Golden Age crime, contd: Death from a Top Hat

When I saw that Clayton Rawson’s 1938 novel Death from a Top Hat – one of the best-regarded locked-room mysteries of its time – was available online at a not terribly inflated price, I ordered it immediately. I knew I was taking a slight risk – a few of the reviews I had looked through, including on blogs run by Golden Age Crime Fiction experts, suggested that this book’s reputation was inflated, or that it didn’t hold up so well when read today. Or that it was a little convoluted or esoteric (which was plausible, given that the narrative is populated by professional and amateur magicians – including the main sleuth, The Great Merlini – and other specialists in the arcane arts).

Anyway, I finished it yesterday and am glad I bought it. Apart from its quality as a whodunit (and a howdunit), I knew within a few pages that I was going to enjoy it purely at the prose level. The narrator, a freelance writer named Harte, starts by mentioning an essay he is writing on the “modern detective story”, which we read excerpts of: with a listing of famous fictional sleuths – from Poe’s Auguste Dupin to the present day, i.e. the 1930s – as well as murder methods. But then he is interrupted by noises coming from the hallway outside, and discovers three strange people and one dead body. A man has been murdered in the opposite apartment… in a locked-room situation.

Much of the fun in the ensuing chapters comes from the banter between Merlini, brought in to investigate (it helps that he is professionally acquainted with some of the suspects), and the police chief Gavigan (who is no mug himself – definitely not the caricature of the over-confident cop who exists only to be a foil to the genius detective). Along with the narrator, they puzzle over alibis and motives – and, of course, methods, given the puzzling nature of the crime setting – but their speculations are soon complicated by a second murder. And so it goes.

Along the way there are snippets of information about conjurors, their tricks, and the history of the profession. There are amusing footnotes, not imperative to the plot. Gavigan rolls his eyes in despair whenever Merlini gets a little pedantic or goes into a mystical-sounding explanation. One chapter, a discussion of impossible-crime methods, specifically cites the "Locked-Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, which had been published just three years before this book.

There are some enjoyable chapter-ending cliff-hangers too (including funny ones), and a neat little mystery-within-the-larger-mystery, involving the disappearance of a man from a taxi after he had been seen getting in. And as for the final solution – I liked it a lot, and I thought Rawson had practised the fine art of misdirection well enough that it was rewarding to go back to the earlier chapters to see what one had missed the first time.

So this is well recommended, for the fluidity of the writing, and the humour, as well as for the mystery. (The second half of the book does sag a bit in places, but picks up quickly enough.) I’m told that Rawson’s short stories are very good too – I have a couple of them in anthologies, and will get around to them soon. 

(Another recent Golden Age crime post is here)

Catching up with AKB

A very pleasing encounter at Kunzum, Greater Kailash-2, a few days ago: I met AK Bhattacharya (or AKB as we always refer to him), the Business Standard editorial director, after what must have been 15 years. From this person flowed many of the kindnesses that enabled me to get started on a freelance career in 2006. He was the big boss who made me the offer I couldn’t refuse - a retainership with Business Standard that would allow me to work independently and write for others - but even before that, at a more personal and friendly level, he had been very encouraging about my blog and would often come by my desk to mention a post he had liked (or something he wanted to correct me about, mainly pertaining to Satyajit Ray). Given the big hierarchical gap between us in office, such interactions were unusual, but he pulled them off warmly and without fuss - and he greeted me much the same way at the bookshop yesterday (where I also got my signed copy of his new book about India’s finance ministers between 1947-77).

Great to see him looking as fit and spry as I remembered, and to find that he often uses the metro for traveling (something that many of the much younger people I know regard with disdain, as if it lowers their status or some such). We’ll catch up again soon, possibly in his lair, the Business Standard office...

On being asked to write for no payment (vs choosing to write for no payment)

 [Wrote this on Facebook a few days ago, thought I'd put it here as well]

A rant I wouldn't normally put here, but since I sometimes get writing offers from people whom I am connected with on social media, here goes: 

 

1) Preferably, don’t mail me asking me to write for free. But since I understand that that’s an unrealistic request, 

2) if you must do this, avoid prefacing the mail with effusive praise – “I love your work”, “I have read Jabberwock every week since I was eight months old”, “It will be an honour to have you write for us” etc etc. It rings false, to say the least.

 

To clarify, I have no delusions about my “standing” as a writer, and I know things change very quickly (the fact that the blog was widely read 15 years ago, or that a book was well-received and awarded 5 years ago, doesn’t make up for the fact that in the past few years I have had a low profile and haven’t been writing as regularly as I once did). But when someone goes out of their way to praise my work and commission a piece, and then makes it clear that they don’t expect me to leave the slightest smudge on their balance sheet, that is a very mixed message.

 

Of course, the fact that writers are under-paid – or expected to work pro-bono to a greater degree than most other professions – isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a surprise to anyone. I have written/ranted about various aspects of this before (including the experience of being on the other side of the fence, working for a publication, commissioning pieces from other writers…and hearing my boss say things like “But, but it’s just a book review. Why should we pay more than 4 a word? And anyway, they get a FREE BOOK!”)** 

 

The stories are endless, and each new experience feels subtly and demeaningly different even as it boils down to “You work, we don’t pay.” The reasons can range from “We are a small, independent publication, we can’t afford to pay at this stage” (this is a position I have basic sympathy for, even when I can’t make the commitment) to the latest one I received just a few days ago: “This is an old and incredibly prestigious journal, so I hope that will compensate.”

 

The practical aspect of not being paid for one’s time and effort apart, here’s something I have realised only in the past 3-4 years: these experiences have, over a period of time, seriously eroded my confidence and self-worth as a writer. They create a situation where I find it very hard to negotiate when discussing a new piece or column. More than once in the past few years, I have felt astonished at the confidence of independent-writer friends who blithely say that they ask for Rs 12 to 15 a word (or whatever) when approached for a piece. 

 

And now, inevitably, a caveat: what makes this whole thing complicated (and I’m sure many other writers will relate to this) is that every once in a while there is an offer for an unpaid/low-paid piece that genuinely turns out to be worth my while. It might be because of the “prestige” or “visibility” (though these factors are less important to me now than they were 10-15 years ago.) Or more likely, because it pushes me to do some writing I had been procrastinating on and probably wouldn't have had the motivation to begin otherwise... writing that can acquire a new life or become the seed for something more elaborate down the line. Or, well, because it is a relatively painless piece to write and helps me get something off the bucket list (e.g. being published in Sportstar, with my byline on the same contents page as Sachin Tendulkar’s).

