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For example," says Kunal Basu, "if I had to introduce you to a reader, I would not say this is a journalist from Business Standard. Instead," he stares so intimately I almost gag over my haleem, "I'd probably write, ‘His head inclined to one side as the sunlight pours in from the window, glinting off the pearl ring on one finger…' I am," he explains, "a very visual person," writes Kishore Singh. | |||
That could be the reason why director Aparna Sen picked his short story, "The Japanese Wife", to film, prompting him to publish it as part of a collection of short stories, the book tour for which has left him red-eyed for lack of sleep, with panda bags underneath, and a tender belly — which last is the reason why he's opted for a vegetarian set meal at Fire, the modern Indian cuisine restaurant at The Park in New Delhi, where he is staying. (We had earlier walked down from the hotel to DV8 only to find it — embarrassingly for me, since I had picked it for our rendezvous — shut down.)
Basu is familiar with the book tour modus operandi, having published three novels earlier (this is besides his academic work, he says), and so isn't averse to answering trite questions with erudite answers. So — and this is for the record — this collection of short stories has been written over a decade; his first short story was written well before his first novel (The Opium Clerk) was published; that, yes, the short story writer must establish the contexts and characters much faster than if he were writing a novel; but no, there is no qualitative difference between a short story and a novel…
An inveterate traveller but equally a disciplined writer, Basu — he says this regretfully — is no socialiser. "I lead a very boring life," he says of his teaching stint at Oxford where he is a senior professor of management, "I'm forever at my desk. I have practically no social life. My wife has to drag me even to the gym." He would though, he agrees, benefit greatly from such outings. "Ernest Hemingway wrote a lot in bars," he says, scooping up a spoonful of dal, "I would never be able to do that, I'd be too busy eavesdropping on other people's conversations." But he makes up for it when commuting between Oxford and London in the train where he will never be with an iPod because "I'm attending to the conversation of others, drawn to their gestures…"
Basu followed up The Opium Clerk with what is till now his best work and my personal favourite, The Miniaturist, about an artist in Akbar's court. Because he packs in extensive research, and equally because he does the first draft of all his non-academic writing in longhand — at night, he had given himself two years to write that novel. "I finished it in five months," he still looks overwhelmed by the process, "my creative persona completely overtook me." He was "bereft, a little empty" after the writing was done because "the world of the Mughals is so seductive," and though he never repeats a theme, he cheated this once to write the short story "The Accountant" in the newly published volume, for a brief dip into their extravagant past.
Even though he was wary of the set lunch, Basu has been doing well, mopping up his plate with the crisp, hot rotis while he talks of his third novel, Racists, which is a futuristic take on science and racial discrimination. Even though it didn't do as well in India — call it apartheid against an Indian writer setting his book outside the country and with a complete absence of Indian characters — Basu says the reviews in the West were mostly generous, even though some critics took issue with it, saying racism as a theme was passé.
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I'm eating faster than Basu can speak (call it journalistic practice) and we decide we'll settle for Darjeeling tea to round off what has been a surprisingly light meal. It is now I ask him whether research alone is sufficient to set a novel in a particular era. "Imagination," Basu points out instead, "is very important. I wrote The Opium Clerk though I've never myself taken opium. Bizhad, the artist in The Miniaturist, is bisexual, I'm heterosexual. I wrote Racists though I'm not a scientist. I'm drawn," he says, "by the unfamiliar, not the familiar."
His decision to teach was a deliberate one. "I knew I was going to write," and so, for his "crime of being a good student" he seized soon after the opportunity to teach a large number of classes till more recent seniority allowed him the freedom to spend at least as much, if not more, time writing away from class. "Ninety-five per cent writers, my agent tells me," he pre-empts my next question, "have day jobs. But I'm fairly obsessive about my writing. It is writing I now get up every morning to do."
His work has taken him around the world, part of which experiences at least have found their way into his short stories. When he began to write "Lotus-Dragon" about the Tiananmen Square riots, for instance, "I went back to my box of slides, 24 rolls of films, to put myself in the frame of mind when I had gone to teach there" — and had needed to be evacuated when the riots began. Clearly, he's also drawn to the absurd. If "The Japanese Wife" about the "wedding" of two unlikely pen-friends who have never met but commit themselves to each other over a life of letters was not so lyrical, it would have been ridiculous; and certainly "Grateful Ganga" about the wife of a rocker carrying the ashes of her dead husband to be immersed in the Ganga (based loosely and imaginatively on a report about the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia wishing to have his ashes immersed in the holy river in India) is plain idiosyncratic.
I tell him both these stories with their careful nuances and play of characters are gripping enough to have been full-fledged novels. "A short story's scope is no different from that of a novel," he smiles back. "They are not qualitatively different, but you need more resolve to finish a short story off."
He also lets drop that maybe, just maybe, he's ready to quit his teaching job and take up writing as a full-time profession, even move back to India — though not to Kolkata, the city of his birth and early youth. "I love Delhi," he pauses, adding an irrelevant (but visual) detail into our conversation: "I like dusks more than dawns, and walking in Lodhi Garden at dusk, I expect the Afghans to arrive, to hear the hoofs of horses and a different tongue." However unfamiliar with the capital, it is here he's considering setting down new roots. "It's the only city in India that has a frontier feel, of people coming and going" — this is not tourists or businesspersons Basu is referring to but the arrivals and departures of dynasties, kings, raiders and settlers over the centuries — "that creates more dynamics than a settled city. The romantic in me is touched by that."
We've long finished our tea, and Basu has a plane to catch to Bangalore, before going to Kolkata and his mother for a well-earned holiday. We've been together for two hours, something he might not have spared in Oxford where, he points out, "I'm very zealous of my time." Of course, he's already working on his next book, though he refuses to talk about it, except to say, "I need a story that takes my breath away".
But if that next book should have someone ‘his head inclined to one side as the sunlight pours in from the window, glinting off the pearl ring on one finger…', you'll know who inspired that line. Or where you read it first.