovering layer after painful layer in human character and relationships. So much of writing is implicitly a tribute to other writing (because everyone has been influenced by someone or the other), but this essay is that rare thing, one accomplished writer trying to make acquaintance with another well-known writer’s Fornit.

[More soon on Stephen King's excellent On Writing. And some earlier Forbes Life thematic columns here: popular science, satire, true crime, translations, doubles, time travel]

Emotional palettes: Vikram Chandra on mixed rasa in ancient literature and popular cinema

There are so many stimulating things in Vikram Chandra’s new book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code that I won’t try listing them all – or doing a consolidated review – but one passage that struck a chord was a reference from the Mahabharata’s Stree Parva, the book about the women on the post-war battlefield. In the original text, Gandhari’s extraordinary monologue includes a description of the slain warrior Bhurishravas’s wives finding his severed arm, then holding and caressing it. The imagery haunted me for a long time when I first read it (in the Kamala Subramanian version, I think; the more literal and dreary Kisara Mohan Ganguli translation is on this page) and I was reminded of it when I read Mirrored Mind. Chandra quotes a rendition by the ninth century scholar Anandavardhana wherein one of the wives, gently stroking the gory limb she has placed on her lap, says:

“This is the hand that took off my girdle,
That fondled my full breasts,
That caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,
And loosened my skirt.”**

Here is, as Chandra points out, an example (one of countless in the Mahabharata) of the mixing of rasas. “The stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savouring of karuna-rasa, pathos.” In other words, the tone of an essentially tragic scene has been heightened by the introduction of a very different – some might even say inappropriate – mood.

Concepts like rasa (the aesthetic pleasure derived from tasting artificially induced emotions while watching a performance), dhvani (the resonance that poetry can create within a reader) and vyanjan (suggestion) have informed artistic expression in India for centuries, and Chandra writes about them at some length, drawing on the work of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, and discussing the function of rasa and dhvani in old literature. But he also mentions a more modern medium.

The urge to savour is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song.

According to Anandavardhana: “While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant… [But there is] no obstruction to a single rasa by its being mixed with others…Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work.”

Chandra continues:

A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasas that will strengthen the predominant rasa of the whole.

****

I had a nice session with Chandra the other day (two sessions actually, a private conversation followed by a public one), and part of our discussion was about the often-uninformed, kneejerk denigrating of works that are deemed “unrealistic” or “melodramatic”. When I interviewed him in 2006, he had said:

I feel very strongly about this notion of what is "too filmi" as opposed to what is realistic. In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we've had an education that's trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the tradition of psychological realism. So when we see the other kind of representation – of mainline cinema – we deny its reality. But the idea that the novelistic/psychological-realism form can transparently give us what is "real" is very naïve. It's a distressing aspect of critical talk, and given the history of colonialism, we should be more suspicious of this idea.

(Full interview here)

Related points are addressed in Mirrored Mind. In a chapter titled “Histories and Mythologies”, Chandra recounts how, as a young writer, he was divided between classical Indian forms of storytelling (with their episodic structures, logical discontinuities and narratives nestled within narratives) and the cool, minimalist “realism” of modern American writing (in creative-writing workshops in the US, the model to aspire to was the spare prose of Raymond Carver). And he writes very eloquently about “the cult of modernity”: how imperialism required that colonisers cast the colonised as primitive, childish, undeveloped, and sentiment-driven; how entire modes of artistic expression get labelled inferior and “premodern” as a result; and what effect that has had on how we continue to view our art and culture even in post-colonial times. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s description of Africans making “a violent babble of uncouth sounds” in Heart of Darkness, he says:

The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble”, the frightening “throb of drums” that he refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into ‘tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours’ […]

These parts of Mirrored Mind particularly appealed to me because I can relate – to a degree – with Chandra’s ambivalence. My own informal “education” in cinema – taking the medium seriously, as something that could be analysed and written about – really began when I exited the world of Hindi films in my early teens, became obsessed with old American films, and began reading criticism by V F Perkins, Robin Wood and others; criticism that was very much rooted in the models of psychological realism, and in a limited worldview where an Indian director worthy of being held up as a major creative force would have to have the particular sensibility and method of a Satyajit Ray. 

