REFLECTIONS OF A WRITER by Timeri N. Murari

Professor Anantharaman, Professor Ananth, Professor Manickam, Ladies & Gentlemen, I’d like to thank you very much for asking me to give the Professor A.V. Krishna Rao memorial lecture. I’m very aware of the honour and even more aware of my surroundings. IIT is where we produce the best and brightest scientists and engineers. And, from what I’ve heard, the moment they graduate they get on the first flight to America where they’re snapped up faster than popcorn in a movie house. It’s a great compliment to this institution that their degrees are valued across the world.

Ironically, I did begin my career life studying to become an electronics engineer. It was what my father wanted. I’m afraid the whole subject baffled me so much that- after a couple of years of battling with maths, trigonometry and diagrams- I abandoned electronics as a career. Instead, I became a writer. You might think that was a quantum leap in career choices - engineer, to writer - but there are similarities in our professions.

Many of you here in IIT are scientists and the great French novelist Gustav Flaubert believed that the novelist should have towards their subjects the objectivity of the scientist. In art, he said, treatment was all, good or bad. Another great novelist Emile Zola thought the novel as equivalent to a laboratory experiment using real people and studying the effects of hereditary and environment in a society.

We both, scientists and the creative writer, base our work on the power of our imagination. The great scientists throughout our history have discovered the secrets of the universe through their imaginings. Einstein imagined relativity before setting out to prove it, while our own Ramanujan imagined his mathematical equations long before they could be proved. Scientists and creative writers dream dreams which they grapple with to turn into reality. We both leap out of the bathtubs like Archimedes crying eureka when we do achieve this reality, that something finally works out the way we’d imagined it.

Using their imaginations, Writers have often led the way for scientists to follow. Jules Verne wrote of a man landing on the moon nearly a century before Armstrong and Aldrin took those giant steps. Mary Shelley wrote about creating a man in a laboratory, long before we had to worry about cloning. Her novel was called Frankenstein. Early on in my career I did write a science fiction novel in which I saw a future third world ravaged by a man made disease killing many million people. About two years after THE OBLIVION TAPES was published, the word AIDS entered our vocabulary. The dividing line between imagination and reality is very nebulous.

The laboratory for my experiments is the blank page or as I have worked on a computer for many years, the blank word processing screen. My inputs aren’t symbols or chemicals but human beings. They are then placed in an environment that I create for them and I then create problems for them to overcome or else be defeated by them. This will be the structure of the story, a sort of mathematical formula that I hope will eventually end with the old schoolboy flourish Q.E.D. But it’s never easy.

Fiction is defined as books and stories about imaginary people and events. The key word, and a misnomer, is imaginery. As a writer of fiction, my characters and events may be imaginary to the reader but they are firmly set within what I perceive as reality. I am, like god, their creator. I make them walk, talk, laugh, weep, fall in love, divorce, rage. But only at the very beginning as it in the act of creation itself, my men and women quickly take control of their destinies on the page.

My characters begin to dictate to me what they want to do, what they want to think, what they want to feel and say. If the writing is going well, then all I become is the stenographer, taking dictation from the characters I first created.

‘No, I’m not going to say or do that,’ one will say. ‘I want to go that way, I don’t want to fall in love, at least not yet, I want to kill him.’

It’s possible this is what happens to a scientist as well. He or she begins the experiment, believing it will go one way but mysteriously, the experiments takes on its own life and moves into unexpected areas. My function in this act of dictation is to make my characters not imaginary but as real and recognisable as I can to my reader. I have met a few readers who have come up to me and said ‘you were writing about me’, and that is a very high compliment when a reader identifies so closely to my imaginary character.

The themes of my novels are about dislocation and displacement. I can’t quite recall which one of Newton’s laws could relate to my themes - either the 2nd or the third. What happens if you are living a normal, safe, comfortable life and have your future somewhat plotted out. And then a force beyond your control impacts on that life. How do you react? What happens to you? It’s not an opposite and equal reaction but it could be something totally unexpected that you discover in yourself at this point of crisis in your life.

In one of my novels, LOVERS ARE NOT PEOPLE, my main character is a woman whose husband has suddenly left her for a younger woman. How is she going to react? Is she going to accept that inevitability, end up in divorce? Or fight to get him back? I’d like to read a short passage of what she’s thinking as she decides to fight for him. She is one of my elements in the laboratory of a modern day relationship. This book was published in the States, UK and translated into German, French and Dutch.

