interview
Life is a death sentence
By Aasim Akhtar
It was with his first book of poems, ‘Gemini’ (Viking Penguin, 1992), that Jeet Thayil became famous. One of the leading performance poets and musicians, Thayil followed with ‘Apocalypso’ (Ark, 1997), ‘English’ (Rattapallax Press, NYC, 2004), and ‘These Errors Are Correct’ (Tranquebar, 2008). His latest offering, a novel, ‘Narcopolis’ (Faber and Faber) was written in 2012.

Set in history
The novel deals with Andalus’ history and the reasons of its fading glory
By Wajid Ali Syed

The great American crime novelist Elmore Leonard outlined some rules for crafting a compelling narrative. His primary technique was to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ what’s happening in the story.

Zia Mohyeddin column
Morgan Sahib

E. M. Foster dedicated his most famous novel ‘A Passage to India’ to his dear friend, Ross Masood, scion of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, one of the most eminent 19th century Muslim reformists. The sub-title of the novel is ‘Only Connect’. Forster took the title from Walt Whitman. He began to write the novel in 1913 but the First World War intervened and it did not get published until 1924.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

interview
Life is a death sentence  
By Aasim Akhtar

It was with his first book of poems, ‘Gemini’ (Viking Penguin, 1992), that Jeet Thayil became famous. One of the leading performance poets and musicians, Thayil followed with ‘Apocalypso’ (Ark, 1997), ‘English’ (Rattapallax Press, NYC, 2004), and ‘These Errors Are Correct’ (Tranquebar, 2008). His latest offering, a novel, ‘Narcopolis’ (Faber and Faber) was written in 2012.

Thayil has said he wrote the novel “to create a kind of memorial, to inscribe certain names in stone. It is only by repeating the names of the dead that we honour them. I wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book.”

Born in Kerala in 1959 of a writer and editor father, T J S George, Thayil spent his childhood mostly in Bombay, and received a Masters degree in Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is the author of the libretto for the opera ‘Babur in London’ with music by Edward Rushton. He is the editor of ‘Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets’ (Bloodaxe, UK, 2008), ‘60 Indian Poets’ (Penguin India, 2008) and a collection of essays ‘Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora’ (Routledge, 2006).

Thayil’s work traces an ongoing metaphysical inquiry, sparked by a dark humour amid the ruins of language. His characters are constantly reminded that life is a death sentence, and yet there is light. A strange orders reigns in the world of his novel, subverting the social order with the faithfulness of dreams.

The News on Sunday: The blurb on ‘Narcopolis’ reads that you were born in Kerala in 1959 but you grew up in Hong Kong, New York City and Bombay. Could you tell us about the experience of growing up in all these cities?

Jeet Thayil: My father was a journalist, and we lived in many parts of India, and in many parts of the world. He started a magazine in Hong Kong called ‘Asiaweek’ in the mid 1970s. So my entire family moved to Hong Kong in 1969 when I was about nine years old. I stayed there until 1980, and then returned to India to do a BA from Wilson College in Bombay. I was working in India, soon after, and continued to live in different cities. In 1998, I returned to New York to do Masters in Poetry. After that I worked in New York as a journalist with a newspaper called ‘India Abroad’. It was a terrible newspaper but I needed money. Since it was for expatriate Indians in America, it was basically full of matrimonial and immigration lawyers’ ads. And in between those ads there was some white space that needed to be filled — that was my job!

TNS: How do you respond to ‘Narcopolis’, your very first novel, being compared to Roberto Bolano and to Denis Johnson’s ‘Jesus’s Son’?

JT: I am very flattered by the Bolano comparison. I think he’s among the five greatest writers of this century. In fact, comparison has also been made with William Burroughs and de Quincey, but I think, the most accurate comparison is with Bolano and Johnson.

However, the only commonality I can envision between myself and Burroughs is ‘heroin’. Certainly, no commonality in terms of style or even subject matter at all; the only thing that is common is that we both write about drugs. As they say, “If heroin was to write a book, this would be it.”

TNS: We come across a whole genre in literature spawned by the drug culture, from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’ to M Ageyev’s ‘Novel with Cocaine’ to, more recently, Mohsin Hamid’s ‘Moth Smoke’. How do you relate to that genre?