It is only in the past few years that I have rediscovered the creative energies of the really good popular Hindi films, and attempted – as a viewer and writer – to understand their “language” and the assumptions underlying it. And so, even while I have written posts like this one in response to sweepingly condescending pieces about Indian cinema – or this one about Hindi-movie songs – there’s a tiny part of me that still feels a bit embarrassed about the tropes of our popular movies; still reluctant to fully embrace the best of them as art (as opposed to “enjoyable entertainment, but nothing more”). There is some irony here, because when it comes to old Hollywood, I have always found it easy to reject Pauline Kael’s simplistic Art vs Trash formulation. I have no trouble placing popular or genre films like Hawks’ Monkey Business in the same circle of artistic merit as more obviously serious-intentioned films. But it feels like a greater leap to put a popular Hindi movie – even one that is extremely well made and has a fully realised “emotional palette” – in that circle. It’s an aspect of my conditioning that I struggle with.

****

Like I said, there is much else of interest in Mirrored Mind, though it is a difficult book in places: an honest report of the reading experience might be “Stirred, then daunted, even stupefied, then stirred again”. It isn’t easy to get into it – if you know nothing about the world of code and computer programming, you might back gingerly away on seeing the first page with its List of Figures that goes “CIL for Hello, world! program in C#” and “Subtraction operator with inputs 4.2 and 2.2” and suchlike.

When I last encountered Chandra’s work, it was in the form of Sacred Games, that epic novel about cops and gangsters in Mumbai – a fast-paced, accessible thriller as well as a thoughtful look at human lives and destinies colliding in a dynamic city, with the reverberations of the distant past constantly running through those lives. So coming to Mirrored Mind, all this talk about algorithms and logic gates and computer programming was a bit scary. But a couple of things happened as I continued reading. First, Chandra’s writing made the world of code and software immediate and interesting. Second, the book morphed gradually into other things. It became a memoir of a reading life and a writing life – of Chandra’s coming of age as a writer, his parallel life in programming, and how the two pursuits have intersected, diverged, or complemented each other (“the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative”). And eventually, a wide-ranging history of Sanskrit grammar and theory.

That might seem a quirky range of topics for a single book, but they come together very well here, and there are all sorts of little ideas and revelations. For instance, it was news to me that good code can aspire not just to functionality but to elegance and beauty as well; that an ambitious programmer can be like a writer who wants to polish his sentences and express himself as well as possible, rather than simply relay information. At one point Chandra quotes Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, who was underwhelmed by a particular code: “It was plodding and excruciating to read, because it just didn’t possess any wit whatsoever. It got the job done, but its use of the computer was very disappointing.” 

Which almost suggests that a version of the form-and-content debate may exist even in this seemingly cold, mechanical world! Perhaps future editions of the Jaipur Literature Festival can have sessions with titles like “Visual Basic, C# and FORTRAN: three celebrated programming languages discuss what aesthetic transcendence means to them."

-------------------

** The Stree Parva excerpt above is from Luther Obrock’s English translation of Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka

A conversation with Vikram Chandra

[This is most of the transcript of an interview I recently did with Vikram Chandra. It was an enjoyable conversation – Chandra is a nuanced, measured speaker who likes delving into the inner workings of things rather than making sweeping statements; but he was still quite relaxed and informal. Note: this talk was mostly about his novel Sacred Games, so it's probably best read after you have a sense of what the book is about. My review here.]



Intro: Vikram Chandra was 34 when his first book Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995. Two years later, Love and Longing in Bombay established him as one of the leading Indian writers of his generation, upon which he slipped neatly out of the public glare for several years. He lives in Mumbai and Berkley and teaches at the University of California. {Full bio here.)

The 900-page Sacred Games, which took him seven years to complete, was launched earlier this month; its protagonists are the Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh and the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde.

Was the long absence from the limelight a reaction to sudden fame?

