THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

Vikram Chandra speaks to Shyama Haldar about his latest novel, Sacred Games

I’m glad there’s more popular fiction in India now. A healthy literature has got to have some pulp

There’s something ironic in a way about talking to you on a day when the headlines are full of how Mumbai thronged to the sweet water miracle at Mahim Creek. The city’s been through so much trauma, the kind your book prefigures.

Yeah, it is sort of this hope for the divine in the mess. Maybe we need it a little more than others right now. For me, the book began as a response to very immediate happenings — extortion, people I know getting shot at, AK47s being fired just five minutes from where I live. I’d thought, to begin with, that the book would be about these local gangsters. The more I discovered, the more I saw these guys were actually caught up in much larger narratives, all of it fitting together in this web of events, the swirling flows of money and arms and power, the current game both in the subcontinent and globally. I think we’re still in the middle of that chakravyuh and it’s going to go on for a while, as far as I can see. There’s this temptation often offered by various ideologies and gurus, these apocalyptic solutions — I think as long as we can avoid going in that direction and somehow endure, maybe, like Sartaj thinks, things will get better some day. You just keep doing your job.

For me, one of the central concerns in writing this became, in a sense, how these huge networks of narratives and people acting out their own agendas intersect. It’s unpredictable in a sense — like Gaitonde and Sartaj pass each other, barely glancing off each other, but they change each other’s lives profoundly. At the end of the story, Sartaj has acted, been forced to act, in what he hopes is a moral way but he’s not even sure it was worth it finally. But he’s been asked to act and he’s done it. For me, as I discovered the book’s entire arena, the sensation increasingly was of how little we actually understand in our individual capacities of the landscapes we live in and why these things happen to us or even why we act the way we do. Which became an interesting thing to think about in the context of the classical detective story — the cop story where what happens typically, all the way since Poe and his ratiocination and then with Holmes, is that the world is set at disorder by an inexplicable sign, usually a dead body. Then the specialist detective comes in and applies the scientific method, applies reason and then sets things back to right.

Which you don’t really have here.

Yeah. I was thinking a lot about the limits of reason and the reader, I hope, will understand the larger canvas, the context, at the same time knowing or understanding that Sartaj and the other players know very little actually.

You see that with Gaitonde’s narrative—he’s already told you what Sartaj needs to know, he holds most of the cards, but it’s Sartaj who has to do the spade work of getting it all together.

And blundering through it. As opposed to the Sherlock Holmesian, superhuman detective. I really had fun doing that — it’s like Sartaj says at one point: detection is very often just about waiting around for things to happen and pretending you know what’s going on.

Was researching the book a bit like that too?

Yeah. It tends to be that way for me. I go and talk to people and I do try to get them to talk about their lives but I often don’t have an agenda or a set of questions already in mind. For me, what’s as important as what they’re telling me is the context, the clothes they’re wearing, their attitude and just the incidental detail in people’s homes which I find myself using years later, mixed up in some other character’s life. It’s more like a sort of free-form stimuli-gathering — I just sort of suck it up and end up using it later. And sometimes the lies that people tell you are really instructive, I think. Specially some of the people I was talking to in the law and on the other side were really interested in having that sort of PR spin on things. You know they’re bullshitting you but what they’re trying to tell you, what they think you should believe is as interesting as the fact itself.

How do you actually meet a don — do you just call up and say, I’m writing this novel, do you want to talk?

Well, that depends on whom you meet. For instance, when I met Arun Gawli, he was setting himself up as a political hopeful at that point and he actually stood for elections and won after that. At that point, he just had a darbar, you could just go there and there were these white plastic chairs, the kind politicians have, and you sat there and sent up a card and after a while the boys came down and called you up and you got to meet him. It was fairly straightforward. There was always this big line of people, not just people connected with politics, necessarily, but local people, some mother with her son who’s just graduated and she’s come to see Daddy about getting him a job, settling him somewhere. Other people, I was introduced to through friends — one of my closest friends is a crime journalist and he’s incredible; he knows everything and everyone. He was a central part of it.

