Kunal's Website

Kunal Basu (whom some of you will remember from his visit to Malaysia in April, see here and here) has just sent me a link to his newly launched website.

Deepika and I can claim that we nagged him into it as we all sat having coffee one afternoon during the Singapore Writers Festival, telling him how badly all authors need them - for promotional purposes but also so that those who write articles on books and authors can find the background information in one convenient place.

Kunal's site really is a corker, I have to admit. I enjoyed browsing through the photo album (as a child above), and reading his opinion pieces on arts and society, management, and traditional crafts.

Hope it isn't too long before we see him back here again.

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 1 : Born in a Library!

My interview with Kunal Basu, author of The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, Racists and The Japanese Wife and Other Stories is in the current issue of Off The Edge where it looks very pretty on the page and appears alongside a piece on the author by Mark Disney. I thank the magazine for giving me permission to use this on my blog, and distributors Pansing for organising the interview. I have split the piece into two parts and the second will be up tomorrow. (This is an earlier draft version and is organised a little differently from the print version.)

Kunal Basu was, it seems, was literally born to the writing life.

His father was a publisher and who met his mother, Shabi, when he published her first book. (She is still producing two books a year at the age of 86.) Basu himself was actually born on the floor of the library of the house in Bengal, surrounded by tall bookshelves. His mother, rushing to finish a manuscript for a publisher, failed to set out for the hospital on time. His aunt cut the chord with a pair of scissors, and his father, in all the excitement forgot to register the birth. “But he kept a meticulous diary,” Basu says “and on 4th May 1956 there’s this one line : Son born. 6.43 a.m..”

He describes his childhood in a house filled with books and lively intellectual discourse, and a constant flow of visiting politicians, authors and painters. He started writing as a teenager and had some stories published in his native Bangla.

He had always thought of himself as a person in the arts, and still seems somewhat surprised that circumstances carried him in a totally different direction. He made, what he now calls, “wrong academic decisions”, studying science and maths before completing his doctorate in marketing with the University of Florida. He became Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University, Canada, before moving to Templeton College, Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Oxford Advanced Management Program.

Whilst he says that he does not regret following this academic path, he says that there has been an internal price to pay: “As one gets older it becomes more difficult to do the things one doesn’t like. And my relationship with writing is nothing short of a grand obsession. I don’t want to do anything else anymore. I want to get up in a morning and just write.”

However, he’s grateful for the opportunities the academic life has given him to travel to parts of the world he might not otherwise have visited. His friends, though, always pull his leg about the fact that as soon as he turns up in a place, political turmoil ensues. “I was Iran when the Shah was deposed, China during the Tiananmen crisis and in Indonesia when Suharto was moving on.” Fortunately, nothing untoward happened in Malaysia on this visit.

While many Indian authors writing from the west seem to be fueled by a sense of alienation, that’s not something that comes through in Basu’s work. “We all build fiction around our lives,” he says “and my convenient fiction is that I haven’t left India, I’ve just gone travelling.”

The travels have lasted 30 years or so, but as Basu sees it, it’s been simply a matter of changing habitat rather than changing home, and he finds that rather exciting. “I love to live in different countries, different parts of the world, different houses, and have different sets of friends. Home for me in many respects is my deep seated cultural moorings and they are not necessarily parochial and not necessarily all tied to India. They are things like books that I’ve grown up with, plays that I’ve acted in or seen, favourite films. I feel very much at home around the Thames because Dickens was an early favourite of mine and the dockside and the docklands of London feel like home for me. And so there are these pegs that tie me to my world and those don’t shift very much.”

His commissioning editor once told him that although he is an Indian author, his writing doesn’t smell of curry. “I said I’m not deliberately trying to create distinction for myself, but I think there are all kinds of thing on my palate, not simply the curry.”

Indeed, Basu’s most recent novel Racists (published in 2006) is the very first Victorian novel written by a person of colour. It features an almost completely white cast of characters and explores the subject of racial science. It wasn’t, he says, written out of any kind of personal angst, and the subject matter took him completely by surprise. The novel began with a single image in his head, that of two children, one black, one white, being raised in isolation on a deserted island off the coast of Africa by a mute nurse, and untainted, as it were by “civilization”.

He knew nothing about racial science at first, but as he started to do his research in Oxford’s Bodleian library, he knew he had discovered a world he wanted to inhabit. He confesses that he is intrigued by what he calls “our indecent curiosity” into the notion of what explains difference.

The experiment at the core of Racists, he agrees, is a product of the rivalry between the two scientists, one French and one British, and the battle between their competing ideologies rather than a meaningful piece of scientific research.