‘It was love but not that alone. In time the intensity of loving, liking, affection - even at times despairing and hating - might have eased and slipped into indifference. I didn’t want that indifference nor did I want another man to replace him. He was my habit, my comfort, my dear, dear friend. We had grown together, one into the other like trees trapped in a jungle: our thoughts, our feelings, our tastes were intertwined. He was wrenching himself out and I would have to hack at myself to free him. And I wanted him back for the purely selfish reason that I’d planned we’d grow old together, die together, be buried together.’

Like other creative writers, the themes are drawn from own experiences. I was dislocated as a child, when my mother died. When you’ve very young, death is the biggest dislocation of all. Unlike divorce, though a modern day dislocation in many families around the world, the child at least can visit his other parent. And that parent, though living a separated life, is a touchstone of reality in the child’s life. But in death, the break is permanent and scaring. It affects all those around the person who died.

My last novel, STEPS FROM PARADISE, is set in Madras over a period of time from the early 1950s to the present. The death of the mother brings in a new wife when the widowed father re-marries. Her impact on the joint family household is a metaphor for the British and western impact on Indian society. It disrupts and then destroys that family, as it clung to the past unable to keep in time to the present. The novel is told in the first person by the youngest of the four children, Krishna.

‘I am Krishna. No, not that Krishna, the charioteer who stood calmly on the battlefield of Kurukshetra and expounded the Bhagavad Gita to the reluctant warrior Arjuna. I am another Krishna, an ordinary boy of eight, hurrying to be nine those many years ago. It's strange that none of us can remember the exact date of the event. We didn't mark it then in our mental calendars, as we didn't think it was an important day in our lives. But I do remember.

It was sunset, the best time of the day, when our Nayana returned home from his office with a European lady. To say we were astonished by her sudden appearance was to understate our reactions. A sorcerer couldn't have performed a more amazing materialisation. That morning we had waved goodbye to our Nayana, like any normal day, and he'd not warned us that he would return with this stranger.

'Who is she?' we whispered to one another.

'1 don't know,' we chorused in reply. We had been sprawled, sweaty and dusty from playing, on the lower parapet of the fountain. But now we tumbled down, one after another, into the fountain well.

'Who is she?' Anjali whispered again. No one replied. She turned to me and put an arm around my shoulder. 'Did Nayana tell you this person was coming?'

'No,' I said. '1 don't remember.'

Occasionally I was told things that the other children weren't, but because I was a dreamy boy, I would forget to pass on the nugget of information. Everyone asked what I dreamt about, and I confessed 'nothing'. My thoughts were ephemeral and I could never articulate them, but everyone seemed to understand that I would naturally be the most affected by what had happened to us.

On that long ago evening there was a harmony, mathematical and emotional, among us. My sisters Anjali and Kaveri were the elder, with Anjali two years older than Kaveri. Kaveri, in turn, was two years older than my brother Jagan and he two years older than me. We were each other's best friends, and I believed this was how it would be until the very end of our lives. Every waking and sleeping moment we spent together. We went to and returned from school together, played together, ate and bathed together and often slept together. We breathed each other's breaths, thought each other's thoughts, dreamt each other's dreams.

Apart from us, there were our three female cousins who were also witnesses to the European lady's visit. They were the daughters of a great-aunt, pretty girls, slight and supple as bamboo. Sushila, Leela and Valli matched the ages of Anjali, Kaveri and Jagan, almost to the month. I was the only one without a female cousin of my age in this small gang. The male cousins in the household were a few years older, and preferred more adult company than ours. All our cousins and their parents lived with us in the enclosed world of our compound. We were a living tapestry, seamlessly woven together by blood and marriage. A stranger would not have been able to tell where one thread began or where another ended. ‘

That novel was published by Hodder & Stoughton in London and in Germany where it was called ‘Das Haus in Madras’.

Many of my main characters, admittedly are women. It could be that as my sisters and a grandmother raised me in my early years after my mother’s death, and influenced by them, I’ve found them intriguing characters to write about. Or maybe I find men a bit boring. Women have a far greater struggle in life and lead a more complex life than men.

I wrote an original screenplay about a girl. In India, the film was called Dayraa, and in Europe and the UK & US, The Square Circle. This film was chosen as Time magazine’s top ten and Time was kind enough to write about me that quote ‘The coming of age of the young woman is limned with wit and affection. Turbans off to screenwriter Timeri Murari’ unquote. All the major critics in the UK and France, gave the film very good reviews.

In 99, I adapted it for the stage and directed it at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre with a British Asian cast. By coincidence, my lead actress in the play was Parminder K. Nagra. She is the star of the current hit movie ‘Bend it like Beckham’ and a wonderful actor to work with.

