Towards the end of Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, the narrator Kailash asks aren’t we condemned to repeat our stories and write the same book over and over again. It recoils the apprehension one had before reading The Lovers (Aleph). One kind of prejudged it as yet another immigrant’s tale. But as one gradually immerses in Kailash’s search for love and attachment in an alien land, the preconceived labels give way to a feeling of disturbing familarity. Kumar’s honesty shines through the complex narrative where story and reportage, fragment and essay and personal and political coalesce seamlessly. Not to forget his earthy sense of humour and a mischievous eye always looking for irony.
In Delhi, Kumar looks cheery despite being under the weather. His previous books presented an immigrant’s perspective of India and Bihar, his home state. This time, Kumar, who teaches English at Vassar College, New York, has inverted the gaze. Somebody who fell for the charm of Big Apple after graduation, it has taken Kumar a long time to reflect on his experiences. The Lovers takes off from the bedrock of idealism and romanticism in campus life with a charismatic professor Ehsaan Ali (modelled on political scientist and anti-war activist Eqbal Ahmad) adding to the enigma. “It took me a long a time to filter experiences, both agonising and ecstatic,” admits Kumar.
The catalyst
The author says he found the story of Eqbal Ahmad very unusual, in fact, inspiring. “A man born in a village near Gaya, he walks across the country during Partition. From Pakistan he goes to Princeton on a fellowship, was charged of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger. As an immigrant, who is also someone from Bihar, I thought his story captured a kind of an earlier form of cosmopolitanism. Now we think about people going to the West in large numbers but if you look earlier there were so many extraordinary tales of cultural adoption and adaptation, etc. So, it was there in my mind.”
Kumar never met Ahmad but he had seen one of the BBC documentaries where Ahmad described himself as “a man without a nation.” “He was not tied to any narrow nationalist ideology, and he was also not tied to any narrow religious identity either. He had a broad, expansive sense of the world. Stories My Country Told Me shows him boarding a car in Kolkata and going all along the Grand Trunk road. Through him, I was also discovering my own past.”
“Also,” he continues, “as I am getting old. I wanted to remember what it meant to fall in love and to be in love. I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing as it takes you to the past. The narrator of The Lovers at some point says that the body forgets. It forgets even the most intimate experiences, and the book was a way to remember what the body would have forgotten.”
The narrator
Also, there seems to be an attempt to let the reader know that the novel has autobiographical elements. The narrator is called Kailash, whose friends call him Kalashnikov or simply AK. “Which I thought was a little clever thing,” interrupts Kumar. “Wo ek chutki le rahe the (I was having fun),” he quips and goes on to explain his intent. “You draw from life, but then you invent something else. In fiction, you don’t invent the events. What is imaginative about it, is the consciousness. How you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything and that is the attraction of writing fiction.”
The form
The novel not only blends fact and fiction, it also brings in reportage and photographs. Kumar calls it an in-between novel about an in-between man. It emerged out of a course called in-between novel that he taught. “I tried to use books of authors who have attempted this before such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat. What I am trying to say is that it has been done before but I am trying to give it a newer form because I have written non fiction books as well. In Hindi, writers like Yashpal have done it before. That one man steps out in a lane and then we have an essay on how clothes are woven. The ordinary run of novels in contemporary scene, in India at least, is either realist or science fiction. They have not necessarily tried this form. I hope to start a conversation. I think Arundhati Roy has done a little bit of it in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness when she is commenting on the contemporary scene.”
Is it the need of the times or the market? “I was not thinking of the market. My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it. If my fiction doesn’t deal with the facts, for example, that there is fake news, then what’s the use of my fiction. When there is so much of fiction around us, I am trying to make my fiction return to a different kind of reality. Now you might say that why not in that case write only non fiction. My point would be that you have to interrupt the pleasant immersion into any seductive narrative — whether it is fiction or non fiction.” The writer needs to be jolted, he adds.