 

As anyone who has spoken with me about my first book knows, I lost money on that one (even though it went on to be moderately successful by the low standards of non-celebrity-authored cinema books): the author's fee was such a joke that it didn't even cover the cost of traveling to Bombay a couple of times to interview the Jaane bhi do Yaaro crew. However, this wasn’t an issue for me at the time; I weighed the pros and cons and decided it was worth it. There was the adrenaline rush of working on a book on a subject that was challenging and stimulating and would give me a chance to do some long-form journalistic work in a field I wanted to stretch myself in. And since I had a couple of decent retainerships at the time, I barely thought about the money.

 

Such considerations change over time, but another, more recent example: the only substantial writing I did in the first half of this year – including the lockdown months – was a long essay commissioned for a book. No mention of payment was made at the time of commissioning, and I went with the assumption that there would be none. (Or that it would be a token amount which wouldn’t be remotely commensurate with the effort I intended to put in.) But I volunteered to do it, because 1) I wanted to be in this book, which was being edited by someone I respect, 2) I had a good feeling about this piece; I saw it as a pretext to get some personal writing done – involving my mother, and certain important events of the past – and to start looking through my 1990s diaries for material and to excavate memories. And it turned out that way: though I laboured over the essay for many weeks – lots of stops and starts and teeth-gnashing – the final thing was quite close to what I had intended to write, and that rarely happens. Right now it feels like seeing that essay in a well-produced book (whenever this happens) will be a large and pleasing cherry on what is an already-substantial cake.

 

Another, smaller essay I wrote a few months ago for another book was also un-paid for (the book being a “labour of love”, as if love and money are incompatible). But I did it because the topic is close to my heart, I had already begun some unstructured writing about it for myself, and I expect to spin it into something larger in the near future. 

 

Most writers will have similar stories about choosing, or agreeing to, such an assignment (with a few misgivings maybe) for one reason or another. But that’s a very different matter from a publication reaching out to a writer, gushing about their work, and then either specifying upfront that they can’t pay, or (and this happens infuriatingly often) sending mail after mail with details about the expected structure and content and deadline, but not even alluding to payment, as if it couldn’t possibly be a consideration – until the writer is forced to swallow his pride and gently touch on the subject. (Whereupon the hedging and excuse-making begins.)

 

(** I contributed related thoughts to the book Everything You Wanted to Know About Freelance Journalism back in 2013. Can share with anyone who’s interested.)

Rooms, private traps: on living with, and growing away from, a parent

[Re-posting this piece I wrote for Indian Quarterly magazine early last year, about my relationship with my mother — a genuinely close one but also one that had involved very little “casual" talk in recent years. And how that came to be tested when a special situation — her cancer diagnosis — arose in July 2016]

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

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”
(Terse summary on the back cover of Emma Donoghue’s Room)

****

The last film I watched with my mother in a movie hall was the 2015 Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Two things about that sentence. First: our last film. That sounds bleak and final, and I hope there will be more to come, but at the time of writing there is more reason to be cautious than optimistic.

Second: it wasn’t just the last film we saw together in a hall, it was also the last film we saw together, period. And I can’t think of the last time we saw a whole film together in a more casual, everyday situation, just sitting in front of a TV set while chatting.

But I’ll return to these points.

Here’s how Room became that film. Years ago, before I had read the Donoghue or even known exactly what it was about, I realised that my mother had developed an attachment to it. The novel sat prominently for months on the table where she selected and stacked books that had come to me from various publishers, and whose titles or synopses -- or  jacket covers -- she  had found intriguing. The great majority of those books were abandoned after a few pages when she found they weren’t up her street, but Room she finished, over many sessions of sporadic reading: putting the book down after a few pages, returning to it between her dalliances with less demanding things such as movie magazines.

It wasn’t until I heard about the upcoming film version, and read plot details online, that I learnt what Room was about. And then, knowing that the film was going to show in Delhi and that mum might like to see it, I read the novel myself as preparation, and found myself thinking anew about what she might have found so compelling.

Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life with his mother in a single small room where she has been kept captive since being kidnapped as a teenager. Here are two people who have been victims of a terrible, ongoing crime -- one  of them in full possession of the facts, nurturing and guarding and making up stories for the other, who is still innocent and unaware that there is a life and a world beyond the tiny space he has known all his short life.

This is, needless to say, an extraordinary narrative situation. The broad premise, and what occurs within it, might be considered unrealistic -- or  at least, very improbable -- but  it also contains an allegory for aspects of a more “normal” mother-child relationship, especially a close one that involves a great deal of mutual interdependence. First there is the womb, a safe space from which the child must eventually be ejected to discover the outside world; and then, in that outside world, there is a still larger “room”, the sheltering one of parenthood, which this infant will stay encased in for at least a few years. Simultaneously the parent must prepare to “free” herself from the belief -- with  its attendant agonies and ecstasies -- that  she alone can walk her child through life.

Did my mother think about any of this when she became so involved with the book? I don’t know, I haven’t asked her (and I won’t), but even if she had, it would probably have been in a subconscious way; she wouldn’t have articulated these thoughts like I just did, all pedantic and reviewer-like. More than a tendency to intellectualise, she has always had what I think of as an intuitive, commonsense wisdom. (The only "literary" observation she made to me about the novel was that she had been first taken aback and disoriented, then gradually fascinated, by Jack’s fumbling first-person narrative; it took her a while to see that the reader was meant to understand more about the situation than the narrator himself did.)

Still, I wonder if she thought about my childhood.

******

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”

Jai is eight. He and his mother stay locked up in a room at the end of the house, down the hall -- not  all the time, but on days when things are especially bad at home; when the big bad wolf huffs and puffs and threatens to blow the door down.

We were always exceptionally close. She was my life-raft on a sea of uncertainty, at an age when I barely knew enough to be certain or uncertain about anything; a shield not just from my father’s unpredictable, alcohol-fuelled violence but also -- and this I realised only much later -- from  the possibility of my becoming over-pampered, turned into a privileged lout, by well-off grandparents trying too hard to compensate for their son’s behaviour.

I don’t want to get too dramatic about this: our lives were never close to being as bad as those of Room’s protagonists. The terrifying memories -- of  my father hammering on a locked door, or overturning a huge, heaped dining table with unfathomable strength, or physically assaulting a Sikh priest who was reading from the Granth Sahib during an akhand paath in our house -- intersect with other memories of going to school; going (once in a while) to friends’ parties; of mum taking up a part-time job as a doctor’s receptionist when she found that her monthly pocket money wasn’t enough (and maybe that she needed to feel useful). But the bad memories are always there too, and aspects of our life certainly felt horror film-ish -- the  many times we had to sneak out when it got dark, for instance, and spend a scared night at a neighbour’s place, or in the maid’s quarters behind the house.

