Wizard of the Serio-Comic

Novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee is the master of Indian cool. In his latest, Fairy Tales at Fifty, he pushes his limits in a bleak tale of modern Indian anguish. The writer in conversation with Open magazine

What is it like to meet contemporary Indian fiction’s smartest and funniest young lad, a quarter century later? “Fifty; it’s the obvious reference point for middle age,” he says, as we discuss the title of his new book. And so we find our man, still writing his manuscripts by hand, with the fountain pens he has just stopped collecting; filled with relief over television shows he never has to worry about missing and unmindful of computers; older and worrying over daughters but jaunty in a Himachali cap, in his beautifully appointed living room in Nizamuddin East. At 55, Upamanyu Chatterjee is no less wry and irreverent than the author—and hero—he conjured up from a place very close to our hearts, at 29. Young Indians first came to a new kind of autonomous, self-aware Indian Writing in English (IWE) with his acclaimed English, August: An Indian Story (1988); and to Amitav Ghosh's equally important novel, The Shadow Lines, the same year. The narrators couldn’t be more different; the latter is earnest and enamoured of the past and his cousin, the former a grass- smoking urban exile with a fine appreciation for tall tales and the masturbatory.

Chatterjee’s young civil servant Agastya or August, nicknamed ‘English’, leads a droll, tragicomic existence in his year's posting in Madna, ‘hazaar fucked’ by all civilisations and languages and at the margins of every debate about what is Indian—yet undeniably vital to what is at its heart, then and now. The tumult he calls up has been called ‘jazzy, baggy, hyperbolic’ (Glasgow Herald); his language ‘satiny, rich but controlled’ (James Wood in The Guardian); ‘wonky and witty’ and possessed of a ‘genius for remaining aloof in the face of gibes at his or Agastya Sen’s Englishness’ with ‘silence, exile and cunning’ (Vijay Nambisan in The Hindu). Chatterjee, who has worked in the Indian Administrative Service by day for three decades—currently Joint Secretary of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB)—has since written a series of novels which uphold a kind of Agastyan vision obsessed with identity and truth-seeking. After this new book, more strongly than ever, also with how we can learn to live unhappily ever after, as its characters put it.

Fairy Tales at Fifty (Fourth Estate, 342 pages, Rs 599), his fifth novel, is the strangest bird of them all, and perhaps with good reason; the India Agastya inherited is not one he would have anticipated digesting easily. The book’s trippy modern mythology is almost inevitable, as is the psychedelic mix of sex, violence and bereavement that turn this satire of sorts into a nightmarish carnival of storytelling. The protagonist Nirip, who has just discovered he is not his parent’s biological child on the verge of 50, fears his decline. ‘He did feel fine most of the time, and had felt wonderful once upon a time but it would be rash to confess, most of all to his doctor, to a permanent sense of well- being; he couldn’t, and certainly not at fifty. Even though fifty was the new forty. Even in India? And thirty twenty? At ten therefore one was zero, not certain whether one was alive.’ Later: ‘Fifty was the new sixty.’

The tale’s whimsical nature is reflected in this kind of interplay, though this whimsy is deceptive, as Nirip’s life turns grotesque, a reflection of modern bile in many ways: ‘A cold and dead, shrivelled-up miser at heart, so some of his acquaintances privately believed Nirip to be, and gave him anyway on his birthday some locally-made Mont Blanc in a gift box that smelt of locally-made Guerlain.’

A steady descent into chaos in this ‘bloody rotten world’ is the ultimate fallout, with breaks for wit which become too few and far between. For, though lifted by typically circular and at times onanistic meditations on train stations, human greed and parentage, the novel’s essential engagement is with violence. This is established early on with a two-part prelude around a boy, Jhabua, who fixates on a serial killer called Angulimala, who hangs fingers (or penises, if the boy’s father, Jayadev, is to be believed) around his neck, one for each victim. Later, come Nirip’s real progenitors Pashupati and Manasi, as well as Computer Bhawani, Kamagni, Magnum and a host of monsters, as the impotent prince battles the ogre. Not for the faint-hearted, dire visions of cannibalism (the term ‘eating pussy’ will never be the same) and gore all make for something Agastya might have cooked up on a bad trip.