The bigger guys are often easier to talk to — you just set it up over the phone. Meeting the foot soldiers is much harder because they’re always scared, either of the police or of the other companies. That kind of thing used to work out more as, stand on such and such street corner and somebody will come and get you and you’re taken somewhere else. For the most part, people were really courteous and had a sort of avuncular attitude — I think that comes once you establish a basic level of trust, make the other person believe that you aren’t going to use this to hurt them. Though there was one guy I was talking to and I kept going on about how I’d never write this in a newspaper and he said, Abbe, tere ko likhna hai, tu likh, na. Mera kya jata hai? (You want to write, you write; makes no difference to me.) A couple of them were like that, but apart from that, once you start talking and he’s telling you the story of his childhood and how he grew up, I think people then start explaining their own history as much to themselves as to you. And people want someone to listen. There were moments when I was like, please don’t tell me names and places, I don’t want to know, couldn’t you fictionalise this a little, please?

It’s amazing what you can find out — I tell my students in my workshops this — if you’re writing a story about, say, somebody who drives trains, just go down to the station and start talking, you’ll be amazed at how much people are willing to tell you. I think it’s a pretty human impulse to want somebody to listen, to bear witness. I also think that’s what, in a sense, makes Mumbai such a great place to be a writer in — you just ask five people their stories and you’ve got five novels, it’s just amazing. I guess any great metropolis has that about it, with all the inherent contradictions of class and money and religion and politics and so on.

One of the reasons I wanted to have the insets in the book, and I hope the reader gets this, is this idea that what happens in life is that there are many peripheral characters and layers of narrative that work on us that we aren’t even aware of — in our own families, there are stories that sometimes we lose without ever having a chance to hear them. Your mother might have a life of her own or a loss of her own that she never will tell you and you’ll never hear about. So, it’s the notion of these stories that are not part of the central narrative but are still working on us and are still important and finally all have connections that start one thread of events moving that somewhere else touches something else. John Barth once said in a class I was taking with him once that there are two kinds of writers: taker-outers and putter-inners. For me, without wanting to let it get too completely shapeless, I did want to get in that fullness of event, so that this feeling of what happened 60 years ago in Partition still rolls on and changes our lives today. Also the sense of many different kinds of people, specially in a city like Mumbai.

I also found on both sides, maybe more so because it’s Mumbai, people have very definite opinions about representations of them. They’re always saying, Woh film mein woh theek dikhaya tha, magar woh film mein galat tha, aisa kabhi nahin hota (they showed things right in that film but not in that other one, it never happens that way). It’s that attitude of I know this, I live this, don’t try telling me any different. People were telling me all the time, aisa mat karna (don’t do it this way).

It’s like with the film International Dhamaka in the book and the reviewer who gets his legs broken. That’s not likely to happen to you, I hope?

(laughs) No. What I was also having fun with was the idea that those of us who are trained by our educations and our backgrounds to accept that reality should be represented in certain ways, like the art film or the psychological realism of the kitchen-sink novel, if we see reality represented in a different way, we automatically assume that it’s not true. Which I think is often the case, specially in the context of the cinema.

What is your take on the Indian literary scene these? Any hopeful signs of moving away from the family saga and diasporic anxiety, two favourite themes with Indian writing in English?

I wonder, really, whether this sense of restriction in theme you’re talking about is a function of thinking of oneself as a literary writer. I’ve noticed this in the United States and so forth, that people who work in genre are often much more willing to throw themselves at the potentially melodramatic or embarrassing and they’re very alert to current fluctuations of political climate or technological change. The most obvious and often-quoted example being Tom Clancy’s having an airliner used as a terrorist weapon in one of his stories, long before 9/11 happened. Wired magazine had an article a couple of months ago about how many of the things that are profoundly part of our lives today were predicted by science fiction. For every single thing that we’re experiencing today, somebody was sitting around in 1936, writing a really garish science fiction story about it. I wonder sometimes if there’s a sort of sense among literary writerdom that it’s potentially embarrassing or tacky to be doing this sort of James Bondy thing.

