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Waiting for Neel Mukherjee in the lobby of the efficiently bland Hotel Lalit, I’m reading his description of the Great Eastern Hotel in Chowringhee from his second novel, The Lives of Others . “The grandeur would make you slack-jawed with awe….”
Some sentences later, the letter-writer – Supratik, who has abandoned the religion of bhadralokism for the religion of Naxalism – returns to what really interests him: “The world beyond the walls of the Great Eastern Hotel, the world immediately outside, at its doorstep… a row of sleeping men curled up like foetuses… Only ten feet separate them from the world of extreme wealth. Inside-outside: the world forever and always divides into those two categories.”
It’s been just three weeks since Neel Mukherjee joined Ali Smith, Howard Jacobson, Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler and Richard Flanagan on the Man Booker shortlist. His years as a reviewer protect him against the sudden glare of publicity, but it is in his nature to be both crisply confident in his professional persona and disarmingly unassuming in every other way.
Offered a choice of restaurants, he says wistfully that he’d like a Maharashtra Bhavan thali , but isn’t sure his Londoner’s stomach would hold up. We compromise, steering a middle path between five-star hotels and thali meals.
The Lives of Others follows the descending fortunes of a North Calcutta family losing its paper mills and its roots in the shift to the south of the city, and the bloody trajectories of a group of Naxal revolutionaries in the Bengal countryside. It is Mahalaya , the first day of Durga Puja, and as we head for Oh! Calcutta in Nehru Place, I ask Mukherjee why the novel seems so confidently bilingual, even though it’s written in English.
Much of his ease with language and place comes from his two decades in Kolkata — he only left the city when he was 22. He grew up bilingual: “My mother, she did not have any English. The only way she could have any investment in her children’s education was through Bengali.”
He remembers her harassing them to read and speak in Bengali; he hopes to be published in Bengali one day (“perhaps with a slim Young Adult novel”), and our conversation swings easily between both languages. The Lives of Others uses and bends English as comfortably and confidently as Junot Diaz or Philip Roth might, retaining flavour without sliding over into parody for the most part. “My editor let me keep in phrases like chewing the worms of your ear — kaaner poka khaacchey . I didn’t want to say ‘talking the living bejesus out of me’ because that means nothing in Bengali.”
He suddenly ducks, genuine horror in his eyes; the car swerves, and rights itself. Delhi is not Kolkata, but Nehru Place’s unreliable traffic is doing its best to remind Mukherjee that he’s back in the homeland. “Two charging bullocks,” he explains. “I thought they’d come straight for the windscreen.”
At Oh! Calcutta, the waiters and the managers warm almost immediately to Mukherjee’s obvious pleasure in the menus. “One promotion is going on: a hilsa special,” says Bimal, our waiter. He has Mukherjee’s immediate attention. He is – in keeping with his ability to translate injunctions from the written world into life practices – a conscience vegetarian, eschewing meat and chicken after he read J M Coetzee’s powerful and persuasive The Lives of Animals . But he is also – in solidarity with his Bengali roots – a fish-eater, though he plans to give this up soon. Not during this lunch, though; Oh! Calcutta has a special buffet menu for the Pujas.
I tell him he should add anything he likes from the hilsa special, and he knows exactly what he wants: “Is the ilish from the Ganga or the Padma?” It’s from the Padma river, in Bangladesh; this year’s catch has been dismayingly poor for the fishermen, but some of the spoils have found their way over to Delhi in any case.
“Do you know what we should have? We should have the Borishal ilish maacher deem bhaja (the fish eggs).” He eyes Tapan, the other waiter, and says to me, “But we should be careful. [To Tapan] please remove this menu because not ordering more from it is causing me pain.”
From behind his back, Tapan and Bimal beam at Mukherjee with approval and return with a profusion of starters, including tiny green-pea rissoles and Murshidabad-style fish fry. I ask what he thinks of The Lives of Others being called a “cross-generational family saga” in several reviews, when it seems to be so much more about revolution, property and wealth, inequality, empathy and its lack.
“I find it dismaying that no one’s calling Buddenbrooks a family saga. But if you’re Indian and you write a book that deals with two generations of family, that label is reserved for you.” Over time, he’s learned to ignore reviews; it helps that he used to write them. “The book has its own life in the world, and it’s not good for a writer to engage with one’s reviewers.”
The critic in him emerges when I ask about the impact that the Booker’s had on his life. “It has a huge traction in India — the long arm of colonialism, don’t you think? But it brings me closer to my Indian readership; it brings writers to the attention of readers, which is a wonderful thing. The Booker does shine a light on you.”
We pause when someone turns up the Muzak— old Bengali film songs, mauled by a soulful and tuneless orchestra. “I know that song,” he says. “Not in this terrible, terrible version, but from the film, I remember the sari Tanuja was wearing.”
The buffet has a wonderful aura of home-cooked party food and an embarrassing amount of gluttony happens on my part between the maacher kalia at one end of the table and the chholar daal at the other. The Lives of Others has a brief, unsparing description of the Bengal famine, and Mukherjee’s anger at the injustice of hunger is very apparent; but food is also one of the ways in which families, especially mothers and sons, communicate with one another.
He defends the Ghosh family in the novel from the charge of dysfunctionality (“They’re all getting on with their lives”), insisting that all families have their strain of darkness and cruelty, if not the precise afflictions of coprophilia, torture and sadism that touch the lives of the Ghoshes.
We pause for a wistful elegy to the luchi , which both of us have bypassed — “I can’t. I ate poori s for breakfast. I want to live to eat another day.” Mukherjee is writing, and working on the mathematics degree he decided to acquire in order to make one of his key characters – a genius mathematician – come to life. He didn’t want to create an implausible mathematician, and acquiring a degree seemed, to him, to be the best way to go about the task of imagining a plausible one. “It’s good if you’re writing all day to do different things, like bake, or garden. I’m told pottery would be very good — Anuradha Roy talks about it, I’m tempted.” He adds, with trademark precision, “I’m only doing maths as a hobby — a student of mathematics, not a mathematician myself. But I think people should. They should be able to think abstract.”
We end on a note of such culinary happiness that neither of us wants to go on to dessert (and anyway, there isn’t the room), with prawns in a sharp mustard sauce. “ Shorshe baata , this is the crowning glory of Bengal,” he says. “I think I should write a book on Bengali food some day.”
On the drive back to his hotel, Mukherjee ignores the traffic in order to talk about one of his favourite subjects — the brilliance of other writers. We agree that we both admire David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks , and lament its omission on the shortlist.
“Mitchell is absolutely wonderful. He and Ali Smith make me see that the model of writing can also be, in a very basic human way, warm and positive and generous.” The car swerves again, as a motorbike veers giddily into our path, but this time, Mukherjee, intent on his thoughts, doesn’t duck.
“The other model for writers is hell; competitiveness, meanness, it’s a recipe for disaster and madness. But I feel very lucky. I feel a lot of senior writers have been very kind and generous to me,” says this writer, so comfortable with tackling the murkier corners of the human heart. “I feel that this model is the way things should work. I must pass the blessings on too.”
