Sonia Faleiro

After a seven-year hiatus, author Vikram Chandra'’s Sacred Games, a ‘Victorian-Indian-gangster-spy-family saga’ releases this August. This 1,225 page novel in which Inspector Sartaj Singh from Love and Longing in Bombay confronts his nemesis, a ruthless underworld don, garnered Chandra a million dollar advance. Sonia Faleiro meets him in Mumbai.

1. What kind of research went into this book?

I don't know how to quantify it, or to call it research because I never know what I'm looking for. I just head out there, and ask questions. I met cops, bhais, and the infrastructure that surrounds and connects the Underworld. As a fiction writer, for the creative arts, and also as a reader, I don't care whether the writer spent 20 years researching some trite, or whether it's made up. Research has become important because we live in a confessional age. Oprah rules the roost. So somehow a writer with personal experiences of what he writes is more authentic. That's nonsensical.

2. You met Arun Gawli. What are your personal ethics about including real people in your novels?

In my work there's never been a direct correspondence with a person who I've then used as a character. They are composites of many people and things and traits. What I was very clear about, which I told people I interviewed was 'I'm not going to use this in any way that exposes you.' As a fiction writer this doesn't make my job tougher because as I said I use a composite of characters and never do a direct placement in my books.

3. I have two books in mind. Among the Chatteratti, and Maximum City (in which Chandra, his sisters Tanuja and Anupama, and brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra are mentioned). Of the latter, allegedly, people Suketu Mehta mentions in the book weren't aware they would feature.

Well, it depends on your contract with the person. If it's a public figure, and you make a pastiche of the person, that's one thing. But if you have a direct, intimate connection and you pretend that you are a friend of your subject's, as it were, and without telling them use their lives as material I think that's shady. It's usually questionable, and likely to make people very angry. If you're sitting at somebody's house and eating their food and saying you're their best friend, and a year later they find some version of themselves on a public page; they have a right to get pissed off.

I'm completely aware of this. If I enter the room and tell the people there 'I'm a writer writing about this mileu', I don't expect them to treat me as a friend. But if I tell them 'I'm your friend' and I behave like that, and I end up spending time with them, that is a betrayal. No two ways about that. I think some people, certain people I can think of, argue for a higher purpose. 'Oh, I have to do this because I'm saving the country.' Some bullshit like that. That's just self-serving crap.

4. I'm assuming since his book released, you two haven't spoken.

No.

5. Inspector Sartaj is memorable for his 4-page sex scene in Love and Longing in Bombay. It's that rare piece of good Indian writing on sex. With many Indian writers you can actually see the writer looking behind his/her shoulder to see that mom isn't watching. How did you pull that off?

(Laughs) It is similar to other writing in that you imagine yourself inside the character; like method acting. The trouble with writing about sex is that you either go in the direction of euphemisms or in the direction of mechanics-Part A fits into Part B. I didn't want to be coy. I wanted to put on page what it feels to be alive in that moment. And you can't think about what readers' reactions may be.

Not just when you write about sex, but when you're writing about anything horrible or wonderful. Sacred Games is horribly violent. And it came out of me. One of the characters Ganesh Gaitonde is a charming, ruthless, selfish gang boss who purges people. So what will my mother think of me when she reads that? You have to put aside those thoughts at certain points. One of my early memories was of my mom, who is a writer, at a screenplay reading, talking to people about an idea for a story. Then she said, 'and then they make love.' And I was like, 'mom!' Maybe it's easier for me; because I know I don't have to be as shy as other people.

6. We don't have a body of crime fiction in English, in India. Where did you turn for inspiration?
I faithfully read Crime and Detective. Also, in the northern vernacular press there's a whole tradition of such writing. When you read sensational writing on crime, you get several layers of meaning. One is actual fact--so and so killed his wife; but you also get what the writer is trying to make of it. There's also a lot of really pulpy stuff in Hindi, including the adventures of Inspector Ranjit. Some of it is really racy and I get caught up in the plot! But it's also fun to read for other reasons because what people make of crime, how they imagine it, is very revealing.


7. Who are your favourite crime novelists?

I like Elmore Leonard a lot. Dashiell Hammett. I just read a pretty excellent book called Public Enemies about the crime rate in the 1930s.

8. You've said Sacred Games isn't a Bombay book, but I'll ask anyway, which is your favourite Bombay book?

I think with great affection of Manto's film writing. I like his short stories but all those little pieces he did for film magazines, especially after the tragedy of the Partition, when the poor guy was on the other side of the border trying to make money to basically drink himself into oblivion, he wrote these things which are so full of life; so acutely alive, ironical, and full of compassion for the people he writes about. What I love about him is that he never judges his characters. I love that element, that complete swathe of his work which isn't widely known or read even though it has been translated and published.