And yes, ultimately, there is no undramatic way of putting this, we did "escape". Aided by the confidence we had in our relationship, and the rock-solid support of my mother’s widowed mother, who -- her own troubles notwithstanding -- took  us in hand when she realised that things had gone out of control. After a mercifully brief custody battle, we ended up living together in a then-very-green-and-quiet south Delhi colony called Saket, which means “heaven”. (But I won’t underline that. Mustn’t get too dramatic.)

*****

A few years after this, my interest in cinema as something one could think about, read in depth about, perhaps even write professionally about one day, began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the reservoirs of film literature it led me to. By this point my mother and I were leading secure enough lives that it was possible to smile at the film’s macabre Oedipal theme. Mum (or Amma as I have always called her for some reason, late as it is in this piece to reveal such a central piece of information) told me how, in the early 1960s when the film released in Bombay, her brother came home and solemnly informed their mother that he would like to have her “mummified” after she had passed on.

(“Needles, sawdust… the chemicals are the only things that cost anything,” Norman Bates says, explaining the practicalities of taxidermy; a horror-movie monster, yes, but also someone who knows what it is like to be so close to and so dependent on a parent that you want to keep their physical presence with you “forever”.)

Despite the emotional security that had come with leaving my father’s house, I was cripplingly shy, prone to melancholia and loneliness. And watching it when I did, Psycho touched something deep in me. I found sadness in it, in scenes like the one where Norman responds to the insinuation that he and his mother might have been looking for money to leave their motel and start a new life elsewhere. “This place happens to be my only world,” he says, “I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood.” He sounds defiant. “My mother and I were more than happy.”

Perhaps on some level, without being able to express it this way at age 14, I was instinctively realising how close I had come to leading the trapped, circumscribed life that Norman and his dead mother do. But then, as he says in the film’s most moving sequence, a long conversation with a conflicted young woman who has “gotten off the main road”, we are all clamped in our private traps anyway -- even  when we seem free. “We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other.”

*******

Imprisonment, Dependence, Liberation, Self-discovery, Stagnation… those are some big themes, and despite my professed reluctance to get dramatic, I can’t help returning to them. And it isn’t just by chance that I have been talking about two films that involve very intense mother-son relationships and the very unusual situations in which those relationships grow, ossify or decay. I have in recent years become aware of a glitch in my relationship with my mother. Put briefly: it seems that our closeness has almost always been founded on big things -- the Important and the Dramatic -- and not enough on the minutiae of life; the Casual, the Mundane.

From the beginning we always shared the really important stuff, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends -- even  the ones from the seemingly open-minded, cosmopolitan families -- routinely  hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette. When I took my girlfriend -- a young woman in an unhappy marriage, on the brink of separation -- across to meet my mother for the first time, I felt none of the nervousness that most other young people I knew would feel in that situation. It was the most natural thing to do.

And this flowed from how things had always been between us, from my mother’s own openness. When I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, she told me about the marriage proposal she had got from an uncle, a childhood friend who had always held a torch for her, and how she had been very tempted but didn’t take it up because it would mean relocating to Lagos, too large a bridge for us to cross at that point in our lives. On another occasion, when the husband of one of her neighbourhood friends made a sexual overture -- figuring that a divorced woman was easy pickings -- I was the first to hear of it, and to be privy to her shock as well as her fear that she may have brought it upon herself by bantering with him at social gatherings.

Taking as much pride as I did in this candour, it took me a long time to discover that I may be undervaluing other sorts of conversations and interactions: the small talk that keeps people going day by day; the sort of behaviour that introverts sometimes dismiss as flippant or inconsequential, but which in its own way brings nourishment and meaning to a relationship over time. Casual chatter and gossip are ways of ventilating the heart, an old grandmother says in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries. In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning, when a little boy tells his parents that he’s fed up of their polite, vacuous conversation -- the  repeated “good mornings” and “how are yous”, which seem vacuous or hypocritical -- one  of them responds that such talk is essential: “It's a lubricant for the world.”

My mother and I never quite learnt these lessons -- or perhaps we knew them once and gradually became careless about them. Partly this was a personality matter -- both  of us being, to different degrees, very private people -- and partly a result of circumstances; for many years while growing up I was intimidated by my nani’s boisterous personality and kept to my room while she was around. But it also reflects the growing-away-from-a-parent process that everyone (except, maybe, a Norman Bates) goes through.

The second half of Donoghue’s Room is made sharply poignant by the mother’s realisation that her son will never again be as dependent on her as he was during their years of incarceration. I have never really lived away from my mother -- even after getting married and shifting to another flat in the same colony, I continued spending my working day as a freelance writer in my old room, my comfort zone, in her house. But like most children do, I moved away in other ways: into new worlds populated by new friends, into a job and the circles it introduced me to, but also into my own inner spaces.

There was a time, long ago, when we played Scrabble together, or watched TV shows together, in the first years after satellite TV came to India. This gradually stopped. As I became embarrassed by the tackiness of some of the Hindi films we rented and watched on videocassette every Friday, I started lingering about outside the room where mum and nani were watching the film -- and shortly afterwards, I moved away from Hindi cinema altogether, and into new realms that excluded my mother. One thing followed another, and casual conversation became increasingly hard; we rarely even sat down and had meals together. Despite living in the same house, we became… not estranged, but something else -- something I don’t know the word for.

Can a relationship that is really, really close in essence also be distant and awkward in some important contexts? And when a new sort of special situation comes around -- one  that demands an everyday intimacy -- what then?

********

I have had to think about these things ever since the day last July when I sat down to talk with mum about what I thought would be a relatively mundane medical issue -- her  lingering discomfort and back pain, which I’d assumed was an offshoot of an old kidney condition, worsened by many years of self-medicating -- and she told me, all matter of fact, “No, it isn’t the kidney. It’s breast cancer. I have had it for a while, so it’s probably quite advanced by now.”