In The Square Circle, procurers kidnap a young village girl but she manages to escape them and has to make a journey into the unknown to find both her home and herself. I can think of no greater dislocation for a young girl than to he stolen away from all that’s comforting and secure in her life. After my heroine’s escape from her kidnappers, she meets a wandering entertainer who plays women’s roles in street theatre. He’s called Lakshmi/Lakshman, she is Sita, and I’ll just read a brief extract from the screenplay.

.LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN (continuing) Are you alright?

SITA (angry) Of course not. Everything's wrong. (anguish) My heart hurts. It's squeezed

with fear. I've escaped the people who stole me away from my village. I've fallen into a

world I don't know.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: The world is full of holes and we all fall through them.

(Pause) Look at me. I'm a man but inside is a very sexy woman. Now that's a very

deep hole to have fallen into.

Sita: My village is Chotapur. Do you know it?

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: One village is like another.

SITA: It's near an old Vishnu temple.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: Everywhere is near a temple but none of them are near god.

SITA (desperate) How will I get home? I'm to be married today.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: Poor girl. Marriage isn't a good reason to return home.

SITA (angry)You don't understand. I'm stolen and lost and you're no help at all.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: I never said I'd help.

SITA: How will I get home?

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: Walk.

SITA: But in which direction?

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: I'm told the world is round as an orange. If you walk in a straight line, you'll end up where you began.

SITA: Of what use is that to me when I don't know in which direction I should go.

(hopeful) You'll take me home?

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: Do I look like an aged uncle caring for lost children?

(checks mirror) I must be ageing fast.

SITA: Then take me to your home. I'll be safe there.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: I have none. This is all my home.

SITA: I'm afraid.

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: Afraid...I too used to be. Of hunger, of life, of death. But then you realise fear is the only constant companion in your life and you might as well be friends.

SITA: But how can I do that? (Weeps)

LAKSHMI/LAKSHMAN: By believing life is illusion, fear too then becomes an illusion.

SITA (after considering, angry) That's too high flown for me. You're useless.

Returning to something I had said earlier about the act of creative writing, there are times that no matter how hard I’ve tried, characters stubbornly refuses to come alive. Some years ago, I wanted to write a work of fiction on the Mughal period, specifically about the Taj Mahal. I was trying to turn a reality into a work of the imagination. I did my historical research in the New York library - I was living there at the time - and began writing the novel. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get it to work. I laboured for nearly a year on a manuscript that ran to around 800 pages. My characters remained stubbornly dead and long buried, refusing to stir from their tombs. I gave up and set it aside.

And then a strange thing happened. I woke one morning with a woman telling me her story. I didn’t know who she was and whether she was a real person or in my imagination. The woman was Arjumand, the Empress Mumtaz Mahal. Once she began speaking, it literally took my three months to finish the novel. I couldn’t keep up the pace with my character’s voices. When she stopped, I heard the voice of Shah Jahan telling me his story. The structure of that novel was complex, as I shifted from her voice to his and to one other, her servant Isa’s voice. The story also shifts between her life and what happened after her death. The present - Arjumand’s life and the future the building of the Taj Mahal and Aurangzeb’s rise - run parallel. The novel was called TAJ and it was a bests-seller in the UK and translated into all the major European languages to become a best-seller in them too.

This is, in my imagination, Arjumand speaking:

‘Was it thunder that woke me? I sat up, startled, listening. It was not yet the monsoon season, but the air was tense with that same sense of expectancy, and still, as if waiting to rage. I could hear nothing, except the first caw of the crows, the bul-bul practising its enchanting scales, and the squirrels scolding shrilly. The sky was pale and clear with the smoke of night lingering at the edges. The mango and peepul and banyan trees outside the window appeared transparent in the delicate light. It might have been my dream that woke me, although I could not recall it clearly. The thunder had struck at my heart which still beat hard and fast. Was it a warning? I felt no fear, no leaden weight of eternity such as the condemned man might on the dawn of his last day on earth, instead, to my surprise, I seemed to feel a lightness, a delight. The excitement was not in the air but in myself, in the sweet remnants of my dream.’

Apart from my themes of dislocation, I do write with a secondary theme in mind too. I’ve spent a great deal of my life in a state of Diaspora, living in England and America for many, many years. In this state of Diaspora, I am forced to consider who I actually am, even as in this modern day many millions do live in countries not of their birth. They cling to the old identity while trying to cope with their present geographical position. The question is: who are you? Do you belong to the past or to the present. Diaspora is a voluntary, sometimes involuntary, dislocation. After I’d written the novel TAJ, I discovered that Indian history makes for a fascinating laboratory in which to conduct experiments and to explore characters and social environment. I wanted to create a character who is Indian yet not Indian in a time of turmoil.

