I Wanted To Copy Marquez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TamcXsfQyuA
The Artist’s Soul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp4O_xlrEmw
For a reading from the Taliban Cricket Club, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgKp7uPD3t4&feature=plcp
For the interview on The Taliban Cricket Club, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgZi_7Bu3rs&feature=plcp
Click on this Link:
http://www.new-asian-writing.com/naw-interview-with-timeri-n-murari/
http://baradwajrangan.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/interview-timeri-murari/
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/08/qa-timeri-murari
A Thesis On My Writings.
https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/95798
NAW Interview with Timeri N.Murari
NAW- Tell us about your literary journey. How and at what age did you start writing?
I became a writer by chance, and not by intention. I was working on a term paper in university and, as a distraction, I decided to write on my experience working through the summer in a logging camp in British Columbia. It wasn’t journalism but more an experimental style of writing and I doubted any newspaper would publish it, and set it aside. A few weeks later, re-reading, I modestly thought it had some merit. At the time, there were two newspapers I admired – The Manchester Guardian and the New York Herald Tribune. The Tribune folded and I sent my piece to the ‘Features Editor’ of the Guardian. I didn’t hear back, and figured it was rejected. So back to term papers and studies. By chance, a few weeks later, researching in library, I picked up the airmail edition of the MG, idly flicked through it and stopped. There was my piece, a full page too with a photograph of a river filled with logs, and my name in bold print. Fatal. If the MG had rejected it I would have continued my studies in history, and become a historian. Instead, I took to writing and contributed a few more stories to the MG. I was 20 then and, armed with the clippings, was hired to work as a reporter for the Kingston Whig Standard newspaper in Kingston, Ontario. I lasted six months, nurtured by the editor, and then fired when a new editor took over.
NAW-Tell us about your book, The Taliban Cricket Club. How did you get the idea for it? Did you carry out any research?
Way back in 2000, I read a very brief report in the newspaper that the Taliban announced they would promote cricket in Afghanistan and the regime, backed by the Pakistan Cricket Board, would apply for associate membership to the International Cricket Council. I thought the item surreal – Taliban? Cricket? They were contradictory, an oxymoron. The regime had banned everything –singing, dancing, keeping parakeets, clapping and even chess. The list is endless. I discovered there were two reasons why the Taliban decided on cricket. Cricket was perfect by Sharia law on the dress of a man – a covered head, long sleeved shirt and long trousers, no part of the body showing. I believe the second reason was the length of time it takes to play cricket – a day, three days, five days- and this could occupy the youth. Unemployment was, and still is, very high among the young men and cricket would keep them out of mischief for a whole day or two.
The idea nagged at me and I made a few notes on how I could use this for a story. I thought I’d throw in a tournament and that the winning team would be sent out of the country – all expenses paid – and probably never return. Great! But as no one knew how to play cricket back then in Afghanistan who’s going to teach my team of young men? A pro from England/India/Pakistan – it didn’t have any dimensions. Apart from a man teaching young men the game the novel would end up about cricket, cricket, cricket. I set the idea aside and went back to my other work when the Taliban were driven out by ISAF in 2001. When they ‘returned’ to fight ISAF, I pulled out my notes to re-think. I wanted to use cricket as a metaphor of how one should act within that games moral laws. I remembered growing up playing cricket with my sisters and female cousins in our garden and even have a niece who played for India. So, why not a young Afghan woman who learned her cricket in India, returns to Kabul when the Taliban announce this and have her teach her cousins how to play this game? Through her I could explore the life of a woman under the Taliban rule and have my cricket team as well. She became my first revolution, cricket the second. She’s a courageous woman who risks her life to teach her brother and cousins to play the game and through her I could explore not only the suppression of a woman’s life but her life style, relationships with her family, social customs, her humour and the sly rebellion. And even add in her love story. She opened many new dimensions in the possibilities of the novel, moving away from cricket which now became secondary. It became a metaphor – the moral code of the game, contrasting with the violence of the Taliban.
Once I decided write this novel, I caught a flight to Kabul. I was lucky to have a very good contact there who introduced me to many of his friends – professors, work colleagues, government officials and also many Afghan women who worked in his office. They were very eloquent about their lives during the Taliban rule, contrasting it with their present freedom to work and not having to wear the burqua. I incorporated their stories in the novel, turning fact into fiction. Of course, I also read up all I could on that history of Afghanistan before and after the Taliban rule. The novel was first published by Ecco in the US, then by Harper Collins, Canada, Allen & Unwin for UK and Australia, Aleph in India, Mercure de France in France etc.
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NAW- Tell us about your other works.
They are very varied and hard to genre-cast. My first novel, The Marriage, an ambiguous title, was based on my experiences reporting on problems among Indian immigrants in the midlands of UK. It was the first work of fiction on the immigration experience and was a love story with a tragic ending. I followed this with a non-fiction work, The New Savages, on the racial tensions between kids in Toxteth, Liverpool. Reviewers and the press accused me of fabrication. A year later there was a race riot in Toxteth. I’ve written romantic comedies, Lovers are not People, set in London and New York, and contemporary fiction, The Arrangements of Love and The Small House, both set in Madras. I even wrote a crime novel set in New York. I had just published a semi-biographical novel, Field of Honour, set in Bangalore, and was planning to explore that theme further. But, I’d spend four months working on a television documentary on homicide detectives in the South Bronx. I was blocked by the experience and the detectives I’d met, and ended up writing The Shooter to unblock myself. I’ve also written historical works, set in India – Taj, A novel on Mughal India, published in 1985, has now been translated into 25 languages. I followed that with British history from 1900 to 1919 and my protagonist in the two part novel was Kipling’s Kim. These were The Imperial Agent and The Last Victory. I returned to semi-biography with Four Steps from Paradise, this one set in Madras. I wandered out of India to write The Taliban Cricket Club, (2012), a novel set in Kabul, and now published in eight countries. I have four non-fiction books, ranging from reportage on racial tensions in Toxteth, Liverpool, The New Savages; a young black couple trying to return home to Alabama from Boston in Goin’ Home; a memoir on an orphaned boy we cared for, My Temporary Son; to my 200 kilometre trek to the sacred mountain, Mount Kailash in Tibet, Limping to the Centre of the World. Limping, as I was recovering from a knee operation when I set out. And before I forget, a YA novel, Children of the Enchanted Jungle. I adapted my film, The Square Circle, for the stage and directed it at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. Parminder Nagra, a wonderful actress and a person, played the main role; Rahul Bose played the Baul singer. A Madras theatre company staged three of my plays, Hey Hero, Killing Time and The Assassination of a Writer.
NAW- How different is the process of writing a book from a film? Was your artistic background of help when you began to write?
When I was writing my screenplay, The Square Circle, (Time magazine chose the film as one of the top 10 best film in 1997) I discovered a film is far more difficult a craft than writing a book. In a book you have freedom to let your characters meditate, explore their thoughts, remain silent for pages. In a film every thought, meditation must be revealed as an action -either in facial expressions, through the eyes on in physical actions. And that is difficult as you can’t write instructions to the actor, he must understand his character from just a few lines of dialogue and a hint of action. It’s the compression of thought/action that makes it so hard to write, pages of a novel must be reduced to a few minutes of screen time, even to a few seconds as the audience is always far ahead of the story line when watching a film. I had to learn to think in pictures, frames, what the audience will see first, before adding in any dialogue to accompany the action. My only background to this craft was watching hundreds of films – Hollywood, Bollywood, Satyajit Ray, Goddard, de Sica, Kurosawa, to name just a few. While in London, I had the good fortune to have two well known Hollywood producers work with me on my first screenplay. They taught me a lot. The screenplay never reached the screen, the fate of thousands of scripts.
NAW- You have worked as a journalist also. Which of the two do you find more fulfilling, fiction or journalism and why?
Each one has its strong attractions for me. I loved my life as a journalist, it trained me to listen to real people tell their stories and gave me an insight into their lives which I would never have had if I wasn’t a journalist at work, trying to tell their stories to the outside world. Fiction fulfills me as much as I explore themes, invent characters (as Graham Greene said all his fiction has some real life persons behind them) and allow my imagination to roam. Fiction allows one such liberties, journalism does not as it has to be accurate to the real person/life/event as possible.
NAW- When you are reading, do you prefer ebooks or printed paper books?
I’ve yet to read an ebook.
NAW- Who are your favourite writers?
The list is very long and varied, ranging from Dickens to Dostoevsky, Normal Mailer to Murakami. I have all Gabriel Marquez’s books, a complete collection of Shakespeare and also Raymond Chandler’s and Dashell Hammet’s. Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald sit side by side. A collection of R.K. Narayan Malgudi stories are also on my shelves. If a favourite, Marquez but all these writers are great talents that I admire and often read and re-read.
NAW- How do you write, in fits and starts or in one go? Take us through your writing process?
I write from 7.30 a.m to 1 p.m, six days a week, and never vary from the discipline I learned years ago. The only way to write is to write and write. That does not mean I don’t get up and wander around but during those hours I hate being disturbed. And once I start a book, I try to keep working on it until I have completed a draft. I set it aside, maybe start another, then return to it to see how it reads. Then come the many, many re-writes. I work on what I’d call a synopsis of the book, fiction or non-fiction, and try to map out the story line. I make many notes to myself. This doesn’t need to be linear, it can go back and forth in time. Once I feel I have it vaguely right – the characters, time frames, the theme, the setting – I start writing it. I know it will never remain true to what I had first imagined, characters take over their lives and re-chart their territory in the story. When I feel I’m on the final draft of a book, I print it out. I found when I read it on paper, I can see more flaws than on the screen and also a feel as to how it will look as a book.