World-altering though that moment was, it’s almost funny when I think of it now. The fan whirring above us. A reality show playing on low volume in the background. Me, having come into her room, knowing her aversion to doctors and hospitals, with a speech carefully prepared to put her at ease (“We’ll go once, it’ll take just 10 minutes, you can tell them what medicines you’ve been taking, they’ll tell us if there’s something else you should be doing, and that’s it... you don’t have to agree to any intrusive procedures or examinations if you aren’t comfortable”), the deadpan look on her face as I recited the first two or three sentences of that speech -- as casually as I could, looking around as I said the words, at the dog, at the TV, so she wouldn’t think I was arm-twisting her -- and then her interrupting me with her grand revelation: oh no, this is the start of something much bigger than you think.

Another case of what should have been a quotidian exchange turning into something larger than life, like old Hindi movies about terminally ill patients. Another demonstration that the ‘Casual’ switch is jammed when it comes to the two of us.

In the weeks that followed -- a fortnight-long hospital stint precipitated by a worried-looking oncologist saying “Can we admit her right now? It’s important”; the realization that my mother, with her ridiculously high pain threshold, had a cancer-caused crack in her spine, which had to be mended before anything else could be done; the days and nights divided between handling things in the hospital and looking after our high-strung canine child Lara, who had been completely dependent on mum; watching the deterioration and immobilization of a woman who, to my eyes at least, had seemed in decent shape for her 63 years just a few weeks earlier, certainly capable of living alone -- through  all this and more, I had plenty of time to wonder how it had come to this: how a mother whom I saw every day had been diagnosed so late that the disease was almost certainly incurable; why it had to be her closest friend, an aunt who lived downstairs, who alerted me with a couple of phone calls to say that mum was in so much pain late at night that she had -- and  this was the biggest red light of all -- been unable to feed Lara.

And, naturally, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had spent more “casual” time with her in the previous few months -- even sitting around in the evenings in her room for 15-20 minutes each day while she watched TV or listened to music -- I would have been more alert to the little signs, the displays of pain that she had kept hidden.

*****

One side-effect of mum’s chemotherapy is that it has made her sentimental about little things, and at unexpected times. One day, apropos of nothing, she asked if I would massage her aching shoulder for a bit -- and then, smiling, squeezing my hand, told her nurse that I had “the healing touch”. And I winced. Only momentarily, but I couldn’t help it; this overt display of closeness and affection was discomfiting.

Visiting the toy store Hamleys with a friend and his little daughter the next day, I idly glanced at art-and-craft games that I thought might be useful for mum -- not so much to pass the time but to keep her mind active, since people with lesions in the brain, and risk of seizures or mental atrophy, need to do this. Soon I realised that I was looking mainly at the one-person activities. Given that I had flexible working hours, which I mostly spent in her house, shouldn’t I have made an effort to find something we could share, if only for a few minutes each day? Was I nervous about the small talk that would inevitably accompany such a joint endeavour? Or was I afraid that such proximity would make me privy to the involuntary groans of pain that came from her when she moved her shoulder or back at an awkward angle? And in either case, what did that say about me -- “such a good, dutiful son”, as I am often called by visitors to the house?

But even with the knowledge that time may be running out and every day is precious, how do you suddenly begin doing the things you haven’t been accustomed to doing for years? How do you force yourself to sit down and chat about “trivial” or “inconsequential” things, or just play Scrabble, with a parent-patient who might need a psychological boost, when the two of you have long fallen out of that habit and become locked in your own little boxes?

Inevitably, given the situation, the bulk of our interactions are about urgent and important things: I walk into her room at fixed intervals to check on her medicine intake and her meals, to confirm a blood-sample appointment, to discuss contacting a new nursing agency when the current one raises its fees. But I’m also making efforts now -- small, self-conscious, not very successful ones -- to turns things around: to chat with her about the currency situation, or banter about whether her post-cancer wig is more convincing than Donald Trump’s real hair, or show her a joke someone had shared on Facebook.

Still confined to our own rooms. Stuck in private traps. But trying.

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

[An earlier post about caregiving is here. And here is my long essay about Hindi-movie mothers for a Zubaan anthology]

Rooms and private traps: on living with (and growing away from) a parent

[Did a version of this personal piece for Indian Quarterly's "Family" issue -- about my mother, and some thoughts that have been running through my mind since she was diagnosed with metastatic cancer six months ago. Needless to say, such a piece will always feel hopelessly inadequate and even pointless. I have multiple other versions of it in my head, most of them twenty times longer, which will never be written; for now, this will have to do]

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

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”
(Terse summary on the back cover of Emma Donoghue’s Room)

****

The last film I watched with my mother in a movie hall was the 2015 Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Two things about that sentence. First: our last film. That sounds bleak and final, and I hope there will be more to come, but at the time of writing there is more reason to be cautious than optimistic.

Second: it wasn’t just the last film we saw together in a hall, it was also the last film we saw together, period. And I can’t think of the last time we saw a whole film together in a more casual, everyday situation, just sitting in front of a TV set while chatting.

But I’ll return to these points.

Here’s how Room became that film. Years ago, before I had read the Donoghue or even known exactly what it was about, I realised that my mother had developed an attachment to it. The novel sat prominently for months on the table where she selected and stacked books that had come to me from various publishers, and whose titles or synopses -- or  jacket covers -- she  had found intriguing. The great majority of those books were abandoned after a few pages when she found they weren’t up her street, but Room she finished, over many sessions of sporadic reading: putting the book down after a few pages, returning to it between her dalliances with less demanding things such as movie magazines.

It wasn’t until I heard about the upcoming film version, and read plot details online, that I learnt what Room was about. And then, knowing that the film was going to show in Delhi and that mum might like to see it, I read the novel myself as preparation, and found myself thinking anew about what she might have found so compelling.

Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life with his mother in a single small room where she has been kept captive since being kidnapped as a teenager. Here are two people who have been victims of a terrible, ongoing crime -- one  of them in full possession of the facts, nurturing and guarding and making up stories for the other, who is still innocent and unaware that there is a life and a world beyond the tiny space he has known all his short life.

This is, needless to say, an extraordinary narrative situation. The broad premise, and what occurs within it, might be considered unrealistic -- or  at least, very improbable -- but  it also contains an allegory for aspects of a more “normal” mother-child relationship, especially a close one that involves a great deal of mutual interdependence. First there is the womb, a safe space from which the child must eventually be ejected to discover the outside world; and then, in that outside world, there is a still larger “room”, the sheltering one of parenthood, which this infant will stay encased in for at least a few years. Simultaneously the parent must prepare to “free” herself from the belief -- with  its attendant agonies and ecstasies -- that  she alone can walk her child through life.

