Tell us a little bit about your growing up years.
Well, I was born in Bombay and lived there until I was 21, when I came to the
U.S. I was
raised in a joint family, which meant I grew up around very loving aunts and
uncles. And
since I was an only child, it helped to have all those extra adults in my
life, for love and
guidance. I've always had many sets of parents and even today, have a knack
for
"adopting" parents.
What do you remember most about growing up in Bombay?
I have two overriding childhood memories or impressions: One, was always being
excruciating aware of the poverty around me. Now, as a middle-class kid,
you're not
supposed to be that aware of--or certainly not supposed to be tortured
by--the poverty
around you. It's a defense mechanism of sorts, to be able to ignore it. For
whatever
reason, I was never able to ignore it and to some extent, it really affected
my childhood,
made me a hypersensitive child.
Two, I always wrote. Writing was my way to make sense of the world
outside
and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I
don't think I was a
terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give wings to the inchoate
emotions and
feelings inside of me.
When did you know you were a writer?
Well, I was writing poems at a very young age. As a child, I would write
'anonymous'
poems to my parents whenever I felt wronged by them and then secretly pin
them on their
closet door. So I learned early on that writing was a good way to get rid of
pent-up
feelings.
All through my teen years I wrote poetry and short stories and essays. I
think I
knew I was a writer--not that I was necessarily a good writer, just that I
was a writer--one
evening when I was 14 or so. I remember sitting in my living room and
writing this long
poem called The Old Man that came out of me as if someone was dictating it.
It was a
terribly sappy poem but I felt compelled to write it and when I was done, I
was exhausted
but I knew something about myself that I didnt before.
Why did you decide to come to the U.S.?
I've never had an easy answer to that question. In some sense, my whole life
prepared me
for moving to the U.S. I was a product of an educational system that was
very colonial
and very Western in its orientation. I still remember my fourth-grade
composition teacher
telling the class not to create characters who were blond and blue-eyed. Her
statement
came as a shock because that was all we knew, you know? When I was a child,
I read
everything ever written by the British children's writer Enid Blyton and
later, the Billy
Bunter and William series of novels. And as I got older, all I was reading
was Western
literature. American pop culture was a big influence, also. I mean, until I
picked up
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, I had hardly ever read a novel by an
Indian writer.
Rushdie was a revelation for me.
So that's the "sociological" answer. But of course, there were also a
hundred
personal reasons--wanting to travel, wanting an adventure, wanting to be
independent,
wanting to get away from certain aspects of my life, not knowing what the
heck to do with
myself after I'd finished college. I remember the day when it occurred to me
very clearly
that if I lived in India, I would never be totally independent and would
never discover who
exactly I was as a person. I wanted to live in a place where I would rise or
fall based on
my own efforts and talents. And I was very lucky to have a father, who,
despite his
immense sadness at having me so far away from home, always encouraged me to
reach for
my dreams and never held me back. . . But I'm not even sure it was this
complicated.
Remember, I was 21. Weird as it may sound, not much thought went into it.
So you came to Ohio State? Why Ohio State?
Well, that's a funny story. It's indicative of how so many major decisions
in my life have
been made. I was sitting in my living room in Bombay, checking off a list
of American
universities that offered a M.A. in journalism, when my eyes fell on "Ohio
State
University." There was a Joan Baez record playing on the turntable and right
then, her
song, Banks of the Ohio, came on. I looked up and thought, "It's a sign",
and decided to
apply there.
Hmmm. Well, I hope the experience there was worth it.
Oh, OSU was a blast. Two of the happiest years of my life. Within days of
being there, I
made friendships that have lasted till today. Those two years taught me that
one can make
new families at any point in one's life. I had such positive experiences
there that it made
me want to live in the U.S. forever. That one line in Bombay Time, where
Jimmy Kanga
feels like he loved Oxford so much he felt he could've gone to war for it,
thats what it
used to feel like to me. I'll always be grateful.
After OSU, I worked for two years at the Lorain Journal, a small but
feisty little
paper near Cleveland. It was a grueling experience, long hours, all that,
but when I left
there, I knew I could tackle anything that daily journalism threw my way.
So you came to the Akron Beacon Journal when?
In 1987. The Beacon had the reputation of being a
real
writer's paper and had just won yet another Pulitzer. It was a great paper
to work at.
Still is.
How did the novel come about? Were you writing it in Akron?
I had started the novel a few years ago under a very different plot
structure. The
first incarnation of the novel was much more 'plot-heavy'. Then, I arrived
at a crossroads
in that I had to decide between finishing the novel or my Ph.D. dissertation
(while working
full-time as a journalist) and I opted to finish the dissertation. The novel
was discarded
but not forgotten.
