Allan Sealy

Allan Sealy doesn’t read newspapers. He lives, like fellow writer Ruskin Bond, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The only concession this 54 year old Anglo Indian writer makes to modernity is his mouse. Also his computer and his net connection.
So even as Sealy loves his solitude, he delights little-boy like in the marvels of technology.

‘Red’, the book Sealy is here in Mumbai to promote, is about many things. It’s also the first book Sealy has written on a computer. Three threads, colour coded run through the book. The red thread tells of billionairess Aline and avant garde musician Zach, who meets in front of Matisse’s painting entitled ‘The Red Room’. The black tells of Gilgitan, earthy and energetic, a Dom who blackens his face with soot and grease, and yet wins the love of an unlikely woman. The third wire is a green one and the most obviously autobiographical. It tells of N, the Narrator, who lives in Dariya Dun, his work and his relationships with his estranged wife Olivia and his daughter, Mandalay. I ask Sealy if he has a daughter as well. ”Yes”, he says after the briefest of pauses,” But she doesn’t look anything like N’s daughter in the book.” Deepa Rose is the same age as the book’s Manda, and she lives in New Zealand (unlike Mandalay who lives in America). Sealy and his New Zealander wife, live like N does, in a little house in Dehra Dun with a walled garden. It’s a house with a newly acquired resident. One that becomes, as Sealy tells me “one of the characters”. Acquired after much frustration with having to access the net from seedy centres -“I was a prisoner of these cybercafés”, Sealy tells me “and they were filthy little places, horrible holes.” So Sealy bought himself a computer, a flat screen monitor and a wireless mouse. Like N in the novel, who encounters, besides the picture of a ‘ dripping Bipasha Basu’ , “something sticky on the floor under my shoe and it’s not chewing gum. It’s- o my god’. So N gets himself a computer too, on which he types in www.hermitagemuseum.com and then ‘Matisse’ in the search box, to watch ‘The Red Room’ download.

We talk about the book’s sense of colour. It’s easy for Sealy to engage with these themes, he’s a painter himself. “I never carry a camera. Instead I do small sketches “, he tells me. I ask him if he’s done any of Mumbai. ”The view from here”, he says gesturing to the sea and South Mumbai green outside. It’s a little pencil sketch on a small President Hotel pad. But it has point and perspective, with the morning star, the taxis and the World Trade Centre.

‘Red’, also has poetry, a quality Sealy’s earlier books have often been praised for. Right from the ‘The Trotternama’ a chronicle of Anglo Indian history, to ‘The Everest Hotel’ . In Sealy’s love story novel, ‘The Brain Fever Bird’, the city of Delhi comes alive in lyrically poetic prose. Here’s Lev, the out of work biological weapons scientist from St. Petersburg, in Delhi – “India Gate, his map says. The wide road leading to it is heroic, out of another sort of dream. Its vaunting scale is familiar : he recognizes the bullying note from his Moscow days”. And of the brain fever bird –“a shy bird, furtive in speckled fatigues, a cuckoo with a liking for babblers nests…and a call that climbs and climbs maddeningly through the hot June afternoon and the burning nights : brainfever! brainfever ! brainfever ! higher and higher till the crazed listener sits down on a stool and prepares a noose that could either be for the bird or for himself.”

We talk about his first name ‘Irwin’ – “it was my father’s name as well, so I was always called Allan. Subconsciously I must have resented it , because I decided to resurrect it, but only the initial. “ And then Sealy tired of people asking him what the ‘I’ stood for.So now ‘Red’ is the first book that features the author’s full name on the jacket - ‘Irwin Allan Sealy’.

What do Sealy’s literary awards mean to him- ‘Trotternama’ won the 1988 Commonwealth Writers prize and ‘The Everest Hotel’, The 1998 Crossword Award . Sealy’s philosophical – “ It’s nice to get a lakh or two. Prizes may probably quicken a writer’s career, but they can also deaden some impulse in him – they can interfere with the flow.” And all those hefty advances overseas writers get ? “It doesn’t touch me “, Sealy maintains. We talk about the huge advance the Harvard student author Kaavya Vishwanathan received “It’s a huge wallop on the head – she doesn’t realise it - at the moment she’s floating but she could sink “ - a prophecy that was to prove uncannily true a few days later.

Sealy himself , may travel but always goes back to his Himalayan Retreat , safely distant from the big bucks. Is money an issue ? “Not a serious issue, in other words I’m not seriously poor!”, he jokes. It’s a joke like most, with some truth. It’s N the narrator in ‘Red’ who answers it most poetically- “When I’m anxious for the future, I look up at the hornbill in the palm tree with a single areca nut in his beak, and think that’s his whole pension too, his provident fund, his retirement package, his future, and then my fears are quelled. Not answered, put at rest. You have to sit quietly on your branch and offer up your self entire, to the world, to the universe, to the next passer-by”.


This appeared in The Week April 2006