1. Your three novels, each set in Bombay (mostly), offer profound portraits of this great metropolis. Be it Jigar Pala’s Chinese restaurant in Prabhadevi; Farhad Billimoria on a strange car-dropping assignment to Borivali; Arzee’s daily commute via Grant Road Bridge; the list goes on, and even minor characters running errands get quite specific locations to do so. In your essay Bombay and Delhi: The Two Cities of my Life you say, “Bombay is the presiding deity of my imagination and novelistic prose.” Tell us what is it like to write intimately about real places in fiction?

A city is already a pulsing fiction: a story that is being continuously produced and co-created by millions of people, each with their own sense of its power structures, history, mythos. For that reason, just like family, it is the greatest and most inexhaustible of subjects for a writer, and perfectly set up to be mapped and extended in novels. 

 

To write about a city one needs to be both observer and agent, to have both something particular that one sees, and something that is at stake personally. In other words, a social reality and a personal reality. Until these two kinds of dynamic engage with one another, the city never quite comes alive on the page in fiction. Bombay contains so many of my childhood memories and youthful illusions, my romances and my resentments. When I travel around the city today and see the bars of the tiny apartments with the laundry hanging in the windows, I see an image of my own psyche in the 1990s and the 2000s, struggling to break out into a sense of freedom and force. 

 

As a travel writer, I can write about scores of cities, even intuit what is special about their ethos and atmosphere. But in fiction the deal is different: you have to contribute a story to the city, surprise the city with some sense of itself of which it was not quite aware. Although I don’t live there any more, I’m grateful for 35 years of memories of Bombay, a stock of images and sensations that I am continuously polishing and replenishing. Sometimes I arrive in Bombay and set out in the morning only to take those bus numbers, each with its own specific map and line through the city, that I have never boarded, to find connections between streets and neighborhoods, between past and present, of which I was never aware. Unlike those around me, I do not have a cause or goal or destination in Bombay: Bombay is itself my cause. 
 

Equally, so very often I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to do. So very often when I go to old and familiar places, I see not what is there today, but the ghosts of what used to be there (such as with the Chinese restaurant in Prabhadevi, or the Naaz Cinema off Lamington Road). I am building back the city in my head without spending a rupee. This is a lovely place to be. 

 

Last, I have the satisfaction of knowing that the Bombay in my novels is an updated and bigger version of the city than the classic accounts. Clouds begins in south Bombay – Farhad Billimoria is a classic south Bombay snob – but ends at the Jivdani Temple complex in Virar, where Rabi finds his own feet in the city and the world. Days of My China Dragon tells the stories of many young migrants to Bombay from the Maharashtra hinterland, Kolkata, Nepal – their perceptions of the city, their own expanding sense of its power and possibilities, their politics. But there are still many Bombays that I do not have roots for and so cannot grow further in the greenhouse of my head.
 

2. While each of your novels explore a variety of themes and subjects, would you agree that your primary concern as a novelist so far has been a kind of unpacking of different modes of living in the world, and how each one of us, at some point or other, needs to find the courage to live the life that we’ve got?

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Agreed. 

 
3. Who is your favourite character from your books?​​

Hard to choose! Probably still my first book-length protagonist, Arzee the dwarf from the book by the same name. Of the minor characters, Uncle Sheriar from Clouds and the waiter Pintu Masurkar from Days of My China Dragon. The most coherently articulated philosophy of Bombay probably comes from Jigar Pala in Days of My China Dragon. He is the classic insider in the city: owner of a business, conducting the parallel theatres of kitchen and table, perfectly in tune with its language and mentality, and with his own giant stock of memories of the city. 
 

4. Your book of essays, My Country is Literature, not only brings together the best of your literary criticism but is also telling of your commitment towards literature. The choices and circumstances of your literary journey, generously shared in the perceptive introduction of the book, would be of immense value to anyone pursuing a life in letters. Which were some of the books by other writers that did the same for you?
 

As a young man, I learnt the most about the technical aspects of writing novels from the books of Willa Cather and Orhan Pamuk, and about the creative cruxes and pathways of turning Indian reality into fiction from the novels of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Among writers about Bombay, Manto and Vikram Chandra had something to give me; even the Bombay sections of Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire are very good, as are Jerry Pinto’s Bombay novels. 

 

In my late thirties, I spent some time in Brazil and grew to love the novels of Jorge Amado and the dense and daring social history of Gilberto Freyre. Among writers on Indian history and society, I have derived the most enjoyment from the essays of Sudipta Kaviraj and the books of the German indologist Heinrich Zimmer. In my friendships with other writers, the people who have influenced me the most are the novelists Ofir Touche Gafla and, although I know him less well, Alexander McCall Smith, whose attitude to life and command of English prose rhythm and work ethic I admire immensely. You’ll see there’s no structure or pattern to this canon, which is the subject and claim of My Country Is Literature. Go forth boldly, reader, and find your own pantheon!

 

5. As the editor of India: A Traveller’s Literary Companion, what were some of your key challenges to put together this anthology of short stories? 
 

In an anthology, the concept (this one came to me already formulated from the publisher Whereabouts Press, California, which has published a few dozen titles under this general rubric, each about a different country or even city) is sometimes the simplest part of the work. The logistical challenges are much more time-consuming. The anthology is about offering a mosaic of India’s landscape and culture through the eyes of its great fiction writers, those who can give a place a spiritual and narrative dimension by refracting it through the lenses of characters and a narrator. One challenge was to balance stories that were written in English with those in translation. Then again, my idea of the perfect story for, say, Gujarat, or Assam could find itself petering out for reasons of copyright, or an inability to work out a mutually agreeable fee with the writer, or, in the case of dead writers, the copyright holder, because of my small budget (I believe it was $4000 for a final total of 13 stories, at a time when the dollar was about Rs.40 to the dollar). 
 

