‘Use a fountain pen to write’

By Editor on June 20, 2010 4:39 am

Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer, critic, and blogger. The author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf (Harper Collins India) and the editor of the anthology India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press),Chandrahas is also the book critic for the newspaper Mint Lounge and runs the literary blog the Middle Stage. In this conversation with Rohit Chopra, he talks about the inspiration for Arzee, the reasons why dialogue is a real test of a writer’s skill, and the need for aspiring writers to be promiscuous in their  reading habits. 

Chandrahas, many thanks for doing this interview. Could you tell us something about the backstory and genesis of Arzee?

My pleasure entirely. About Arzee: in 2004 I was on my way to work one morning (after I finished my studies in 003, I returned to Bombay, where I’d spent nine years when I was growing up, and worked for two years a cricket writer for Cricinfo) when I saw a very short and good-looking man, about my age, crossing the street in front of me in Behram Baug in Jogeshwari. Sometimes faces immediately suggest stories, the shape of a life–surely more imagined than real, but anyhow they set something ticking in the brain.

In those days I wasn’t capable of anything longer than short stories. I thought of a story about a very small young man who’s both teased and loved by his friends, who himself loves the city and yet fears it, who wants all the normal things in life but feels he may not get them, who’s oversensitive to insult, yet has some secret source of power that allows him to hold himself up against the world. Even the fact that he is good-looking is double-edged. He feels it some kind of cruel joke that he such a small size and handsome, so people look at him all the more and make him uncomfortable.

A year later, when I gave up my job to start a different kind of life, I hadn’t yet written this story, but I was still excited by it. So I picked it off the hanger of my story cupboard, and wore it for about a year as I wandered around Bombay, and tried to set up a life in book-reviewing and literary criticism. Often I would go in the middle of the day to the old cinemas, as people go to the Noor in the novel. Finally felt I had all the elements in place: the protagonist, the cinema, his circle of friends and acquaintances, his mother, a sense of the shape of the story and the part of Bombay where it’d be set. Of course it would be a long time before all of these were to be properly realised on the page. I made many mistakes as I proceeded and had to return to correct them.

I don’t remember when I thought of the name “Arzee”, but it was fairly early on. It was one of those things that just arrive by themselves and seem instantly right.

What might you describe as some of the challenges a writer faces in finding his or her voice?

I think that the problem of writing fiction is that everything—character, plot, the narrative on the level of individual sentence and paragraphs, what to say and what to leave out—is completely up to the writer, but this is a freedom rife with difficulties (like most freedoms). In order for everything to make sense the book has to have a certain key, a certain unity of perspective. It takes a long time to find and control a voice: a voice that suits the book and brings out all its colours and mysteries.

Voice works as a kind of filter, a compositional key: some kinds of things have to be wrong for the book if other kinds of things are to be right. If you look at a page of your proofs and cry out, “That’s absolutely stupid!”, it actually shows that you have a sense, set up only by the success of other passages or scenes, that something here is contrived or flat by the standards or expectations that the novel itself has set up. What we think of as a voice actually arrives only in spurts and dribbles: an inexact phrase being replaced by a more exact one, an effect of smoothness and speed being produced by the deletion of two paragraphs one spent a week over. It’s the scrubbing and polishing, as much as the heat of first composition, that creates the voice. You just keep working till you get there.

Also, just as one grows up in the sense of becoming a more worldly and independent person, one also grows up in work. As you keep working and thinking and living, you learn to see why something might have a certain superficial charm but is overall just not a good idea, or that a text’s themes and preoccupations and tone can be realised on a number of mutually supporting levels—that the brew can always be made thicker and stronger.

In similar vein, what were some of the challenges you faced in bringing Arzee to life, both the book and the characters?

Hmm. Let me try and make some notes and observations about the various aspects of the story.

Structure: perhaps the main structural problem was that of balancing the external world of the story with the internal world of the protagonist’s mind. The book is told in the third-person. We see Arzee from the outside, even though the narration tracks his thoughts quite closely and is always tied to him. I thought it necessary to balance out the more considered language of the narrator with bursts of interior monologue on a higher pitch at key points in the story. This was the sound of Arzee thinking, circling, doubting, suspecting, dreaming.

Tone. It was absolutely necessary that the story had a double tone of pathos and humour, laughter and sadness (one journalist disastrously quoted this phrase as “slaughter and sadness”). Although the book was told mostly through the eyes of Arzee, the narration also had to rise above him to allow for a point of view upon Arzee. Sometimes the narrator himself has a joke at Arzee’s expense, as when he gets bored of hearing Arzee ramble on and on and leaves a blank passage in the dialogue, explaining that “there wasn’t anything he said that he had not said already”. While Arzee’s mother always feels for all his troubles, the gangster Deepak is always having a laugh at his expense. The reader was meant to laugh at Arzee as much as he or she sympathised with him.