Did my mother think about any of this when she became so involved with the book? I don’t know, I haven’t asked her (and I won’t), but even if she had, it would probably have been in a subconscious way; she wouldn’t have articulated these thoughts like I just did, all pedantic and reviewer-like. More than a tendency to intellectualise, she has always had what I think of as an intuitive, commonsense wisdom. (The only "literary" observation she made to me about the novel was that she had been first taken aback and disoriented, then gradually fascinated, by Jack’s fumbling first-person narrative; it took her a while to see that the reader was meant to understand more about the situation than the narrator himself did.)

Still, I wonder if she thought about my childhood.

******

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”

Jai is eight. He and his mother stay locked up in a room at the end of the house, down the hall -- not  all the time, but on days when things are especially bad at home; when the big bad wolf huffs and puffs and threatens to blow the door down.

We were always exceptionally close. She was my life-raft on a sea of uncertainty, at an age when I barely knew enough to be certain or uncertain about anything; a shield not just from my father’s unpredictable, alcohol-fuelled violence but also -- and this I realised only much later -- from  the possibility of my becoming over-pampered, turned into a privileged lout, by well-off grandparents trying too hard to compensate for their son’s behaviour.

I don’t want to get too dramatic about this: our lives were never close to being as bad as those of Room’s protagonists. The terrifying memories -- of  my father hammering on a locked door, or overturning a huge, heaped dining table with unfathomable strength, or physically assaulting a Sikh priest who was reading from the Granth Sahib during an akhand paath in our house -- intersect with other memories of going to school; going (once in a while) to friends’ parties; of mum taking up a part-time job as a doctor’s receptionist when she found that her monthly pocket money wasn’t enough (and maybe that she needed to feel useful). But the bad memories are always there too, and aspects of our life certainly felt horror film-ish -- the  many times we had to sneak out when it got dark, for instance, and spend a scared night at a neighbour’s place, or in the maid’s quarters behind the house.

And yes, ultimately, there is no undramatic way of putting this, we did "escape". Aided by the confidence we had in our relationship, and the rock-solid support of my mother’s widowed mother, who -- her own troubles notwithstanding -- took  us in hand when she realised that things had gone out of control. After a mercifully brief custody battle, we ended up living together in a then-very-green-and-quiet south Delhi colony called Saket, which means “heaven”. (But I won’t underline that. Mustn’t get too dramatic.)

*****

A few years after this, my interest in cinema as something one could think about, read in depth about, perhaps even write professionally about one day, began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the reservoirs of film literature it led me to. By this point my mother and I were leading secure enough lives that it was possible to smile at the film’s macabre Oedipal theme. Mum (or Amma as I have always called her for some reason, late as it is in this piece to reveal such a central piece of information) told me how, in the early 1960s when the film released in Bombay, her brother came home and solemnly informed their mother that he would like to have her “mummified” after she had passed on.

(“Needles, sawdust… the chemicals are the only things that cost anything,” Norman Bates says, explaining the practicalities of taxidermy; a horror-movie monster, yes, but also someone who knows what it is like to be so close to and so dependent on a parent that you want to keep their physical presence with you “forever”.)

Despite the emotional security that had come with leaving my father’s house, I was cripplingly shy, prone to melancholia and loneliness. And watching it when I did, Psycho touched something deep in me. I found sadness in it, in scenes like the one where Norman responds to the insinuation that he and his mother might have been looking for money to leave their motel and start a new life elsewhere. “This place happens to be my only world,” he says, “I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood.” He sounds defiant. “My mother and I were more than happy.”

Perhaps on some level, without being able to express it this way at age 14, I was instinctively realising how close I had come to leading the trapped, circumscribed life that Norman and his dead mother do. But then, as he says in the film’s most moving sequence, a long conversation with a conflicted young woman who has “gotten off the main road”, we are all clamped in our private traps anyway -- even  when we seem free. “We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other.”

*******

Imprisonment, Dependence, Liberation, Self-discovery, Stagnation… those are some big themes, and despite my professed reluctance to get dramatic, I can’t help returning to them. And it isn’t just by chance that I have been talking about two films that involve very intense mother-son relationships and the very unusual situations in which those relationships grow, ossify or decay. I have in recent years become aware of a glitch in my relationship with my mother. Put briefly: it seems that our closeness has almost always been founded on big things -- the Important and the Dramatic -- and not enough on the minutiae of life; the Casual, the Mundane.

From the beginning we always shared the really important stuff, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends -- even  the ones from the seemingly open-minded, cosmopolitan families -- routinely  hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette. When I took my girlfriend -- a young woman in an unhappy marriage, on the brink of separation -- across to meet my mother for the first time, I felt none of the nervousness that most other young people I knew would feel in that situation. It was the most natural thing to do.

And this flowed from how things had always been between us, from my mother’s own openness. When I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, she told me about the marriage proposal she had got from an uncle, a childhood friend who had always held a torch for her, and how she had been very tempted but didn’t take it up because it would mean relocating to Lagos, too large a bridge for us to cross at that point in our lives. On another occasion, when the husband of one of her neighbourhood friends made a sexual overture -- figuring that a divorced woman was easy pickings -- I was the first to hear of it, and to be privy to her shock as well as her fear that she may have brought it upon herself by bantering with him at social gatherings.

Taking as much pride as I did in this candour, it took me a long time to discover that I may be undervaluing other sorts of conversations and interactions: the small talk that keeps people going day by day; the sort of behaviour that introverts sometimes dismiss as flippant or inconsequential, but which in its own way brings nourishment and meaning to a relationship over time. Casual chatter and gossip are ways of ventilating the heart, an old grandmother says in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries. In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning, when a little boy tells his parents that he’s fed up of their polite, vacuous conversation -- the  repeated “good mornings” and “how are yous”, which seem vacuous or hypocritical -- one  of them responds that such talk is essential: “It's a lubricant for the world.”

My mother and I never quite learnt these lessons -- or perhaps we knew them once and gradually became careless about them. Partly this was a personality matter -- both  of us being, to different degrees, very private people -- and partly a result of circumstances; for many years while growing up I was intimidated by my nani’s boisterous personality and kept to my room while she was around. But it also reflects the growing-away-from-a-parent process that everyone (except, maybe, a Norman Bates) goes through.

The second half of Donoghue’s Room is made sharply poignant by the mother’s realisation that her son will never again be as dependent on her as he was during their years of incarceration. I have never really lived away from my mother -- even after getting married and shifting to another flat in the same colony, I continued spending my working day as a freelance writer in my old room, my comfort zone, in her house. But like most children do, I moved away in other ways: into new worlds populated by new friends, into a job and the circles it introduced me to, but also into my own inner spaces.