For that reason, I’m glad to see that there’s more popular fiction about these days. Hindi, for instance, has a huge mass literature and in English the fact that we’re now starting to see thrillers and chick lit and love stories — I think that for a healthy literature, you’ve got to have an amount of pulp. The exchange of ideas and themes is really important. A long time ago, when I first told my British editor about Sacred Games, he said: Aren’t you a little scared that people are going to say that you’re now writing popular fiction? So there is that in the air — I said, well, you know, I hope it’s popular (smiles).

What about the writing for the Western audience charge — that’s been a sore point for you.

It’s just so annoying. Recently there was this journalist who asked me, Why are you releasing this book in Bombay? I was like, well, I happen to be from Bombay and it’s a book about Bombay and all my friends and family are there — but apparently that’s not enough. The charge is you’re trying to — what was it — ‘establish yourself as an Indian writer’. How do you do that — I mean, I’m Indian, so it is going to be Indian writing. But the terrible thing about this is that if I’d released this in London, the question would have been, why did you go over there. I think it’s a paranoia that puts both the questioner and the writer in a double bind because you’re always trapped by this fear of whatever you’re doing — even if you’re cooking something — is it truly culturally ours or not. I think that comes from this insecurity and this fantasy, in a sense, about the West. I guess it’s a kind of obvious thing to say, but the West is guilty of Orientalism and we’re guilty of Occidentalism — we construct this thing which isn’t there and then we spend our lives setting ourselves up in opposition to it, which is a really trapped position to be in. You’re letting somebody, an imagined somebody else, set the contours of who or what you should be. It’s frustrating. And every time you think it’s going to die out, you think, oh finally we’re past it, up it pops again.
Flip side: any qualms your liberal and untranslated use of Indian idiom may faze readers abroad?

I guess my self-image is more that of a storyteller than an author, in the sense that we’ve constructed that notion in the last couple of centuries. For me, the idea that a story is received is really important — if you’re telling a story, somebody’s listening to it. In my first book, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, there’s this image of one of the narrators who happens to be a monkey who’s in a room typing out a story and in that same room is the family he’s become a part of and outside in the maidan there’s a huge crowd that’s stretching to the horizon. So that image is I guess sort of my reality. I write for people I love, that I’m close to. I can imagine their reactions — my younger sister is really ruthless about being bored, she will tell you, Do not bore me. So, I can imagine that and then the language I would use to tell them a story if I was sitting around at home with them is the language that I want to get on the page because it feels fluid and mine. And using those words, you really add to the weight, the texture of a sentence, they bring you into the character’s life.

I think all of us find ways of getting over the not-understanding the unfamiliar things we come up against when we’re reading something from somewhere else. I grew up, as a lot of us did, reading Enid Blyton, and for years I was very excercised over what a macaroon was — what the hell is Fatty eating, it sounds so delicious and I can’t find one. But it didn’t take away from my experience of those stories or other stories. The context makes it clear; if you don’t understand the precise meaning, you’ll get the general sense of it.

Most of the women in your family are people who write — do you tend to work off each other creatively?

I think my mother was hugely influential, because she was always doing it, there were books in the house and there was always conversation about writing and film and plays. All three of us grew up inevitably thinking that this was something you did, although the realities of making a living from it were immensely clear to us — we saw the cheques that she got. I think that even now the conversation is often in that same way about something that one of us is doing — in that way, it’s a sort of constant exchange of ideas and opinions.

You were also part of the team that scripted Mission Kashmir. What happened there? You had, among others, two extremely talented writers — you and, despite your fallout with him, Suketu Mehta — and yet somehow the story didn’t come together.

For me, I’ll speak for myself, film always has been — and that one was — a tremendously ambiguous experience. When you’re working on a novel, you have such freedom, nobody can tell you what to do or not do. Film, from the ground up, is collaborative and, specially as a writer, you have the least control of anyone. It can be really exciting sometimes when ideas bounce off each other — at other times, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world. It’s fun to be out of your own head and hanging out with a bunch of people, and sometimes you write a scene and you see it 40 feet high on the screen and it’s amazing. But then again you don’t have any control and so you can only sit and mutter at the back about what you think should have been done.

