Kunal Basu tells Devjani Bodepudi what it took to recreate the seedy underbelly of Kolkata in his latest novel.
Read an extract from Kalkatta, or click here for Devjani Bodepudi’s review.
Kalkatta is about people facing the consequences of the India-Bangladesh partition. Jamshed’s family are refugees in a ‘Kalkatta’ rarely seen or brought to light. How has the setting of the story been a challenge for you?
I wouldn’t call it a challenge, but I would call it one the most exciting adventures of the novel. Because when I thought of this story and the character of Jami leapt out at me, from my understanding and empathy for people who were displaced during the Partition but who have found their way—I mean, not them but their successive generations have found their way into today’s Kolkata—Zakaria Street suggested itself as the location. Obviously, what’s important is although I was born and raised in the city, there are large parts of the city that are completely unknown to me, which is the case with everybody who lives in a city.
My metaphor for Kolkata has always been that of a universe in which there is a set of planets. We inhabit our own planets and we pass by each other, but we are strangers to each other. So my biggest excitement in this novel was to enter a different planet and have real meaningful access, not as a visitor but perhaps as a bit of an insider into the Zakaria Street and Chitpur where Jami grows up, my character grows up with his family. And there is a curious incident that happened, which helped me.
I was thinking about the story and I needed to find an informant. I was there at Jaipur Literary Festival with my previous novel and we were at a party and there was this gentleman: big man, Marwari, Calcutta Marwari and he was talking in good Bengali with two another people and I overheard him saying that he was from Zakaria Street. I shamelessly latched onto him and became his friend and said that you have to introduce me. Jai Govind Indoria is a social worker and an amazing person and works in the Zakaria Street area. He is everybody’s friend. He supports people from all different walks of life, with health, education etc. He led me by the hand and over two years walking the streets of Zakaria Street and climbing the stairs of these buildings, I became friends with a whole lot more.
Jami is perhaps a composite of the different characters that I met and drank a lot of tea with, went to dodgy bars, went to watch football matches with
So, the Shiraz building is very real, is it?
Sure, Shiraz is absolutely real. I mean you can literally get lost in Shiraz. I would get lost in Shiraz. I met some guys…now, I have not modeled Jami around any one of them, but Jami is perhaps a composite of the different characters that I met and drank a lot of tea with, went to dodgy bars, went to watch football matches with, and over the two years that’s sort of become my adopted home.
As I read Kalkatta, I felt a certain distance towards Jamshed, the protagonist, and his family. I felt there was no emotional connect and any gravitas was lacking. Even in the violence, I felt it was all slightly comical and matter-of-fact. Was this intentional, a way of saying, “This is his reality and pity is not required?”
For me it was deliberate character development. I didn’t want the reader to have a definite plan in their head as to where he is headed, what he is about to do. He is a product of his circumstances and from an early age, his personality is being formed through pushes and pulls and nudges in different directions, from the people around him, some of whom have very formed personae. For example, I have deliberately given his sister a formed persona. But as you will see, I have saved the emotional punches towards the end, when you get closer and closer and closer to him as he gets closer and closer to himself. In many ways this is a story of Jami discovering himself and therefore a story of discovery must start with distance.
But even the violence, I felt, was almost Tarantino-esque. You know, it was sort of happening, you saw it; you couldn’t get involved with it; you couldn’t take those punches with the character.
Well, hopefully you will feel the punches as you go on. The introductory two pages were pretty much setting up a scene, which probably creates an intrigue in the minds of the readers, forced to ask, why did he get beaten up? But as you will see, the emotional intensity will build up and the other thing is there is a lot of violence, harshness, edginess in the novel, but I did not want it to be melodramatic.
I didn’t want the reader to have a definite plan in their head as to where he is headed, what he is about to do. He is a product of his circumstances and from an early age, his personality is being formed through pushes and pulls and nudges in different directions
As I was reading, I felt strains of Slumdog Millionaire. Those were the kind of images that came into my mind. It had a kind of cinematic feel to it. You can see the scenes very vividly. Is that something that is essential to your writing?
I must confess that I am probably one of the very few Indians who haven’t read Q&A. I know Vikas [Swaroop] well, and he probably won’t appreciate that I haven’t read the book and I haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire. But we live in cities—Kolkata, Bombay—where you have populations of disadvantaged people living in slums and shanties all around.