There was a time, long ago, when we played Scrabble together, or watched TV shows together, in the first years after satellite TV came to India. This gradually stopped. As I became embarrassed by the tackiness of some of the Hindi films we rented and watched on videocassette every Friday, I started lingering about outside the room where mum and nani were watching the film -- and shortly afterwards, I moved away from Hindi cinema altogether, and into new realms that excluded my mother. One thing followed another, and casual conversation became increasingly hard; we rarely even sat down and had meals together. Despite living in the same house, we became… not estranged, but something else -- something I don’t know the word for.

Can a relationship that is really, really close in essence also be distant and awkward in some important contexts? And when a new sort of special situation comes around -- one  that demands an everyday intimacy -- what then?

********

I have had to think about these things ever since the day last July when I sat down to talk with mum about what I thought would be a relatively mundane medical issue -- her  lingering discomfort and back pain, which I’d assumed was an offshoot of an old kidney condition, worsened by many years of self-medicating -- and she told me, all matter of fact, “No, it isn’t the kidney. It’s breast cancer. I have had it for a while, so it’s probably quite advanced by now.”

World-altering though that moment was, it’s almost funny when I think of it now. The fan whirring above us. A reality show playing on low volume in the background. Me, having come into her room, knowing her aversion to doctors and hospitals, with a speech carefully prepared to put her at ease (“We’ll go once, it’ll take just 10 minutes, you can tell them what medicines you’ve been taking, they’ll tell us if there’s something else you should be doing, and that’s it... you don’t have to agree to any intrusive procedures or examinations if you aren’t comfortable”), the deadpan look on her face as I recited the first two or three sentences of that speech -- as casually as I could, looking around as I said the words, at the dog, at the TV, so she wouldn’t think I was arm-twisting her -- and then her interrupting me with her grand revelation: oh no, this is the start of something much bigger than you think.

Another case of what should have been a quotidian exchange turning into something larger than life, like old Hindi movies about terminally ill patients. Another demonstration that the ‘Casual’ switch is jammed when it comes to the two of us.

In the weeks that followed -- a fortnight-long hospital stint precipitated by a worried-looking oncologist saying “Can we admit her right now? It’s important”; the realization that my mother, with her ridiculously high pain threshold, had a cancer-caused crack in her spine, which had to be mended before anything else could be done; the days and nights divided between handling things in the hospital and looking after our high-strung canine child Lara, who had been completely dependent on mum; watching the deterioration and immobilization of a woman who, to my eyes at least, had seemed in decent shape for her 63 years just a few weeks earlier, certainly capable of living alone -- through  all this and more, I had plenty of time to wonder how it had come to this: how a mother whom I saw every day had been diagnosed so late that the disease was almost certainly incurable; why it had to be her closest friend, an aunt who lived downstairs, who alerted me with a couple of phone calls to say that mum was in so much pain late at night that she had -- and  this was the biggest red light of all -- been unable to feed Lara.

And, naturally, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had spent more “casual” time with her in the previous few months -- even sitting around in the evenings in her room for 15-20 minutes each day while she watched TV or listened to music -- I would have been more alert to the little signs, the displays of pain that she had kept hidden.

*****

One side-effect of mum’s chemotherapy is that it has made her sentimental about little things, and at unexpected times. One day, apropos of nothing, she asked if I would massage her aching shoulder for a bit -- and then, smiling, squeezing my hand, told her nurse that I had “the healing touch”. And I winced. Only momentarily, but I couldn’t help it; this overt display of closeness and affection was discomfiting.

Visiting the toy store Hamleys with a friend and his little daughter the next day, I idly glanced at art-and-craft games that I thought might be useful for mum -- not so much to pass the time but to keep her mind active, since people with lesions in the brain, and risk of seizures or mental atrophy, need to do this. Soon I realised that I was looking mainly at the one-person activities. Given that I had flexible working hours, which I mostly spent in her house, shouldn’t I have made an effort to find something we could share, if only for a few minutes each day? Was I nervous about the small talk that would inevitably accompany such a joint endeavour? Or was I afraid that such proximity would make me privy to the involuntary groans of pain that came from her when she moved her shoulder or back at an awkward angle? And in either case, what did that say about me -- “such a good, dutiful son”, as I am often called by visitors to the house?

But even with the knowledge that time may be running out and every day is precious, how do you suddenly begin doing the things you haven’t been accustomed to doing for years? How do you force yourself to sit down and chat about “trivial” or “inconsequential” things, or just play Scrabble, with a parent-patient who might need a psychological boost, when the two of you have long fallen out of that habit and become locked in your own little boxes?

Inevitably, given the situation, the bulk of our interactions are about urgent and important things: I walk into her room at fixed intervals to check on her medicine intake and her meals, to confirm a blood-sample appointment, to discuss contacting a new nursing agency when the current one raises its fees. But I’m also making efforts now -- small, self-conscious, not very successful ones -- to turns things around: to chat with her about the currency situation, or banter about whether her post-cancer wig is more convincing than Donald Trump’s real hair, or show her a joke someone had shared on Facebook.

Still confined to our own rooms. Stuck in private traps. But trying.

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[An earlier post about caregiving is here. And here is my long essay about Hindi-movie mothers for a Zubaan anthology]

'If a plumber said she had plumber's block, would you condone it?' - a Q&A with Jerry Pinto

[Did this interview for Scroll]

Introduction: Earlier this month, Jerry Pinto’s 2012 novel Em and the Big Hoom was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, which recognizes the work of English-language writers from around the world, across three categories: fiction, non-fiction and drama. Pinto, a journalist and professional writer for close to three decades, has written or edited many other books across categories, including the National Award-winning Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Surviving Women, Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, and the children’s books Monster Garden and Phiss Phuss Boom. He speaks about the prize, his body of work, the many challenges facing a writer, and his newfound interest in translation.

Was this prize more gratifying in a way because you didn’t know you were in the reckoning? How rare that is in a time where authors are constantly expected to be in the public eye, competing furiously, playing the double role of marketing person.

The Windham-Campbell Prize is the kindest of prizes. You don’t know you are in the running. You don’t know that you’re on the shortlist. You are protected from that opening-of-the-envelope moment. Your life goes on pretty much as it always has and suddenly someone rings you up or emails you with the good news. I think that this is one of those rare prizes that doesn’t seem to need to turn the writers into gladiators at an arena, that isn’t about betting and odds-on favourites, there’s no bitterness about not being nominated or your book not being sent for it…nothing. I understand why the other prizes do that sort of thing. Sponsors aren’t coming along handing out all that lovely lolly for the good of writing. They want the bang for their buck. No issues with that. I see what the logic is but I don’t like it. Which is why I am so honoured and so happy to have received this one.

