I Reconstruct Marginalised Voices Through My Fiction

The Last of Earth is a line from the T.S. Eliot poem which is in his book, Four Quartets, and it is a very famous line that is quoted often and is about how it is the end of our exploration when we come to where we started and the last of earth left to discover is that which was there right at the beginning. Those are the lines that thematically spoke to what I wanted to say in the book and they are there in the epigraph. Hopefully, they set the context for the reader. Which is that we go on journeys expecting to discover certain things or landscapes whereas the journey perhaps needs to take place within ourselves; it looks at expeditions and colonialism as well as what are the imperatives that is causing these people to go on these journeys. What set you off writing this book? I moved to the UK around 2008 or 2009 and at that time I came across this Englishman’s account of travelling to Tibet [A. Henry Savage Landor’s In the Forbidden Land] which includes two Indians whom he describes as manservants and it is very clear to me from the early pages of the book that the man could survive in Tibet only because of the geographical knowledge that the Indians had, their knowledge of the weather and their forbearance. But at the same time, he doesn’t see them as his equals. So, he talks about whipping them, about the need to deliver firm punishment, so that the native knows how to behave and what is expected of them. And I was interested in this contradiction and also the fact that in every such account the Englishmen call themselves explorers but refer to the people who make their expeditions a success as porters and bearers. The very spark of the story was in trying to understand this mindset where you don’t see someone as your equal even though they are the one keeping you alive and also whether that relationship can change in a terrain like Tibet which is very harsh and isolating. So that was the starting point of the book and from there it went on and assumed its structure. So, inequality is one of the subjects you like to explore in your books and it was also the case in your debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, which looks at it in a way that no one has quite done before. How did you come to pick this subject? For me, the project of reconstructing voices through fiction that don’t exist in the mainstream is definitely what I am interested in. A lot of my journalism when I worked freelance was very political and that motivation is definitely there even in my fiction. I am interested in writing about people we don’t really root for otherwise. There are, for instance, hundreds of explorer accounts. But what is the Indian’s experience? We don’t have that at all, not even in the historical records. The project of reconstruction of these voices is entirely absent in the mainstream discourse as in the case of Djinn Patrol with the voices of the children or in this case the voices of Indians and female explorers with regard to what their experience would have been like. So that’s what I am interested in and every time I write a book, I think that is going to be one of the main parts of my story. How has being a journalist helped and hurt your fiction? In terms of help, I think it has taught me to research which came to be very useful when I was writing this historical novel because there were tons of material that I had to sift through and find what I would actually use in my novel. When I was working as a journalist, there were certain subjects I had explored over the length of a year through many stories. For instance, I wrote about the Right to Education Act over the course of a year. Having collected all that material, I had to decide how to present it as a story, what is the story and what are the statistics I am going to use to write it which are the questions one has to ask as a journalist. And that is what really helped while writing this novel because I had a tremendous amount of material. When I sat down, I had piles of research. And I had to pick and choose what is going to be right for this novel, what my characters are going to notice and how to give this information in a way that doesn’t make it seem that I am only writing about their historical background. My training as a journalist helped in that, but on the other hand, my overreliance on fact, the need to find out if something was actually true or happened, all that impedes the narrative suspense, and also the narrative momentum, and that is something I am still working my way through. In fiction, we require a verisimilitude, an adherence to reality, but I go too far. For instance, if there is a map and I mention a road, I want that road to be there, and that is not always a useful element in fiction. Who are the thinkers in the current scenario whom you find interesting? You know what, I’ve been watching The Daily Show and the comedians on it in the US and for me the only way to process the news these days is mostly through the lens of these comedians which I don’t see many journalists doing because there is so much censorship going on today and when I watch them I feel this is how they are speaking truth to power in a way that appeals to me as well. But if you are going to talk about writers, well, I love Pankaj Mishra’s work. I very much recommend his books on the temptations of the West and the very Eurocentric view we have about history and so forth. As for others, no one comes to mind at this moment; I read a lot but most of it is just noise. Is comedy going to wipe out literature? Not at all; they are different forms. When I read a book, what I get out of it is different from what I feel when I watch these comedy shows which are very much based around news. But also, there are no words to describe some of the brutalities that we are seeing around us today and they are not described as such in the newspapers or at least in the way that we expect them to be and the comedians seem to be the ones who are actually saying it like it is. Literature doesn’t follow the daily news cycle; writing and publishing a novel takes time. What inspired the character of Katherine in your book? Katherine is based on many of the female explorers who travelled around the world at that time. One of them was Isabela Bird who travelled to Ladakh which was then colloquially known as Little Tibet. Five women had gone to Tibet. Some went there to convert the people there to Christianity, some of the others went because they wanted to explore and were interested in the region. I wanted to write about the female experience and I was wondering how they would have been able to climb mountains wearing their skirts and other encumbering dresses. Also, what would have been their experience there as opposed to that in London where they were very confined as per Victorian standards? What is your next project? It will probably be another novel. There is this essay collection, Letters to a Writer of Color, which I co-edited and I do have an essay in that, so I will be returning to personal essays, too, but hardcore journalism is possibly not in the picture.



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