Actually, I didn't expect the gap to be this long. When I began work on Sacred Games I thought I was writing a very different, shorter book. I was reacting to the environment in Mumbai and, in a larger sense, the country in the 1980s and 1990s. What I'd imagined was a very local book about the tapori down the street. But it soon became clear that in dealing with crime, the connections with all the other things are really important – politics, religion, the larger geopolitical tensions of the subcontinent.

Talking to a senior police officer in Mumbai, I asked him about an encounter involving automatic weapons, which had happened barely 50 feet from my house – my father and I actually heard it. The man said to me, “Listen, I can tell you the story of this shooter who was killed – who he was, where he came from, and about the cop who brought him down – but if you really want to understand what's happening and why, you have to talk to these other people …” What he was implying was that the layers of various other things that connected to this incident were larger than what my limited vision suggested. The local guy is connected to a larger don who in turn has been recruited into a much larger game. At that point the book started becoming bigger. It began to encompass the narrative of the nation-state and even went back in time to Partition, the effects of which still roll on in our lives.

It's a very complex novel. The marketing blurbs seem to cast it as a cop-vs-gangster story, but it's more dense and layered than that.

I wanted to write an anti-thriller of sorts. To begin with, I was interested in the classical cop/detective story structure, which (and apologies for getting into my college professor incarnation here!) is a post-Enlightenment form. It's the only truly modern form of narrative that we've created. I mean, you can find instances of love stories, stories about families and so on in medieval literature, but the detective form belongs to the age of reason. And the classic structure is: we start with an unexplained case/dead body, there is the application of reason by the detective, the studying of clues, he develops a theory and proves it to be true, and at the end all is well – balance has been restored.

But I wanted to overturn that template. The shape of this book is such that numerous layers of history and events play a part in the protagonists' lives, and they themselves never know the larger picture. Ostensibly, Gaitonde and Sartaj seem to belong to the classical detective tradition – like Moriarty and Holmes – but in fact, they hardly ever meet. Instead they, like all of us, tend to be caught up in events that are far bigger – in a huge web of agendas and politics and ideologies.

It's being marketed as a thriller, but I'm hoping the reader will pick up that the breakage from the classical thriller form is intentional.

You repeatedly highlight the unknowable workings of cause and effect – as in the passage where Sartaj Singh reflects on a policeman getting killed and his son subsequently becoming wayward and heading down a path of crime. "Each action flew down this tangled net of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. You tried to arrest some apradhis and a policeman's son went bad."

Yes, and Sartaj also observes at one point that we are continuously being thrown about by forces beyond our control. In fact, at the end of the book he makes a choice, but he doesn't even know in full why he made that choice. Hopefully, the reader by the end will see the mosaic and understand to an extent what is happening and why – but our protagonist has no clue.

It's interesting you say mosaic. That word comes to mind quite often, especially in the way you use the Inset chapters (which don't directly involve Sartaj or Ganesh Gaitonde but provide a background to their lives and the events they are enmeshed in). Personally, I had a problem with those because they interrupted the flow of the story for me and I wanted to stay with the central characters. But their use is very ambitious. In the last Inset, for instance, you present an event that we've already read about earlier in the book – the death of a policeman – but told this time from a different angle (the perspective of the man who kills him). The effect is kaleidoscopic; it's clear that you're reaching for something deeper than the telling of a story through the eyes of two protagonists.

To my mind, the justification for the Insets is that they set up a layer of stories that help us understand more about ourselves. I'm hoping that they will be like the subterranean notes in a symphony, which you can hear in the background.

For instance, there's a scene at the end where Sartaj takes his mother to Amritsar. He sees that she's remote and he assumes that she must be thinking about her deceased husband, his father. But the reader picks up that she's really thinking about her elder sister, who was lost to her in the Partition riots. And we pick this up because of an earlier chapter that tells us about the childhood of this woman. Those layers are to be found everywhere in human lives. Often, people who have been living in the same house for decades don't even realise that the other person has a whole history, an interior life.