I like Midnight's Children, hugely so. When I first read it I was in college, living in South Bombay's Warden Road. I was like, 'Kemp's Corner? Wow! This is about my life.' It was very exciting. I still have a huge affection for it. The flavour of the language, so alive. It felt like my book, my language. The nearest writing to that kind of writing at the time was Nita's Natter in Stardust! (Laughs) You have to give props to Stardust and Shobhaa (De) to do that. They were the first people to do that in English. Everything else was so ploddingly proper and square.
Very exciting, actually!


9. What kind of possibilities did Midnight's Children open to you, as a young writer?

When you don't see representation of yourself in the world around you, in film or stories, there's a certain emptiness. It's stronger in many other places than here. One incident, which really brought this home, was when I was a Teacher's Assistant in Houston in a class for foreign students. A Nigerian student came up to me and started singing, Haathi mere Saathi. I asked, 'how the hell do you know that?' and he explained how big Indian films are in Africa. Then he spoke of how there was no Nigerian cinema at the time. I had certain snootiness about Hindi films. Even though I loved them, I knew you weren't supposed to. That incident brought home how important it is even to have your own trash.

When you grown up reading Enid Blyton and Phantom, even if you do have Chandamama and the stories that your mother tells you, it's hard for you to imagine yourself. Even reading Premchand and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee isn't enough, because in my environment speaking English and Bambaiya Hindi, wasn't being represented in the story. I didn't have a relationship with my environment through the mode of a story.

Once somebody shows you it can be done, you think 'God, I can write about anything.' I can write about being in 6th class and beating Pranay Singh. (Laughs) That's one of the really valuable things about English literature, of the explosion of media, and I think it's starting to happen in music apart from Hindi film music. For instance, I love Rabbi. When I heard him, I though, 'gosh, I've been waiting for you for years. Where have you been?' We need to be able to sing to ourselves, about ourselves about the place we live in, in a way that feels right. That's a great boon.

10. Rushdie has said of you, 'He's someone whose writings I have always liked. Envy is a good test. When you get annoyed at somebody who's so good.'

(Laughs) Yes, Salman's been very nice. He's a friend and extraordinarily fun to be around. Like in his books, in real life he tells really great stories.

11. As an Indian writer living abroad, what equation do you have with the community of Indian writers in the UK and the US, for example?

It's really valuable. It's nice to have a community, even if it's a fractitious one, where people are fighting. (Laughs). It's sort of like what in the film industry is called the biradri. (Laughs). And the filmi biradri is an interesting one. They bitch about each other, they backstab. But finally, it's nice to have that environment where you are at home and there are other people concerned with the things you're trying to do. So you can have an ongoing conversation with them, not just in the sense of hanging out and talking to each other, but also through the nature of your work. I like that. It's fruitful.

A few years ago, in the late 1990s, my friend Anuradha Tandon and I started this thing called Adda. The whole idea was that once a month we'd meet at (the restaurant) Goa Portuguesa and invite a bunch of people, and someone would lecture, read or do a performance. What was amazing was how fast and vibrantly it took off. Pretty much after the first time we had to do it by invitation only. Some really amazing collaborations came out of that. We stopped doing the Adda because Anuradha got really busy, and I was spending a lot of time abroad. But I miss it. It was something one really looked forward to. Similarly in the States, I've twice done this conference called Breadloaf in Vermont where faculty, scholars, and fellows spend 10 days inside this pressure cooker where there's a lecture or reading going on every hour. And by the end of it, you're exhausted. But I love that experience!

12. You clearly enjoy interacting with other writers. Will Sacred Games change the equation?

Do you mean the money and all of that? I think jealousy is an inevitable condition, in film you learn this. A—ny big success raises hackles. And I don't think of (my) big success in any kind of aesthetic or virtuous way; I think of it as good luck, a weird mysterious something or the other. But that's okay. You find your friends and your enemies. And sometimes finding your enemies is also fun.

You know I was 35 when I had my first book published. So I have had that precarious feeling of 'will I get published? Will people like my work?' It's a scary, harsh place to be and you have to somehow keep faith with yourself and struggle through it. I've been in the film industry long enough to see people enter with a bright flame of success, and then flame out, get eaten up. All those tragedies happen. So I have sympathy with them (other writers); especially, when you have this feeling that recognition, monetary success, and even your own people accepting you as an artist depends on you being bought in New York. And then to see somebody else walk into it, especially if you think that other person is not so deserving.

