{"id":27751,"date":"2014-02-01T20:15:07","date_gmt":"2014-02-02T01:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=27751"},"modified":"2014-02-03T13:49:52","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T18:49:52","slug":"an-eight-hundred-and-twenty-five-second-interview-with-reclusive-author-vikram-seth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=27751","title":{"rendered":"An Eight Hundred and Twenty-Five Second Long Interview with Reclusive Author Vikram Seth"},"content":{"rendered":"

by<\/p>\n

Smriti Daniel<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"At<\/a>

At Taprobane last week: Vikram Seth<\/p><\/div>\n

What do you say to a man who has kept you waiting for five years? Before us stands author and poet Vikram Seth; shirt open to the waist, hair tousled by hands and breeze, he\u2019s uncertain of who we are and why we have come to intrude on him. I\u2019m wet from the hips down, having waded through the waters that encircle the little island of Taprobane, but my recorder is dry and my notebook is open.<\/p>\n

I know enough not to take this interview for granted \u2013 the last time Vikram was in Sri Lanka for the Galle Literary Festival it was 2008 and he wasn\u2019t speaking to journalists. This time he says he will spare me five minutes \u2013 I negotiate for 10 and eventually receive 13:45 \u2013 but there is still some material from a reading and short conversation to be mined and in the end, it is just enough.
\n
\nJust over a month ago, Vikram was on the cover of the magazine India Today, holding a board that said: \u2018I am not a criminal\u2019. Inside, in a brief, yet deeply moving essay, he argued against the now notorious Section 377 of India\u2019s penal code and for everyone\u2019s right to love \u2013 regardless of caste, creed or sex. It was a rare political statement from a writer who seldom invests his clout in popular causes. Now, he responds to a compliment on it with: \u201cThank you, well, I didn\u2019t quite throw the weight of my influence behind it, rather it was the weight of my feeling. While I do my work, so to speak, through my books, I do feel a writer is also a citizen and just like anyone else has views on various subjects. If I feel strongly enough, I express those views.\u201d It\u2019s just that when Vikram Seth has something to say, the world takes notice.<\/p>\n

In person, Vikram is small-made and wild-haired, he smiles readily and is courteous in the way few famous people are \u2013 he asks and then remembers my name and speaks easily to the small group of fans gathered at the Serendipity Coast \u2018mini-literary festival.\u2019 Vikram\u2019s friend, Geoffrey Dobbs, is our host and moderator. Ostensibly, we are here to talk about the author\u2019s new book. The much anticipated sequel to his most famous novel, \u2018A Suitable Girl\u2019 has already been making headlines though fans won\u2019t see it for at least another two years.<\/p>\n

Published in 1993, \u2018A Suitable Boy\u2019 opens with a memorable summary of the book: \u201c\u2018You too will marry a boy I choose,\u2019 said Mrs.Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.\u201d In between this beginning at the wedding of Lata\u2019s elder sister Savita and the end, where Lata celebrates her own nuptials, Vikram covered an extraordinary amount of ground. He staged a madly ambitious portrait of post-colonial India on the brink of its first general election. With no common enemy to spur them on, an entire subcontinent was engaged in the fraught, messy business of knitting together a national identity out of a multiplicity of religions, languages and ethnicities.<\/p>\n

The novel took for its subject matter the politics of a great man and the manoeuvring of a matriarch; becoming an epic narrative that weighed equally the account of India\u2019s infancy and the angst of a young girl in love. At 1349 pages, it was famously the longest ever written in the English language. Not surprisingly,writing it consumed nearly a decade of the author\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Now, 60 years down, Lata is in her eighties. \u201cShe\u2019s looking back on a full life, with all its ups and down, and also 60 years in the life of a country. She\u2019s also looking forward, life doesn\u2019t end at 80,\u201d he says, \u201cyou can face in both directions.\u201dVikram will not reveal anything more specific \u2013 his characters he says, are shy, even recalcitrant. He is more willing to talk context and setting. To write \u2018A Suitable Bwoy\u2019 Vikram spent a great deal of time interviewing, travelling and researching the period in order to get the minutest of details right \u2013 for instance, where did people leave their shoes when theyvisited a courtesan or how often. All India Radio broadcast bulletins in a day.<\/p>\n

His research for this novel will be of a different order altogether: \u201cit is complicated by the fact that \u2018A Suitable Girl\u2019 is set in the present and so in a sense, everything that is happening around me is at the risk of being grist \u2013 even this interview,\u201d he says, adding \u201cyou have to get your facts right. If you don\u2019t, people stop believing in the book, in a funny way.\u201d The writing of this book too is slow going. Vikram is likely to collect all his research and then write in one continuous stretch, a single arc; revising it only upon completion of a first draft.<\/p>\n