My wife Melanie and I spent a month trying to figure out what to leave out of the book, and we looked at the Insets very carefully. But without them, you don't get that sense of background, of complexity. I mean, I admire thriller writers for their virtues – the cleanness of the writing, the economy of their plots – but when I was trying to understand why this guy was getting shot 50 feet from my house, the answers that came to me were far more complicated than "there was one good guy and one bad guy and so on…"

Where does a character as fascinating as Ganesh Gaitonde come from? Is he a composite of different people you met during your research?

The word "research" implies a certain structure that I'm not entirely comfortable with – like a journalist going out to work on a specific, time-bound project. For me it was more random and happenstance. Over a period of time, I spoke with many people from the other side of the law. You talk to them, find out about their lives, but you also take in so much information that's incidental – the way they hold themselves, a silver statue of Krishna in the background – and all that stuff comes together maybe even years later, and out pops this character who is an amalgamation of various things you've seen or even read about.

Gaitonde is part poet, part visionary, initially sceptical of custom, religion, anything that categorises people or creates divisions among them. Eventually, however, he goes along with the myth others create for him – a Krishna bhakt, a Hindu don. Is this another commentary on the human need for structure, for identity?

Evolutionarily, we are built to look for patterns in everything. This translates into ideological narratives. It’s been shown that when there's a blankness in your visual field, the brain fills that in because it can't stand the emptiness; it's so attached to the idea of unity. Gaitonde, despite wanting to be a man alone, to live without structure, is seduced when someone offers him a narrative that “explains” him to himself. And on some level I think we all do that, even the most self-conscious ones among us. In this era of globalisation, there's talk of this unexpected tribalism that's happening. When someone says to us, here's an ideology, here's an explanation of who you are, it's very attractive because I now know my place in the world.

Many of the supposedly bad people I met were actively religious, thoughtful about their lives and like anyone else they want to have a structured existence. There was this hitman, for instance, a highly rated shooter, who was a yoga-doing vegetarian. And he said to me, "Agar main meat khaata hoon, dimag garam ho jaata hai jabki thanda rahna chahiye." ("When I eat meat, my mind gets hot, it doesn't stay cool like it should.") He also kept saying to us, "Why are you writing a book on the underworld? You should investigate life's big problems, the big issues facing us all."

The hitman as philosopher…

And so we asked him: "Listen, it's obvious that you think about all these big things, so how can you justify taking money from someone and putting a bullet through the head of someone you don't even know?" And he replied: "Woh kya hai, upar wale ne uski maut likhi hai aur mera role hai usko maut dena. Main toh natak mein apna role ada kar raha hoon." ("God has decided he has to die and my role is to bring him Death. So I'm just playing my part in the grand scheme.")

Essentially, you see, he's taking the Arjuna position, which is very clever.

It's disturbing to find that people who are capable of such terrible things can be so lucid and self-assured. Reading a book about Pol Pot recently, I was struck by this very intelligent, educated guy with a utopian vision who somehow ended up causing the deaths of millions of people. How does a person like that make the leap from here to there? These questions fascinate me.

As a writer, how do you get into the head of a character (Gaitonde) who offhandedly describes how he hacked an informer to pieces and then went into his house, "ate a little sabudane ki khichdi and went to sleep"?

Obviously, I haven't lived Gaitonde's life, but as a writer you have to find a little part inside yourself that might have that inclination and try to develop it into something bigger. It's a bit like Method acting, and you have to be careful, because like Method actors who disappear into their parts, you can't let it dominate you too much. I guess that's why writers are famously unstable – you spend half your life playing with these creatures who are inside your head!

In some ways it's a relief to get away from the darkness of this world (laughs). I think I'll write something set on a pink island next: boy gets girl, girl gets boy, boy gets boy, everyone is happy!

[Chandra has a strong film connection. He went to film school at Columbia and worked with Vidhu Vinod Chopra (his brother-in-law) on 1942: A Love Story and Mission Kashmir.]

There's this fascinating synergy between the film world and the lives of your gangsters. In one scene Gaitonde and his boys are watching Deewar, and they cry because they identify with what's going on. And one feels it's inevitable that some of these young men will consciously start modeling themselves on the Amitabh character, who in turn was based on the real-life figure of Haji Mastan - creating a never-ending circle.