“The thing is that in many ways we think of science as being very objective. But when it comes down to it, it is a human endeavour and like all human endeavours it’s permeated by competition, rivalry, bias, love, hate. Everything. So why should this experiment be any different ? And data isn’t neutral. It talks in the voice of the collector and the observer. If you have two observers, then obviously the data is ambivalent and that’s exactly the case with Belavoix and Bates were trying to do.”

It’s a truism frequently tossed in the direction of new writers that you should write about what you know, so it comes as a surprise to learn then that Basu finds it extremely exciting to write about places he hasn’t visited beforehand. If he had, he says, the experience might actually have impeded, rather than enhanced, his historical imagination.

Kucing, Sarawak, features prominently in Basu’s his first novel, The Opium Clerk. Although he only managed to make his first to the city on his way back from Australia last year, and doesn’t regret at all that he hadn’t been there when researching the novel.

“When I read the diaries and the history and started imagining Kucing, I think it was closer in many ways to Kucing of the nineteenth century. One doesn’t necessarily have to travel physically if one travels in imagination,” he says. But, he cautions, “Imagination has to be helped by research by reading the right things, and the right props are necessary.”

He set his second novel, The Miniaturist, in the court of the emperor Akbar in C16th India, but says that it was much too dangerous to travel to Afghanistan and to the Hindu Kush at the time of writing it. However, he says that he experienced the core of the story because he had travelled in the Mogul parts of India, eaten Mogul food, and listened to Sufi music, and read substantially about that period.

Tommorow, find out how the film of The Japanese Wife came to be made, and read about where Kunal gets his ideas for stories from!

(Pic above taken by Kavita of Pansing.)

Kunal, Coffee and Curry Puffs

Kunal Basu was the guest author at MPH's Breakfast Club. He read from the title piece from in his short story collection, The Japanese Wife in which a painfully shy Bengali boy finds a true friend in a Japanese penpal, and later marries her ... by letter. The two never meet, but remain entirely loyal to each other. It's a relationship, as Kunal says :

... of great intimacy, but no domesticity ...

Kunal had a small but very tuned in audience and it was certainly one of the liveliest Breakfast clubs that I have been to with no-one being shy to ask questions.

He talked (among other things) about how he is :

... driven by the strange ...

when he writes; about where his inspiration comes from :

I think I have a chemical imbalance in the brain ... stories germinate in my mind ...

whether he finds it easier to write short stories or novels :

... both require the same emotional passion ...

who he writes for :

I write to please myself and hope this will please others

and whether he has writing rituals :

I write fiction longhand and non-fiction on the computer, and I write fiction at home, and non-fiction at Oxford (where he a Professor of Marketing) ...

And of course he talked about the making of the film of his short story The Japanese Wife with director Aparna Sen which will start doing the rounds of the film festivals next month, and be on general release in October. It is a true piece of world cinema, filmed in English, Bengali and Japanese, and by the miracle of YouTube I managed to find this news item about it :

Aparna ready with The Japanese Wife



I have more posts to come on Kunal, so stay tuned!

Opium, Marauding Islamic Gangs, and a Squished Cat

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglee, as dear old Robbie Burns once said.

Yesterday's Readings@Seksan was the one that has given me the most headache, despite the fact that I had thought I had everything pretty well arranged. Two writers had to drop out last minute due to personal circumstances, a third just didn't answer the SMSes and phone calls and was a no show. Three readers down - I felt completely jinxed.

However, the writers who did turn up more than made up for all the difficulties and made the afternoon very worthwhile.

Teoh Choon Ean (who also goes by the pen-name Cean when she writes short fiction) is one of the best-selling local authors nominated for the The Star-Popular Readers Choice Awards for her first novel , which won third prize in the Utusan Group Literary Prize 2005. You may remember she wrote Nine Lives in just six days! Despite the speed with which the book came together, I'd say (after the extract we heard) that the writing certainly did not suffer and I can see this appealing to teenagers looking for a not too difficult and unstuffy read.

Narrated by 15 year old Bee Lian, an orphan living with grandparents, who shares her secrets with the mangy yellow cat which lives next door. Cean read from the beginning and end of the story.

The poor cat got squished on the road. I was so upset ... and am seriously thinking of starting a society for the prevention of cruelty of literary animals. (Will make Peter Carey honorary president!)

It was very special to have Kunal Basu read for us at Seksan's. He asked the crowd what they wanted him to read about opium, art, race or love. They answered in chorus Opium (which makes you wonder a bit!). In my introduction I had talked about how Kunal chooses to write about places he hasn't visited and so he read us part of The Opium Clerk which was set in Kucing. He followed that with the same extract from The Japanese Wife that he had read in the morning - perfect because so self-contained, and yet giving the essence of the whole story.

