Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai talked to Shoma Chaudhury at Diggi Palace in Jaipur literature festival

It was quite cold in Jaipur and I was not too used to that kind of weather. Since my family stayed close by, my nephew would drop me to the Diggi's palace and we would normally take a rickshaw on our way back.(didn't like to trouble him too much although if I had called him, he would happily come to pick me up) I was much grateful to my friend who had agreed to come with me to Jaipur (just because I wanted her to come) more-over it was just an holiday for her and she is one friend who never disappoints me.

The Jaipur festival was all over the city. Sometimes we went over to the exhibitions on the other side of the town and sometimes for shopping. We tried food in many restaurants and tasted the local cuisine but most of the time we were at the literature festival. It was fun interacting with other writers. during coffee break, I would try to start an conversation with stranger but could never succeed.

Writers by nature are either shy or snobs, that when I am glad that I had a friend by my side.

I enjoyed the conversations of many writers but this one was my favorite

Kiran Desai in conversation with Shoma C

Shoma
Kiran, you say you had no idea where your book was headed. Did it really begin without character or plot?

Kiran

Yes. I was writing in every direction. It was years before I could see the story and map out its historical and emotional parallels. Six years into the book, I was really depressed. It was too dark; it wasn’t true. I had to pull back and make it funnier. The world was also changing so fast — I felt I should have finished earlier and been at the next stage. I really thought I was going to vanish completely.

Shoma
But there must have been a kernel of an idea...

Kiran

There was this realization that what my generation was going through in America was the same as what my grandparents had gone through in the UK decades earlier. Nothing had changed. Both sides like to see it as different — the US doesn’t like thinking of itself as a colonial power and Indian immigrants try and emphasizes how welcome they are, but there is a lot of hypocrisy in that pretence. Immigration is not a pretty thing. It’s often very cruel. It’s just self-preservation to ignore racism in these countries.

Shoma
Did you take refuge in hypocrisy as well?

Kiran

Now no longer, now there’s a kind of hammered out honesty! (laughs) The Indian community in New York has grown and the media is everywhere, so one is a part of this whole dialogue. It keeps you honest. But there was a time when I felt more distant from India and then I thought of being Indian in a very odd, nostalgic sort of way. When you are with people who don’t know anything about India, it’s very easy to gloss over the difficult bits. My first book is very much a product of that desire to see myself as Indian in a pretty way — something I wouldn’t associate with myself now.

Shoma
Can you spell this out a bit ?

Kiran

It’s hard to put a finger on it. On the one hand, I was reading Marquez and Calvino and wanted to write in that fable/folk way. But also, it was an utterly sweet version of what it means to be Indian, almost a childhood version, like RK Narayan, something that doesn’t look at the harsher stuff. The same arguments are raging now in Latin America. ‘Realism versus magic realism’. For many younger realist authors there, Marquez is a dirty word.

Shoma
At the Booker, you said being Indian is essential to your artistic vision. Can you elaborate on that?

Kiran

When I first went away, I was far from any Indian context. I was in this little town in Massachusetts, then later in Vermont — there were hardly any Indians around. I didn’t really transform myself, but the Indian side was just missing. Looking back, I see how bad it was. I think of people forced to immigrate to places where there’s no community — suddenly all your references are gone, your language is gone. Even the English you speak is formal and curbed. Then I come back here and see how my father speaks — there’s an ease in his language, a kind of wild, raucous humor that I had lost completely. I have it a little bit more now because I feel very much part of the Indian community in New York. But I’ve lost a lot of richness of language being away. Rushdie too must be really sad for that. He was really happy at the Jaipur festival, I could tell. He was laughing really hard at all the jokes. You can’t do that anywhere else — abuse, be rude with your friends, be totally affectionate, and know that everyone understands that emotional space.

Shoma
If India is your emotional centre, what aspects of it engage you?

Kiran

I suppose the same things — the big huge issue of globalization. The dilemma of how it’s playing out. In many ways, it is a deep moral and ethical issue for us. We’d like to see ourselves as globalize Indians doing business across borders in the best possible light — but you often wonder. You drive into the Indian countryside and see nothing has changed. Latin America opened its doors decades before we did, and there is such sourness in the air about what happened there.

Shoma
To get back to your writing, is it possible to essentialize what’s Indian about it?

Kiran

For me, being Indian means being in touch with India on a day to day basis in New York — go to Indian art exhibitions, hear Asha Bhosle sing, eat in Jackson Heights, go to the houses of friends. It means the open door, the whole ease and generosity that goes with being Indian. It’s the emphasis on community and friendship, which you don’t see in the States. Everything there is so stilted. The western world is a deeply formal and lonely place. That’s the great tragedy of America. That’s what their literature is about. If you live like that, you are condemned to write that kind of literature also. (laughing) Everything is framed in deeply psychological terms, in this language of therapy. You are focused on one individual finding meaning for themselves. But that’s not the location of our literature and our writing. We are often writing of what it means to be up against community and society. The problem is too much of the writing in the US is now coming out of writing programs. You are taught to concentrate on small moments of yourself, blow your interior dialogue up to a huge degree (giggling). All this is quashed out if you are an Indian. You don’t loom so large; you are part of a community of many people. Even our language is different. In America, coming out of this process of group approval, everything is becoming too sanitized. All weirdness and eccentricity is ironed out. The whole New Yorker school of short story writing. Tragic. American writing used to be much more fun. But the weirdness that produced the Confederacy of Dunces or Truman Capote’s early books has been completely eroded.

Shoma
Has the Booker forced changes on you?

Kiran

Yes, it’s very depressing. You want to just play and write. But it’s become difficult to be playful. If you write from India or any developing country, you are forced to become a kind of mediator, an interpreter for your culture. Poor Afghani writers — they must really feel this burden.

Shoma
So are you asked for your views on the great Islam debate?

Kiran

Yes, and I think we are really lucky to have grown up being Indian so we don’t have this bizarre view of Islam that the rest of the world seems to have. I think it’s been a vile thing for George Bush to have headed America. I really wonder if it can ever go back, or whether it has permanently lost something of its soul as a nation. They have redefined their thinking in the most stupid ways. It’s really very distressing.

Shoma
What were your festival highlights?

Kiran

(Laughing) I am not going to be the one to spill all the masala gossip on Tehelka, to the everlasting wrath of all the other writers! But I had a really good time. It was chaotic but warm and intimate.