I think this synergy between life and cinema, or even the visual arts in general, is just a fact of our modern world. We're so saturated with media that, thinking in a science fiction way about the near-future, it might be possible in the next 5-10 years to walk around Delhi wearing visors that overlay a layer of information over the physical world. So if I'm looking at the Red Fort in the distance, I might simultaneously be able to see footnotes about it, or perhaps even a reconstruction of the fort as it once was. Already I have half my life on this thing (pointing to his cellphone). I think we're heading in that direction.

The Deewar passage reminded me of a review I read of the film Heat, where Al Pacino played a cop and Robert De Niro a criminal. The reviewer observed that Pacino and De Niro had already become such icons playing these types of roles that if they went out on the street to observe real-life cops and gangsters, it's likely that those cops and gangsters would have modeled their own personalities on roles played by these very actors 20 years earlier.

Yes, that’s an interesting observation. In that context I think of the Yakuza in Japan, or obviously the mafia in the US and the constant cross-referencing between movies, television and the real-life practitioners. Doing my preparation for the book, I found that policemen and gangsters both had very definite opinions on cinematic depictions of their lives – what was right and wrong. Watching a film called Vaastav, I found that the producer was the brother of one of the underworld players – so the narrative was being constructed by people who actually live it. That was the inspiration for a scene on Gaitonde's boat, where the real-life gangsters become so involved with the making of the film that he's producing.

In the book, this also provides the cue for a very funny passage where a cantankerous old critic watches the movie made by Gaitonde and pronounces it "too filmi and clichéd – the filmmakers have obviously never met a real gangster".

I feel very strongly about this notion of what is "too filmi" as opposed to what is realistic. In India, especially in the upper and middle class, we've had an education that's trained us to see reality in a specific way, which mostly comes from the tradition of psychological realism. So when we see the other kind of representation – of mainline cinema – we deny its reality. But the idea that the novelistic/psychological-realism form can transparently give us what is "real" is very naïve. It's a distressing aspect of critical talk, and given the history of colonialism, we should be more suspicious of this idea. Gauri Viswanathan has done some amazing work about the use of the novel as pedagogical in colonialism – to train young Indian men and women to see the world in a particular way.

Often, what we think of as melodramatic films reach deeper truths while seeming artifical on the surface. And what is overly emotional/melodramatic anyway? I look around me at Indian families and by God, we're so melodramatic in real life! Without wanting to generalise about 1.2 billion people, we do express emotion in a way that, say, someone in Massachusetts wouldn't.

A general question about the literary coverage in mainstream media in India. What are your views on the portrait of the writer as celebrity/P3P and the limited space for book reviewing?

A space for serious reviewing is necessary – not just in terms of new books but also in terms of people being able to write about something that was published 10 years ago. American journals provide enormous amounts of space for conversations on literature. Without that space, you're just working alone – with no idea what others are doing.

You drew a lot of attention in India with the million-dollar advance for Sacred Games.

And it's very different elsewhere: if you get a big deal for a book in London or New York, there will be a buzz but the buzz will be confined to the literary trade – it definitely won't make it to the front page of the NYT! The celebrity-obsessed angle of Indian reporting is fascinating. But one has to examine the historical reasons for this: after princely patronage vanished, artists in India worked in a vacuum for a long time. Naturally, the first few big book deals for Indian authors have given a charge to Indian English publishing, and the media has got onto the bandwagon. It's not necessarily a bad thing – it's certainly better than being ignored altogether – but if it takes space away from meaningful conversation about the books, that's a problem.

I have to say, the condition of Indian journalism in general is of some concern too. It's good to see the way TV channels and publications have been coming up in recent times, but there's also so much slapdash stuff in newspapers everyday, put together at the last moment and flung onto the page indiscriminately. In certain newspapers it's so clear that money is doing the talking.

There’s an amusing passage in Sacred Games where a character says, "No one can compete with a writer for mountainous inflations of ego and mouse-like insecurities of soul." Most people who are enthusiastic about writing know that the highs and the lows can both be so intense. When you've put 7-8 years of your life into a book like this, and at the end of it all a critic writes a 600-word review saying "this book should have been 200 pages shorter", do you feel like knocking his head off?