During the interval there was some lively book selling going on which I am very much encouraging. Sufian Abas was selling copies of the newly released and limited edition anthology Aweks KL which is being snapped up like hotcakes. The guys from MPH brought along piles of Kunal's books and offered a generous 20% discount.

Meanwhile I was asking around - did anyone have a poem concealed about their person that they would like to read, since there was time, and it so happened that some of the good folks from Poetry Underground (a performance poetry group based at Dram Projects) had come straight from a practice! My luck was turning.

I roped them in to do a quick set to start off the second half, Sheena Baharuddin, Reza Rosli, Catalina Rebuyan, George Wilgus, and new recruit Hazlan Zakaria took the floor to deliver just one poem each in rapid succession and they got some hearty applause.


After I'd introduced Peter Brown by telling the audience that he was originally from Essex, Peter began with a very very bad Essex girl joke ("How does an Essex girl turn the light on after sex? She kicks the car door open." Ouch.)

I had called on Peter to read at the 11th hour, and was so grateful he let himself be persuaded because his short story The Last Deejay is one of my favourites in Silverfish New Writing 7 (about which more another day), a story of friendship and loyalty set against the chilling background to a dystopian Malaysia in 2027.

I'm very glad Saradha Narayanan (looking very pretty in pink!) came back to read from The Freedom of Choice and selected passages which she felt gave us an overview of the book. The most affecting part for me was the description of the adoption of the baby.

Kunal rounded off our afternoon beautifully with an extract from his second novel, The Miniaturist, about an artist prodigy in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar.

Thanks a lot to Seksan for the wonderful space, to all those who came, to those who read, to those who helped me set up and clear up, to Shahril Nizam for the blog poster.

I plan the next event for May 24th.

Readings@Seksan in April - Sticky Post

Catch our next monthly writers event! (Map) Admission free and everyone is very welcome. Please pass on the invitation to anyone else you think might be interested.

It's a little early this month, for one good reason. When author Kunal Basu contacted me to say that he would be in town, I had to grab him for the event. He will also be appearing at MPH's Breakfast Club in the morning (11-12.30 a.m.). Eric has an excellent write-up on Kunal whom I first met at the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival, and then again at the Singapore Writers' Festival.

The lovely poster was designed by Shahril Nizam, and I think I owe him big time!

(This post is sticky. For more recent posts, please check below.)

Singapore Stories Part 1

Singapore ... a little country that gets its priorities right! :

Arrived there Friday afternoon and went straight to the hotel to meet David Davidar (below) for the interview. He's one of the great heroes of the publishing world, putting Penguin India firmly on the world map, working with some of the greatest writers of our time, and now a novelist in his own right with The House of Blue Mangoes and now The Solitude of Emperors.

David also introduced me to Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin in China, and what began as an interview relaxed into a fascinating chat about favourite authors, the Man Asia prize and the future of publishing.

You'll get to hear more when I've transcribed my tape and got the article written!

On the Saturday morning I made my way to the Arts House where the Singapore Writers Festival was being held and what was the old parliament building makes a stunning venue.

I went to hear Indian author, Anita Nair (above), whose novel Ladies' Coupe (a kind of updated and feminist Canterbury Tales set on a train) I thoroughly enjoyed.

Anita talked about her love of mindless violent films, making the decision to break with her advertising career, and her writing process.

I then caught David Davidar in two sessions back to back. The first moderated (very well) by novelist Meira Chand, and the second with him in conversation with Kunal Basu (below left) who manages to combine being an author of several highly acclaimed novels (The Opium Clerk, The Minaturist, and Racists) with an impressive academic career (just take a look at his CV!). He's heading for Malaysia in April so you may get a chance to meet him then.

In the afternoon it was time for our panel on litblogging - one of a series of discussions about different aspects for blogging. For me it was a chance to reconnect with my Singaporean blogging friends in "real life". Deepika Shetty (a.k.a. read@peace) was as always a skilled moderator (below), and the other panelists were Zafar Anjum (Dream Ink) blog ...

and Rambling Librarian, Ivan Chew (below far left, with me looking terribly enthused!).


There was so much to talk about, and a lot of passion for what we do, and the hour fairly whizzed past. I was sad that I didn't get a chance to chat a bit more to Ivan, whom I hadn't met before, but hope we get to connect again.

It was great also to talk to a Singaporean audience as I really would love more of them to drop by this blog and pass me book gossip from down there. (If you're from Singapore and reading this give me a wave!!)

(More pictures and stories to come!)

Postscript

Zafar captures the day very well indeed.