There's a moment when you're 34 and haven't got published, and you hear of some 24-year-old being paid $600,000. You get a stab in your gut. You have to be a saint not to feel that. But you have to find some way of getting past that, and just working. There's no other cure. Also, not that getting published isn't unimportant, but also to meet people, who've read your work, is an amazing experience as well.

13. Better than the cheque?

(Laughs) Well if I say that I'm going to sound like a really pious, pompous ass! But its finally about what you want to do. You throw something out in the world and imagine this reader, this listener, to whom it means something. And when it does, it's intensely satisfying. I think the greater loneliness is when you create some sort of art, and feel that it's gone unheard.

14. That's why you have your email id in your books.

In my first two books the frame is explicitly set so that the story is told and heard by someone. That's really important to me. And people write with ideas, opinions, and suggestions. It's fun. What I have to slide by is when people ask me to explain things. I don't think writers should explain. (Laughs). Then I have to do my professorial thing. 'What do you think it means?' (Laughs).

But I'm also just a geek, and in the 1990s when the Internet came of age, I was making money in grad school by writing software for magazines, and then it was commonplace to include your email after your article. Initially my editors were reluctant, 'You'll be hounded by psychos.' But the only scary email was in print. That was frightening, but I never heard from him again. My email will be in Sacred Games as well.

15. In your famous essay, The Cult of Authenticity (Boston Review, 2000) you write of being judged on merit, but on 'perceived Indianness'” and 'the degree of ... Assimilation by the West'." Do you still find yourself being judged because of where you live?

I've been listening to that lazy criticism for years, and watching it being applied not just to myself but also to others. I always thought it comes out of insecurity of self, from the critical class, and their anxiety of the immense power of the West and the media there. So there's this paranoia of 'who are you writing for, and what are your intentions?' It's not just because people are getting paid lots of money, it's also this idea of virtue that locates good intent and selflessness in this indefinable region that exists somewhere in the hinterland. So by locating it somewhere else, by speaking another language than your mother tongue you have somehow become corrupted. Amit Chaudhury made a fine point when he asked, 'even if somebody is writing for the West, so what? Does it necessarily mean there is something lacking in the work because the audience is of a certain place, class or colour? To me it looks like an attempt to censor and control.

16. You grew up in Bombay. Is it any different for you, from Mumbai?

In my mind it's always been this city of schisms, strange schizophrenia, and purposeful blindness of one part of the city towards the other. Both you and I would walk past each other and agree not to disturb each other, that kind of thing.

But historically, this movement towards social censorship, towards an imagined idealism of a glorious past, which never existed; a fear of the foreign, and especially of women and of sex, of women's sexuality expressed in virility and culture, is really distressing. And also, it's connected to a lot of things which go wrong. Frustrating. But that's not necessarily Bombay; it's more like liberalism doesn't necessarily reside in Bombay. Bombay is sometimes the most retrograde, tending towards fascism.

The question is not so much whether we choose to live in Bombay or Mumbai, but what kind of imagined city, or imagined future city people want to construct. Because that is what's used for political gain, what causes exploitation and suffering.


17. Is this a city you could see yourself living in again?

Absolutely. Most of the time I live a very ordinary life. Meeting my friends or going to see a movie at New Empire. Or hanging out in Lokhandwala. So yes, I do have a space for me here.


18. I like the picture of you hanging out at Lokhandwala. Where would you hang out?

(Laughs). Various places. There's a chaat place at the second crossroad I spent many hours at. After that, McDonald's opened it became the glamour centre of Lokhandwala. (Laughs). That became a really interesting place to just sit, read, and watch the parade.

19. You still think Mickey D's is glamorous?

(Laughs) Yes, in a qualified sense! There's a great energy about people having fun and trying to look their best, and impress one another. And flirting.

20. Your wife Melanie Abrams is also a fiction writer. How do two writers happily co-exist?

We were both afraid when we first met that we would get on each others nerves, drive each other crazy. But we've managed to feed off each other. What's strange about writing is that sometimes you imagine something in your head so completely, but you can't quite see it completely on the page, and your readers may get confused. Something simple even like moving your characters across the room. You haven't demonstrated that in the text fully, but in your head he has crossed the room. It's nice when I'm really frustrated with a plot point to be able to yell, 'Melanie! I don't know what to do' And she comes up with something. Actually, we spend way too much time together. In my old house we had two studies, we had separate rooms. In this new one (in Berkeley) there's only one study. You have to find this balance between closeness and distance.