NAW- Tell us about your other work life. What do you do when you are not writing?
When I finish my day’s work, I spend some time with my dogs – I have four Indian breed dogs – who do demand a lot of attention. They are very therapeutic, I enjoy their company. I usually read, both fiction and non-fiction, in the afternoons and then depending on the day and my partners I play tennis twice or thrice a week. On the other days, I walk very briskly in a local park for a half hour to 45 minutes, often as not with my wife. In the evenings I read, more magazines than books, if my dogs allow me to as they usually want to play or need back or tummy rubs. When I do take off, I head for wildlife reserves where I can spend a week or two away from work, emails etc and enjoy watching animals in their natural habitat. I have some great photographs.
NAW- What are your upcoming projects?
In July 2014, Aleph publishes my new novel. CHANAKYA RETURNS, covers a vast canvas of power, love, history, politics, betrayals, sex and more. It is narrated by Chanakya (370-282 BC), reincarnated in the contemporary world as the adviser to Avanti, the daughter of the head of a nameless state in India. In the course of the novel, Chanakya poses an eternal question: What shapes our lives—The Power of Love or the Love of Power? His protégée, Avanti, has to choose between love and power. The choice Avanti makes has all sorts of implications not just for herself and her dysfunctional family, but for the people of the state her family has ruled for years…
In his previous existence, the historical Chanakya was exiled from his homeland and took his revenge on the king, who was the cause of his misfortune, by defeating him in a war. He was then responsible for anointing Chandragupta as ruler of the Mauryan Empire, and advising him on every aspect of statecraft. In the novel Chanakya is acerbic, witty and ruthless, and provides the same services to Avanti. He manoeuvers that awkward young daughter of a charismatic powerful politician across the chessboard of power to become a brilliantly successful politician in her own right.
Now, I am working on the continuation of the family saga of this political dynasty
Publisher: Aleph. www.alephbookcompany.com
Scholastic India will publish my new YA novel, Axxiss and the Newton Chords, the first in the Axxiss Trilogy, later this year.
On Chanakya Returns.
CHENNAI: Have you ever thought what it would be like to have Chanakya, the renowned strategist of fourth century, reincarnate? The author of Arthashastra who helped Chandragupta Maurya rise up as the king of Maurya dynasty, is now back as our everyday politician in Timeri N Murari’s new book Chanakya Returns.
“He could be anyone, any politician you relate him to,” the author says, speaking at the launch of the book at Odyssey, Adyar. Soon, the names of Narendra Modi, Sonia Gandhi, Amit Shah and Jayalalithaa are suggested from the audience. He graciously nods to them, and repeats, “Yes, anyone!”
According to Timeri, though Chanakya is from an era of 2,000 years ago, whatever he said then is still relevant. In the book, the present day Chanakya remembers bits and pieces from his past. And to bring out a physical resemblance, the Chanakya in the book has a partly burnt face, given the Chanakya of the past is said to have been ugly. Timeri says that initially, while working on the book, Chanakya was nowhere in the scene. “But as I read my first few drafts, I realised that a character similar to Chanakya was shaping up. So I went back and read what is left of the Arthashastra today,” he recalls.
In the book, Chanakya says that people are the same today as they were 20 centuries ago. Probably, the princes and courtyards of the yore have been replaced by the rich businessmen and their bungalows. What about the stringent rules of the past, we ask. “It is said that Chanakya advised Chandragupta to cut a hand of those who were corrupt. Of course, all this cannot be done now. Most of our politicians and bureaucrats would walk one-armed then,” says Timeri with a laugh. In the book, the present day Chanakya is more like a goodwill supporter to the president’s daughter. One, who knows that the president is corrupt and does not want his daughter to follow the same path. He advises the daughter to become an able ruler and replace her dad, explains Timeri.
While there is no question that politics makes for a major part of the book, for Timeri, it was a story of a family, a dysfunctional family with politics in the background. “Just like any other family, say from a corporate world, it is a story about love and the relationship among them,” he says. However, what inspired him to write the book was the ‘dreadful situation in politics’ today. “There are so many dynasties. Every politician’s family is in politics. It’s more like a family business. Every politician’s daughter or son is in politics. It’s sort of like taking over a company,” he says with a sigh.
Known for his work Taj: A story of Mughal India and The Taliban Cricket Club, Timeri confesses to having a penchant for Indian history. “In The Imperial Agent and The Last Victory I wrote about the British period between 1900 and 1920. History has always been a favourite part of my life. It’s the stuff I like to write about,” he says. And while we await his next release, he leaves it a mystery as to whether it will be a sequel to Chanakya Returns.
On Empress of the Taj
On Enter Queen Lear
THE HINDU Sept 6/16
Timeri Murari talks about his new play and how Shakespeare’s works are still relevant today
Timeri Murari is looking forward to a trip to London next week. His new play, Enter Queen Lear, directed by Simone Vause, will open at Drayton Arms Theatre for an initial three-week run. The romantic comedy revolves around an ageing, wealthy movie star who accepts the role of Lear again, and what happens through the rehearsals. Metroplus catches up with the city-based writer to find out more.
How did Enter Queen Lear fall in place?
A friend of mine had an acting group in London that got together every week to do both old and new plays. Last October, I’d sent this play, which I had done a couple of years ago, and the actors did a reading that went off very well. My friend Nicholas, who is also my producer, wanted to give it a shot and so did the actors. I remember one elderly lady telling me how much she enjoyed the reading. I said, ‘Shakespeare must be turning in his grave.’ She sweetly said, ‘I bet he’s kicking himself for not having thought about it first.’ I was quite flattered with that remark, and that’s how it all started.
London has a terrific theatre scene, and so, casting must have been easy…
It does; it’s more vibrant than New York or any other city. The first person we zeroed in on was the lead character (Jenny Runacre) — a fine actor. The hardest part to cast was the role of a make-up artist, an Indian woman. A lot of actors would show up at the sessions and then opt out. So, finally, we found an actor who looks Indian — we were running out of time, and cast Catherine Winer to do the role of the Indian woman. I’m told she read very well and we hope she does well.
How relevant is Shakespeare today?
Well, he’s still very relevant because his works deal with human character… and that hasn’t changed at all for ten thousand years. It’s still about power, greed and love. Even now, you can do Romeo and Juliet; there are enough instances of that in India. You can stage that in a village tomorrow, and they will recognise what you’re talking about. Or Hamlet; you can see a reflection of today’s society in that as well.
Which is perhaps why even Indian filmmakers are taking it up now?
I read often about how Shakespeare’s plays are being turned into films. It’s certainly having more relevance in India. Nobody in England or America is doing movies that are set in modern times but use Shakespeare. Surprisingly, it is Indian directors who are taking them up.
You released a young-adult novel recently. How different is the process of writing that and something like Enter Queen Lear?
It works very differently. In a novel, you can have the person thinking internally for pages and pages. But you can’t do that in a play. The latter is about character and the story; you have to bring it out through gestures and dialogues. Those are the two elements for a play to work. It’s a much different craft to writing a novel, but I quite enjoy the challenges that come with it.
On Goin’ Home.
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL interview by Joy Lewis.
To the outsider, the South appears to be making good progress against racial barriers; (more jobs) are pluses. School integration and industrial growth. But, “racism has become simply more subtle– today, blacks can sit at a lunch counter but they’ve no money to buy food,” Timeri Murari said, reflecting on economic realities for many blacks in the south.
“Goin’ Home” is the story of a black family, Arthur and Alma Stanford and their young son, who attempt to resettle in Eufaula, Ala., Arthur’s hometown. After seven years in Boston, the Stanfords packed their belongings in the fall of 1978 for greener and homier pastures. They planned to build a ranch house on the acres belonging to Arthur’s father and grow their own vegetables. Alma intended to go to business school and Arthur counted on a decent paying job, paying not the $7 an hour he got in Boston spray-painting cars, but enough to support their dreams.
Murari, a 38-year-old novelist and playwright with apartments in London and New York, accompanied the Stanfords South. He is charming, with a distinctly educated British accent. Born in India, he too is dark-skinned and knows prejudice.
“In early 1978, I read a newspaper account about how blacks were returning to the south from the industrial north. In fact, black migration north had nearly stopped,” he told me. “It was quite a phenomenon. I had never been south, and I was curious.”
“I think it’s better in the south,” Arthur tells Murari in the book before leaving Boston. “There you don’t make as much but it don’t cost you as much to live and you can live more comfortable.”
Murari spent several weeks in the bosom of the Stanford clan, chatting with Odie and Bud, Arthur’s parents, tagging along when Arthur tries in vain to get a bank loan (which had been promised before he left Boston), going job hunting with Arthur, talking to Alma and other relatives, meeting civic leaders, and absorbing Eufaula’s present and past.
“A beautiful little town…like taking a journey back into the Confederate past,” he writes in “Goin’ Home.” “Everything here looks as if a deliberate attempt has been made to still time and bottle it.”
Sadly, the only job Arthur finds is at $2.65 an hour. The bank won’t loan him money unless his wife also works–dashing her hopes for business schooling. The longer Arthur and Alma stay, the more they grasp that their South and Eufaula have changed little. They learn that a dual wage system still operates–whites preferred over blacks, with more pay for the same work.
Disheartened, the Stanfords realise they can’t make it. In January 1979, they go back to Boston–defeated, they know, by racism they cannot disrupt nor escape. “I don’t think we was prepared for what stood in our paths,” Arthur says.
What frustrates the Stanfords almost as much as under-the-counter discrimination is the attitude of blacks who never left– Eufaula.