Then, in 1999 I won the Nieman fellowship, which allows journalists a year of study at Harvard.
When I found
out I'd gotten the Nieman, I promised myself that I would pick up the novel
again and I
did. I salvaged odds and ends from the abandoned manuscript and wrote some
new
chapters during the first semester.
But it was during the second semester that the novel really took off. I
went home
to Bombay during the Christmas break and was struck by how many people there
led such
sad lives.
I remember lying on the couch in my father's apartment one afternoon and
vowing
to finish the novel.
I felt a desperate ,
burning urge to tell the story of the people I'd grown up around.
I kept that promise to myself when I returned to Cambridge. I was
actually
grateful for jetlag, because it was easy to wake up at 4 a.m. I would write
each morning
for a few hours before starting my work day. On some days, the writing
flowed so
easily--almost compulsively, you could say--that I would skip school and
write for eight to
10 hours straight. The bulk of the novel was written in less than two
months. I liked
having the lonely, solitary experience of writing juxtaposed against the
socially hectic and
busy life I had as a Nieman fellow. I worked hard and partied hard during
this period and
that balance was somehow very important.
What's Bombay Time about?
Good question. I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Basically, it's
a story about this
group of middle-aged people who are residents of an apartment building in
Bombay. All
the characters are Parsis or Zoroastrians, -
which is the
religion I was
raised in. Parsis are members of a small ethnic minority who came to India
as political
refugees from Persia over 900 years ago, and who went on to become one of
India's most
affluent and Westernized ethnic communities.
So, against the backdrop of a
wedding reception,
I tell the life stories of the individual residents--who they were in their
youth, what has
made them who they are today--and ask the question of how does one live a
middle-class
existence in a city of so much poverty? That's it, in a nutshell.
Hopefully, the novel is
more interesting than my summary of it.
What was the inspiration for Bombay Time?
Growing up in India exposed me to many
stories of
startling pathos and tragedy. Daily life for so many people seemed like an
endless struggle
and yet, I watched these people live their lives with a typically Bombay
brand of humor,
with bravado and courage. I wanted to commemorate their lives with my novel.
I am also fascinated by the insider-outsider status of the Parsis of
India. I wanted
to examine their love-hate relationship with Bombay, torn as they are between
disdain and
a helpless love for the city of their birth.
In a sense, you can say that that's the story of the middle-class in any
city around
the world that's besieged with corruption and violence and poverty.
Who are your favorite authors?
I draw inspiration from everywhere. I'm one of those people who even reads
cereal
boxes. But my favorite authors are Salman Rushdie (I recently re-read
Midnight's
Children and wept in awe and gratitude), Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid.
But
influence is a hard thing to account for--I think Bob Dylan and Emily
Dickinson have
probably influenced my writing--in terms of making me crazy about words--as
much as
anybody.
So how hard was it finding a publisher? It happened during your Nieman year,
right?
Although my friends tell me how lucky I was to find a publisher, I tell them
that that
wasn't the miraculous part. Because that was the result of effort, a
cause-and-effect kind
of thing. The truly miraculous part was finding an agent.
What happened was, I was attending a lecture at Emerson College in Boston
and
asked the speaker a question. Based on my question, my
agent-to-be
approached me and asked me if I was writing anything. Believe me, my
question was not
terribly brilliant or clever or anything. My agent has since told me that
she has tried
analyzing why she approached me instead of the other people who asked
questions that
evening but has been unable to come up with an answer. She says it was just a
hunch.
Anyway, I started mailing her chapters as fast as I wrote them and pretty
soon, we had a
book.
What are your hopes for the book?
I'm still so thrilled to have found a publisher for it. I'm so glad
Picador/St. Martin's
Press, bought it. But my hope is that
I've written
an emotionally honest and culturally truthful book about a group of people
that many
Americans know nothing about. For my Parsi and Indian readers, I hope they
find some
piece of their lives reflected in this book. For my American readers, I hope
they can see
past the superficial cultural differences and see that the hopes, sorrows
and fears of my
characters are not so different than those of ordinary Americans. I mean,
this is a novel
that deals with troubled marriages, dashed hopes, the unfairness of getting
old, and above
all, the importance of friendship and community. None of us are strangers to
these
themes.
So what comes next? What are you working on now?
What comes next? Well, obviously the world tour, the appearance on Oprah and
the
house with the swimming pool. (Laughs.)
No, seriously, I'm
hoping to get cracking on my next novel. It deals with domestic servants in India and explores the relationship between
a servant and the woman she works for. Also, I'm
looking forward
to the Italian version of Bombay Time. We just sold the Italian rights to
Saggiatore. And
I'm happy about that.