Angulimala is horrific but also the stuff of our daily headlines. “Yes, when people say this is ‘so shocking’, I think, what world do you live in? The stories of Nithari, that cannibal and his servant; of YouTube beheadings. They say this tale is dark and shocking, but these things happen and you can’t do anything, and the world goes on. There is still tennis going on around you,” says Chatterjee.

How did the story evolve? “You needed two people who are diametrically opposed, prince and pauper. I needed a kind of filtering mind, Nirip’s, and the contrast needed to be very physical. I enjoyed the sisters most; I really haven’t done women. Actually it was so much fun, it seemed easy. If you’re married to an ogre—and millions are married to ogres— how to stay one step ahead? And I enjoyed Pashupati a lot. Even the most monstrous villain is taken care of by time.”

With the humour comes a sense of divine retribution, throughout. “It’s the only point of this whole business of fantasy, folktale, fairytale; what purpose does it serve? At the end, a serial killer will be offed by a serial killer.”

Some readers may find it difficult to break with the calmer, more palatable world of Agastya, or to let go of that wise, wicked book. How does it feel to be identified with your books—one book in particular — so closely? “They’re always doing that, I’m okay with it. My standard response is that Henry James quote: people who write fiction do not need to write autobiographies. You have to put something of yourself in. Otherwise why the hell are you going through this process of writing a book? So, is Agastya Sen me? The answer is obviously ‘no’, but you know…” Chatterjee trails off.

He reminds me that the book was not always such a hit. “English, August was published after two years of rejection slips. And it’s not as if it got good reviews in those days.” Did he read and keep his reviews those days, and after having moved house? “They were definitely in a box, somewhere.”

Of course the book was made into a film (in 1994, starring Rahul Bose), and found Chatterjee a steady readership; in 2009, he was recognised as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. And his favourite character is beloved chiefly because of his wonderful ability to be still, to do nothing, Nowhere. “The real inspiration behind that irreverent voice is technique. Everyone presumes that because it was so easy to read, it must have been easy to write. But how do you draw the reader in? I could have had a communal riot in Chapter Two, a flood in Chapter Five, a riot in Chapter Six,” says Chatterjee. “I deliberately made the story plotless, to underscore his boredom. The novels that follow are more difficult. I’ve always maintained that a writer is perfectly justified in making demands on his reader. Why should everything be a breeze?”

Chatterjee’s protagonists are noble men who seek out challenges in this way, even when they do not realise they are doing so, dealing with the times in whatever way they can; as seen in Agastya and most dramatically in Nirip. There is a recurring cast of characters which re-appear in his world. “That happens inevitably. Some of the characters, at least in the earlier books, are unfinished business. I like that continuity. The Mammaries of the Welfare State (for which he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004) in one sense carries on from English, August. There is none of that focus on the individual that there was in the first book. Both The Last Burden and Way to Go are sort of meditations on death. Way to Go is much more gentle. Weight Loss (Chatterjee’s 2006 dark comedy about a sexual deviant) I liked enormously, but I think it’s the book that has, even more than Fairy Tales, produced the sharpest reactions, because they can’t get used to the character. I don’t know, he’s a lost soul I guess. I remember [journalist] Prem Shankar Jha telling me, ‘He’s such a loser’,” says Chatterjee. “Yes, and I remember telling him, what is there to win?”

He doesn’t really pause as I laugh. “In fact that distinction and that sort of rhetorical question is at the heart of it. If you feel there is nothing to win, you end up with a character like that.”

