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JAI ARJUN SINGH
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Intolerance is intrinsic to human nature, says Raj Kamal Jha, but the denial of civil rights in Gujarat was shocking. Excerpts from an interview.
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Photo: V.V. Krishnan
Raj Kamal Jha: Perfect balance.
How did "John Brown and a dog called Chum" come about? Did you already have a book in mind when you wrote it?
No, not at all. I was in Ahmedabad on work and went to Gulbarga, almost like a riot tourist. I have this terrible disease of getting distracted — looking at what's in the margins instead of in the frame — and there was a partly burnt workbook that reminded me of my childhood, when you would freeze in panic if you misplaced your textbook. And here was one tossed on a huge, charred heap, lying there for three months.
The piece almost wrote itself. It was a very personal response, certainly not journalistic, but I'm lucky to work for a paper that put it on the Edit page. Then I realised it was like a string I had pulled from a huge fabric hovering over me, and I had to keep pulling at it hoping to puncture a little hole in this fabric. So that I could breathe.
What affected you most about the riots?
Strangely, the hate on display didn't. Because, of course, you can't legislate tolerance — all of us have our prejudices, you have the right to hate your neighbour. But only inside your head. You can't deny him his rights, and what was most shocking was how this denial happened. It was as if the law didn't exist. Senior officers of the State let politicians ride them. And not one of them has had to pay.
Was that the driving force for Fireproof?
The driving force was the need to write it. And some questions I had about intolerance. Being intolerant isn't about being Left or Right or about religion, or about one's level of education. It's something much more elemental, I think. There are well-educated people, incredibly caring fathers or husbands, who are viscerally intolerant of The Other. Maybe it works the same way as love. Love needs a leap of faith, hate does too. So is intolerance linked in a very fundamental way to who we are as human beings? These were things I needed to address.
Where did the idea for the footnotes — the dead people's narratives — come from?
I wanted to let them whisper their stories, uninterrupted. Imagine if each person killed in Gujarat had a laptop, broadband, a good turn of phrase, a telegenic face and access to TV studios — think of the discourse then. That's why when I look at this so-called national outpouring over Jessica Lall and the candlelight vigils, I can't help thinking, where did all that paraffin go when Gujarat was burning?
Your fiction tends to be allusive, dreamlike, fragmented, while your day job is as a journalist who deals in hard facts. Is there a conflict there?
I think we exaggerate the importance and value of style. What's more important to me is the story, the idea. And I could never have written the book if it hadn't been for the hundreds of stories that were coming in from reporters. One of the things I like most about my job is that there's a story pool lapping away at me all the time. So the two lives coexist quite well.
At a book discussion once, you said it was unrealistic to expect many people to read. Why?
See, the few people who are damaged enough to love reading are essentially those who are comfortable with solitude. Also, reading forces you to have both imagination and empathy — two troubling little things — so you see a bit of yourself in anything you read. And to expect all of us to be like that is ridiculous.
Besides, it's so unfair — why, if you are not a publisher, would you want huge numbers of people to read? (Laughs.) People who feel the need to read will read. Even a writer who is very full of himself will never say, "There are 1,50,000 people who need to read me."
There will always be people who won't get from my writing what I get out of it. But there is nothing I can do about it. And I don't say this in arrogance, it's a simple statement of fact. You have to be true to yourself. It sounds selfish, but the writing process is selfish.
But even selfish writers do put their work out in the public domain.
Of course I'm very happy that someone is willing to publish what I've written. And publishing makes a difference — it helps you take leaps in the dark, not worry much about safety nets. But personally, I feel lucky if just four or five people like something in my book. Even if a single paragraph works for them, that's very satisfying. I think even individual lines can work in isolation. There's a great passage in Orhan Pamuk's Snow where the protagonist is frustrated because the woman he loves cannot explain why her faith is more important to her than his love. That exchange, just a couple of pages, you can carry for the rest of your life.
What I'd really like to do is write a book where each page blows me away. But that will never happen. The shoemaker's elves won't come tip-toeing in at night and fix my paragraphs. There are scenes in my head but I just don't have the words to express them. This might sound like a cop-out, but may be it's because this language, English, isn't wired into my double helix.
You didn't grow up speaking English?
My mother tongue is Maithili. My wife is Bengali so we speak most of the time in that language. But like I said, it's probably a cop-out to blame that. Eventually, as the saying goes, a painter learns to adapt to his paint box: you have a limited number of tools and you work with those. Yes, it's possible to steal a new paintbrush once in a while and throw it into the box, a new shade of colour, but when you're 40, your neural synapses are all wired (laughs) — "Jo hona tha, ho gaya".
All you can do now is keep searching for new bits of canvas, the occasional brush to steal.
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