JT: I’ve been a great fan of that genre of literature. I’ve read all the books that you’ve mentioned, including ‘Moth Smoke’ when it first appeared in hard cover. At that time, I was ‘doing’ the drugs he’d described. I thought it was an excellent book. I was very excited to finally see books by writers from this part of the world writing about drugs in a very ambitious and literary way.

For me, ‘Narcopolis’ is not about drugs; it’s a literary novel about society, religion, God and death. The framework that hooks the entire narrative rests on is drugs. I get disappointed when I hear ‘Narcopolis’ being described as a book about drugs. Of course, there are parts of the book which are autobiographical but I tried very hard not to write an autobiographical novel because there are plenty of those in the world, and I was really not interested in writing another one of those.

Although some of the details of the world described in ‘Narcopolis’ are based on autobiography, it’s absolutely been transformed by imagination and idea. As a matter of fact, I tried to disguise the autobiographical element.

TNS: So how was ‘Narcopolis’ actually born?

JT: The main reason for writing this novel was that I wanted to create some kind of a record or memorial for a way of life that has dissipated, for people who are no longer alive and for the city that has vanished.

Bombay was an amazing place — the Bombay of my childhood and my youth — welcoming and cosmopolitan, open to visitors and tourists and to anybody who wished to go there, live there and transform his life. It welcomed people from all communities, of all ages, and of all kinds of talent. That city is gone! Now it’s a divided city; divided along Hindu and Muslim lines; along economic lines.

The city of Bombay has been replaced by the city of Mumbai. What really changed everything were the riots in 1992. I don’t think Bombay has recovered from it since, and I don’t think it ever will! That altered the character of the city forever. And people are still wounded from that time. Actually it’s a tragedy that a city that had so much promise unravelled and became this anxiety-ridden place full of fear and doubt and suspicion.

Of all the cities, Bombay was the worst hit by the riots. You can’t say that about Delhi and absolutely not about Calcutta. You will see shop signs with Muslim names in Delhi and Calcutta, in Madras and Bangalore but not in Mumbai. Byculla and Bhindi Bazaar, for instance, are ghettoes. That’s not assimilation — that’s not part of the city’s character or fabric.

TNS: Tell us about your characters now; were they born of real-life characters?

JT: Dimple is based on somebody I saw in an opium den very briefly in 1981 or there about. I saw her a couple of times making pipes, and then she disappeared as people often did in that world. But I never forgot her because she was visually very striking. She was charismatic and intelligent, self-possessed and elegant. So when the time came to write the character of Dimple, she was the photo I had in my head.

But I never went back looking for her — there was no point. 90 per cent of the people who I knew in the den from those years are dead.

Even in the beginning, the world of drugs was not alien — I felt very comfortable in it. I even fitted right into it, in a way, but of course the people in that world were all engaged in some kind of an illegal activity: there were petty criminals, big criminals, pimps and prostitutes, and of course, drug addicts. But, for some reason, I felt absolutely at home. I was a part of it — (I was an addict too) — I went there every day. These were the people I spoke to everyday. I would spend hours of the day there and was as much of an addict as anyone. It wasn’t easy to come out of it. I tried many times but was not successful. Finally, I joined a Methadone Programme in New York in 2002. Methadone is synthetic opium I took for two years and weaned myself off that.

It was a very seductive world, and no one can indulge in it without liking it. It feels very good in a physical way. I can’t make a judgment about the culture that surrounds it. I got back to the den a couple of times but nobody I knew back from those days is still around.

TNS: Who’d been an influence on your literary career?

JT: The poet, Charles Baudelaire, as a young man but later so many novelists. I did like Jack Kerouac a lot in my teens, but not today. I still read Allen Ginsberg, though. I’ve never been that much of a fan of Faulkner’s. As a teenager I read everything I could by Hemingway. Of all, F Scott Fitzgerald is a poet — a great writer.

Something amazing is going on in Pakistan right now. Look at all these Pakistani novelists: there are so many of them at the same time, and they’re all working. That’s a very unique thing. Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, H M Naqvi, Daniyal Moeenuddin, Kamila Shamsie and Mohammad Hanif: six novelists right there and each one doing exceptional work. It’s a very special moment in Pakistani fiction. In India, there is no ‘moment’ in Indian writing. There might, however, be a ‘moment’ in Indian non-fiction. It’s not, however, one kind of a collective moment that’s happening, though. Basharat Peer, Suketu Mehta, Subramaniam and Arif Tyrewala are great. Vikram Chandra’s ‘Secret Games’ is, indeed, a great Bombay book.

