Keshava Guha Talks Capturing City In Flux Through Fiction

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: What was the genesis of this book?

A: I’d finished a draft of Accidental Magic in 2016. A day or two after that I'd gone with my mother to Bandhavgarh on safari. Anyone who's read the book can understand why, in that setting, I would have the idea. It seemed like an image... It took a couple of years to figure out that it was a novel and that should be the ending.

Q: The play on the title fits beautifully with your novel and the surround sound in the ecosystem.

A: David Lodge gave his memoir the title ‘Writer's Luck’. Whether I'm writing short stories or novels, I have difficulty with titles. In this case, everything just seemed to line up. The image of the tiger, the title of the ‘tiger’s share’, contrasted with the lion's share. It was just one of those moments where you think, wow, I've just had a piece of luck.

Q : H ow easy was it to adopt Tara Saxena's voice?

A: My first novel was in third person from four perspectives. I found that much more difficult to manage because you're taking the reader in and out of a range of minds. Having one narrator whose voice drives everything is simpler. It was turning her into the protagonist and giving her more independent life — that took longer. I have a lot of affinity with her because we're both people who have our inner lives formed by a lifetime of reading. She's a woman, I'm a man; she's a lawyer, I'm not; she's from Delhi, I'm from Bangalore. But that bond that I share with her... was my way into her. And I did not grow up in a world that was divided on traditional gender lines. One of the really important moments of my life is that my father went to an all-boys school and I wanted to go, but my parents refused, partly because they didn't believe boys should grow up separately from girls. As a result, most of my closest friends are women. Also, my mother, my sister, my wife — these are all people through whom I have been able to learn more about what the world looks like from their perspective.

Q : I recall ed your essay on walking in Greater Kailash . What remains with me is your power of observation.

A: Two writers have influenced me strongly — Philip Roth and Javier Marias, who have a very strong voice. And in writing about themselves, they can keep you captivated. I never had that kind of confidence or even interest. To me, what makes writing interesting is a chance to write about other people, to live vicariously. I'm constantly listening to the conversations. I can't switch it off. A lot of writers are very visual. I think my sense of hearing is also quite strong.

Q : T o transcribe your environment may seem effortless, but it's not.

A: There's something about Delhi which made me more present, more curious. When I was growing up in Bangalore, it was a very sheltered upbringing. Not that my life in Delhi was not privileged, but I don't speak Kannada... I can speak Hindi in Delhi, I travelled by public transport. And those are things that deepen your engagement with the city. I was looking, listening, wondering. I think partly because I wasn't from Delhi. I suppose it is the way that I wanted to write, try to bring all that in.

Q : The re were cues where I thought this guy observes and absorbs. H ow much of it is he carrying around ?

A: It is a real mixture of observation and imagination. Part of it is a trick. One of the funny things I've learned is that you could write a story and give it to 12 people — they're very bad at knowing the bits that are automatic. Someone will read something and think, ‘This feels so true to life. You must have experienced it.’ But that might be the one bit that I didn't. You want the reader to believe in what they're reading... You have novels about pre-Partition Delhi and you have Ruth Jhabvala and Anita Desai novels about middle-class Delhi in the 60s and 70s. Delhi is a very different place now and I wanted to give a sense of some of those changes.

Q : Y ou point out that there's room for social mobility. T his is the ‘ N ew ’ Delhi.

A: There is a new group of people wielding political, economic power... I had seen people like that who saw things changing and thought, I'm going to ride this wave of change, I don't want to be someone who loses out.

Q : Y ou managed to put down on paper the changes taking place in the social, economic, political milieu .

A: I was trying to do two things. The first was to try to record those changes. What fiction can sometimes do is document changes in things like values and attitudes. At the same time, I didn't want readers to feel that I was trying to explain Delhi to a non-Delhi audience. What one is trying to do is capture the city at a very particular moment. What fiction allows you to do is write a set of concentric circles where you have one character or one family at the heart of it. But you can keep expanding the stakes outwards.

Q : H ow would you define literary fiction ?

A : So 50 or 60 years ago, there was just fiction. I think people understood there was a difference between Iris Murdoch and Arthur Hailey. But the idea was they were just novels. The problem with this category of literary fiction is it can give the false impression that these books are not meant to be enjoyable, as if they’re ‘eat your vegetables, take your vitamins’ kind of reading. I think that it is fiction that aspires to the status of art... You're trying to create something of enduring aesthetic value. But you still want people to be turning pages.

Q : W hat is it that you seek as a reader? W hat do you aim to achieve as a writer?

A: As a reader, paramount for me is the pleasure of language. If I look at the writers that I love, it's because I like to spend time in the company of their sentences, phrases and paragraphs. Take an example of a writer that I admire, Jhumpa Lahiri... her sentences are incredibly finely crafted. There's always a moment that's meant to break your heart. But the language is a vehicle. As a reader, I'm drawn to writers where language is the thing itself. The other thing I'm really drawn to is the unfamiliar. I like writers whose sensibility is a little ‘tedha’. I love Helen DeWitt, there's a streak of madness in the way she looked at the world. I think as a writer, you want to encourage people to read more closely because so much is opened up... There's a range of things that novels can offer, but each of these is a pleasure... Coming back to that idea of pleasure — because it's not about whether it's good for you or not — just makes your life infinitely better and richer for every half hour you get to spend doing it, whether it's writing or reading.