“I’ve talked to blacks who live here,” Alma confesses in the book. “And when you talk to them and tell them how far they’re set back and that things need to change, they just look at you as if you’re crazy. They say ‘You can’t change it, we’ve been like this all our lives. “‘
“You know what I found out talkin’ to the black guys at work” Arthur asks Murari. “They don’t want nothin’. They’re happy just workin’ one day to the next. The South really hasn’t changed much you know.”
“Goin’ Home” is succinct. It shows Murari’s skills as a reporter in London for The Guardian. His descriptive passages are detailed but not overburdened. Thus, the story of a realistic dream moves quickly to an inevitable fate, given the social milieu of the south. Reading the story of an ordinary black family–in their own words– and listening to white civic leaders describe and assess the “facts of life” for southern blacks and whites is an eye-opener for those who know little about southern living.
Historical accounts of the land Murari visits and the people he meets give the story fullness. Occasionally he digresses into his own terse philosophy. For instance, upon entering a down south savings and loan bank he comments: “Banks have no poetry, no prose, no songs, no dance. They always remind me of operating rooms–clean, sterile, well lit, and they bare the financial intestines of their customers. A digit here, a zero there, cleanly incised by the razor- sharp computers and adding machines. Only white people are to be seen behind the counters and in the offices.”
Murari keeps in touch with Eufaula and with Arthur and Alma who now live in Salem, New Hampshire. Alma recently finished business school and is a secretary; Arthur has an $8 an hour job in Boston. But, Arthur states in the book, he still desires to return to his roots: “One day, I’m goin’ back, goin’ home, for good.”
On Limping to the Centre of the World
“I’m not always right, but what the hell!”
Timeri Murari is a journalist by profession and writer by choice. He has authored 14 books including ‘My Temporary Son: an orphan’s journey’ and the bestseller ‘Taj’, which was translated into nine languages. In 2002, he was given the ‘R.K. Narayan Award’ for his work in cinema and theatre. He also wrote and produced the award-winning film, ‘The Square Circle’, voted as ‘one of the ten best films of the year’ by Time Magazine. The film was later adapted to theatre and staged in London to rave reviews. ‘Limping to the Centre of the World’ is his latest book about his trek to Mount Kailas. Here he is in an email interview with Ajinkya Deshmukh:
- ‘Limping to the Centre of the World’ seems like a very personal travelogue of a potently life-changing journey. How has everyday life changed after your trek to Mount Kailas?
A. The changes have been subtle, not radical, and the change continues. I have grown much calmer, I don’t worry about the minor or even major irritations in daily life; I’ve learned to pace myself and not plan far ahead. I prize every day and wake with anticipation for my work, and for the surprises that can happen. Also, I have grown far more aware of our natural world – everything from the shape of trees, the colour of leaves, the flight of birds and their calls to the changing nature of our sky. My father brought me up to be very aware of our environment and I do believe we have wounded our natural world fatally, as I’ve noted in my book. - You mentioned in the book that you are not a very religious man, and yet the journey seemed pre-ordained. How do you handle agnosticism and destiny as two very different shades of faith?
A. Yes, it is weird that no matter how hard I tried, I could not escape this journey to Kailas. Admittedly, I can’t explain this except that I went there for a child and that could have moved the mountain. Nature is power. We cannot explain the reasons for our existence, why we are born, live and die, and what our role is in this universe. Destiny does not exist; it’s not a faith in any sense. If we did have control of our destiny, individually and collectively, we’d be masters of the universe. Religion has entrapped us in a narrow set of beliefs and superstitions so we’re blinded to the wider implications of our existence on not only this planet but also in an unimaginably vast universe. Religion divides us from our common humanity.
Q. Has your belief structure undergone a revamp?
A. No, I have not, like a Paul on his way to Damascus, undergone a blinding change in belief. The trek to the mount Kailas only reinforced a belief in our natural world and its awesome power. Once man worshipped nature, now he worships himself as god. We’re helpless when nature unleashes its forces – a tsunami, an earthquake, rising sea levels, vanishing species… The dinosaurs lived longer than mankind, and yet have only left their bones and footprints, as memorials of their existence.
Q. Your works span many genres: fiction, non-fiction, theatre and cinema. Which medium of communication are you most at home with?
A. I enjoy stretching the envelope in whichever medium. It’s a challenge to always try to do something new and renew myself at the same time. In a novel the characters can internalize their thoughts and feelings while in a film we must see this happening and on the stage, hear it. An idea sometimes suggests itself as a novel, sometimes as a film and I try to follow my instincts.
I’m not always right, but what the hell!
Q. ‘The Square Circle’ won you many accolades. What is the theme of the work (film and play)?
A. I had always meant the film ‘The Square Circle’ (‘Daayra’) to be a love story between two people trapped in opposite identities. It’s an intriguing essay on the nature of real and assumed gender identities and cultural proscriptions. It’s also an exploration of sexual identity in an Indian context where love has nothing to do with marriage and sex has little to do with love. As I was unhappy with the film director’s interpretation, I re-worked it as a stage play which I directed at the Leicester Haymarket theatre. The main leads were Parminder Nagra and Rahul Bose. The theme remained the same, though not the ending. In the play, I returned to my original ending.
Q. Your travels have taken you the world over. Apart from established names, do you think India fails to provide an equal platform to budding writers and playwrights?
A. The answer is a big YES. Certainly new writers are having their works published but are given very little support by their publishers, while Indian playwrights are expected to write free of charge for amateur dramatic companies, at least in the English medium. In the West, writers and journalists are given a great deal of respect, while in India they’re looked down upon as inferior professionals.
Q. How would you comment on Indian writing in English? Any favourites? - I can’t claim to have any favourite but there is a lot of very good writing coming out of India, but also some very bad writing. Editors and reviewers appear to have problems in distinguishing between utter drivel and true talent.
Q. Departing from literature, having been a journalist, do you think Indian media, especially electronic, has steeped much into yellow journalism and sensationalizing?
A. Viewing our Indian news channels leaves me fuming and worse, uninformed. It is a very depressing experience. There’s very little hard news, no serious investigative journalism while many hours are squandered on murders, rapes, scams, movies and excessive sports. No doubt they’re of interest but India needs to be better served by this ‘new’ medium.
Q. The last few years have seen you professionally very productive. Anything new in the pipeline?
A. I’m stretching the envelope again. This time I’ve written a young adult work of fiction which will be published by Scholastic later this year. We’re still working on the title and it will appear under a pseudonym. I will also start a bi-monthly column for the New Sunday Express from November.
Q. Through a cultural perspective, what do you think lacks in the Indian psyche?
A. I wish we Indians had a better sense of humour. I don’t mean slapstick or the crude adolescent humour in cinema. I mean a sense of wit. We take ourselves and, even worse, our politicians, too seriously. After all, nature has a wicked sense of humour!
India Abroad January 2, 2004 the magazine
ENCOUNTER
Love with an English Flavor
Shobha Warrier Speaks to Timeri N Murari, whose 25-Year-old Novel is Making a Comeback in Hollywood
In 1978, when Timeri N Murari was a journalist with The Guardian, he wrote Lovers Are Not People. He had just moved from London to New York. Twenty-five years later Carlton America, the Hollywood film production company, is recreating his novel as a contemporary film.
The novel, written in the first person, is the account of a wife whose husband deserts her and their two young children for a younger woman. Instead of letting him go, the jilted wife resolves to bring him back. Playing detective, she learns he has gone to America with the young girl. She follows him to New York, befriends the girl, undermines the relationship and wins back her husband.
Murari has written the novel – a love story of disappointment, possible divorce and emotional entanglement – in the form of a romantic comedy. There is nothing Indian about his novel. The husband and wife are British and the mistress, an American. New York provides the setting, for a drama ideal for Hollywood.
“It came out of an emotional experience I had been through,” recalls Murari, 62, who in 1959, moved to London from Madras to study engineering but found his calling in writing. “I had just moved from London to New York and had been away from India for a long time. The characters came through naturally as English and American.” Since the story was the written as the woman’s first person account, Murari felt she had to be an English woman.
In 1963, after studying at a university in Montreal and freelancing for The Guardian, Murari joined a newspaper, in Kingston as a reporter. “I was very lucky to have got my first job,” he recalls. “Most papers were not willing to hire an Indian. They were very prejudiced against Asians at that time. “
In six months the new editor sacked him. “I was the only Indian in the newsroom but when I was fired, the rest of the staff was ready to go on strike against racial prejudice.” But he dissuaded them and returned London to join The Guardian.
Looking back, he feels The Guardian had perhaps published his articles unaware that an Indian wrote them. “From my name, nobody could make out my Indian identity,” he laughs. Murari feels other British journalists accepted him only because he played good cricket.
The only other Indian working with The Guardian then was cartoonist Abu Abraham, whom Murari remembers as a “very charming, friendly man, always there for you with advice.” Abraham, who died last year, once told him, ‘I would like to see people like you in India rather than your talent being used here.’
Once he left England, Murari was struck by the difference between the America of the 1970S and the England of the 1960s. “America was a more open society, and much easier to get on with because it never had colonial ties with India,” he reasons. “The British had prejudices against India because they had ruled India. There was a lot of racial prejudice there, and I wanted to escape that. “
He wrote Lovers Are Not People during his stay in New York. About four years ago, William Blaylock, a Hollywood producer and Murari’s friend, read the novel and wanted to make a film out of it. Taylor Hackford, the director of well known films like An Officer And A Gentleman, was to direct it and Murari went as far as writing a screenplay. But the project fizzled out.
“After that, I had forgotten completely about the novel and the project,” he says. “Then I got an email from William [saying] that somebody else is interested in the project and [inquiring] whether the rights were available. I said yes, and the contract was signed. “
For copyright reasons, Murari is not writing the screenplay for the new project. Scripting began in Hollywood in December. Casting is due in February and the film will be ready for release by fall.