(Laughing) No, I think it's inevitable that some readers won’t have the patience for this structure. With reference to what you said earlier about finding the Insets problematic, I was quite conscious that somewhere along the way the book would lose readers who didn't want to stray far from the central storyline. But as an artist (and I don't mean to sound pompous), one has to try and make the vision in one's own head come together. In classical Sanskrit there's the concept of the reader who has the “same heart”, so to speak – and eventually, even if it takes years, the book will find such a reader somewhere. In the final analysis, maybe that reader is who one writes for.

Will you return to the small-book format after this?

At this point I'm not even thinking about it – I’m just taking a very determined holiday, including a sabbatical from teaching. I have no plans other than to indulge myself by reading whatever I want, watching all kinds of movies and bad television.

[Also see this excellent interview of Chandra by Sonia Faleiro, from much before the book's release.

And this essay by Chandra, "The Cult of Authenticity".

Sacred Games review here.]

Despair and nihilism in Bombay: Sacred Games

Around two-thirds of the way into Vikram Chandra's massive new novel, there's a passage that might help explain why the author has packed such a wealth of detail into this book. Sartaj Singh, the Sikh police inspector who first appeared in Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay, is trying to prevent a looming calamity, a possible nuclear plot. But he also has other, relatively minor cases to deal with on the side, and in a sense those are what sustain him through these difficult days. To escape his nightmares about sweeping fires and complete annihilation, to avoid being crippled by the larger picture, Sartaj tries to lose himself in the daily bustle of life. Stay with the details, he tells himself. The specifics are real. It was important, somehow, to care about Mrs Kamala Pandey and her sordid adultery and the chokra in the red T-shirt. He felt a loyalty to the ordinary, a sudden affection for her glossiness and her made-up face and her greed for glamour...

The subtext here is that to understand Sartaj Singh and this book’s other protagonist, the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, it's important to know about the quotidian details of their lives – and in some cases, of other lives they come into contact with. The specifics are crucial to a meaningful portrayal of their worlds, and Chandra thoroughly explores those specifics, even to the extent of including long asides about tangential characters.

The book-jacket description makes Sacred Games sound like a cat-and-mouse story between the cop and the gangster, but this is misleading: the only encounter between Sartaj and Gaitonde (or at least the only one where each knows the other) occurs very early on, and both men are weary and beaten down in different ways. Gaitonde, driven into a state of paranoia, has ensconced himself in a strange, cube-shaped building in Kailashpada. Sartaj is outside, waiting for him to surrender. They talk, banter; Gaitonde starts telling Sartaj stories from his early life. Shortly afterwards, the door to the building is mowed down and the inspector goes in to find that the gangster's long and bloody career has finally ended at his own hands.

(Note to "spoiler"-phobes: all this happens within the first two chapters, so relax.)

Sartaj carries on with his regular routine: investigating murder and blackmail cases, helping his boss ferry "unofficial earnings" to a consultant, visiting the widow and children of a constable who died during a stakeout – and then learning to his shock that the Gaitonde episode isn't quite over yet, that something bigger is afoot. Meanwhile, in a charming narrative device, Gaitonde continues speaking to Sartaj (and us) from beyond the grave, telling the story of his rise to power, his triumphs and failures.

Sacred Games is an account of the intersecting lives of the policemen and the underworld – their clashes, their interdependence, how their biggest decisions come from the demands of surviving in the big city. In many ways Sartaj and Ganesh are two sides of the same coin, and Chandra underscores this by drawing many parallels between them. Again, the little details are important: the image of a severed foot forms a crucial part of each man's memory of the 1993 bomb blasts; Sartaj hums "Mehbooba Mehbooba" to himself while driving, and a couple of pages later there's Gaitonde watching Sholay for a second time; on different occasions and in unrelated contexts we see them frequenting the same places; each man is haunted by apocalyptic visions and by lack of sleep.

