Strange tales without borders

Tell Rana Dasgupta he's in danger of being defined by that most eye-rollingly tedious of lit-club prophecies "" the Next Big Thing in Indian Writing "" and he, well, rolls his eyes, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

This isn't because Dasgupta belongs in the (equally romanticised) category of reclusive, non-worldly writer who doesn't care whether his book sells.

He's marketing-savvy, on the ball with his publicity and launch dates and even freely distributes bright red "business cards" with review blurbs on them.

It's just that compartmentalisation goes against the grain of everything his debut novel stands for. Tokyo Cancelled is a book that sets out to defy the universal tendency to romanticise foreign places and to put countries and cultures into little boxes.

"Too much contemporary writing," says its author disdainfully, "derives its frisson from the neatly packaged cultural differences between people and places."

"Besides, I'm not even Indian, strictly speaking," he says; Dasgupta, who looks younger than his 33 years and has a clipped accent that's difficult to place, is a British citizen who grew up in Cambridge, completed a degree in literature in France, did his Masters in the US and came to Delhi only in 2001.

For a couple of years he even worked with Business2Media.com, a corporate news wire. Then came the contract with Harper Collins and Dasgupta started devoting his energies to his book.

One of the striking things about Tokyo Cancelled is that there's no attempt to exoticise a place "" be it Osaka, Buenos Aires, Paris or Delhi "" for the reader.

Dasgupta's linking device "" 13 passengers stranded at an airport tell each other stories to pass the time "" is occasionally patchy; there are times when the book cries out to be just a short-story collection with no connecting thread.

However, the stories themselves make for compelling reading. They move between degrees of strangeness "" a young businessman falls in love with a doll; a changeling tries to redeem himself by helping an old man find a word; two malcontents discover how to transubstantiate matter with the help of a packet of cookies "" all the while questioning our conventional notions of time and space.

A cartographer works on a map of the world that is based on velocity "" the speed at which things move across the globe "" rather than on conventional geography.

Another character visits Manhattan for the first time and is surprised by the verticality of its skyline: "his map had only shown it on the horizontal".

Dasgupta's reading of medieval literature, especially Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, created an interest in the idea of global space. "The events described by Chaucer may have occurred in far-flung places, but they were all centres of medieval Christendom," he says.

"Consequently, even when his characters travelled far and wide, they were essentially moving within comfortable, homogenous spaces." That, he says, is a reflection of what the world is like today, as the globe continues to shrink.

"The Delhi elite is scarcely different from the New York elite in terms of their values, the houses they live in and their lifestyles. So it's strange that people talk about other countries in exotic terms."

Apart from medieval literature, which he finds fasinating for its use of people as symbols ("the language is completely emptied of psychology"), Dasgupta admits "" almost apologetically, given his antipathy to stereotypes "" to being a Rushdie fan: "He showed that contemporary writing didn't have to be banal or unliterary."

Rushdie said once that his formative influence was The Wizard of Oz "" the film, not the book "" and that's echoed in Dasgupta's assertion that he's been influenced more by film than by literature.

"Even Hollywood," he says, "for all it shortcomings, is interesting because it's always up to date with whatever is happening in the world."

Also, folktales have always been an inspiration, as anyone who reads Tokyo Cancelled will see. "As youngsters, my friends and I used to write fairytales and gift them to each other," he says.

"In fact, one of the stories in this book was originally written as a birthday present."

It's clear that their author has the storyteller's gift himself.