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Merchant of Madras
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Ameen Merchant says The Silent Raga stems from what he has always known
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Photo: Shanker Chakravarty
Native tongue Ameen Merchant learnt to speak Tamil before Urdu
I learnt to speak Tamil first, then Urdu. I could have been born in Madras for I was just about a few months old when my parents moved there from Mumbai.”
Ameen Merchant’s prologue to the conversation is as much about him as about Madras. This debutant 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 itself. “The roads, the cricket matches, the fights…” all are still fresh.
“Though I took four-and-a-half years to finish the book, my agent was on my case for long,” laughs the freelance journalist. But the seed was planted in his head in the ’70s. 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.”
His Janaki obsession led him to extract Janaki out of that novel and build a story around her.Ameen got a Canadian scholarship “and spent five weeks in isolation” writing about Janaki. “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. The importance of music in Chennai finds echoes in the book. Even the chapters are called varnam, alaapana and the like.
“I am not a trained musician but I am a good listener,” says the man who has “the bad habit of asking again and again what he doesn’t know.” Almost every page of his book has a Tamil phrase or a local reference. Ameen’s next book is set in South India and contemporary Canada. “It will explore India and its post-colonial ties.The second book is always difficult, isn’t it?” In “The Silent Raga”, being a debut work, he has written what he has known.
“Even to write science fiction, you need to put in some element of truth. Honesty comes from writing what you know.”
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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