This novel migrates from one part of the city to another part of the city goes to Alipore, goes to Keyatala, it goes to Sudder Street and so this is not purely a slumdog area but one of its locations, so that it has a broader location in that. Now is this cinematic? People who have read my earlier writing will say that my driving methodology is one of imaginary. Perhaps I am a failed artist. You know, I wanted to be an artist as a young boy but I failed to do so. And so my primary response to any environment is a visual response and I like to believe I have a real eye for detail. And so not simply Kalkatta, but all my previous books I think have this particular feature, which is that I have to see it before I can write it.
Your book is obviously very research driven, and you talked about how you got involved in that. What inspires you to delve in the past?
I think stories. I am not a person who is like, “I like this theme so let me write a novel about it” or “I like this place, I’ll write a novel about it” or “This event in history is fascinating, let me write a novel about it.” I can’t. I have to daydream and think suddenly of a story that appears almost from nowhere. I was not planning to write a novel about a male sex worker in Kolkata and if you had asked me this question three years back I would have said “What?” For some strange reason as the story appeared I said I need to now engage with this world in order to make it authentic and genuine. And in this particular instance, the past was a recent past and the past actually is relevant only to an extent that the ancestors have been displaced from Bihar. They go to Bangladesh; some go to Pakistan but this, per se, is not a novel about Partition.
I am not a person who is like, “I like this theme so let me write a novel about it” or “I like this place, I’ll write a novel about it” or “This event in history is fascinating, let me write a novel about it.” I can’t.
You studied engineering and then did a PhD. How did you start writing?
I think I was a writer to start with and I became an engineer and I did a PhD in Management by coincidence. I grew up at a time when a middle class boy grew up either to be a doctor or an engineer to find a job. So, I studied precisely the wrong things. I took the wrong decisions in terms of career. But my passion always has been to write. My mother was a very well-known writer in Bangla and my father was a federal publisher. And I was actually born on the floor of my parent’s library. It has always been about writing, always been about art for me but I meandered through my professional life and therefore, I rarely give career advice to people.
All the stories are different from each other. Is there any one way to describe all of them? What would you say is the common thread that runs through them all?
First of all I have not tried to consciously deconstruct myself. There are some very interesting quotations here. One is Isaac Singer, one of my favourite short story writers and novelist who said, “Writers should not act like sociologists and anthropologists; let sociologists and anthropologists do their job.”
And Cortez once famously said, “God should not behave like a theologist.” I have not consciously, therefore, tried to draw out the common thread. But if you were to ask me, “Is there something that touches you similarly when you’re writing different stories set in different times?” I think the one thing that reaches out to me is empathy, is human empathy and in all of these situations, I’ve tended to empathise, and I’ve usually tended to empathise with the dispossessed.
You can’t just walk on to the streets and ask “Excuse me, are you a gigolo? Can I interview you?”
Sexuality is explored as a commodity in your book. Jamshed’s coming of age or “rebirth”, as you described it, is when he is able to provide that service. He becomes visible suddenly and not just as a Muslim refugee with zero prospects. Do you think the world of the male gigolo and its image or place in society is much more accepted than that of the traditional female prostitute?
No, probably not. See, if you look at the purely the amount of fiction that has been written on the sex work, the vast majority right from traditional times to these times has been about female sex workers. And there is a reason for it. I mean starting from Emile Zola’s Nana for example—classic world fiction to contemporary fiction to Bangla fiction. It’s very much become more in focus; two reasons, one is obviously it is the more prevalent form of prostitution, sex work for a whole variety of complex reasons of women providing services to men. The second is that female prostitution has been relatively easier to capture because it is place-centric. In other words, brothel-centric. My biggest challenge was to find the gigolos. You can’t just walk on to the streets and ask “Excuse me, are you a gigolo? Can I interview you?” You can’t see a locality full of gigolos. And male sex connection is through Facebook, through Twitter, through text, through Internet, through word of mouth. So it is incredibly hard to identify and trace, which I managed to track over two years. So actually the story or the experiences of male sex workers is underrepresented in literary terms.
I’m reminded of the novel The Middle Man by Sankar, where innocence is lost in a sort of battle with propriety and finding a place in respectable society. The protagonist for Sankar becomes a pimp, Jami becomes a gigolo. It seems the world of sex and the sex trade eventually gets them all. Is that really what happens to good boys who can’t make it in society?
The only similarity is the two individuals find themselves in difficult circumstances and a profession related to sex trade is the one that they get to work.
But is that the state of our society now, where if you can’t make it in a viable profession you inevitably end up like Jami?
