KIran Nagarakr

I meet Kiran Nagarkar at his beautiful Breach Candy bungalow – raintrees outside, brass urns, and mahogany tables inside. It’s a friend’s house, he tells me, he lost his own . How that happened is a story that could be an aside in any of Nagarkar’s novels. A sinister version of the ‘Water Wars’, the squabbles the chawl protagonists in his famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ are subjected to. It’s an urban nightmare both sad and scatological, and the writer is upset in the retelling.

But today is a hopeful day – the 63 year old Marathi English novelist is back after a break of eight years. Like ‘Cuckold’, his historical Sahitya Akademi winning 1998 novel, this present work is another voluminous saga. It tells in 584 pages, the coming of age story of a young Indian terrorist - Zia Khan. Early reviews have been mixed. Nagarkar is back last night from a reading in Germany, and is off the following day for the books launch in Delhi. Mumbai and Calcutta follow next. So Nagarkar is all keyed up. A new book is always a tense occasion ,and must be particularly so for Nagarkar, a writer who has risen from humble beginnings through constant re invention, moving from Marathi to English, and from novel to screenplay to a play.

So we talk. About Zia, Nagarkar’s terrorist hero. About the art of the novel. A subject he’s eloquent on, and obviously impassioned about,” I keep going back to these classic tales”, he confesses, ”you can live your life by these stories, Homer has you by the collar, and Kabir has you by the throat… I mean gosh, how many times have they buried the novel?” he demands. “All this post modernist fixation of -I have to be different, I have to be original… “.

I ask him if he enjoys any contemporary writers- Amitabh Ghosh , he answers , pausing to wonder at Ghosh’s genius for unravelling fascinating nuggets ,”I mean he found out that the Burmese King actually lived in Ratnagiri”, constructing much of his ‘The Glass Palace ‘around that little fact.

And Rushdie ? In Nagarkar’s new book, his terrorist hero Zia , is obsessed with killing Rushdie. Zia, who has been sent by his family to study at Cambridge , updates Allah with Yeatsian status reports on SR/Essar’s whereabouts “The Beast has gone underground…All the heathens and disbelievers of the world have conspired to throw a smoke screen around it “. I ask him where all that graphic imagery of ‘the evil one reading from his satanic book ‘…and his ‘hooded eyes’ came from ? “Well that’s Zia’s perspective “, he clarifies. Nagarkar himself doesn’t enjoy Rushdie’s prose anymore – “he’s trapped “, he analyses . Nevertheless he fumes those who criticise at Rushdie– “these are people who have no idea of the value of life”.

Nagarkar should know. In 1977 Nagarkar wrote ‘Bedtime Stories’ a scathing retelling of four stories from the Mahabharata. The play had a chorus that was represented by a Nazi , and the perpetrators on trial were the audience themselves. The play was attacked by the RSS even as rehearsals themselves became an impossibility , to say nothing of an actual performance. But then Nagarkar’s non novelistic endeavours have always been somewhat jinxed. The famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ began life as a screenplay for Dev Benegal, but was abandoned mid-way. And in this latest book Zia’s novelist brother Amanat has a run in with a couple of such fickle film producers who “keep him hanging for months on end, destroying whatever fragment of self esteem he had left”. Why does this happen , I ask him ? Maybe they are just horrid people , he replies post a thoughtful pause. Yet Nagarkar confesses he is still extremely fond of Benegal, even though the two scarcely speak.

Like Nagarkar and the Marathi establishment. Once hailed as a shining gem of Marathi literature, Nagarkar reveals how today he is persona non grata . It’s an episode that has been particularly painful for this Marathi writer. Right from 1991 when Nagarkar was in Chicago on a fellowship (“cleaning bathrooms “, he tells me in another delightful aside “the fellowship was so shoe string”). That’s when he made the decision to switch languages “For days I couldn’t get out of bed “, he confesses , “the move seemed a betrayal”. And yet Marathi readership with its abysmal numbers was slowly killing the writer in him. Nagarkar hadn’t written for 12 years. As he explains,“ Saat sakkam trechalis’ is called a milestone in Marathi lit… But what’s the use of a milestone if it sells only 1500 copies in 25 years?” .

I ask him how he spent those non writing years . “We struggled to make ends meet, he confesses. Arun ( Kolatkar, the poet) and I were partners for 20 years. We wrote ad copy but then our agency closed down,. We were out of a job. We’d go around together, and we just would not get any work – me in my kurta pajama, Arun with his long hair .God knows why, he, Arun had a reputation for unreliability. Our rejection fee used to be Rs.1500 for an assignment and Rs.3000 if our work was accepted. Somehow we got by. And now after his death Arun gets all this recognition. What damn use is it ?”

So will this new book change all of this ? ‘God’s Little Soldier’ is contemporary. It’s come after eight years of writes and rewrites. “I struggled”, Nagarkar explains “with the character of Zia.” The first draft, 800 pages plus and handwritten, was rejected when Nagarkar realised that the rigid idealistic terrorist hero he had created could take no humour. Zia was emerging as a vastly different character from the tongue in cheek chawl boys in Ravan and Eddie. Where Ravan and Eddie coped with recognizable evils like errant fathers and school bullies with zing, Zia created his own monsters. Like keeping Ramadan to please his aunt, by pretending to eat (to satisfy his liberal Muslim parents) and then throwing up post every meal. Or by flagellating himself. All of which makes ‘God’s Little Soldier’ very dramatic. Also cinematic, as locales move from Bombay to Cambridge and then worlds away to a Trappist monastery atop a ledge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s been described a book which has the ideas and events for three or four different novels, and certainly as you follow Zia through his childhood , and see him moving from Cambridge dons to gay priests to arms dealing god men, you begin to see why. Colourful, kaleidoscopic and quite the dance of life, even if it is macabre.

IN the Week April 2006