“Writing novels takes a lot of courage,” Pavan K Varma, diplomat and author, tells Indulekha Aravind
Despite a full-time day job as a member of the Indian Foreign Services Pavan K Varma found the time to pen 16 works of non-fiction, spanning a variety of subjects from Ghalib to Krishna to the “Great Indian Middle Class”. He has now entered the realm of fiction with his debut novel When Loss Is Gain. “I wrote it because I had a powerful story with me, which kept growing and evolving. It’s just that a hectic schedule and one non-fiction project after another kept the writing of it at bay,” says Varma, a few hours before its launch in Bangalore. Being a veteran writer, he displays not the slightest trace of pre-launch nervousness or diffidence.
Varma’s “powerful story” is set in Delhi, his “home”, and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where he is now serving as the Indian ambassador, and deals with the conflicts within Anand, a successful lawyer who is told he is going to die of cancer, a diagnosis that turns out to be incorrect. Meanwhile, his wife has left him for his best friend and he must now reassess the choices in his life, a journey of introspection for which he travels to a remote town in Bhutan, where he meets Tara, who is herself grappling with her inner demons.
To write fiction, says Varma, took a certain amount of courage and resolve. “Writing fiction is a much more interior process, a far more subjective journey, and subjective journeys call for more courage. In some way, the book encompasses my approach to life — there is so much offered to us for free on the platter of life but mostly, we merely nibble at it.”
Did he, as the protagonist does with Tara, quote Urdu couplets to his wife while he was wooing her? Varma confesses that he did. “I grew up with poetry, so it was only natural. And over the years, I fear that the tendency has got worse — I now quote a lot more,” he says, and then laughs uproariously. Varma, whose works include a contemporary take on Kama Sutra and an anthology of erotic literature, says he also chose to explore the theme of desire in his novel because that’s something we Indians tend to keep “mothballed”.
The conversation segues to how novels, though works of fiction, need to be culturally rooted as they would otherwise lack authenticity. From there, it is just a short hop to the general rootlessness that he feels is a malaise of the urban educated. “We are linguistic half-castes,” he says. This is a theme he had explored in Becoming Indian (2010), and it also formed one of the arguments of the inaugural address he delivered at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, from which he has just returned. “It has reached the stage where it is almost infra dig to have gained that kind of fluency in your own language. It’s as facetious as an entire generation or more in the United Kingdom passing out of school having read only Kalidasa and not Shakespeare.”
The solution is to correct this institutionally, through changes in the education system, and by promoting awareness that we can’t be caricatures, he says. “English has its relevance but it can’t be a substitute for one’s mother tongue.” Varma says he made a conscious effort to learn Hindustani and Urdu, which also led him to translate into English the poetry of Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
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From Bangalore, Varma’s off to the Jaipur Literature Festival, now in the eye of a political storm over the presence of Salman Rushdie (will he, won’t he?) — a controversy Varma dubs “contrived” considering that Rushdie has come to India a number of times. Literary festivals themselves could do with a few changes, he says, including more planning, and greater importance to writers in regional languages.
For his next book, the 1976-batch IFS officer returns to non-fiction. “Without being melodramatic, it is a book that deals with what I believe are the reasons for the current crisis of the state,” he says, adding that that is all his publishers will allow him to say at this point.
So no more forays into fiction? “I will return to it if a powerful story grips me. And with far less hesitation this time.”