The day job complements his work. “I can’t write a column. It’s death. I can’t interview a writer,” he says, of his alternate career. Aware of the irony, perhaps, he continues. “To be absolutely honest, when I sat the IAS exam I had written to The Statesman about working as a sub editor (he searches for the word for a bit). It’s the only paper I read even today, believe it or not. I went and met him, I remember him as he was a man with goggles for some reason, and he really thought I was mad, to want to leave the world of the IAS. Now it’s changed. Everything is wide open.”

I tell him I’m not sure if this is the case, though of course, compared to his generation, it certainly is. In some ways, things are just the same, some people go into the civil service with the same idealistic expectations, if there is more cynicism in other quarters. “I can see how the early years interest people. You have enormous scope for doing good in the sense of drinking water, health, electricity and so on,” says Chatterjee, who was first posted in a small town called Chiplun, in Ratnagiri. “The workload is so much, the job itself is so complicated especially if you are going to a subdivision. It takes you minimum one year to figure out what you’re doing, and by the time you figure out what’s going on, it’s time to move to the next posting.”

He says he reads ‘indiscriminately’, most recently Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), about the Italian Jewish writer's incarceration at Auschwitz. I see Aubrey Menen, that lesser-known Irish-Indian writer on his shelves; Chatterjee says he hasn’t read him yet, though he has read Menen’s autobiography, The Space within the Heart . Currently he is reading Proust in French, with the English edition on hand. “There are certain books which I’d like to remain intriguing. Proust’s Swann’s Way is so navel-gazing and so wonderful. The thing I thought of is David Copperfield, and how both characters are ostensibly looking back at their childhoods. In Proust’s book, the central character—never named, I presume it’s Proust, he’s eight or nine or 10—is of great interest. The sensibility of this boy who can compare the painting he saw in the Louvre to another painting is that of an adult, refined mind. Why this acute and deliberate difference in perception? I like to leave it there.”

There are some ground rules. “I can read in Hindi and Marathi, and for two or three years I struggled to learn Sanskrit. Bengali writers I try and read in Bengali. Other Indian writers I read in English, though translations tend to be poor,” says Chatterjee, who has often emphasised in the past that English is an Indian language. “It’s nice that all these languages exist together.”

Chatterjee has just written a short story called ‘Othello Sucks’ for Granta. “It’s a self parody. A family sitting around the table, and the daughter screams ‘Othello sucks!’ She’s doing it at school. The family says Shakespeare is great, and so on; the bottomline is that they are saying ‘Othello sucks’ because Shakespeare is White and can’t do Blacks. I’m very happy with it, it’s actually quite funny.”

He has mentioned a 15-year plan for his books in interviews a decade ago, and that plan still sticks, he says, with some changes and new challenges. “Weight Loss was unexpected. The one that I wanted to do in its place is a respectably sized collection of stories. It’s difficult to switch between short stories and novels. I have written five or six, but all of those predate English, August. At that time, here were short story competitions, one where I was given a consolation prize perhaps. Meenakshi Mukherjee was horrified by my use of four-letter words.”

Is Agastya coming back again, I ask, finally. “Yes, but you can’t have the same jokes, he’s 30 years older. He can’t continue to look around him and say, ‘This place sucks’. As and when I do the Agastya book, it will not be because of the individual and character alone; his world is worth returning to. I have to figure that out. It’s there, slow cooking.”

Just as I think he has gotten terribly serious—compared to the writer I have in my head, the way we keep all of our favourite writers in our heads—he tells me he keeps his clothes in a giant urn in his living room which I have been asking about, as we photograph him. Earlier, he said, deadpan, “If you are going to ask me about influences, James Hadley Chase is among them.” Not Kundera, Yeats, Kafka? (All of whom he has been compared with.) “Chase,” he insists. I'm not falling for it; I read the books. The 29-year-old author whose hero quoted Marcus Aurelius on failing well has grown into just the kind of wit a fan could anticipate. There is great comfort in that, and in his lessons for living the modern way: unhappily, unaccountably ever after.

August: An Indian StoryEnglishFairy Tales at FiftyUpamanyu Chatterjee