God’s little storyteller

Kiran Nagarkar is not fond of critics. Nor does he care for computers. The outsider, however, he likes very, very much.

The Wednesday Kiran Nagarkar is due to launch his latest book in Chennai, he is smarting from a bad review. It dogs him like a malignant shadow, nipping occasionally into our conversation – he just can’t seem to shake it off. At some point, this criticism of his book rouses a broadside against all Indian critics. “If the USA and the UK accept a book and give you money, it has to be good. If they give you 500,000, it has to be superb. And if they give you one million, then it has to be doubly superb. We still do not have the willingness or capacity to try and gauge it for ourselves.” Good criticism, Nagarkar proposes, is being unafraid of being wrong. “We’re terrified of making a mistake, and the only time you can make a genuine mistake is if you respond on your own. So who is looking at these Bombay books? Are they really checking out if it feels like it’s from the place?”

A little earlier, we were discussing the cottage industry that appears to have sprung up in Mumbai, especially in non-fiction, with writers – many of them handsomely talented, some less so – seeking to prove their mettle, as if in battle, by crossing over to the other side of the tracks and unearthing stories of survival from slums. Nagarkar did that himself almost two decades ago, with Ravan and Eddie, which, in its time, was hailed in some quarters as the quintessential Bombay novel, aiming to accommodate the excrement on the earth, the stars in the Hindi-film firmament, and everything in between. His new novel, The Extras, is – in the parlance of cinema – a sequel. It is also the first Nagarkar novel to have been keyboarded. “I have gone down very badly in life,” says Nagarkar mournfully, as if confessing a compulsion to peer into the bedrooms of particularly athletic neighbours. “I now use a laptop, and it has been a singular disaster.”

Till he finished God’s Little Soldier, everything was written by hand. This must make him the possessor of the supplest wrists in the subcontinent – he rewrote it about eight times. “It’s such a cliché but it’s true,” Nagarkar says. “Thinking with your hand is a different story from thinking while you’re typing. On the machine, as you start and as you’re typing it in, you’ve already decided to change the sentence. Earlier, you sat down and tried to get your – if not act – at least thought process together.” He was left with no choice after the lady who used to stop by on Saturday afternoons to type out his written drafts stopped stopping by. “She was really gifted,” he says, because she could decipher it all, despite “the cross here and a circle there,” and despite “handwriting that grows smaller and smaller till an ant’s shit appears larger than the letters.” Every once in a while, I find myself at the receiving end of an uninhibited dispatch from a mind whose outpourings, at least on page, have been extolled (or excoriated) as Rabelaisian. “By the great grace of God,” he tells me later, “I am not at all self-conscious about writing about sex.”

The unflattering review nudges its way into the conversation again when he speaks of The Extras, which began life as a screenplay when an unsuspecting director commissioned from Nagarkar a “garish, 1970s-style melodrama.” The director was unconvinced by an early draft, and the screenplay veered over to literature instead, as the basis for Ravan and Eddie. “Once the first chapter – which I’ve repeated in The Extras – was over, I got the titles on,” says Nagarkar. “The next scene, the two boys are grown-up. The original screenplay was mostly about the grownups. Everything that was there about the children was completely new to me.” The unused material – the extras, you might say – gave birth to The Extras. “People have accused me of overwriting in The Extras. But I am writing about Bollywood, about excess at its worst.” His peeved emphasis on worst renders the word disyllabic. “I thought it would be words and language that created that character. But we lack… Today’s critics…”

Nagarkar has been reading, recently, The Man inside My Head, Pico Iyer’s book-length grapple with Graham Greene. “Here is an author [Greene] who, thanks to Anthony Burgess and others, we have decided is a bloody third-rate bugger. You know, there’s a limit to what asses we have become.” Nagarkar doesn’t think highly of Western critics either. “Even with them, out of a hundred, maybe a thousand, you’ll find one good critic. Otherwise, they’re using words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘fantastic’ – what else is there?” Somewhere in between, he transforms into his own critic. “I am not a good writer, yaar. I take too much time.” The thoughts are now ellipses, and the narrative has begun to leap from his adoring publishers in Germany to his relative obscurity in India. “The UK and the USA have never accepted any work of mine, which is why any time you read an article about me, they will always say – if the person is favourably disposed towards me (which not many people are) – that it’s a major mystery why Kiran Nagarkar is almost completely unknown.”

