‘Writing is about creating kinship’
ZIYA US SALAM
|
With his second book to be released shortly, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi opens up on The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay.
|
PHOTO: TEAMWORK FILMS
BEGUILING SIMPLICITY: Shanghvi takes on listeners at the Jaipur Literature Week.
The finely woven silk sheets glisten on wooden takht as the late winter sun seeps through luxuriant foliage at Baithak, Diggi Palace’s little corridor for a free exchange of views at Jaipur Literature Week. Cane chairs made c
omfortable with soft cushions are beginning to be occupied as lovers of Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s writing trickle in. Just outside, a man in traditional Rajasthani headgear offers Jodhpuri chai in earthen cups.
All this could as well have been for a personalised ghazal programme. But people are here to listen to a piece from Shanghvi’s latest The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay brought out by Penguin. Just the right setting for somebody who insists on calling Mumbai Bombay throughout his novel. Also, a man who is not too sure if he would write a novel again!
This after his first book The Last Song of Dusk not only got him the Betty Trask Award but also drew comparisons with the likes of Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai! His latest was short-listed for Man Asian Literary Prize 2008!
Soon after the Week wound up, he answered a few questions about his work and way of writing with a beguiling simplicity.
Your first novel began as a series of stories told in exchange for drinks. How did the second come about?
The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay is the story of four friends, and how their lives are torn asunder when one is murdered. The ensuing trial was refracted to illuminate how each of their lives — and their relationships — were wrecked out of recognition. I was mindful of the narrative and what questions it was meant to serve. Chief among them: how do big public things affect us in small private ways; where do sexual desire and politics collide; how easily can we turn into the people we loathe the most?
You love to tell stories, you have said. Is writing a novel a love affair with an expiry date? Or is it a spontaneous outcome of pent-up emotions?
Structure is crucial: I need to know how a story ends in order to embark upon it. Some writers believe telling a story is a spontaneous thing. I’m afraid the Gujarati in me works in far more basic — and controlled — a fashion. For The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay I needed a map, a path through the forest, a compass. I was open to returning to a missed fork in the narrative path, but a general sense of direction was non-negotiable.
How possessive are you about your work? It is said a story, once published, belongs to the readers?
Readers must embrace a story, know it, love it, argue with it, take it in, keep it with them like an old letter or a favourite talisman, then pass it down. A story only exists in its relationship to the person who hears it, reads it, passes it on; so without that delicate tango between reader and writer a book is a one-note samba. It is just a voice in someone’s head; it is only a kind of schizophrenia (but I’m in two minds about that).
Literary characters, you said, at the time of your first novel, are influenced by reality? How far is it true of the married older woman and the young photographer here?
In The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, when Karan is abandoned by Rhea, he discovers that only through the cleaving of heartbreak does the world explode upon him with all its animating mysteries and vivid discontents. But then, slowly, the enigma of her abandonment educates his photographic aesthetic, loss turns into style, and notifies his subsequent work. All of us suffer heartbreak, but only artists enjoy the advantage of using loss to deepen the colour of their work.
How did you arrive at a balance in relating a story increasingly found in little anecdotes in our life? And that wonderful juxtaposition of expressions like Bombay Fornicator and a baby being tickled on his soles!
Literary fiction’s greatest failing is that it’s often as dull as dahi. I see these big fat novels exploring ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘colonialism’ or some such tedious -ism that forms the bulk of some mind-numbingly inane liberal arts syllabus.
When authors write about these big boring ideas they often forget that readers are not looking for a lecture but an imaginative engagement with a world that might be wholly foreign from their own but one which reminds them how easily they could belong to it. Writing is about creating kinship, about reminding us again and again that we are human, so we are more alike than we are unalike.
With ...Dusk you were compared to the likes of Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai... Did it bother you? Or pressure you into writing with greater care and responsibility?
The comparisons were flattering but inaccurate, and lazy because the basis of comparison was ethnicity. In any case, my work is inspired more by photography and music than writing.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