Love, betrayal and retribution are these not ingredients for a wholesome Indian film? In fact, not
long ago, one-of Murari’s’ friends thought Lovers Are Not People was ideal for a Tamil film.
“It did not materialize,” he says. “You know the kind of films that are made [in India]. Efforts to attract Hindi film producers also did not [work]. I am happy that it is not going to be a Hindi film. Commercial elements in Hindi involve six songs, six dances, etc. At least in Hollywood, she [the wife] will not be made to dance around New York! I am happy that it is going to be a Hollywood film!”
He has his reasons to be peeved with the Hindi film industry. In his only stint with Hindi films, Daayra (1996) starring Nirmal Pandey playing a transsexual and Sonali Kulkarni, he ran into disagreements with director Amol Palekar.
“(Daayra) was the second crossover film to reach the Western audience after [Shekhar Kapur’s] Bandit Queen but it did better than Bandit Queen in France and England,” Murari recalls. “I would have loved to direct the film but I didn’t have the experience and the film financiers wanted a name known to the film field. That was how Amol Palekar came in. I gave him a full script. The film was a disappointment in one context that Palekar changed the end, which I didn’t like at all. He killed the cross dressed man in such a stupid way. But it was very satisfying in the context that all the reviews that came out barely mentioned Palekar but mentioned me, the writer, which is very rare in the film business. Time magazine voted it as one of the top ten best films of 1997 and in their review, they only mentioned me!”
To compensate for the disappointment, he directed” the same story as a play titled The Square Circle for the Leicester Haymarket theater. Murari says it was an extremely satisfying experience directing Parminder Nagra (before she became famous for Bend It Like Beckham) and Rahul Bose as the transsexual. “I thoroughly enjoyed directing the play. I had a very talented cast. Parminder’s role was a very demanding, emotional and physical role and poor Parminder had to do it night after night. In the no-minute play, she is there on stage all the time.”
His association with Hollywood is not going to end with Lovers Are Not People. Another novel, Field of Honor, set in Bangalore in 1952 “in a time when India just became independent and was changing,” might appear as a Hollywood film soon.
Since 1973, when his first book Marriage, a work of fiction set in England, was published, Murari has written over a dozen fiction and non-fiction books. He returned to Chennai in 1988 when his father fell ill and now lives there with his Australian wife.
On Steps From Paradise.
EXCERPT from THE HINDU interview by Kausilya Santhanam
Q: The themes of your novels are varied. ‘The Shooter’ deals with a New York cop, ‘Taj’ about a historical love story and ‘Steps from Paradise’ about a family in South India.
A: I don’t keep within a genre or style of writing. It did confuse my readers initially for they expect a writer to keep to type. The publishers too want you to remain on one genre. But I want to push the envelope. My novel ‘Steps from Paradise’ is in one way, a metaphor on the impact of colonialism on India. Here it happens on a much smaller scale. This is about a close knit family, like our joint families of the past, and when a stranger enters the household, it starts to fall apart. It cannot withstand the impact of this ‘invasion’. And a member of the family invites the invader in. Even as in our history, the invader has always been invited me, often as not to defeat another prince. So, it is about an inner betrayal as well.
Q: Is ‘Steps from Paradise’ autobiographical as it is set in Chennai and focuses on one particular family?
A: Of course, on the surface every novel does seem autobiographical, especially if it’s a contemporary story. Every time Graham Green published a novel, the reviewers claimed it was semi-biographical because he dealt with certain themes. Of course, I have drawn on certain characters, places and situations that existed in the Madras of those days. After all, I was born and raised in this city, so if I do write about it, it will look biographical because of the time and places. Yes, there are some parallels to my own life in the novel. My mother died when I was very young, even as the narrator, Krishna’s mother died when he was very young. And like the narrator Krishna, my father did bring in a European governess to look after my sisters, brother and me, whom he eventually married. She became our stepmother. She was a very disruptive influence in my family because she had no understanding of how our joint family functioned. I’m afraid I didn’t like her very much at all. But this, a second marriage, is something that happens in many families and I hope that readers will identify with the problems of this particular family when something so devastating as a mother’s death occurs, leaving young children. You don’t have a choice when your widowed father re-marries. So, what I was writing about below the surface was the impact of a person from an alien culture into a family situation. But there the similarities end. Krishna’s brother dies in an accident. My brother’s alive and well. Krishna’s sister marries a zamindari and leaves him. That’s fiction too. When one writes, drawing on one’s own experiences, fact and fiction become blurred and indistinct, the words become all one fabric and it’s impossible to unweave it and say ‘oh this thread is true’ but that thread is ‘fiction’. Let’s say it’s a more personal novel than any I’ve written before, although ‘Field of Honour’ also had the same theme of a family conflict.
On TAJ-A Story on Mughal India
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS interview by John Gibson
She was 12. He was 17. And they fell madly in love. One of the greatest love stories that’s just been told. By Tim Murari in his double-edged novel “Taj.”
Half is a novel about the true-life love affair, half about the building of one of the wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal.
We’re talking about the seventeenth century, long before the Brits made it their own. Shah Jahan, the Shadow of Allah and Conqueror of the world, fell in love only once.
But permit me to tell you the love story as I heard it from Mr Murari when he brought a breath of the subcontinent to Edinburgh the other day.
Monument
“The nobleman’s daughter was always behind the veil until the one night of the year she was allowed out with the veil removed, during an annual festival. By chance the prince saw her and it was as they say love at first sight.
The Shah became the richest man in the world but all his wealth couldn’t prevent her death at 35. He ordered eight days of mourning, he lost two inches in height and his hair turned white.
“Which brings me to the second half of my book. Shah Jahan, who never remarried, commanded 28,000 men and women to labour day and night for 22 years to build the Taj Mahal -an ever-lasting monument to his one love.”
Murari now lives in London, New York and his native Madras, where at school he was taught that the Taj Mahal was designed and built by an Italian jeweller, before the education authorities set the record straight.
With “The Jewel in the Crown” and “Gandhi” re-kindling interest in India, 43-year-old former Fleet Street Journalist and TV documentary writer Murari feels the climate is “Just right” for “Taj.” But he stresses that his novel has nothing of Britain in it. It’s set exclusively in the pre-Brit period.
“India bad been there for a thousand years and you discover from the book it bad a rich culture and a lot going for it. The British only re-invented it.”
And Lord Curzon, a Brit, was largely responsible for the restoration of the Taj Mahal in 1901.
LIVERPOOL POST interview by M.W
FROM THE troubles of Toxteth to the marble splendours of the Taj Mahal is a fair leap. but ex-Liverpool resident Timeri Murari has made it.
True, he lived in the city way back in 1974 when he rented a room near the furniture store which was to go up in flames in the Toxteth riots some years later.
Tim was strategically placed to see the social problems and sense the simmerings of violence among the young blacks and whites even then.
He was gathering material for his book The New Savages; Children of the Liverpool Streets. which got good reviews even if the title did spark off some controversy.
A more glamorous spot, the Taj Mahal, is the subject of his new novel ‘. Taj.’
It is a testament to love-in more ways than one.
When Tim. who was born in Madras, took his Australian bride Maureen to see the Taj he realised how little he knew about its story. “Therefore,” he says, ‘I read all I could find about ii so I would appear more erudite in the eyes of my wife.”
Tim has dedicated “Taj” to his own lovely lady. ..Maureen.
MID-DAY (Bombay) interview by Tara Patel.
WHO IS Timeri N. Murari? I was asked to interview him at such short notice I forgot to ask him what the “T” stood for!
After all the man’s of Tamil origin and not a very remote. origin at that. Murari’s new book is titled Taj and more important, I didn’t ask him enough about the novelist’s licence, I imagine he’s taken on is love-story of Arjumand Banu, the Mumtaz-i-Mahal of our very own marble monument in Agra which lovers (of all kinds, presumably) have come to gape at for over three centuries.
It’s his eight book to date, must be the only novel of its kind-everybody well, almost- knows about the Taj Mahal and its story, never mind if the romance has been romanticised beyond historical fact, the whole world loves a lover and all that.
It’s fact that Emperor Jehangir’ son Shah Jahan fell in love with a nobleman’s 12-year-old daughter and married her-allegedly he adored her so much that in a span of 18 years or marriage she bestowed on him 14 children and, nor surprisingly, died during her last childbirth.
Hence, the Taj-it is sad, 20,000 labourers worked day and night (so we are told) for 22 years on a marble tomb to beat all other marble tombs. Some say the emperor built the Taj to boost his ego, after al! building grand buildings was a royal Moghul past- time, others less cynical say it was built purely out of an undying love for his begum as also out of guilt that she died delivering his children that’s the author’s interpretation.
In his early 40’s, Murari relates how he’d come to pick on the Taj Mahal as a subject for a novel: it seems in a previous book set in India his American and British editors wanted to put a picture of the Taj on the cover (never mind if it was only fleetingly mentioned in the book!).
“It made me so mad,” remembers Murari, “their vision of India, especially in America, is limited to the Taj Mahal. I promised to write about it in my next book if only they’d remove it from the cover of my book at that time. Once I started researching, the story became absolutely fascinating and so tragic that I got taken up by it. I’ve enjoyed writing this I book the most’.
No, not much of his research work was done in India although he’d visited the Taj several time. His father, a major in the army during his school days had a posting in Agra. But for the book, he spent a year researching and writing it at the New York Library (which in his opinion is the best in the world, on par with the British Museum Library).
On how he took to writing. After boarding school in Bangalore he went to Loyola’s in Madras, quit after a year in favour of an apprenticeship , with Marconi’s (electronics) in the UK. But after two years, he went on to McGi11 University in Montreal.