He brushes aside the proffered theory that he may be too highbrow. “I am extremely modest in my demands,” he says. “I don’t want anything but the whole world to be my reader. I write to read aloud, and I am willing to sit at Churchgate station and read to anybody who will listen.” It’s the writer as troubadour playing to an uncaring world rushing by, an outcast even, seeking entry into the mainstream – and it may explain why the protagonists of all his novels are, in some sense, outsiders, extras, fringe characters cast into the foreground through forces not of their own making. The protagonist of Saat Sakkam Trechalis (Seven Sixes Are Forty Three), Nagarkar’s first novel, is a writer, a total unknown. The leads of Ravan and Eddie are little extras in chawl, and the princely husband of Mirabai in the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Cuckold is an extra in his wife’s life. Even the fanatical Zia of God’s Little Soldier is an extra in his liberal Muslim family, an outsider awaiting his moment in the limelight. And in Nagarkar’s newest book, Ravan and Eddie are quite literally extras in the Hindi film industry.

Nagarkar agrees with this observation – up to a point. “I hate metaphors which start a book in the mind of the author,” he says. “I cannot do this Waiting for Godot business. Don’t give me something so bloody simplistic, yaar. But as I was completing The Extras, I realised, to my horror, that there was a metaphor there, and the metaphor was ‘the extras’. I realised, as a matter of fact, that there was a very solid metaphor for me in the book.” Which is this: Barring maybe 0.0001 per cent of the population, all of us are extras. Fortunately, we also think we are the centre of the world. And we don’t even know if we’ve been cut out of the frame on God’s editing table. “This feeling kind of grew over me, that we make so much of ourselves – and thank God we do – but we don’t really amount to anything. We are not the Buddha or Mahatma Gandhi.” Ant shit, in other words.

The other constant in Nagarkar’s novels is the lingering scent of Hindi cinema, most pronounced, of course, in Ravan and Eddie and The Extras, both derived from a Bollywood screenplay, but also in Cuckold (with its central love triangle) and God’s Little Soldier, which contains this marvellous passage: “Zubeida Khaala had once taken him to a Hindi movie and had asked him to close his eyes when a woman in hot pants, along with fifty other girls in skimpy skirts, had danced to the most enchanting song he had ever heard. ‘Rumba ho, ho. Sumba ho, ho.’ He had covered his face with his hands and watched the disco dancing through the gaps between the fingers. He’d felt strange in his chest. His heart had taken on the rhythm of the song. One slow beat followed by two quick knocks on the rib cage.” Few writers in English have captured the spangly seductiveness of kitsch as Nagarkar did with these few sharp lines. Fewer still would have recalled Bappi Lahiri’s gaudy score from Armaan.

But Nagarkar says he disliked Hindi cinema intensely. (He calls himself a “Hollywood baby.”) He was dragged along to films like the Shammi Kapoor-starring Janwar, and found little to make him recant his opinion that “Hindi films can be a bit of a joke.” But when he began to write the bits about Hindi movies in Ravan and Eddie, he mellowed down. He used to review English and Hindi films, and he realised that if you want to talk about India, you have to know that the Hindi movie is central to understanding it. He adds, with a writer’s empathy, “If you’re writing about a film star, however phony he or she may be, you cannot ignore the tragedy. They are constantly terrified that someone else is going to get the No. 1 slot. Unless you’re aware of your own ambivalence and the ambiguity of their fate, you’re never going to depict them properly.” Long after his aborted screenplay, Nagarkar experienced a second brush with cinema, with what he calls a half-second role in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open. “Talk about extras,” he laughs. “You’re sitting in front of one of them.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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