But isn’t the
narrative also about restrained relationships, in the sense that
no relationship has been rounded up, no relationship has been
developed to a logical conclusion?
I wouldn’t say
that they have not been taken to their logical end, but they
have not been taken to their ideal end. And that, I think, is a
reflection of the way things are. It is an attempt to take a
realistic look at relationships in life. It is very difficult to
come upon ideal relationships in which perfect things happen at
a perfect time. Very often relationships are what they are.
Sometimes they are not complete. Sometimes people are not always
at the same point of commitment to a relationship at the same
time. The relationships do exist in different phases of
incompleteness. This particular book is about decisions that you
take at some stage in life which may continue to haunt you
later. That naturally presupposes a certain amount of regret, a
certain amount of inherent mistake in the choices that people
make. In that sense these are not ideal relationships. If you
talk of ideal relationships then the book will finish in a page
and a half. Unfortunately, that’s not always how things
happen.
Now I am not
suggesting that this is an autobiographical novel, but how many
details have been culled out of your own experiences?
It is certainly
not an autobiographical novel but I don’t think that a writer
can divorce himself completely from what he has seen or lived or
done. Some of his experiences must flow into his work, which way
and how much differs from writer to writer. In this book, the
events, the characters, the stories are all fictional but what
has come in is certainly lived experience. In the sense that I
have lived in Delhi and Dehradun so I have seen physical
characteristics of life around me. I have travelled by this
train (Delhi-Dehradun Shatabdi Express), I have lived in Bombay
at a certain time, I have lived in Washington and these are the
places that come in the book and so my personal experiences of
having lived in these places have certainly found their way
here.
How big was the
first, and how small was the final draft that eventually formed
the book? There are moments in the book that make one feel that
something must have existed there which is not there any more.
Your reading and
perception is very accurate. The first draft was relatively
longer. Maybe another 25,000 words and when we looked at it
together with the editor we saw that there were portions that
were not hanging together as well as the rest. So when we
removed these portions there was only about 40 per cent left. I
started again with that 40 per cent and rewrote the rest of the
stuff, and ended up with something like 65,000 words. There were
certainly the possibilities of going into bylanes and side lanes
and building up those relationships, or moods, or moments that
you say you feel are missing in the present narrative. There
were many characters in the first draft that now don’t exist.
The main female protagonist was swept out, and Rohini, who now
forms a fairly significant part of the book, was a very minor
character in the first draft. So deliberately I chose not to
move into those bylanes because what was compelling to me when I
wrote the first draft was the central theme and the central
voice, and I found that the more we went into the sides and
brought in other people etc, the more we were taking away from
the intensity of the central voice.
Despite these
cautions and precautions there does appear to a hastening up in
the last part of the novel, especially when the protagonist
starts relating to and sharing thoughts with his teenage son.
There is the feeling of something petering out.
Yes, perhaps. But
it does not really peter out in its reality, it peters out as
far as this narration is concerned. What I wanted to show was
that the narrator’s relationship with his son was an important
compelling emotional factor for him. Also the time when he
starts relating to his son is important because at that point he
is reaching the end of his journey and can remember his own
childhood clearly. So in that setting he seems to relate better
to his son because he realises that his son is a child today,
just as he was at one time and the fact that he is reliving the
memory of his childhood makes the relationship easier. Now if
this book was to carry on then certainly, I think that the
relationship with his son would be a very positive aspect of the
years that would lie ahead. But then that is pure guesswork.
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