 

 

 

 

Set in history
The novel deals with Andalus’ history and the reasons of its fading glory
By Wajid Ali Syed

The great American crime novelist Elmore Leonard outlined some rules for crafting a compelling narrative. His primary technique was to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ what’s happening in the story.

Many first-time authors have taken the same approach. How would the method work — telling the story, not a made-up world of cops and bad guys, but rather about Islamic history, specifically the rich tale of Andalus, the Muslim Spain.

Zaif Syed has tried that in his book, ‘Aadhi Raat ka Sooraj’. As the name suggests, the novel deals with the glory of the Muslim era. That imagery of Muslim rule in Spain is seeped deeply into our collective conscience, chiefly through the portrayals in Iqbal’s poems, Nasim Hijazi’s sentimental novels, Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s travelogues, and then through many television serials.

The story of the Golden Age of Muslim Spain has been told thousand times by many. It grips our hearts and imaginations every single time. The same story dazzled Zaif Syed that he travelled to Andalus to take in the sights, sounds and vistas for himself. The resulting book is unlike Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s famous travelogues that sadly boast about propitious companions and then auspicious buildings. Zaif, on the other hand, was carrying a heavy historical and cultural baggage with him.

He deals with Andalus’ history and the reasons of its fading glory in the novel. Some people might say that there is no plot in the book in the traditional sense. But once you imagine that the central character in the novel is Andalus itself, you realise that the story does have a rosy beginning, a flourishing middle and a tragic end.

Zaif daringly plays with several different styles. It takes time to grasp that the novelist and even the characters are all engaging with the reader in first person. The writer’s style is probably influenced by noted Italian novelist Italo Calvino. The novel’s style is probably influenced by Amir Khusro’s ‘Qissa Chahardarvesh’. It’s a great mix that jells with the treatment of the content. The novelist and the novel, both leave undeniable impressions on the reader.

The general layout of the book is that he chooses rich Andalus characters from all walks of life and then tells their stories. There is a cornucopia of these characters from across many spheres of life: Military commanders, poets, philosophers, mystics, heroes, and villains. The writer builds a rich tapestry, which represents the full gambit of life in Andalus.

The chosen effervescent characters in the novel tell their stories in their own language, in their mindset and with their own vision. Muslims ruled in Spain, at least partially, for nearly eight centuries. Besides his language skills to interpret a story, his background as a journalist and researcher was handy.

He consulted over 100 books and thus the bibliography mentioned at the end of the novel is as impressive as the novel itself. In some sense, it freshens up your memory and gives a perspective of what went wrong.

Aadhi Raat ka Sooraj

Author: Zaif Syed

Publisher: Fiction House

Pages: 176

Price: PKR300

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zia Mohyeddin column
Morgan Sahib

E. M. Foster dedicated his most famous novel ‘A Passage to India’ to his dear friend, Ross Masood, scion of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, one of the most eminent 19th century Muslim reformists. The sub-title of the novel is ‘Only Connect’. Forster took the title from Walt Whitman. He began to write the novel in 1913 but the First World War intervened and it did not get published until 1924.

Forster’s novel depicts the muddled atmosphere that existed in India at the turn of the 20th century with absolute brilliance. His India is a country unapprehendable and vast where nothing is identifiable, not even the birds. It is a meticulously-written account of how the ‘natives’ and the liberal Englishmen understood each other (or didn’t understand each other).

The crux of the novel is not the sustained encounter between the English colonists whom he describes as “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and underdeveloped hearts” and the Indians, but the search for that quite something, which makes human beings connect with each other. And it is about personal relationships, about friendship and the extreme importance of friendship.

In 1957, the distinguished writer, Santha Rama Rau, egged on by Cheryl Crawford, a playwright (and one of the founders of the Group Theatre in America), began to dramatise the novel. In a most moving dissertation titled  ‘Remembering Forster’ she confides:

“I decided to try. Just as a literary exercise, I told myself. No one need know that I had had the impudence to take such liberties with one of the century’s most celebrated novels. I needn’t in fact show it to anyone, certainly not to Forster who must be swamped with any number of far more professional adaptations.”