The search for identity, the making and remaking of it, is vital to their stories. Sartaj is discomfited by memories of his upright father, who an old acquaintance matter-of-factly (and resignedly) describes as "the only honest policeman I've ever known". It's a long shadow and he can't escape it; when a woman meets him privately and tries to pay him to investigate a case, he puts on an indignant front, threatens to arrest her for bribing a policeman – but his instinctive reaction on seeing the money is to snap, "Listen, this isn't enough!"

Gaitonde, on the other hand, is constantly redefining himself, or allowing himself to be redefined. When we hear about him in the third person, he is described as a "Hindu don", but the man we meet in his own narratives is initially indifferent to, or outright contemptuous of, the barriers people set up for themselves. (In a telling passage involving a young girl being forced into marriage against her will, he muses: I would have broken all their smug, snug heads open, if only that would have made any difference. But custom floats between men and women, it hides in the stomachs of children and escapes and expands and vanishes in every breath, you cannot kill it, you can only suffer it.)

But he accepts the mantle of Krishna bhakt and Hindu don as an exercise in image-building, and gradually comes to believe in his own legend. All gifts are betrayals, he reflects, Nothing is given to us without something larger being taken away...becoming Ganesh Gaitonde the Hindu bhai was itself an act of murder, it was the murder of a thousand and one other selves.

At one level, Sacred Games is a fast-paced thriller driven by conversation and incident (this aspect is stressed by the delightfully lurid cover, complete with gaudy title font and portraits of Gaitonde and Sartaj that bleed into each other, the faces sharing a common eye). But running between the pages of this book is another, more thoughtful, more cynical narrative about the nature of identity, and the endless and unknowable workings of action and reaction. This second book is driven by the characters' interior lives, their attempts to make some sense of their world, and their inherent nihilism.

Chandra's research and writing, his feel for his characters, are as assured as ever, and I particularly enjoyed the throwaway humour: like Gaitonde offhandedly mentioning that he and his boys used the code word "Iftekar" for policemen, the wickedly funny scene where a principled scriptwriter is corrupted by two 17-year-old Thai girls, another vignette involving a cantankerous old movie reviewer who trashes the film Gaitonde produces. (Chandra takes a few digs at members of his own profession, mainly in the form of writers taking themselves too seriously.)

But reading a book of this size, it's always possible to wonder how much detail is too much – and, conversely, how much can ever be enough. As Hurree babu points out in this column, the really large books make a very particular set of demands on the reader. You have to struggle with the things for days, move through chunks of 60 or 70 pages at a time, live with a set of characters for a long time. Muscles get sprained, the physical and mental investments made are big ones – and so, when such a book turns to be merely good rather than spectacular, the reward doesn't seem commensurate with the effort.

Despite being a reasonably patient reader, and someone who does this for a living, I felt this way at times with Sacred Games. Nearly all the bits that dealt directly with Sartaj or Ganesh are compelling – one exception being Gaitonde's spiritual odyssey, which is as tedious as similar passages in Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldier – but the four "Insets", which add up to around 150 pages, are more problematic. Some of the material here, taken on its own terms, is as good as anything the author has done before – notably a flashback to the early life of Sartaj's mother, who lost her elder sister in Partition riots. But I was never convinced that it all belongs in this book.

When you have two characters as interesting as Gaitonde and Sartaj, you don't want to spend so much time away from them. Pared down, Sacred Games could have been a great 700-page, or maybe even 600-page, book. Whether it would have remained the very ambitious book Chandra set out to write is another matter entirely. (Given how meticulous he is, how many stories he has to tell and the number of years he's spent working on this, would even a 1200-pager have sufficed? Where does one stop when one sets out to write an epic?) In its current form it's a good enough read, with much that's rewarding and some bits that feel extraneous. I’m not sure that will be enough to satisfy the casual reader, say someone who gets through 15-20 books in a year and expects all of them to be paisa-vasool, as well as time-and-energy vasool. (My mom, who normally rejects anything that’s denser than Paulo Coelho, has finished Shantaram after months of effort, but that’s only because she’s in love with Gregory David Roberts.)