He started reporting for a small town paper in Ontario called the’ Kingston Whig-Standard. the editor. Donald Sutter, taught him the ropes of the profession; alas, a new editor proved to be racist and Murari quit, took to doing journalistic assignments on a free lance basis for the London Guardian. the Sunday Times. the Observer and other papers and writing books.
On The Arrangements of Love
NEW SUNDAY EXPRESS- Sushila Ravindranath.
What is the theme of your new novel?
THE ARRANGEMENTS OF LOVE is an intricate and subtle exploration of love. I’ve constructed a quirky and oddball scenario that reveals a tender and moving story of characters all looking for something – and hidden under these individual stories is the search for love, in its many guises. There are three main characters involved in these searches. Nikhil, an NRI, looking for his father and escaping a broken marriage. Apu, the detective he hires to find his father and who mourns for her own lost love, and the father who lives alone with the memories of a betrayed love. Love after all is the raft we all cling to in this very lonely sea we all exist it. Without it, everything else is meaningless. At the same time, the novel’s a detective story and about surviving in the chaos and confusion which is our India. Here, as we all know, we must expect the unexpected and India is full of surprises.
You’ve set this novel is Madras? Why is that?
Apart from Madras being my home city, my family having lived here for many generations, I deliberately wanted to set it in this city as it’s very seldom written about. If you look at all the novels being written today by Indian writers (or even non-Indian ones), they’re all set in a north Indian city or in a north Indian landscape. Madras barely exists in the modern literary landscape; it’s fallen off the map. Yet I find this a fascinating and exciting city. It has the subtle blend of tradition and modernity, it’s a passionate city and quietly cosmopolitan. It’s also a city with a long history and many beautiful buildings which I hope will not be demolished by our philistine government. I wrote about the city in my previous novel, STEPS FROM PARADISE (which, by the way, will be reissued by Penguin Books next year). And I set another one of my novels, FIELD OF HONOUR, in another south Indian city, Bangalore. I love the south and even in my novel ‘TAJ-A story of Mughal India’, set entirely in its historical locations, I managed to drag in a south Indian character to make him major figure in that story.
What are you working on now?
I have completed a new work of non-fiction, OUR HOUSEHOLD GOD, about my personal experiences with an orphaned baby. It’s again set in Madras (Chennai if you wish) and I’m still working on finding the right title. Penguin Books will be publishing this one early next year. I’m currently working on the final re-write of my new novel, which I’ve just completed an early draft, and you guessed right – it’s set in Madras and other south Indian locations.
TODAY. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
THE ARRANGEMENTS OF LOVE is so different from your earlier book, TAJ, that was released earlier this year. Which genres do you prefer- contemporary/historical fiction?
It’s not a matter of preference really. It’s how I want to tell a story. I have written two other historical novels, set in India, after Taj and at the time thoroughly enjoyed recapturing Indian history as I was then in the mood of writing and studying our history. History gave me a great perspective on our past and what I have said often is that when we study our history how little things have changed. In both Mughal and British times our conflicting self interests which allowed the invaders in divided us. And I should add that our present day politicians remind me of our princes of the past, both in their lifestyle and their lack of morality. But then contemporary fiction reflects the times we live in which is an equally exciting genre to work with and I have been writing it for the last few years.
This book deals with the whole NRI confused thing. Don’t you think it is a little clichéd?
When you say clichéd it means that what I am reflecting is our present day problems. The novel isn’t entirely about Nikhil and the NRI problems but also about the relations
my detective, Apu, has within her present, day society about love and arranged marriages. She is a modern Indian woman coming to terms with the death of a man she had loved and struggling against the family pressures most young people face in places like Chennai. The novel also deals with the break up of a marriage (Nikhil’s mother’s) and the consequences of what happened. So while it is partially about NRls, it’s about how love or the lack of it can distort our lives. And I do believe these are problems facing every one of us as we all want and need love.
Would you describe your new work, OUR HOUSEHOLD GOD, also as autobiographical?
It is, I suppose, somewhat autobiographical and is about my and my wife’s relationship with an orphaned baby. The baby was surrendered for adoption by its parents because it had a serious problem. My wife saw it in a Chennai orphanage, raised the necessary funds (over a lakh) for the nine-hour operation to correct the problem. And she arranged for its adoption abroad. But it stayed with us to recuperate and unfortunately remained in our home for a year before the adoption came through. It’s really a love story between the baby and two elderly people.
You have worked with Parminder Nagra of Bend it like Beckham (for The Square Circle where she played opposite Rahul Bose). Tell us about the experience?
Working with Parminder was great. I found that when you direct a very talented actress, your life can be both easy – because she responds so well to suggestions – and difficult because she needs to understand the motivations of the character. In my play she was on stage all the time and gave herself both emotionally and physically to the role. In fact, when I first cast her, she didn’t want the role because she knew it would very demanding. But once she agreed to play the main lead she gave herself to the role over a 100 per cent.
On the film The Square Circle
INDIAN EXPRESS interview by Mukund Padmanabhan.
TIMER N. MURARI, author of The Square Circle, defies genre, like the director who’s made his 1993 screenplay into a winner of a film. Although he’s sometimes inexplicably described as a Raj novelist, only a couple of his many books fall squarely in this category. In a sense, even the term Indo-Anglian author appears misplaced. For instance, three of his novels -which are set abroad -have no Indian reference points and are written with a completely Western sensibility. A former journalist- he worked with The Guardian in the early ’70s – Murari hasn’t been economical with his output: he’s both diverse and prodigious. In a little over two decades, he has written ten novels, two non- fictional works, three plays and a couple of screenplays that have dealt with subjects as varied as the Raj, historical romance, crime and social drama. His best-known book, of course, is Taj, the historical novel that was translated in nine European languages.
When Murari wrote The Square Circle (originally titled Stolen), he was unsuccessful in raising money for the screenplay soon after he had finished it. It was after a friend introduced him to Pravesh Sippy(he’s co-producing the film along with Murari) that the proposal to film it (using Amol Palekar as director) took shape.
A tragi-comic love story where the key characters are a young abducted and girl and a transvestite. The Square Circle may well evoke comparisons with Bandit Queen. It is transparently feminist (perhaps unwittingly anti-male) and its raw, blunt dialogue is peppered with four letter words. Like Phoolan Devi Murari’s girl seeks vengeance after being abducted and raped.
Beneath the hard and bitter carapace of The Square Circle, however, lies an underbelly of wit and tenderness. Despite its profanity and violence, Murari’s (hitherto unpublished} script appears intended not so much to shock but to undermine our notions of normality. ‘Natural’ is the love between the young girl and the transvestite; ‘abnormal’ is the malevolent, male-dominated, misogynistic society they inhabit. The script succeeds in weaving a web of empathy for the couple as their relationship-which seems founded on a shared loneliness and a sense of being unloved and unwanted -blossoms into an odd but convincing love.
The Madras-based author says he’s “90 per cent happy” with Palekar’s rendering of his screenplay and thinks that Nirmal Pandey and Sonali Kulkarni were “brilliant” in the lead roles. The residual “10 per cent” unhappiness relates mainly to the film’s end.
Murari, meanwhile, has written another screenplay. He’s reluctant to talk about, beyond saying that the story is based in Madras and that the film will constitute his next project. He has also recently sold the rights of one of his novels, Lovers Are Not People, to a Hollywood producer. His latest novel, Steps From Paradise, was published by Hodder and Stoughton earlier this year .
As executive producer, Murari was present when The Square Circle was filmed in Orissa between December 1995 and February this year. Although a low-budget film, he’s unsure how much the film will recoup financially. “I’ll be happy,” he says, “if all those who invested in this film get their money back.”
PREMIERE interview by Sara Wallace.
INDIAN WRITERS MAYBE ENJOYING acclaim on the global literary scene, but aside from Satyajit Ray, Indian filmmakers have tended to neglect international markets in favour of entertaining 90million viewers back home with popular Hindi spectaculars A rare crossover is The Square Circle, which charts the relationship between a village girl who is sold into prostitution; and the male transsexual who persuades her to live as a man.
“A film like mine would be hard pushed to gain distribution in India,” says Square Circle screenwriter Timeri Murari. ‘Bollywood is absolutely formulaic. Films have to be three hours long and contain no less than six song and dance routines. Bollywood is in such a rut, it is looking to Hollywood for inspiration rather than drawing on Indian experience.”
Despite celebrating 50 years of independence India, according to Murari, “is in a state of crisis. We’ve had 50 years of corrupt politicians, AIDS has reached epidemic proportions; infanticide of girl babies takes place on a real scale; and yet India is culturally unable to look at these problems.”
In The Square Circle, the heroine is sold into prostitution; as she travels as a man, her horizons expand. Things are slowly changing for the better for some Indian women, but on the whole life is very hard. So, what impact can a film like The Square Circle have? Murari simply hopes the reaction will be like “a stone in a pond creating a ripple effect”.
Murari is currently in production on his next film, about a racist London cop who travels to India and discovers that his own father was an Indian. It will star Indira Varma (also seen in Kama Sutra, another Indian film that opens in London this month but had a huge struggle to get Indian distribution). “I want to show the world,” says Murari, “a little piece of India that it rarely gets to see.”
The Imperial Agent Interviews
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS interview by John Gibson
TIM Murari could be sitting on a fortune with his new novel, “The Imperial Agent.” It’s his sequel to Rudyard Kipling’s revered picture of British India early this century, “Kim,” and according to its author it would make a blockbuster movie, even more impact as a TV mini series.
Says Tim, Madras-born and now spending nine months of the year in his native India: “It’s a big adventure story, an espionage tale in fact, and with its five or six characters interwoven I feel it would do better on TV than cinema. I’ve had my ego boosted by some influential people who are suggesting it might make another’ Jewel in the Crown.’