Em and the Big Hoom has been so widely acclaimed – it is the most high-profile of the many books you’ve done – and yet it has its roots in a personal and distressing subject, your mother’s real-life illness. It had a tortuous journey too, taking years before you got it in its final shape. Is there something bittersweet or unnerving about winning a big prize for this particular book?

I have all kinds of feelings about this book even now that it has passed into my history as a writer. To begin with, I wrote it so many times, I often felt that it was some kind of burden that I was fated never to put down. Then I had to talk about it again and again because it was born into the era of literary festivals and I tried my best to go wherever I was invited because I wanted to give the book my best push. I was deeply involved with everything, including the cover, which features my artwork thanks to the kindness of Bena Sareen and Ravi Singh at Aleph.

Oddly, when I was writing it, I never thought it would become the catalyst for conversations about mental ill health. I thought it was a novel. I have no problems, may I say here, with people talking about it as if it is non-fiction. Because that seems to be an accolade, a novel that reads like it happened.

But then the readings seemed to turn into encounter groups or something very similar. People would get up and tell stories about a friend who had said he would kill himself so often that no one believed him when he was sitting alone in his apartment with a bottle of rat poison; about the girl-next-door who vanished because she liked to sing and walk about naked even though she was in her late teens; about the brother incarcerated in his own room for five years because he heard voices. I did not know what to make of these testimonies. I tried to make the space as non-judgemental as possible but then that is not always possible. Besides, I am not a trained professional and I was wary of being taken for one. And the good Lord knows I’m not a paragon of virtue.

So a friend suggested that I encourage them to tell their stories, to create a book out of these survivor accounts, of people who have someone in their world with a different mind. And Ravi Singh now has the manuscript for A Book of Light which should come out from Speaking Tiger later this year.

I have been honoured and humbled by the honesty and the self-implication that so many of the writers have shown. They are torch-bearers and they’re showing us that it isn’t six degrees of separation between people seen as normal and people seen as ‘mentally ill’. It’s often one degree away or zero degrees. For if there is a person who has not suffered a moment of imbalance, of madness of one kind or another, then you might have finally stumbled on to a rare case of fully functional normality, so normal a normality that it should be pathologised perhaps, called a normalism.

The prize must be very pleasing purely at the level of the honour and recognition involved, but the money isn’t a small part of it. You have been quite vocal – in conversations, Facebook statuses and so on – about writers not getting paid as much as they deserve (whether they are independent journalists or authors struggling for decent advances from publishers). Do you see that changing anytime soon?

I hope it will. I trust it will. I wouldn’t put money on it. Here’s the thing. Every year, the journalists of my acquaintance march into their editors’ offices and argue for raises. They cite the usual bunch of reasons: the high cost of living, the lure of better pay in other jobs and other professions, how much hard work they do. I do not think one of them ever says, ‘And when you’re budgeting my pay hike in, why do you not think about raising the rates we pay our freelance writers?’ I didn’t do it when I was a full-time journalist though I have to say that when I started a travel dotcom, we paid writers well, we insisted that every staffer should travel, we worked on equity.

But writing as a skill is hard to quantify. So the editors have to fight hard to tell the moneybags men that they need to pay X more because she writes better. The moneybags say: ‘Then get someone else, na? My chichi has a flair for writing and she won’t even charge, she’ll be so happy to have her name in print. Shall I give you her number?’ There are entire magazines run on that kind of writer and this supply and demand situation always causes a problem. Many years ago, a freelance journalist called Parag Trivedi invited a whole bunch of journalists to form a union. It didn’t work.

Right now the best way to get paid well in India is simple: you should have a non-Indian passport, preferably a foreign passport and you can ask for a dollar a word. And editors will pay it too, some of them.

The other problem is that so much of freelance writing bases itself on old friendships and old relationships. How do you tell a buddy that s/he can’t afford you? How do you say, ‘Look, why don’t you simply hire a bunch of young people and then spend the rest of your life rewriting their work, training them and then losing them to the competition?’

For the rest of us, it’s the usual four-rupees-a word to ten-rupees-a-word. I must make an honourable exception for the Malayala Manorama group that actually pays well and pays on time and does not make one jump through hoops by creating an invoice, signing it, scanning it, sending it back and then waiting.

You have been an incredibly prolific writer… poetry, fiction (for both adults and children), non-fiction (on subjects ranging from cinema to gender relations), translation, anthologies, columns, reviews. Does any one sort of writing count as “relaxed, take-a-break writing” for you – the sort of thing you find easy to do when things aren’t going too well?

Okay, secret. It’s almost always fun. It’s almost always misery. The idea is the fun thing, the movements in the head, the connections, the links, the oh-that-might-also-fit-there sensations. Then there’s the first fine flush, that lasts for the first draft, when it’s always great to start off again, to open a notebook and return to word-making and world-making. Then comes the tough bits, the pruning, the editing, the rewriting. That takes me about twice as much time as the writing. I wrote three drafts of Murder in Mahim and I thought it was done. I came to Delhi inoffensively and met Ravi and he said, ‘Just a few more things I want you to do’ and I am holding on to the myth that it’s just a few more things when it’s not, it’s another draft because you change a word and that changes a sentence and that changes a paragraph and suddenly like a chain of bicycles, everything is in a heap and you’ve got to start again.

A related question: Isaac Asimov, discussing his prolificacy, once said that it helps to be working on different projects simultaneously because it makes writer’s block less likely; if you get fatigued with one sort of writing, you move on to something else. Has your experience been similar?

Yes, it works like that for me as well. I am always working on a poem. I am always working on some non-fiction. I am always working on some fiction. I am always working on some translation. I am always editing some student assignments at the SCM department where I teach journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic. I have a manual right now to look at for MelJol (an NGO for empowering children). I have a brochure to edit for a fund-raiser at the People’s Free Reading Room and Library. If you have several things going at once, you’re less likely to get bored of one thing. But there are often times when I will take a day off and only focus on one thing, such as reading a friend’s manuscript or editing someone’s translation or reading a draft.

But even so, writers’ block is a problem for me and I get over it by writing mechanically. I berate myself constantly. I say, ‘If you had a plumber who said she had plumber’s block, would you condone it? If you had a cook who said he had cook’s block, would you accept that he should not cook and you should go hungry? And if you are not as important an artisan in the creation of civilization as a cook or a plumber, you should not be a writer.