So there is a line, when he goes to Anirban Mitra, his Bengali friend who is the intellectual, when he says, “you have a problem that arises from a conundrum.” You want to be rich but you can’t, right? You missed the boat. So, first is either you have to be born rich or second is you have a real nose of an entrepreneur who is able to smell dough in a pile of dung, and third is you get high marks in school right from kindergarten. But if you have missed all of these three then you are relegated to a part of society where you don’t necessary end up as a prostitute, but you end up in a whole lot of odd jobs like masseur, courier boy, working in a shop etc. These jobs can never be mainstream and can never provide you that kind of respectability that Jamshed and his family desire. And that is really the case for a vast majority of our fellow citizens not only in Kolkata but also elsewhere. I was telling somebody it was a pity to contemporary fiction and contemporary cinema, the focus of the middle and affluent Indian and our stories—and we do have stories—but what about the 60 percent of Indians who are trying to make it in life and don’t have those assets?
I come from the generation from Bengalis who grew up perfectly bilingual in literary terms and all my early writings, short stories, poetry were in Bangla. Then I wrote in English, not abandoning Bangla. Then I have told myself that we are truly from a bilingual culture and the best way to establish that is to write a full-length novel.
Are you working on anything currently, your next novel?
I have written my next novel. Kalkatta is not my latest novel. My latest novel is entirely written in Bangla. It is my first Bengali novel and hopefully it will come out next year. How it has come about is that I come from the generation from Bengalis who grew up perfectly bilingual in literary terms and all my early writings, short stories, poetry were in Bangla. Then I wrote in English, not abandoning Bangla. Then I have told myself that we are truly from a bilingual culture and the best way to establish that is to write a full-length novel. And I wanted to write a full-length Bangla novel. So, following Kalkatta, I have written it.
Are you happy? Do you feel that you have done a language justice or genre justice?
But that’s for readers to think. But am I happy to offer it to publications? Then yes.
What’s your take on the recent Aamir Khan controversy? Do you feel that we are in a more intolerant India?
Absolutely, there is no debate about it. The whole question is how does one resist that, the people from right, a lot of intellectuals, not simply from the arts professions but from a lot broader spectrum of society, no matter what the political persuasion might be. This goes against the very idea of India. You can agree or disagree with a particular mode of protest, but what one doesn’t need to do is be distracted by the mode of protest and look at the reason behind the protest. That’s not to say there was no intolerance in Indian society before, far from it, but we’re seeing a heightened form of it. The things we would see when we were growing up. Were there people who were prejudiced against Muslims? Of course there were, but the ethos of our society was such that they hesitated before objecting in company. Now people don’t care. They say all sorts of provocations, not just about religious minorities but lots of different kinds of people.
Yesterday I was reading in the papers that Jindals bought a flat in Mumbai for Rs 160 crore, and this is the highest priced flat in India. Rs 160 crore for a flat, where there are millions of Indians starving. We are living in obscene times and obscene times will create this kind of outbursts—not that I’m justifying these kinds of outbursts.
There is a whole clash of ideologies and people seem happy to say whatever they feel like and Twitter and social media has fuelled it in a way.
One of the big advantages of social media nowadays is that we connect, express and share. One difficulty at individual level is our opinions on Facebook, I don’t reflect on it. We don’t ponder on it and discuss it, “This is what I think, what do you think?” The kind of consideration that goes behind voicing an opinion is lost.
You mentioned you were in Dhaka during the hangings of the two opposition leaders. You were also in Paris during the attacks. Things around the world seem to be getting more and more pressurised. Do you think that this is just a perception or do you think that this might actually be the case?
No, it’s actually happening, regardless of the Paris tragedy or the situation in Bangladesh. It is undeniable that everywhere around the world societies are grappling with issues of inclusiveness. They’re grappling with the issue of us and them and some of this issues are taking form in violent proportions; in our country it takes a certain form and in other countries it’s taking other forms. And it is certainly a symptom, in my view, of the growing inequality in this world, the tremendous growing inequality between the rich and the poor, before the financial crisis, following the financial crisis, as well as the visibility of people who have more, unjustifiably more, which is fuelling a kind of rage and a kind of disenchantment with this world. Not all of this disenchantment is channelled in a constructive, deliberate, thoughtful way, but sometimes in a violent way.
But this was bound to happen. Yesterday I was reading in the papers that Jindals bought a flat in Mumbai for Rs 160 crore, and this is the highest priced flat in India. Rs 160 crore for a flat, where there are millions of Indians starving. We are living in obscene times and obscene times will create this kind of outbursts—not that I’m justifying these kinds of outbursts, but what else can you expect?