Manipulated
“You have a Smiley character in control of Kim, still harbouring divided loyalties and love. Kim’s now 30, as opposed to the Irish boy spy Kimball O’Hara immortalised by Kipling, and we meet him at the start of the freedom movement in India. Which way is he to go? That’s what the reader has to find out. In the original story Kim was very Indian in his upbringing until he was discovered by the colonel character who trained him to spy for Britain. I’ve taken him on from there and he’s still being manipulated by the colonel, your present- day Smiley.”
Tim feels his timing with this formidable novel is pretty well ideal.
“Kipling was 50 years dead last year and host of Kipling books came out. His copyright was up last January. There’s a public who have heard of Kim and a public who haven’t heard of either Kim or Kipling, so my novel shouldn’t be hard to sell. Hollywood owns the film rights to ‘Kim’ and when they made the first film in the thirties Kim was played by an American brat and Errol Flynn played a friend of his.”
“They re-shot it a few years with Peter O’Toole as the Lama and an Indian boy cast as Kim. If they bring my novel to the screen I could visualise Harry Andrews as the colonel, but maybe Harry’s too old now. “
“I wanted to write only one novel about Kim, spanning 1905 to 1922. By the time I got to 1910 I knew I’d need another 500 pages, so it’s one novel in two parts. There’s a bit of sex in it, but Kipling said that Kim knew all kinds of evil. You couldn’t call it steamy and I’ve woven some Indian mythology into it. The book isn’t aimed at one market, it’s intended for anybody who craves a good story.
“Rather than write about somebody who’s having a nervous breakdown in suburbia, I chose Kipling’s creation.”
INDIAN EXPRESS interview by Geeta Doctor
WITH his bushy eyebrows and faded blue jeans, Timeri Murari is all set to play the part of the writer as “angry young man”.
He doesn’t flick an eyelash though, when I ask him what he feels at the normal response to his name, “Murari who?”, for certainly his work appears to be almost unknown in India. He smiles in that manner described as faintly quizzical in the best Victorian novels. He doesn’t have to justify his intriguing first name which is taken from his ancestral village just off Ranipet, near Madras, nor his work which winged on the tag ‘Best-selling’, has made its way into nine different languages. Sitting in the pale pastel, cane-and-bamboo comfort of an old Madras house, Murari waits for me to ask my next question. For Murari is first of all a journalist. After studying at McGill University, Canada, he worked for the Guardian at London and then went over to New York, where he now lives part of the time. In the USA, he started doing a series of real-life TV, documentaries based on the lives of newly arrived immigrant communities.
Murari then took to roaming the badlands of the Bronx and came up with a police detective novel: The Shooter. ‘Cops are great storytellers”, he volunteers by way of explanation. None of this, however, really goes to explain how he moved into India next and produced not only the best-seller Taj but also two books of historical fiction, that form part of the same story, that show him to be a writer of strong imaginative fibre. He cites both Norman Mailer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as possible mentors, but turns to Kipling to borrow a hero, Kim, for his panoramic plunge into a period of Indian history, that is still the province of autobiography, (Nirad Chaudhuri’s being the latest example) and liberation theology.
‘I wanted to know more about recent events in India. A lot has been written from the point of view of the British. That was what was immediately apparent in the course of my research, …I wanted to re-create the period between 1905 and 1919 and look at it from the point of view of an Indian.
“Part of the reason that I took Kim was that I wanted a character who was very special for the British and make him eventually an Indian who would be willing to die for his country. Kim had in him all the ingredients of divided loyalties that made him very interesting for me, I wanted to open him up a bit more.”
On The Marriage
Excerpt of Hindustan Times interview by Sudhir Sonalkar.
‘How The Marriage came about was that the London Sunday Times had an investigative page called Insight,’ Timeri N. Murari explains. ‘They had a call from an Indian immigrant worked in Coventry. He told them about an extortion racket preying on the immigrants and was appealing to the Times to help them. I was then working as a freelance writer, mostly for The Guardian. I knew the Times editor, so he called me up to hire me as part of the Insight team investigating the extortion. I went up to Coventry first to check out the story and met the caller. It turned out that there were thugs among the immigrants themselves who were working the extortion. If an immigrant did not pay up, they threatened to get him fired from his job. Obviously, the local white shop stewards were taking a piece of the action as well. The person I met had reported all this to the police but the immigrants were too scared to tell the cops anything, so the cops couldn’t get any affidavits, so they couldn’t press any charges.’
The paper sent three English reporters and Timeri Murari, an Indian journalist, to look into the case. After spending some ten days with the immigrants, Murari and his friends were able to obtain two affidavits and prepare a report. On returning to London, however, they found to their dismay that the affidavits were not adequate to prevent libel action against the paper. As the report was never published, Murari was upset, and egged on by a sense of injustice, decided to transfer the whole business to fiction.
‘Obviously, the novel does not remain wholly true to the events,’ Murari said. ‘I soon found myself immersed in the broader question of looking at the Indian community in England as a whole, and of fabricating complete characters. The story line also changed, and semi-heroes and semi-villains emerged, who played their role in the unfolding drama and withdrew. But I also wanted to explore the loneliness of self-imposed exile. These immigrants had voluntarily left their homeland, yet they constantly yearned for their villages in the Punjab. At the same, I wanted to look at the problems of the second generation that had no idea about India at all. They were born in England, educated in English and, were to all intents and purposes, Englishmen and women. Would they or could they follow the old traditions and customs, including such important decisions like an arranged marriage, or would they be more British in their outlook? I wove in the love story of Leela and Roger to explore that theme.’
The New Savages Interview
LIVERPOOL POST interview by Harold Brough
TIMERI MURARI whose forth. coming book is the subject of a court injunction today, is a freelance writer who came to Liverpool in search of the human story behind urban decay and deprivation. He left with a lingering hangover of depression
It was not just the reality behind statistics about sub-standard housing or ,jobs in South Liverpool, but living with the people, the tension in their lives, the limited hope of escape.
“Yes, I was surprised by what I found.” he says. “I did not expect the tension of the boys there. I came out of it very depressed, I took some time to recover from it. I liked the boys and I felt terribly sorry for them. Their horizons are so limited by the situation.”
He spent more than two months in the area, on the street corners, around the sad, derelict buildings, the tenements, the cafes, researching for “The New Savages,” which is due to be published next month by Macmillan, unless a judge in chambers decides otherwise.
The book is about two days in the life of four fictitious but allegedly typical Liverpool boys in this part of the city. They are Marko, a 17.year-old half-caste, Ato, the white Negro unsure of his identity moving towards a breakdown, Trenchy, the white boy paying lip service to the Boot Boys while attempting to stay out of trouble, and Bicklo, leader of the Boot boys, at least temporarily while the king is in prison. Together, with their friends and their enemies, they, live their hopeless lives in a world which includes the booze, the battling and the beef (girls).
The main theme says Murari is the despair of the situation. ‘No one is going to do very much about it. The economic situation is not right to help alleviate the situation.” He says the conclusion is the despair of the four, their inability to escape their destinies.
But the book is also about deep racial tension and it also contains reported comments on life and the scene in this part of the city by several local people who for different reasons are involved with the people and the problems.
Murari served his time day and night, rain and shine researching the book with the young ones, and others to the extent of following in the wake of the flying bricks in the fight between white and coloured. He says the characters are not overdrawn. and while despair may be the main conclusion he talks of the colour tension: “There is conflict between black and white. There is a great deal of bitterness in the community.”
He is 33, single, and was born and educated at Madras. He went to university there and in Montreal, the, idea for a book about people in this type of urban environment stemmed from reading a dull, boring report-“2 1/2 people sharing 1.3 bathrooms” a report in which the people involved were hidden by statistics.
So he went in search of the people, visiting cities including Birmingham and Sheffield before deciding to base his book on Liverpool. A fight between white and coloured young people happened while he ,was staying in the community. He has no reason to think it was an isolated or particularly rare event.
But he would expect to find a similar situation of tension in other big cities. While he expects fighting to continue spasmodically in Liverpool but not at a high pitch he expects that of other cities also.
But for several reasons it was a depressing stay. One is that, if he is right it is the young who harbour these feelings. The other is his claim that fighting, once territorial, has become racial.
‘Yes it does not sound very good for the future.”
On The Shooter
INTERVIEW
Why I wrote THE SHOOTER.
It was certainly different from previous work – a novel set in India called ‘Field of Honour’. I’d spent six months researching and making a television documentary on homicide detectives for a British TV channel. These were the pre-NYPD BLUE days. The detectives I chose to film were with the 7th Homicide Zone in the 48th precinct, South Bronx of New York City. The precinct was just below the Cross-Bronx Expressway. During those months, I witnessed many homicides and murder investigations, walked down dark hallways, and raced down fire escapes with the detectives. Their streets were mean and very dangerous. I also socialised with many of them – dinners, drinks, birthday parties, fishing. By the time I’d finished I’d made three or four really good friends and had developed a great admiration for many of them. When I returned to normality and decided to write a new novel, I found myself blocked by the experience. Cops are great raconteurs with a grim sense of humour, and my head was filled with their stories. To clear the block, I wrote THE SHOOTER, and dedicated it two of the friends I’d made – Capt. John Culley and Detective Andy Lugo.
The novel after that was the best seller, set in historical India, TAJ (link to Taj), on the Taj Mahal.
On the stage play The Square Circle.
THE GUARDIAN interview by Chris Arnot.