In the end I went over budget – I was only 29 at the time and often very naive in money matters – and the excess was deducted from my own royalties, which I thought fair enough for the pleasure of producing such a sophisticated book! A disproportionate amount of the $4000 was spent on acquiring the rights for Rushdie’s fabulous story set in Srinagar, “The Prophet’s Hair,” whose 93-word opening sentence is the first fictional sentence in the book.
 

But surely the greatest challenge was getting Anita Desai to write the foreword, which she generously agreed to do for no fee. However, as she did not do email (this was 2009), I would have to first write her a letter on my laptop, then take it down on a pen drive to Century Bazar junction in Prabhadevi, where I was living at the time, to be printed, then fax it to her fax number. It would be received in Massachusetts, and the whole process would be followed in reverse for me to receive a reply a week or two later. When the publisher asked if we could have a few edits to her introduction, he swiftly edited his own request when I told him about how much work it would be to change a single word!
 

6. Through our project, Cities in Fiction, we hope to build a database that can be used by both teachers and learners as a resource to engage with South Asian cities in literature. If you were to teach about Indian cities through fiction, which books/stories would be your top five picks?
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One can learn plenty about Indian cities from novels. But as soon as you set out to link fiction and urban studies, you begin to select according to criteria that may not be organic to fiction. Let’s start from 1947. Yashpal’s Jhootha Sach is an amazing book about Lahore and Delhi, and about the ideas and templates for India and Pakistan. For Bombay, Manto’s Bombay Stories would be a fine place to start, followed by Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games or Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower. Sankar’s novels Chowringhee, The Middleman, and The Great Unknown offer synoptic portraits of Kolkata; he has a real love of people. Among recent books, Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angels offers a very impressive portrait of Muslim Delhi, almost designed to be put onto an academic syllabus with its neatly ordered meditations on history; I loved even more her portrait of Shillong in her debut novel Lunatic in My Head. Among shorter works, I often return to Prasad Shetty’s “Ganga Building Chronicles,” the story of a building in Bombay.
 

7. Over the years, you have been part of numerous writing workshops and residencies both as a facilitator and participant. What are your thoughts on the creative writing pedagogy for an Indian classroom?
 

Probably too complex to retail in a paragraph here, but I’ll try. I don’t endorse the capitalistic ethos of private universities; my own education was largely a gift from many sources (the Indian state, scholarships, newspapers and bookshops, people). I believe that the humanities, at least, can be taught for almost no cost and should certainly never be denied to anybody for want of finances. My Country Is Literature is an attempt to stuff an undergraduate degree in literature between the covers of a book.
 

I also think that creative writing degrees, for all their merits, generate an entire complex of undesirable incentives and practices, not least of which is to make art and writing yet another highly systematized and often suffocating, trend-driven market, disgorging wave after wave of the paradoxical and bathetic individualism of the herd (look at the scores of people writing and publishers suddenly publishing cutesy novels about restaurants and bookshops!). They also seem to make young people too careerist at an age when they need to set themselves up for the long term, and reluctant to criticize mediocrity or think aloud in ways that add a spark to literary debate, such as by writing reviews (historically, a key aspect of many writers’ education from Eliot to Naipaul). But I find I really enjoy teaching on Ahmedabad University’s Post-Graduate Diploma in Translation and Creative Writing. The students are a mix of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, so they’ve seen a bit of life, and the goal, at least of my own teaching, is to increase the amount of beauty and pleasure we can derive from the study of writing and the company of books. I also enjoy teaching travel writing, particularly in schools and to younger people. Travel writing shows you how to pay attention to the world, engage with people, make notes: all essential skills for becoming a real writer.

 

8. Last book you truly enjoyed reading?​
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Yuvan Aves’s Intertidal is a masterly portrait of the rivers and sea and tides and currents around Chennai that is also a call for participatory democracy and ecological activism. In truth, there’s rarely a week when I don’t read an enjoyable book. This week, that would be two short Bombay-centric histories: Naresh Fernandes’s panoramic City Adrift and Shabnam Minwalla’s delightful Colaba: The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai.
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9. You often talk about the importance of literary friendships in your life. Would you have been a different writer if you did not have the access/privilege of these friendships? How formative could these relationships be in one’s literary career?
 

Very formative. In my twenties, my work in literary criticism and then novels opened doors for me not just to readers whom I never met in person, but to other writers. Two people who have been amazing gurus for me in both art and life are the novelist Ofir Touche Gafla (whom I would never have met were we not invited to the same residency in 2010, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program) and the novelist and literary critic Aamer Hussein. Both also teach writing. Today, when I myself have reached the age they were when I first met them, their personal example is still a very powerful model for me.
 

In the end, the richest and most subtle education one receives is from people, and this aspect of education will never be superseded by technology or wealth. Even the university can only be a conductor for such a relationship; equally, it could also end up suffocating such interactions through the weight of bureaucracy, the emphasis on quantitative measures, and by making teachers jump through the hoops of administrative work. Every young writer inevitably finds his or her teachers on the page, but having even one person in your life as a literary catalyst can be very valuable, too, in showing you how you need to live to be a writer.

​10. When can we expect your next book of fiction? Are you working on something currently?
 

Yes, I’m writing a book about a character who is himself a city, a nation, a civilization, a manifestation of the divine will, the master of all that he surveys – except Time. This is such a vast subject that I myself have no sense of when it will be completed, or whether by that time AI will be able to generate a novel on this theme in the time it has taken me to write these two sentences.​​​