But when she finished typing out THE CURTAIN FALLS,she couldn’t resist sending it to Forster with a letter “drafted and re-drafted a dozen times.” To her utter surprise, within a month, she received a letter from Forster, written in green ink, saying he had read the play, liked it, and suggested that she should come to Cambridge to talk with him about it.

The final draft, approved by Forster, was sent to managements on both sides of the Atlantic who hummed and hawed over a play, which had a big cast of twenty-five speaking parts — not to speak of guards, servants, punkha wallas etc. — and four sets. They did not consider it financially feasible, especially as the starring role was that of an Indian.

After months of deflating experience Santha Rama Rau heard from Frank Hauser, director of a company called The Meadow Players, who requested permission to produce ‘A Passage to India’at the Oxford Playhouse in Oxford.

Where do I come into all this? In 1959 I had been able to find some directorial work at the Guildford Repertory Theatre in Surrey. I was asked to direct Noel Coward‘s   ‘Hay Fever’, a comedy as English as Devonshire cream. Hauser, having learnt from Sheila Burrell, my leading lady, that an Indian (in those days Pakistanis were usually referred to as Indians) was directing a revival of Coward’s most famous play, came to see it. He was tall and lanky with a chiselled face on which sat a prominent nose. His eyes shone as he spoke.

After a few pleasantries he asked me if I had read a novel called ‘A Passage to India’. I had read it in Australia a few years ago and had found it to be profoundly moving. He told me that he was going to produce the dramatised version of the novel at Oxford. “There is a very good part in it.” he said. “You mean Dr. Aziz?” I asked. He nodded, “Where would the poor Indian doctor run into the exalted European Principal of the Government College?” He intoned the line in the fake accent that Peter Sellers had popularised as the ‘Indian accent’ in the satirical BBC radio programme, ‘The Goon Show’. “No, that is not how Aziz would speak” I said, and I repeated the line in the manner in which an educated U.P-ite Muslim would speak English. “You’ve got the part,” he said, ‘Let’s go and find some place to eat.”

Thus began my deep and life-long friendship with Frank Hauser. But I disagree.

After the curtain call at the end of the opening night of ‘A Passage’ in Oxford, E.M Forster appeared on the stage to a renewed round of thunderous applause. He stepped forward and talking in front of an audience that included all the London critics made a speech. In Frank Hauser’s words: “The opening night went off better than any of us could have hoped. It was one of those lucky nights in the theatre when everyone — audience and actors — seemed to come together in a sort of delightful absorption. Mr Forster rounded it off by making the best curtain speech I’ve ever heard. After a most graceful and obviously sincere tribute to Santha Rama Rau, he congratulated the company ‘not only for being so good but for being so many.’ From then on he had the audience in the palm of his hand and he juggled them into wild applause. A happy evening.”

When the curtain came down the great man thanked every member of the cast before coming to me. He held me by the arm and warmed the cockles of my heart by saying that he couldn’t have wished for a better Aziz. Our next venue was to be Cambridge, his hometown, and I asked him if I could take the liberty of visiting him in Cambridge. “I should be very pleased,” he said, generously. He was 81 at the time.

When I arrived at the theatre in Cambridge for the opening night, the stage doorkeeper handed me an envelope. Inside was a card, written in Forster’s scholarly scrawl, inviting me to tea in his ‘rooms’ at King’s College the following afternoon.

Forster’s apartment, bequeathed to him by the college authorities, was on the first floor of the awesome Gothic building of King’s College. The old porter who let me in to the quadrangle escorted me up a long flight of stone stairs to his front door.

He was shorter than my impression of my first meeting on the Playhouse stage. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and a professorial bow-tie. Frank Hauser had described him as ‘a stooping spry old buffer in a grey tweed suit, glasses glinting, the familiar rabbit face…’ and he was dead right.

Forster received me with a smile redolent of sincerity. Mr Zia Mokh-ye-deen” he said pronouncing my last name with an Arabian guttural emphasis, “And so punctual. Come into my parlour.”

(to be continued)

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