Timeri N. Murari’s theatrical version of his controversial film, THE SQUARE CIRCLE, which might shatter a few illusions about the ‘homeland’, opens this week. Gang rape and transvestism are featured. ‘This is the real India, not the version put out by Bollywood,’ Murari says. ‘This is the India where women are casually molested and most men are male chauvinists.’
Murari has flown in from Madras, grateful to Vayu Naidu for giving him the chance to direct his work in the way that he intended, rather than the way it was treated in Bollywood. ‘She’s obviously a kindred spirit and we both know that in the theatre the writer has control,’ he says over a drink in the Haymarket bar. He’s a former journalist – a Guardian man full of entertaining stories of old Fleet Street. But he’s a serious writer too, with 10 novels to his name and a burning desire to erase the memory of director Amol Palekar’s treatment of the film.
The Script examines the relationship between an itinerant actor who dresses up as a woman and a young village girl persuaded to dress up as a man for her own protection after she had been abducted and raped. Eventually, they become lovers. Not a typical Bollywood movie, then. The miracle is that Murari managed to get it produced at all by a film industry where screen sex is usually confined to a gyrating navel in a see-through saree. ‘My script is about sexual identity,’ he says. ‘How we define ourselves as men or women and how that identity governs the way we live our lives’.
Having gone so far with it, he was appalled when Palekar changed the ending and had the transvestite hero bumped off by the same men who had raped the girl. ‘We rowed about it, but once a director gets the bit between his teeth there’s no stopping him. There was no reason for it. I can only think Palekar was disturbed by the character and wanted to take revenge on him.’
The ending that Murari envisaged will finally be revealed in the Studio at the Leicester Haymarket. You have been warned.
THE HINDU interview by Gautam Bhaskaran.
‘The Square Circle’ was neither a square nor a circle. Timeri N. Murari’s baby that it was, this original screenplay struck disaster when Amol Palekar directed it. The film had meandered away from the original and all that Murari could do was gnash his teeth in anguish rather than anger.
During a chat with Murari just before he flew to London, I was curious to know why he had, at all, thought of making a movie out of it, rather than staging it as a play first. Which is the usual practice. Murari agrees that there have been instances of a motion picture being adapted into a theatrical production. ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is a classic case of the screen slipping onto the stage.
‘They had seen the movie and were certain that it would make good theatre,’ he says. ‘The company is eager to have on its repertoire works written by Indians, of course about Indians. Seventy per cent of the picture remains intact. I changed the climax. I also changed bits and pieces within which I knew wouldn’t work on the stage. Besides my original script was about a girl and what happened to her, but Palekar shifted the emphasis to the transvestite. My ending was very different from what you saw on the screen. The play will stick to the original intent.’
But why did he not direct the movie itself?
‘I was desperate to do that but could not find a financier. Ultimately, I found somebody who was willing to fund the project if Palekar were to direct. It was a trade-off that I have lived to regret.’
Not for long though, and the play comes as a challenge to one who is working with a largely British talent. ‘I have restricted the cast. The girl in the play is a wonderful British Asian actress, Parminder Nagra, and so is the rest of the cast.’
LEICESTER MERCURY interview by Lizz Brain.
Square Circle was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the best films of 1996.
Now it has been adapted for the stage by its author, Tim Murari, and makes its world premiere at the Haymarket.
‘It all started when I was visiting India from my home, which was in New York at the time, and wanted to take a photograph of a girl herding some goats,’ he recalls. ‘But she ran off screaming to her village, and the next thing the villagers came screaming out at me. Luckily, I was with my wife and sister, so everyone calmed down but I discovered she was frightened because a lot of girls had gone missing, been kidnapped and sold to brothels. I started to think about her, and what would happen if that happened to an illiterate girl who had been kidnapped but escaped and tried to make her journey back to safety. I thought she would disguise herself as a man and the idea for the story was born. It’s partly about her wanting vengeance for being attacked and raped, and partly about her journey and the way she develops and grows in confidence. The Haymarket asked me to adapt the story, which was quite a challenge, as the film is essentially a road movie, and in a theatre you can’t change location in a second, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how it turns out.’
A cast of five will be coming to Leicester in October to begin rehearsals for the show, and several will be playing multi-roles.
‘I really am looking forward to working here. I’ve done theatre before but the Haymarket has such a great reputation, especially in London, and it will be a joy to bring my work here.’
On The Taliban Cricket Club Curious Books UK
How did you learn about the Taliban’s interest in using cricket for propaganda purpose and could you tell us about how the seed of an idea grew into The Taliban Cricket Club?
Way back in 2000, I read a very brief report in the newspaper that the Taliban announced they would promote cricket in Afghanistan and the regime, backed by the Pakistan Cricket Board, would apply for associate membership to the International Cricket Council. I thought the item surreal – Taliban? Cricket? They were contradictory, an oxymoron. The regime had banned everything –singing, dancing, keeping parakeets, clapping and even chess. The list is endless. I discovered there were two reasons why the Taliban decided on cricket. Cricket was perfect by Sharia law on the dress of a man – a covered head, long sleeved shirt and long trousers, no part of the body showing. In other sports men wore shorts and t-shirts, so obviously the Taliban had made a study of all sports before deciding to encourage cricket. I believe the second reason was the length of time it takes to play cricket – a day, three days, five days- and this could occupy the youth. Unemployment was and still is very high among the young men and cricket would keep them out of mischief for a whole day or two.
The idea nagged at me and I made a few notes on how I could use this for a story. I thought I’d throw in a tournament and that the winning team would be sent out of the country – all expenses paid – and probably never return. Great! But as no one knew how to play cricket back then in Afghanistan who’s going to teach my team of young men? A pro from England/India/Pakistan – it didn’t have any dimensions. Apart from a man teaching young men the game the novel would end up about cricket, cricket, cricket. I set the idea aside and went back to my other work when the Taliban were driven out by ISAF in 2001. When they ‘returned’ to fight ISAF, I pulled out my notes to re-think. Cricket was secondary to the theme of introducing this revolutionary sport to Afghanistan when you consider what was banned.
Q: Why did you make a fictional female a cricketer?
I remembered growing up playing cricket with my sisters and female cousins in our garden and even have a niece who played for India. So, why not a young Afghan woman who learned her cricket in India, returns to Kabul when the Taliban announce this and have her teach her cousins how to play this game? Through her I could explore the life of a woman under the Taliban rule and have my cricket team as well. She became my first revolution, cricket the second. She’s a courageous woman who risks her life to teach her brother and cousins to play the game and through her I could explore not only the suppression of a woman’s life but her life style, relationships with her family, social customs, her humour and the sly rebellion. And even add in her love story. She opened many new dimensions in the possibilities of the novel, moving away from cricket which now became secondary.
Q: Why in the 1st person?
Every artist must take risks, whether in writing, painting, film, dance, theatre. Once I had decided on Rukhsana as the main character I had to decide how to write her story. I wanted to focus entirely on her and her view of the world she lived in. The only way I saw how, was to tell the story entirely from her view. If I had written the novel in the third person, I felt distanced from her, as a writer, and it would be the same for the reader. In the third person I would have to leave her, sort of dangling, while I went into writing what the other characters felt and thought, give them an interior life too as one does in third person narratives. But in the first person, we hear what she hears them tell her, and this gives her the thoughts on them and we see them filtered through her thoughts and her eyes.
Do you have any personal experience of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban and if not, how did you research your characters? Did you have a friend or relative in mind as your mental ‘model’ for Rukhsana?
No, thankfully I didn’t have any personal experience living under the Taliban. I wouldn’t have lasted long as I’m not Muslim and most non-Muslims fled the country back then. First, I read all I could, books and website, on stories of life under the Taliban. In Delhi, I met a few Afghan refugees who told me their stories too. Then I went to Afghanistan and met men and women (working in offices beside men) who had lived under the Taliban and they told me what daily life was like in those years. I incorporated many of their stories and incidents into the novel. Surprisingly, the women had more sympathy for the men as the men had to grow beards and pray five times a day, otherwise they were beaten. The women told me life under the burka was hard, restricting their lives but they learned to survive. What worries them today is the fear that the Taliban will return and send the women back into those dark ages. I had sketched out the inner life of Rukhsana before I went to Afghanistan but didn’t have a complete image of her. Then when I was in Kabul airport going to through immigration I saw my Rukhsana – a woman in her 20s, lively, animated, talking to her friends, laughing easily. Now and then she’d frown and listen before reacting. And she had a ‘C’ curl of hair that fell across her forehead. She was also quite beautiful but unaware of her beauty. I watched her for ten minutes and then she was gone.
Q BBC How do you find the balance between the romance and the terror?
People don’t stop falling in love even under tyrants. It can’t be helped, and it does inspire hope. When I was in Afghanistan I hear many stories from both young men and women on how they had fallen in love and then both sexes were forced by their fathers to marry the man or woman of his choice and they all experienced that same long life of loneliness in living with a person for whom they had never had any affection or love. A friend of Rukshana’s tells her about her love affair and the denial by her family and knows Rukhsana too had fallen in love. So in writing this novel, with that in mind, I wanted to write about not only the darkness but the light in people’s lives. We need to remember always that we’re all alike, whether an Afghan Muslim or American Christian or an Indian Hindu, the whole range of people and their way of life is very similar. We have the same needs – to eat, to work, to love. We feel the same pain, the same humiliations, we have a sense of humor and we share the same pain of grief and tragedy. It’s no different what you are as a human, even under the worst tyrants, people try to remain normal and live through life the best they can. They are born, grow up, fall in love, marry, have children, celebrate their joys and mourn their sorrows.
Books set in Afghanistan are almost all unremittingly miserable. How does it feel to have perhaps written the first book about the life under the Taliban that doesn’t need to be sold with a large box of Kleenex?