She was the first person to read this book. I know some writers are gun shy about showing their book before it has been completely written. But I don't feel like that pretty much most of the time. I like the feeling of communication with somebody else. With Melanie, or my mother or sisters in the act of producing stuff. As soon as I get an early proof I send it off to a novelist friend in Washington DC. I like him to read it because he's somebody who I really respect. He's really sharp.

21. You've said you're going to continue teaching (creative writing at the University of California). I'm wondering, what do you teach someone who is talented or has been published?

Well, I think you can teach craft, you can't teach art. There's no way I could make someone talented. It's as absurd as me wanting to be a Wimbledon tennis player. I could practise for a thousand years and take all the lessons, and never be close.

What you can do is give somebody a vocabulary and an alertness to the issues of craft, which is what I learnt from my teachers. The kind of care which can go into narrative, sensitivity to conversation. And the more you practice it, the more acute your senses become to this kind of thing. It's like any art in that sense. What the teacher gives you is perhaps the space, and a certain kind of conceptual framework in which you can imagine what you're trying to do.

22. Does your interaction with your students influence your writing?

Absolutely, which is why I keep doing it. Just interacting with a bunch of young, fresh people is really valuable. They challenge you, and ask you interesting, provocative questions. And I test my stuff on them all the time. In one of my classes we talked for a long time about the name of this novel. So I would come in every class and the first thing I would say was, 'How are these names?' (Laughs)

23. So who came up with the name?

I finally did. And they approved it!

24. So are your novels compulsory reading?

No! (Laughs). I mean, I wouldn't do that. Not just because it would be unethical but it would be weird for me. How do you teach your own work? Though I have sat in a class where the teacher had us buy his book. (Laughs). And we were forced to discuss it in very complimentary terms!

25. You also taught Manil Suri. What were your impressions of him?

He brought in a very early section of that novel (Death of Vishnu) to a community workshop I taught in Washington DC. And I liked it. I thought he was a promising talent. I'm really happy that he'd doing well, and I'm looking forward to reading the next one.

26. What's on your bookshelf?

This book. (Removes it from rugsack). It's about the power struggle between Persia and Greece in the ancient world. And the thrust of the book is that at the time Persia was the big, stable world power; Greece was a bunch of terrorist states. It's really well written, fluid and interesting. I like it a lot.

The other book, which I just finished yesterday is Will in the World. It's about Shakespeare. It follows in a chronological way his life through his plays, and, we know so little about the man, evidence is so scanty, almost the biggest piece of evidence we have about him are the plays themselves. So this takes a really acute, subtle, nuanced reading of the plays and tries to interpret what we know about the man, and speculates about him.

I read a lot of fiction as well. But strangely enough, in the last year of finishing this book I found it really hard to read fiction. Maybe because I was thinking so much about my own work, and my mind was hyper aware. When I read fiction I like to fall into the dream. Let myself be seduced, and get inside that world. Then the story surrounds me and I'm engaging with it, and participating in it. So in that last year I was thinking so much about issues of pacing and language that I couldn't read a page without thinking, 'this page needs to move a little faster', 'that sentence needs to be tuned up a little!' And that's annoying. I don't want that second guessing voice in my head when I'm reading fiction. So for that reason, I think, I ended up reading a lot more non fiction.

27. Vikram Seth has said the same thing. He doesn't read fiction when writing his own because he doesn't like to get the voices mixed up.

Really? It's not that acute with me. I like reading various kinds of fiction, and I read pretty much continuously.

An edited version of this interview appears in Tehelka, January 21, 2006.

Photo: Sanjiv Valsan

Read an extract of Sacred Games.

Labels: Profiles

What a lovely interview! Thanks.

I loved LALIB and was beginning to wonder what became of Vikram Chandra. Your interview answers that question and quite a few more. Thanks, Sonia.

Simran

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, NOT 'Bumkum', Sonia my sweet :)

The venerable moshai must be turning indignantly in his grave!

Other than that, wonderful interview, as ever.

Suresh

Lovely interview, I was wondering what the chap hed been up to lately - suspected he might have been writing screenplays only. Which leads me to my question: when is the movie of L&LiB coming out (or Sacred Games, for that matter)?

Hey Sonia I liked your interview in the Buzz :)

Sonia - I deliberately kept reading this post for later. When I started reading the book. And now that I'm half through, I thought I'd sneak a peek and ended up reading the full interview. It was a superb interview and I just loved all your questions - they were thoughtful and really got a lot of things out from Mr. Chandra. Have you read the book ? I'm reading it, and it is just awesome.

Thanks for this.

Hi Sonia,
Im a big fan of yours and keep following your interviews. Any tips for budding interviewers?