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Photo: Shanker Chakravarty

Going native Ameen Merchant

Ameen Merchant’s prologue to the conversation is as much about himself as about Madras, the city which took him in its lap, bestowing on him its distinctiveness, its language being one element. This debut author, now living in Canada, had Madras (Chennai) as his home address for about 25 years. A home whose familiar smells, sights, mores, he states, now breathe in his memory. So much so that he has derived the plot of his first novel, “The Silent Raga”, published recently by Harper Collins, from the city. “The roads, the cricket matches, the fights…” everything is still as fresh as the morning bread in him, he reiterates.

“Though, I took four-and-a-half years to finish the book, my agent was on my case for long,” laughs the freelance journalist at himself for doing things at his pace. But its seed was planted in his mind in the 1970s. Ameen elaborates, “I read about a character called Janakiamma in a novel serialised in a Tamil magazine. She ran away from home and the author never gave any explanation for it. I left Madras and couldn’t chase the story but often wondered why Janaki did so.” Calling himself “always curious, a rather writer-ly thing to do,” he thought of finding an answer to the quandary, years after. Asking around among friends about Janaki drew a blank.

“So I found the author’s number and went out for dinner with her. The anti-climactic part of it was when she told me that she never pursued Janaki beyond those two paragraphs that I had read, simply because the story was about her (Janaki’s) sister. And here I was, building it into an obsession for all these years,” he says, quite excitedly at the thought. “Sub-conscious is a strange place,” he murmurs thoughtfully. For, the more he thought about Janaki the more he got drawn into her story. He chewed on it, “There could be so many reasons for someone to run away from home.”

This led him to extract Janaki out of that novel and build a story around her, stack by stack, as to what could have driven her to do that, what could have happened to her, by injecting images, some lived, some known. By knitting in events and emotions, making the inner world of the characters as vivid as the outer world. Ameen soon won a Canadian scholarship “and spent five weeks in isolation” writing about Janaki. What started as a short story couldn’t end up as one. “My professor told me, ‘you have introduced a lot of things in it and you’d better resolve them’.” That led him to write “The Silent Raga”, published in Canada last September. With music being an important part of Madras’s cultural life, Ameen’s pen represents its overtones throughout the book. Even the chapters are called varnam, alaapana and the like.

Almost every page of his book has a Tamil phrase or a local reference. “My publisher asked me to let them be (without explaining them), as they are important for the plot.” And also, haven’t we read books with local expressions in French, Latin, etc.? His book anyway “has the universal themes of love, betrayal, loyalty, family bonds.”

Ameen’s next book is set in South India and contemporary Canada. “It will explore India and its post-colonial ties.” A difficult book, he calls it, at the same time seeking your approval: “The second book is always difficult, isn’t it?” In “The Silent Raga”, being a debut work, he has “written what he has known.” He reasons, “Even to write science fiction, you need to put in some element of known truth.” Moreover, “Honesty comes from writing what you know.”

Well, how many can disagree with that?

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