But the device always runs the risk of being called a gimmick. “Well, there is always a risk. I am conscious about it but not to have tried would have been a failure. For example, my narrator is falling in love with another person but he also has to write a paper for his course. In the midst of writing his paper he learns about Indian soldiers in the First World War. So we have a picture of that. If it keeps happening, somebody might call it a gimmick but I have written with absolute conviction that it is performing a function of trying to reproduce the fragmented discovery of the world by a young consciousness and it also represents the messiness of life and the messiness of love.” After a pause, he adds, “I don’t know about you but in my life nothing happened in a clean fashion.” He admits that he was always conscious that he would be judged. “When I write about women and sex there was a fear that as I am writing about myself, one should know what is it filtered by. But then jab pyaar kiya to darna kya...,” Amitava’s punchlines come effortlessly
The sense of an outsider’s point of view is evident in the narrative. He shares a common experience to inform how it works. “When I go to another city, the number of photos I upload on Instagram increases. Is it because the place has more views than the place I am living in? No, it is because I am seeing everything with new eyes. The outsider is alert to difference. My America is the America of the outsider who is always looking in. He is standing outside the window looking inside and in some moments he enters to see kya ho raha hai.”
In-between man
Talking about in-betweeness, Kumar goes back to tell the story of one of his uncles, a gold medallist in Physics, who was picked up by the NASA in 1965. “He never returned. It took him 20 years to listen to his mother’s voice. When I was there, a phone call was arranged and I still remember the way he said, ‘maa....’,” he stretches the syllable to convey the pain. “He made arrangements for his sisters’ weddings but whatever his sense of loyalty to his adopted country was, he never returned. Then I saw a generation armed with Skype and cellphone.”
Kumar, who admittedly belongs to the trunk call generation, says, he is aware of how he is better off than the previous generation and how he is not as good as the next generation. “When my mother died I was not there. I remember how she used to wish me happy Diwali. But I had no Diwali. Had I been here, I would have complained about noise of crackers, the pollution but there I was missing it. This is in between....”
It is this nostalgia that describes his work but Kumar is not finished yet. “There is fondness for this nostalgia but also a sense of suspicion. Because nostalgia also pushed many immigrants to send money and gold bricks after the demolition of Babri Masjid. I am opposed to that. It is a more and more complex world with more and more complex and divided responses.” No wonder, his narrative reaches Kashmir.
Passionate engagement
Kumar, who also dabbles in journalism wants it to shed its traditional tools of objectivity, distance and detachment. “I am opposed to that. My attempt is to bring the concreteness of daily journalism, the reportorial eye to the page but also have voice and presence and even prejudice so that an alternative journalism emerges that says that there is no objective view. There is only a passionate engagement and a fight over it.”
A section of the American media tried doing that the recent US Presidential election but could not affect the outcome. Kumar sees it differently and calls it the victory of fake news. “There were so many people swayed by news being pumped in by unemployed youth in Macedonia who made thousands of dollars by pasting fake news.” Kumar says he is presenting a fiction that is not pretending that it is serving the truth. “Instead it accepts that it is presenting fiction to the reader but the interruptions juxtapose fact with fiction. I hope it produces a more critical readership, a readership that is more aware of what it is doing and more sceptical of what it is doing.”
Litti chokha literature
Kumar addresses diasporic identity without any colonial baggage. There is bucolic wit in his language which he says is not “homework English”.
“I didn’t want to write a boring book. I don’t think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny. I like to remember this motto more often than I have.” One reminds him of Siddharth Chowdhury, another author who writes about Bihar with equal felicity and whom Kumar has mentioned in author’s note. “We are bringing a Bihari sensibility to English. Jeet Thayil and others are bringing another kind of energy to the page. That has more to do with rock and roll, drugs...It is also very good but that is different from our somewhat earthier roots.”
Now with news from Bihar reaching his living room as it happens, Kumar says the time is ripe for what he calls “litti chokha literature.”