In Conversation with Shiv K. Kumar

Swapan K. Bannerjee
In Conversation with Shiv K. Kumar
A Writer is Never Off Duty
[Armed with the letter: "Thank you for the kind things you’ve said about my novel…I shall be happy to meet you in Hyderabad", I landed at Secunderabad to meet the fêted writer Prof. (Dr) Shiv K Kumar on a day the sky was enveloped in a shroud, and the auto-owners, determined to scuttle the move to go digital (you know why), were on an indefinite strike.
Sensing my plight for the not-so-tourist-friendly traffic condition, Prof. Kumar, when I called him over the phone, drew a picture of the route leading to his Bungalow: "You’d better come down to Tarnaka crossing; and from there, head for State Bank of Hyderabad at Habsiguda crossing a few furlongs away; cross the divider and the main road to enter the lane right opposite…"
It’s a school-zone. Kumar’s bungalow is surrounded on three sides by Johnson Grammar School, Suprabhat Model High School and Gowtham Model School. Soaring Asoka trees, visible from far off, line the walls on either side of the cottage; and the blazing bougainvillea in pink, red and off white rides slipshod over the front fence.
When I rang the bell, Prof Kumar was busy editing a paper to be submitted the next day. But he set the task aside and talked for two hours in a spirited and energized way, he said, he had never done before.
Prof. Kumar is arguably the only Indian writer who has proved his mettle beyond any doubt in every genre of creative and scholarly writing. A poet, novelist, playwright, translator, short story writer, critic and educationist, Kumar has taught English Literature all over the world. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and awarded, among other Prizes, Charles Holmer Poetry Prize, Sahitya Akademi Award, Padma Bhusan et al…
His fifth novel: Two Mirrors at the Ashram has recently been published by Penguin.]
Excerpts from the Conversation
When and how did the idea of the novel strike you first?
Life never offers you the complete story. Life offers you a fragment from somewhere. A little scene, you meet someone, you hear someone say something very insightful, very provocative, something very moving. And your mind is set into motion.
There was a party going on in Delhi—a cocktail party. There somebody exhorted a friend of mine (who is very close to the protagonist of the novel): "You drink too much. Your life is just going to pieces. Why don’t you go to some ashram? There’s one down South. There’s a Swami who has an international following. In any case, you’re fond of women. You go there!" That triggered off my imagination.
My friend is, however, not a writer. Nor am I a boozer. I’m more stable kind of person. There’s nothing common between me and the protagonist Rajesh Sahni. So, in the novel, the whole thing gets transformed. It shows that what you write about may not be your actual personal experience.
Have you actually had the experience of living in an ashram?
No. Let me tell you I have not been to any ashram. It’s very surprising. But it’s not difficult to imagine. You walk by a temple, a church. You look inside. But I can’t stand these professional preachers. That’s why I’ve created this Swami…
How long was the gestation period?
You’d not believe. I could put it like this. The novel wrote itself within three months. Most people won’t understand the mysterious creative process. The novel just happened to me. The great American poet, R. K. Archibald McLeish, has said that a poem is a happening. If it doesn’t happen, then better it never gets written.
Like what Keats said?
Well, I was going to quote that! If it doesn’t come like the leaves of a tree then it had better not come at all. Somehow the whole thing fell into a pattern. There was this Swami, the hero, Susan from USA and one thing led to the other. I didn’t have to wait.
But after the first draft there’s the slave work. It has to be done, you know. Six/seven drafts. I call it slave work. Revising of MS, rewriting, redrafting—it’s also a creative process. It’s very exciting.
There is quite a bit of profoundly interesting dialogues sprinkled throughout that actually form the backbone of the novel. When you write a dialogue scene, do you mentally first chart it out, or do you let it flow and take its own course?
At Cambridge where I was doing my research I was perhaps the poorest. Everyone there came off a very affluent family. But conversation has always been my forte. As a college student I was a great debater. I’ve been a broadcaster over the BBC. So I don’t have to contrive. I don’t have to say: well, I’m going to create this little piece of dialogue between so and so. Once the character appears on the scene, I just let him talk, and I just become a good listener.
You know, most of this novel was written during my morning walk. I’ve done most of writing on my feet, I can say. I walk and I hear my characters talk to themselves. Then I come home and say: I must catch the stuff. It’s already there. So I try to reproduce. A good dialogue, I think, should have one basic feature. It should sound natural. And if it has to sound natural, it’s to be short.
Another thing is that I’ve written a play (The Last Wedding Anniversary). As a teacher I’ve taught drama: Shakespeare or Harold Pinter or whoever it is. When you’re writing a play you understand that dialogue is the only form of communication.
For some writers, groundbreaking ideas come when they are at the edge of sleep—at midnight or at the crack of dawn. Do you usually write in the small hours of the morning?
You may have read somewhere that Khushwant Singh rises very early in the morning. He gets up at 3a.m. I’m an early riser. But I don’t actually write in the morning. Then you have to hold a pen and sit in the desk. As I have already said, when I go for the morning walk, my writing session begins. My writing period is forenoon eleven to one, then again in the evening from five to eight. But a writer is never off duty. He is always working on something.
Are you still ambushed by memories of your childhood?
Indeed I am. Once, my dear friend Mulk Raj Anand asked me to write a complete book on my childhood. But I could not write it. That would have been a kind of autobiography. In every novel or story of mine you’ll find bits of my childhood. Childhood is the most formative phase of one’s life. I’m now 85. How old was I when I still imagined myself being pulled in wooden trolley kind of a thing by some woman? My mother said I was then one year old.
Have you ever thought of writing your own biography?
I’ll never do that because it’s a sequence of falsehood. You do try to cover yourself up. Nobody has said the truth about himself. I don’t want to compromise. I’m honest enough to keep my hands off. You have your love affairs, and you’re afraid that if your wife, friends, your mother were to read this, they’d say: O my goodness, you did this! We never knew you’ve done such shocking things!
According to you, "A painter, like a writer, has to dip into sin now and then to perceive virtue in its true perspective." Do you, as the author, subscribe to this view?
O certainly, yes, yes! It’s the writer’s urge to experience. I mean, the idea is to acquire experience in totality. So in order to savour the totality of experience you’ll have to dip into sin sometime which otherwise you won’t like to do, which is not your normal self. Life is flowing by like a river. You must also see how other people live…
In your much acclaimed novel Nude Before God, you wrote: "Somewhere deep inside me lurked a fear of death, of having to close my eyes before I’d accomplished anything." Does this fear still exist?
When I said that it was some years ago. Since then, I’ve written my own version of The Gita; I’m about to complete the first draft of The Mahabharata; and I’ve also done my version of The Dhammapada by Gautam Buddha. So my attitude towards that has changed. Is it due to the fact that these scriptures have influenced me? The answer is yes. You feel it’s like walking from one room into another room. I hope the moment when I quit it’ll be in the midst of a sentence that I’m writing or preferably in sleep. So that’s no terror for me. That’s what I’ve learnt from The Gita.
And so far as the accomplishment is concerned, it’ll be for the posterity to assess. You’ve left your books behind. I may have published 18/20 books. These will be my little mementoes offered to posterity. Buildings get destroyed. Roads are rebuilt. Every thing can be demolished. But a book lives forever. Somewhere in some library one of my books will still exist. So life continues.