The poetics of surprise

discusses his dreamlike debut novel, which examines issues of urban Indian masculinity in changing social circumstances.

Niladri Dasgupta is a man who seems constantly to be on the run, and the book that contains him, Rajorshi Chakraborti's Or the Day Seizes You, is one of the most interesting debuts in recent months.

This is a novel about missed connections, about the vast spaces that can exist between people in close relationships, and it uses surrealism to create the sense of a skewed nightmare world "" a literary tradition that extends from Kafka to modern-day writers like Kazuo Ishiguro and Alex Garland, but something we're not accustomed to seeing in Indian writing in English. In its refusal to draw obvious connections between the various episodes in Niladri's life, it is more effective than a conventional narrative would have been.

For the author, it was also a means to explore how societal changes raise new issues of identity for the contemporary urban Indian male. Chakraborti, 28, spent his early life in Calcutta and Bombay. At the age of 16 he moved to Victoria, Canada, to study on a two-year scholarship.

Since 1996 he's been moving between Calcutta, London and Edinburgh, juggling various jobs alongside his writing. He was to be in Delhi later this month for a literary festival but there was a last-minute rescheduling. However, he agreed to an email discussion.

You won the Philip Larkin Prize after graduating from Hull University. When did you start writing poetry? Any published work?

Misleading as it is, the Philip Larkin Prize was actually for "best final year essay by an undergraduate", so that didn't have anything to do with poetry per se. I did write poems as an adolescent which were (regrettably) published quite frequently in the teen/youth pages of newspapers in Bombay and Cal. One of them even won a national poetry competition, but they were all juvenile pieces whose only lasting value is that I'll never write like that again.

So you're more comfortable with prose now?

I decided at about 18 that prose is where my real interest lies. Since then, I haven't written another poem, nor have any occurred to me. This was also the time when I fell in love with the novel form. I wrote two dreadful novels rapidly that year one after another, utterly imitative of everyone I admired at the time "" the usual suspects for an impressionable late adolescent, Garcia Marquez, Camus, Kundera "" and a whole bunch of stories. Again, their only value is that I got those particular mistakes out of my system forever.

For the next six years, however, I didn't write a word of fiction, even though the longing to write burned as steadily as before. I just had no stories compelling enough to tell. Instead I read voraciously, like a starving autodidact "" everything from Cervantes through Balzac and Flaubert all the way to the most recent African and American stuff.

Whatever interesting writers I could find from each region: central Europe, Latin America, Australia, and of course India. Somewhere during those years, I also began a similarly prolonged love affair with selected genres and phases of the history of cinema.

The narrative structure of your book is fascinating. It's much more subtle than, say, magic realism, which often lends itself to excess. In contrast, your book requires a careful reading to realise that it isn't a strictly logical narrative. Did you always intend it to be that way? Or did you start off constructing a straightforward story about this character named Niladri, and then find that the story lent itself to a fragmented, unchronological treatment?

No, I only ever thought of him in that way. In fact, I carried a few episodes and images in my head for a long time before I saw they could form part of the same novel, because they were about a similar sort of character. And then each chapter surprised me as it occurred to me, because I had no pre-formed template for the characters at all.

I suppose the only vague pointer I had about Niladri was that he is a man whose first instinct is to run in the face of anything unpredictable and challenging. At some point the title showed up to help me along, though Saul Bellow's own masterly novella, Seize the Day, has always seemed to me to ironically hint at the opposite, that whatever you (fail to) do, ultimately it's the power of happenings and of being itself that will seize you.

I'm glad you emphasised the surrealism. I love the world of dreams, their density of unexpected surprises, the momentum of events and transformations, and finally their whole atmosphere where all limits are stretched and angles askew. Perhaps additionally my style emerges out of my love of cinema, as well as from an addiction to implausible anecdotes and tall tales.

But I love telling stories through situations and images, especially those that seem powerful and evocative enough to suggest many possible readings. Apart from being hauntingly beautiful and compellingly readable in their own right, I love those images and situations in the works of other writers.

What ideology of insect is Gregor Samsa [in Kafka's The Metamorphosis]? What is Joseph K [in The Trial] being tried for? And yet, despite the mystery, page after page flashes past as we read, gliding forward upon what Kundera wonderfully describes as the "beauty of perpetual astonishment", and "the poetics of surprise".

The book's cover is very apt (see box). Were you involved with the design process at all?

My editor asked for my ideas about the cover, and I emailed them about a dozen different visual possibilities that seemed to me to express something of the atmosphere of the novel. Based on these suggestions, I suppose their design department went to work.

They got back to me a while later with three ideas, and I picked this one immediately. Its juxtapositions seemed to me wonderfully evocative of the mood of the book, and yet the image is opaque and mysterious, almost begging a story unto itself. I'm delighted with it.

Themes of dislocation often figure in the work of non-resident Indian writers, and it's visible (albeit in a significantly different form) in Niladri's story as well: his not really seeming to belong anywhere. Does any of that draw from your own experiences?

Almost all the actual details of the story are fictional, but a lot of the feelings are derived from personal experience "" though you often take them in a different direction from how you might have reacted personally. Your characters become experimental selves, as it were, choosing numerous roads not taken by you. You also spread out different autobiographical details among different characters.

As for the sense of being adrift, I think it's clear I didn't want to write about those sensations within the context of cultural displacement, which is a well-travelled path in world fiction, and especially in much Indian English writing of the past so many years. I have nothing against such novels, but other writers can depict such situations with much more sensitivity and acuteness than me.

But what I did discover in the course of writing the story was that it could be a perspective into exploring the predicaments and limitations of middle-class, contemporary, urban Indian masculinity, within rapidly changing circumstances.

Because of new social conditions, old certainties about fixed roles (which were getting pretty threadbare and hypocritical for many of us anyway) begin to seem absolutely inadequate. How will the hitherto enthroned Indian male respond to the new imperatives "" if his wife refuses to remain in a marriage where she has nothing in common with him, for example, and begins a relationship with someone else? More and more young Indians will spend years abroad, as students as well as professionally.

How do they cope with the challenges of isolation, unfamiliarity, the anxiety of renegotiating themselves? I try to introduce these questions, but never from a position of superiority or judgement. I'm part of the same journey.

The book's structure is so unsettling "" jumping from one unconnected incident in Niladri's life to another; ending abruptly. Did you face any resistance from your publisher?

My editor, V K Karthika, was very appreciative of both the form of the book and the texture of its incidents. If there was any reworking, it was to do with the overtly political content of certain passages, which she thought clogged and burdened the text unnecessarily. Perhaps that is a challenge for my next book, a more harmonious integration of political preoccupations within the story and the characters.

Judge a book...

A continuing sense of time being stretched out to the point where it doesn't mean anything, uncertainty about where dream-life ends and waking-life begins... some of these concerns, crucial to the narrative structure of Or the Day Seizes You, are reflected in the book's provocative cover design. Two famous Salvador Dali paintings occupy the background: "Le Sommeil" ("The Sleep"), which depicts a giant sleeping head precariously tethered to the ground, and the hypnotic "The Persistence of Memory" with its landscape of eerily folded "melting" clocks. In the foreground are men's shirts in what appears to be the interior of a train compartment "" suggesting rootlessness and constant movement.