Then I start to write mechanically putting words down. They are dry desiccated words, words without meaning or significance, words without juice, over-used words forming into armies of clichés and I am often tempted to judge myself harshly, ‘You’re no writer. You’re just another hack’ but I write on. Now I am an ice-breaker and I pushing against the icefloes and soon, soon, it’s open flowing water and the words are back and now it’s dancing. But I have found that without the robotic writing, without the heartless-faithless-spiritless writing, you don’t get out into the open.

When I first encountered your writing, a lot of it was about cinema – the short-form journalistic stuff in particular, but also the Helen book which was so detailed and for which you watched dozens of films closely. What has your relationship with cinema, especially mainstream Hindi cinema, been like? And has it had an effect on your writing?

I loved Hindi films. I loved everything about them. But I could also see what they were not. They were as much vehicles for modernism and nation-buildings as they were Trojan Horses for patriarchy and cheap sentiment. Something about this encounter with popular culture shapes us in different ways, I think. Some people look at a title like Dulhan Wohi Jo Piya Man Bhaye and think yes, yes. Some people look at it and think, patriarchal bullshit. Some people look at it and say: Oh is that so? Not the woman with the certificate but the woman who makes her lover happy? Some people say: The songs are good so let’s go see it. And then there’s us, the critics, the reviewers, the ones who stand at a distance, looking but also sighing.

I think many critics have said that Em and the Big Hoom showed I have a feel for dialogue. I think that might come out of my encounter with cinema.

Children’s writing in India used to be (possibly still is) characterized by people writing down to children – being pedantic, trying to spoonfeed them ideas and messages, undermining the value of a fun story imaginatively told. Tell us something about your own approach to writing for children.

Children are a nasty bunch. They’re completely led by their instincts. They don’t really care what’s good for them or bad for them. They want to read what amuses them. The problem is that they have no economic control over their reading. The books available to them are decided by adults, by librarians and teachers and parents and gift-giving aunties who choose improving books and pedantic books and message stories and the kids give up on reading and the cry goes up: Oh, they don’t read, children have given up reading. That’s not their fault, it’s our fault.

Next, children are monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. If they see their parents coming home to slump in front of the television, that’s what they’ll want to do when they relax. If they see their parents hunched over a smart phone, that’s what they’ll want. Don’t blame the monkeys.

Finally, I don’t write for children. I write for me. When I’m done, someone, usually a publisher says: oh this is a children’s book because it has a teddybear in it. And then they sell it to the chaps, like Mr Hall and Mr Knight in that wonderful poem about the algebra text book.

As readers – or as consumers of your work – how are children different from adults? What have your interactions with young readers been like?

I try not to interact with children too much. They do your ego no good. “Did you write this book?” a girl asked me, holding up ‘Talk of the Town’ which I wrote with Rahul Srivastava. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very boring,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said because she was a well-brought-up child.

Other great questions I have been asked: ‘Why aren’t you J K Rowling?’ and ‘Have you written any books like Captain Underpants?’ and ‘I don’t like the cover of this book. It’s too yellow. Do you have a pink book?’

As a teacher, what advice do you give to young writers who are struggling to find their own voice?

I tell them to read a lot, to be patient, to read some more, to write a lot, to rewrite a lot, to talk to people, to connect, to volunteer, to seek out experience, to try and see the virtual world as one possible source of excitement and not the entire world.

You have done a lot of translating in recent years. What stoked this interest, and what determines your choice of texts? Has translating changed you in any way as a reader and as a writer?

I always say that I wish other people would translate so that I could just sit back and enjoy what comes out in other languages around the world and in India. Now, around the globe, things seem to have sorted themselves out for the Anglophone world. Is there a book on early on-set Parkinson’s disease in German? It’s available in English. And every writer from Basho to Undset is available in English. But Baluta, a modern-day classic in Marathi, one of the first autobiographies by a Dalit? That had to wait thirty years. So we have so much writing around us but we don’t have enough translators.

So for me this is an urgency because it feeds into my view of a pluralistic diverse India, where we speak so many languages and live in so many different ways and we learn each day in the living of it how much we need to do to keep this wonderful country going. I began to translate because I was hoping to be a bridge-builder. That’s what translation does: it builds a bridge between two linguistic islands. Yes, languages are never islands; the bilingual already form footpaths at low tide between them and the sea around cross-fertilises them but permit me my metaphor.

What are the challenges in translating (especially translating a potentially controversial book like Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue), compared to doing your own writing?

Right now, Jai, it seems as if every book is potentially controversial, no? Anyone might be offended. Anyone can sue. Anyone can take offense. Anyone can rouse a community by saying, ‘S/he’s insulting us’ even when that Anyone hasn’t even read the book. So every act of bookmaking is now fraught with peril but how else will we fight the peril but with each act of civilization?

Right now the book I am translating is Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha by Swadesh Deepak. Deepak was a magnificent playwright whose Court Martial was performed across the country, in Kolkata and in Mumbai and in Delhi. He had a serious mental problem and tried to kill himself. He spent seven years in an agony of silence and fear. And then when he recovered, on the urging of his friends, he wrote Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha. When I heard of this book—his son Sukant Deepak is one of the contributors to my anthology Book of Light—I was fascinated and when I read it I was completely enthralled. There is such a strange quality to the book; it has all the hallmarks of great writing and great mental unease. I have read nothing like it in any other language. Here is a bridge, I thought, a bridge between Hindi and English, a bridge between the world of those who are seen as mentally healthy and those who are seen as mentally unwell, a multipurpose bridge beautiful and ugly and mysterious and built at great personal cost.

How great a cost? After it was published, Swadesh Deepak rose one day and went for his morning walk and never came back. He has been missing since.

You told me once that you write on paper and then get it transcribed. Is that still the case? What for you are the advantages of such an approach?

My first draft is always hand-written because this helps me in a number of ways. I can type very fast and that isn’t always a good way to write: fast. I like to think I am part of the slow writing movement as I start work with pen and paper. I like to think that this gives me time to consider the line forming in my head before it is set down on paper.

I know it has taken you forever to get a smartphone. Are you becoming more tech-savvy, in terms of writing/editing a piece on a phone or some other infernal little device?

There’s a great section in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen and Alice have been running and running and when they stop, they’re in the same place.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

All I can say is I am from a slow sort of country.

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[My review of Em and the Big Hoom is here]