Time. The book’s action takes place over two weeks, so how time was managed in the book was very important. Early on, Arzee is excited and everything happens very fast. Midway through, everything slows down and Arzee experiences time as an enormous burden. The story had to be given legs—an ability to leap just as Arzee does when he jumps over a wheelbarrow on the street and “almost does not come down” – then a kind of stasis.

Cast. It was always going to be a short book, so it was essential that the characters around Arzee be dealt with quite economically, and contribute something very specific to the story. Sometimes they make just the single appearance. Some of the key characters are persistently present even when absent, such as Arzee’s mother and the hairdresser Monique. I felt this was true to life—one is always having imaginary conversations with the people with whom one is closest, one doesn’t always need them to be physically present. All, or most, characters in the book are brought together in the final chapter, when Arzee recovers his sense of the fullness of life and the power to dream.

Dialogue. I feel this is one of the biggest tests of a fiction writer’s skill. Of course, there are many good writers who have no great love for dialogue at all, and we read them quite happily: we go to them for other things. But I really like books where you feel you can hear someone talking, as if right there in front of you. In real life, talk is always a mix of relevant and irrelevant things. Sometimes a single phrase, or even a pause, opens out a person’s nature completely. In fiction, you’re a little hamstrung because you can’t convey such things as a person’s accent, the pitch of his or her voice, the way someone runs words together or stops upon a syllable, the gesture that accompany their conversation – these are the things that make the talk of a real person so interesting. You have to think carefully about dialogue to make up the deficit. Indeed, dialogue becomes fuller and more satisfying when certain kinds of gaps are left in the conversation—less is more. I don’t think I’ve ever got so much pleasure in my work as from writing dialogue, especially the exchanges between Arzee and Deepak and the long conversation in Phiroz’s house between Arzee and Phiroz’s daughter Shireen.

Who are some of your literary influences, and how do you negotiate those influences as a writer?

One can’t be a writer without first being in love with certain books and certain writers. But one’s influences are so many. I’ve never felt powerfully dragged along in the wake of just one writer or model. It’s like having a hundred teachers, none of whom casts a very big shadow on your work. Sometimes reading another writer shows you not what to do, but what not to do—you see how something complicated can actually be quite simple. On a list of writers I love and admire for different reasons, I suppose I’d put Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Willa Cather, Chekhov, IB Singer, Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoevsky, Sandor Marai, Bohumil Hrabal, and the pair of Egyptians Mahfouz and Alaa Al Aswany.

For a fiction writer, reading a good work of fiction by somebody else inspires feelings of both admiration and a kind of jealousy. You think, “My work had better be just as good, else I won’t forgive myself!” In her essay “Reading Barthes and Nabokov” Zadie Smith writes, “The novels we love best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hideen passageways, et cetera.” The beauty and complexity of novels makes one hungry for them, and one wants to build one’s own house too to be similarly beautiful and durable. Influences of other writers are like the influences of one’s parents or one’s family: one carries them along and in some way can’t escape them, yet one becomes one’s own person and influences others in one’s turn. I certainly think of writers I love ardently—Bandhopadhyay and Cather, for example—as family. I feel I know how they’d react to certain situations.

In your literary journal, the Middle Stage (I won’t describe you as a blogger because that really does not say much about what you do), you talk about literary criticism as a species of literature. How has your work as literary critic and reviewer influenced your writing? In particular,how has writing weekly essays on the Middle Stage and connecting with readers through the site/blog contributed to your formation as a writer?

I was lucky to receive an education (in Delhi and Cambridge) that showed me that the best literary criticism has the same love of language and metaphor, hunger for ideas, and distinction of prose style that we take away from literature itself. Or to put it another way, it may possess not just the reflected glow of literature, but its own bright personality. Working on creative work of my own and reflecting upon the creative work of others and seem to be to be allied activities. Writing about other books—especially books that I feel strongly about, whether positively or negatively—has helped me figure out my own theory of fiction, what I think works and what doesn’t. It has also given me a much fuller and richer life in literature than I would have if I were just a writer of books.

The Middle Stage occupies a big place in my writing life, because I started putting up posts on it in 2005, around the same time as I left my job to begin life as a full-time writer. I’d spent a number of years studying literature at university, and had lots of ideas that couldn’t be expressed through conventional reviews. Three or four paragraphs on the internet was the perfect form for them, and I loved linking to other pieces, thereby compressing two or three hours of reading into a small entry. The sense of having one’s own home on the Web—a space to which you gave everything you could, for no material reward, purely for the love of work—was a big part of my early days as a writer, although these days I’m regrettably not always able to find as much time for my blog as I should.