In fact, we\u2019re lucky to see him at all \u2013 in the throes of a writing jag he\u2019s said to become conspicuously reclusive. After all, a significant chunk of his thirties were spent locked up in his parents\u2019 home in Delhi, writing furiously and seeing few people as \u2018A Suitable Boy\u2019 took shape. (His mother, India\u2019s first female Chief Justice, says she saw his father, a successful entrepreneur dubbed \u2018Mr.Shoe\u2019 after his product, in the character of Lata\u2019s suitor Haresh.)With his \u00a3250,000 advance for that book, Vikram promised to keep his father stocked in whiskey \u2013 their choice of nightcap through those years. Unfortunately, his advance for \u2018A Suitable Girl\u2019 \u2013 a princely $1.7 million \u2013 was not destined to be spent as pleasurably.<\/p>\n

When the author failed to conform to his publisher\u2019s schedule (which would have had the sequel in bookstores last year to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the book) they demanded their money back. Dismissing it as a \u201cglitch,\u201d Vikram says \u201cbooks take their time. The publisher wanted me to deliver \u2013 chop, chop \u2013 on the date.\u201dWhere publishing that first book was risk, the hoopla surrounding this novel guarantees sales. Still, Vikram says the prospect of publishing it remains daunting. \u201cYou can submit any bullshit (? Ok), and people will publish it now. You have to have an inbuilt detector to judge its quality\u2026one has to go not by sales but whether the book is worth killing trees for.\u201dWrapping up our interview he says he will spend the coming months engaged in fierce activism on the Section 377 issue while he travels about the sub-continent \u2013 the latter, he feels, he \u201cowes to the Girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such is Vikram\u2019s fame that one often forgets he\u2019s only ever written three other novels. Many of his most dedicated fans obsess not over Vikram\u2019s prose but his poetry. He hasn\u2019t released a new collection in 14 years \u2013but promises that there may be one within a year or two from now. Who can be certain though what form it will take?<\/p>\n

Here is a man whose oeuvre of 13 publications includes a travelogue about hitchhiking through Tibet (\u2018From Heaven Lake\u2019); a critically acclaimed novel in verse about San Francisco written while completing a PhD in economics at Stanford (\u2018The Golden Gate\u2019); a collection of 10 hilarious fables in verse for children (\u2018Beastly Tales\u2019) and a collection, published a year later of Tang poetry from Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu, translated from Mandarin into English (\u2018Three Chinese Poets\u2019). Most recently,Vikram penned a libretti composed of 4 texts inspired variously by theChinese, the European and the Indian civilisations and the elements in nature (\u2018The Rivered Earth\u2019).<\/p>\n

\u201cMy publishers tell me what I suffer from is brand disintegration,\u201d he says later as his session is underway. Pointing to the likes of Agatha Christie or Dick Francis, he says, \u201cPeople know what kind of stuff you\u2019re going to write and then you produce it for them and they\u2019re happy and your publisher is happy and presumably you\u2019re happy, but the muse, ah, the muse may not be happy. The muse is not amused,\u201d wincing at the joke, he blames it on his arrack sour. (The cocktail is clearly a hit. As part of his reading, he shares an acrostic written in honour of Taprobane in which it features prominently: \u2018The sunset hour\/an arrack sour\/ pourspeace on pain,\/ringed by the lights\/of a full moon night,\/books wax and wane,\/as from afar\/no unkind star\/eyes Taprobane.\u2019)<\/p>\n

His other choice of readings that evening are taken from \u2018The Rivered Earth\u2019 and inspired by his new home \u2013 a rectory in Salisbury that once belonged to the 17th-century metaphysical poet George Herbert. In his elegant tones, he recites from memory Herbert\u2019s poem \u2018Love (III)\u2019 \u2013 \u201cLove bade me welcome \u2026\u201d \u2013 before responding with, \u2018Host,\u2019his poem in which he thanks the poet for standing \u2018just out of mind and sight, \/ that I may sit and write.\u2019<\/p>\n

Such is the intimacy Vikram has shared with his readers through the years that his reading immediately brings to mind an old, favoured poem. In\u2018Homeless,\u2019 the author spoke of envying those \u2018who have a house of their own,\/ who can say their feet\/ rest on what is theirs alone.\u2019 A request and he is willing to recite it once more for a crowd that bursts into applause as he, eyes closed, brings the session to a finish.It is difficult to explain that sense of having celebrated the blessings in a stranger\u2019s life but perhaps, dear reader, you understand anyway. As Vikram stands up, he is immediately surrounded by people wishing for a word with him. However unlikely it may seem, we feel we know him well. And in that moment, he reciprocates the sentiment, and stands chatting for longer than he must.<\/p>\n

COURTESY: SUNDAY TIMES<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Smriti Daniel What do you say to a man who has kept you waiting for five years? Before us stands author and poet Vikram Seth; shirt open to the waist, hair tousled by hands and breeze, he\u2019s uncertain of who we are and why we have come to intrude on him. I\u2019m wet from …<\/p>\n

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