I know India is constantly in a state of turmoil, I should add. The depressing experience I learnt from our history is that we never learn the lessons it should teach us.

But this novel was to be set in pre-independence India. I chose the years 1901 - 1918, the pinnacle of imperial rule to the nadir of Jallianawallah Bagh. But who could I create who would have to chose an identity? And who would he identify with? I decided to continue the story of Kipling’s Kim. He’s an Irish orphan boy who behaves more Indian than many Indians. His was a reverse Diaspora, where did he belong, whom did he belong to. The novel ended up into two novels, The Imperial Agent and The Last Victory.

KIM LOOKED north, not in worship, but in memory. It was gradually becoming light and it seemed, at first, a trick of the eyes grown used to the Indian night. The mountain peaks were just visible. Soon they would turn pink as the sun brushed the snow.

'Somewhere up there is the home of my old companion, the Lama. Long ago we travelled from Lahore to Benares in search of the sacred river. He found what he was looking for. He was fortunate. God blesses the innocent -and he was a child. I have never known such innocence. What chance had I, with the bazaars of Lahore and the Grand Trunk Road as the gardens of childhood? It is true I have survived and thrived, more fortunate than many of my chokra companions, dead, disabled, begging. My friend found strength in his belief that God guided him. I have no such belief yet. But one man, the Colonel, is the father I have never known. My mother is India herself; the sun, the dust, the waters, the odour of the hot earth. One day I too will have belief, I too will search. From up there in the mountains my friend's spirit will be my guide in life.'

Kim stood up and stretched. He strolled over to a deodar, untied his pi-jama and urinated. The steam and smell imparted an earthiness like the smell of cattle, the sweet smoke of dung fires. It gave him life against this wintry chill. After retying his pi-jama he approached one of the Sikh bodyguards.

'Sardar, when will they finish?'

'When they are good and ready, and not when chuthias like you want it. Now return to the other coolies.'

'Salah,' Kim swore cheerfully. 'You too would be squatting with me on the road if it wasn't for that fine uniform. Where are you from?'

The bodyguard chuckled. 'Near Ludhiana. And you?'

'Lahore,' Kim replied, conscious that his past was partly fabricated. He could not claim with such certainty a place in India; he had no village, no ancestors. 'Do they pay you well to stand here like a statue?'

'Well enough to feed my wife and children and to buy my own farm one day.'

'Buy? For your bharti the sarkar will give you one free from their Crown lands, reserved specially for loyal sardars like you.'

I knows there isn’t a pat answer or solution to the dilemmas of Diaspora or displacement. We’re all dislocated in one way or another, we’ve left the womb, we’ve left family homes to make our way in the world, following torturous paths. I did try to explain it to myself in my new novel THE ARRAGEMENTS. This will be published next year in the UK.

The Arrangements is partly a romantic comedy with the more serious theme of Diaspora. It’s also about various characters searching for love in this city, Chennai where the novel is set. One of the characters doesn’t have a word of dialogue, we don’t even know what the character thinks. It’s a baby crocodile that my Diaspora character, Nikhil, an Indian American, finds in his hotel bathroom.

Don’t ask me how it got there, it just appeared on the page, the way odd things can happen in a laboratory experiment. Eventually, my character Nikhil returns the crocodile to its native river and in parting he says this to it as a way of goodbye. He’s called the crocodile Renee, after his ex-wife.

‘Well, Renee, this is where you were born, your native place. Did it make a hell of a difference that you spent a few days in a hotel’s bathroom? I doubt it. It didn’t change you in any way. You know deep down inside that you are this creature we call a crocodile. No one can take what you are, away from you. You think, you move, you behave, and maybe you love too, like a crocodile. You don’t try to be anyone else, you don’t worry whether you should be a tiger or a deer. You aren’t confused with longings or dislocated by identity. You are who you are, forever.’

Renee was already moving with certainty down the slope. She paused a moment, smelling the sweet river air, and then slid in with a child’s glee, causing scarcely a ripple. They both took a step forward to see her under the clear water, kicking with joy as she went deeper and deeper into the shadows. Then she was lost to sight. They waited in a long silence, hoping to see her join her own kind on the other bank but, when she didn’t surface within their sight, they left. Ganesha had stolen away softly into his jungle. Nikhil wondered whether Renee would remember the kindness of strangers, as she basked in the sunlight on a distant rock.’

Fiction tries to tell us who we are and where we are. It tries to hold up a mirror, and sometimes we might recognise ourselves and our situation in a written page.

And as my character says I’d like to also remember the kindness of strangers and thank you all for giving me this opportunity to address you.

(Visit the Author at: www.timerimurari.com)