You started out studying film at Columbia, after your BA, before you moved on to write your first book. So there’s film and there’s also your other profession as a computer programmer. Do you see these informing your writing work? You’d talked about this in an interview you gave to a Berkeley campus paper shortly after you joined there.

Well, for one thing, in writing this book, I was quite aware all the time of the deep connection between the novel noir and the film noir and that whole sort of atmosphere, and that certain archetype that’s the hero of the noir. Then, also, there are the sort of cutting techniques that film uses — I think, in larger terms than that, that these end up making you intensely aware of structure. I do think a lot about architecture and I tend to think about the architecture of stories really visually. When I’m teaching workshops, we often end up drawing schematic drawings on the board to trace the progression of a story and where a character is. I notice myself doing that and I think that’s something that’s a part of me.

There’s also somebody who used to be at Berkeley, this architect who wrote this book called An Endless Way of Building, in which he talked about design patterns in terms of architecture and how within a given culture, over time, people will tend to develop the same kinds of solutions to problems of the construction of living habitats. So that you’ll have a sort of souk in the middle and the public buildings around that and then the layout of whatever falls around that will be in a certain pattern. And so what he was doing was tracing commonalities between various seemingly unconnected constructions and arguing that what we see over time is that the same solution, because it really works well, gets used or transformed again and again. Then in the early 90s, a group of four programmers developed this idea in programming and wrote a very famous book called Design Patterns, in which the idea was that if you’re a programmer, you’re often faced with problems that are specifically different but are really quite similar. So what they did was that they abstracted principles and called them by certain names — if somebody gives you a programming job, you can ask yourself which design patterns might this fit into and then once you’ve figured that out, you can make specific that design pattern for the job. So the question I and my students tried to work out over the whole of last year was does this apply to narrative as well. Can we see certain structures being repeated within given cultures of storytelling? How does it work, which ones are satisfying? It sort of sounds very much like a formula, but it needn’t be. So, for instance in the West, you have the classical structure of the rising arc of action leading to a climax and a catharsis, while in India it’s quite different — classically, at least, we’ve had this idea of the narrative rising and falling — the idea is that one bhava put next to another bhava increases the flavour of both. That isn’t the same idea, in psychological terms, of something needing to be catharsised. What you’re actually doing is letting the emotion rise up in the play in front of you, tasting that emotion and then letting it slip away and then tasting the next one. You can actually see this in narratives that are older, pre-encounter-with-the-West. Even Hindi movies, actually — that’s why they’re often so baffling to the Western eye.

Yeah, something tragic has happened and you have a clown scene right after that.

Yeah, Mehmood shows up and he does his thing and the whole structure of that is constructed so that all of it fits together. In a really well-executed film like that, it all somehow balances together and still has an overall taste to it but it still has all these elements mixed together. Whereas unity of action, time and place, emotion, in the Aristotelian model is really important. Where this helps me as a writer — I guess I am obsessed with architecture and form — is that it seems to me a fruitful way to try and think about what it is about stories that are satisfying. When I sit down and make my contract with a book, there are already certain built-in expectations inside me about what the story should do and if I don’t get that, there’s a very real feeling of disappointment, sometimes you feel ripped off. But if you feel like you’re in good hands, and that there are rules being broken but it’s being done for a conscious reason, then you’re willing to go along with it. I think, in the worst sort of way, these then boil down to formula — you see that in Hollywood and our own cinema. Hollywood’s full of formula, even in the language — in the industry, it’s all, Okay, second act’s too long, we need one more beat here, this sequence needs a high point — people have this very technical language for describing essentially the structure of the plot and if you’re working with somebody on a budget that doesn’t allow you to take risks, everybody’s really aware of it. If you think about it, in the visual arts and the theatrical arts, there is usually this sort of structure that constitutes the norm and then people work with it or against it. Sometimes the norm gets reworked when something really profoundly important happens—when somebody like Picasso comes along and demonstrates how to break the rule and educates, in a sense, the viewer in how to see his paintings and then creates a new arena for another design pattern to form itself around.