I feel a good literary blog—several are listed on my blogroll—can provide a really powerful lens on literature, as much as a good literary magazine or weekend review supplement. It’s a place where the contemporary and the classic, the familiar and the obscure, the hyperlink and the long quote, can be brought together, routed through a reader’s strong sensibility. At some point, when I have a little more time, I would really like to immerse myself in work for the blog once again.

As I write in the review of Arzee the Dwarf, I suspect you are a bit of a flaneur, recording on your travels within Bombay its sights and sounds. Could you share some thoughts about your relationship with the city and its role in the book?

I love the city: its different neighbourhoods, the energy and industry of its people, its sense of life as a pitched battle, its acute awareness of space, the immense and often debilitating pressure it exerts upon human consciousness, the beauty of its hundreds of old buildings and its views of the sea, its dozens of relatively inexpensive pleasures, its many-voiced and multilayered history. Just the feeling of standing at the door of a local train at night, looking at things run past and feeling the wind on my face, sets my thoughts going. I’ve lived about half my life here, in two separate chunks, so I feel I can read Bombay in a way I can’t, for instance, read Delhi, where I went to university.

For all that is a concrete jungle, Bombay actually has great natural beauty: the sea and lakes and creeks and backwaters, hills and mountains. It’s India’s most democratic city: people of different classes and cultures mix more easily here than anywhere else in India. For all these reasons Bombay is a treasure trove of narrative material.

Arzee loves it too, as he has never known any other place, and it has given him whatever he cherishes most in his life, in particular the Noor cinema, which is his home in the world. He has a romantic relationship to the city, and loves the routine of the same walks on the same streets at the same hours. In the novel, circumstances make him explore the city more widely than he previously had—Arzee’s map of Bombay expands within the timespan of the book. Bombay is also linked to pride in his own self, to his ego: if life doesn’t work out as he wanted it to, he would rather leave Bombay than feel as if he is being mocked by the city.

In a related vein, the novel, in a sense, may be described as an act of translation and transcription, of bringing the rhythms of life in Bombay to the page. How did you seek to achieve that transcription?

I just tried to depict as strongly and vividly as I could the places that are most important to the book: the cinema and the kind of people who are seen there; the darkness of its auditorium and the heat and light of the projection room; the run-down apartment where Arzee lives and the chawl where he goes to meet Deepak and Phiroz; the low stone wall by the gutter where Arzee likes to stand and think; the salon where Monique works and the small anonymous offices where operations like the betting syndicate and Mehndibhai’s mysterious activities are run from. Arzee’s life is ordered by the life of the cinema, so there is a definite rhythm to his day, a rhythm different from that of most other people in the city. To bring alive the shape of his day was also to bring him to life.

Any advice for an aspiring writer?

A few things maybe. Read as widely and as unsystematically as you can. Mark up all the books you read unless they’re borrowed. Learn to hate certain kinds of books just as you love other kinds, to develop an ear for insincere or fraudulent work. Spend time in secondhand bookshops. Try to listen as carefully as you can to people. Love language and be interested in the history of language, the origins of words and their changing sense across time. Learn to recognise cliches and other kinds of deadwood in language, and to edit these out ruthlessly in our your own work. Always read a piece one last time before submitting it—it shows that you care, and allows you to eliminate minor infelicities. Take some kind of course in either reading or writing if you haven’t already. Try and spend some time at your desk every day so that it becomes second nature to be there.

Finally, borrowing from your interview technique, any non-writing related advice for our readers?

I don’t know…there are so many things. I’m sure I’m more in need of advice from people than able to dispense useful thoughts for them! But a few things maybe. Keep a diary—it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself. It allows you to return to older versions of yourself that you might otherwise lose. Love someone deeply, and put your arms around them often, but don’t get so close (metaphorically speaking now) that the mystery of the life and mind of another disappears. Think about the self—this is just a extension of my own advice to myself at the beginning of my fourth decade in this world—about both the pleasures and perils of ego, about the power you have to be a positive force in the world. Run as often as you can—it’s one of the things that people seem to leave behind when they get to adult life. It’s great for both body and mind—great when you want to work some puzzle, out or escape from some negative cycle of discontent or resentment. Many of the plot problems of Arzee were solved while running! Use a fountain pen to write—words are such fine things that they deserve this little touch of style. Eat lots of fruit. Follow the English Premier League, and support Tottenham Hotspur. This is a very strange bouquet of advice, but there you have it!

Photo credit: Aparna Jayakumar 

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