I am delighted that Kleenex has lost a possible market. I wanted to show that under every tyranny, people did fight against the tyrants in many ways, some violently, others more cleverly. At the same time they have to lead ‘normal’ lives. We try to snatch joy and love under the most cruel circumstances in our need to survive and keep our sanity.
Your average British woman has a pretty low level of interest in cricket – your average American or Canadian even less so (Cricket? That’s like a grasshopper, right?) Was your book written with the Indian market in mind? Did you make any changes to the text to appeal more to readers who aren’t so cricket-savvy?
I didn’t write it with anyone in mind. Since, I enjoyed writing it, I thought there’ll be a few people out there who could enjoy reading it too. I was very surprised that my New York agent first loved the book, without saying ‘cricket! No one will read this?’ She sent it out New York publishers and the bigger surprise was that five responded, wanting to buy the novel. Ecco bought it and the editor, Lee, called me and we talked for an hour and she barely mentioned the word ‘cricket’. But yes, I had to cut back on the technical terms – leg slips, silly point, leg breaks – I used in the first draft as she didn’t understand their meanings. As I’ve played cricket nearly all my life, mostly in England for the Guardian newspaper team, the hardest work was simplifying the game but not so much for the readers but for the boys who are learning the game in the novel who had never seen a cricket match and thought cricket was an insect. India bought the novel only after the French, Dutch, Lithuanian and Norwegian publishers, none of whom, I suspect, have ever seen a game of cricket!
I suspect many readers will assume you are a woman, probably 20-30 years younger than you actually are – yes, I checked you out on Facebook! Is that stereotyping a good thing or a bad thing and are you amused or insulted by the inevitable mistakes?
I’m more amused. Writers are slotted into comfortable genres – thriller, crime, romance, historical, literary (whatever that means) and are expected, like prisoners, to remain in their allotted cells. The first question I’ve been asked is ‘how could you write this as a first person woman narrator?’ I had written a previous novel, ‘Lovers Are not People’ with a first person woman narrator and that did extremely well, with no questions asked. On this one, I had a mail from a woman in Texas who saw the book in Barnes & Nobel, was intrigued by the title and the story line but said she hesitated to buy it when she saw it was written by a man. Her letter was very flattering as she completely believed Rukhsana’s voice.
Is there any future for Rukhsana and her friends and family once the book ends? Where do you see them today, a decade after the events are set?
For Rukhsana, yes, there is a more stable future – a married life, happily I believe – and she returns to spend time in Afghanistan to write about it for a newspaper. By now, she has a couple of kids and is settled in New Delhi. Her brother Jahan, after his degree from Delhi University, is now in America, probably working on his masters or even working for NASA as that was his ambition. The cousins’ future could be darker. They were trying to get to Australia by paying a smuggler to get them there. The journey was hard and dangerous but they make it, are imprisoned by Australian immigration, appeal to the courts and, after a year, are finally allowed to settle in the country. They worked and studied in the evenings for their degrees, remaining close knit and supporting each other and now are happily settled down in their careers. They are the lucky ones – today hundreds of young Afghan men, more boys, walk all the way to Europe looking for work.
THE TELEGRAPH, KOLKOTA
Though I have come home, it is not quite home’ |
Novelist, filmmaker and journalist Timeri Murari has been writing for four decades. But the Chennai-based author, who returned to India after years abroad, tells Kavita Shanmugam that you need to read to be able to write. |
Consider this. He’s an acclaimed Indian English author and an illustrious journalist. He has been writing for 40 years and has penned 18 fiction and non-fiction books, including a period bestseller Taj. He has directed a play in England with Bend It Like Beckham actress Parminder Nagra. A documentary filmmaker, he also wrote and produced an internationally hailed film The Square Circle, made in Hindi by Amol Palekar as Daayra. Yet Timeri Murari — the Chennai-based writer who lived for 30 years in England and the US — is seldom to be seen in India’s literary circles or festivals. In a fast developing publishing world where every pretty young thing or geeky graduate is writing a book, Murari — an R.K. Narayan award winner (given by the Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India) — is a name that only the cognoscenti seem to be acquainted with. “It’s simple really why I am not spotted on the national literary scene. I am not invited,” says the spiffily-attired, 70-year-old scribe, clearly not unduly fussed about his isolation. “What can I say? It is all Delhi and Mumbai centric,” he says in his clipped, British accent. It is the festivals’ loss, for the writer with his inimitable and flawless style has notched up a rich oeuvre. Starting off on a novel set amidst Punjabi immigrants in the UK, he whisked up a mystery novel and then went on to make his mark with his historical fiction, Taj. From doffing a gentleman’s hat at Emperor Shah Jahan’s deep love for his wife, he portrayed the poignant, slow disintegration of a south Indian joint family in one of his best books, his semi-autobiographical Four Steps to Paradise. Or take his travelogue, Limping to the Centre of the Earth, on an “atheist’s” pilgrimage to Mount Kailash for the sake of an orphan. His latest fiction Taliban Cricket Club, which recently hit the bookstores, traces the daring escape of a spirited Afghan woman journalist from intolerant Talibans. Murari is happy with the enthusiastic response that the book has evoked in the US. Seated in a visitors’ room surrounded by paintings, artefacts and a long, walled bookshelf in his one-storey ancestral home, he talks about the feedback. “My editor in New York says this is the first time any of her books has been reviewed by National Geographic,” he says. The irrepressible author, who sticks to his discipline of writing every day from 7.30am to 1pm, has also moved on to his next novel — set in Afghanistan once again. What is his fascination for Afghanistan? “Afghanistan is our neighbour. Whatever happens there is bound to reverberate on us. In the last few years, the Taliban’s importance is growing. If Afghanistan goes to the Taliban, the al Qaeda will be at our doors,” points out this former journalist who has written for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, London. “The Afghanis are extremely courteous and friendly people. How can one help them? The country is a powder keg,” he says, spreading his hands helplessly. Murari, who covered the Indian elections during the Rajiv Gandhi era for a prominent political magazine, has always straddled journalism and fiction writing. It was while writing a piece for the The Sunday Times on union problems among Indian immigrant textile mill workers in Coventry that his first novel was born. “The article got stuck because of legal problems and I had all this research material. So I decided to fictionalise it,” he recounts. This immigrant tale titled The Marriage revolved around an Indian girl falling in love with a British boy. Murari has had no formal training in writing. He was studying engineering in London when he decided to move to McGill University in Canada to study political science and history. While studying there he wrote a piece for a Canadian newspaper on a summer logging experience. That was the beginning of his career in journalism, though he moved soon to England where he joined The Guardian. “Writers are born,” says Murari, citing his example of not having gone to creative writing school. However, he emphasises the importance of reading. “You have to read many, many writers before you work out your own style.” He laughs when I ask him about the “mini-explosion” of Indian English writers on the publishing landscape. “It is like my editor says, every person has a short story inside them, not a novel. What we are seeing today is short stories being stretched into novels.” The constant “churning” in the publishing world with new technological developments such as e-books and Kindle makes it difficult to predict the future of this field, he says. “Everyone thinks they can write. But it is hard. What most people don’t do is read the great writers. You can only learn from reading the best writers out there,” he says, reeling off names from his list of the best — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and so on. Murari, who was born in an illustrious Telugu Naidu family in Chennai (his grandfather’s friends included powerful politicians such as K. Kamaraj), was circled by books as a child. Parts of his childhood figure in Four Steps to Paradise — a novel that he is particularly fond of, as is his Australian wife Maureen. It tells the story from the eyes of a young boy, Krishna, of how an outsider, a European woman, breaks up a family. “It is biographical in parts,” admits Murari, whose father — a civil servant in the Madras Presidency — married a foreigner after his mother’s death. “This novel is full of depth and strength probably since it is set in my own past,” he reflects. “Did not Hemingway say that writers should stick to writing what they know? It might be good advice but writers also need to write about things they don’t know and should learn from,” he adds. His more recent book, Limping to the Centre of the Earth, was one such adventure. The book emerged out of a story. Murari’s wife was caring for an abandoned sick baby who needed an operation which was very risky. “People told me that if I went to Mount Kailash and made a wish, it would come true and I wanted to do it for the child,” says Murari, who made the journey despite a weak knee. Though not superstitious, he adds that the little baby survived. Now adopted, his photograph adorns a table in the room. Murari loved his journey to Mount Kailash in Tibet. “It is special; it’s not just an unusual looking mountain. You feel awed standing before it because of its history and age. It dates back to mythology, to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. I loved the solitude and getting up to 18,000 feet and coming back alive,” he says with a laugh. If you probe his lack of belief in God, he says, “I prefer to think nature is God.” He scoffs at the Large Hadron Collider’s claim of being closer to locating God’s particle. “The closer they get to it the farther it will move away. The mystery of the universe is such that nobody can solve it.” Cricket, which plays a huge role in Taliban Cricket club, is a big passion. Having learnt cricket in what was Chennai from his grandfather and father, Murari later played with the likes of British playwrights Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and American writer James Baldwin when he lived in New York. Baldwin, in fact, once advised him against taking up the onerous task of becoming a full-time writer. But Murari wrote, even while he focused on making documentaries. It was while shooting a documentary on detectives in South Bronx in New York (“cops are wonderful storytellers”) that he got the grist for a mystery novel, Shooters. New York was also where he married Maureen. You can tell that Murari was a handsome man in his younger days. Even now, tall and distinguished looking with a receding hairline, dark bushy eyebrows and lively black eyes, he is quite a force to reckon with. But Murari stressed that he got “tired” of the US. Along with Maureen, he returned to India in 1988 to become a part of “changing” India. “I wanted to write about India with authority by living here rather than as a tourist,” Murari says, adding that his father’s failing health also prompted him to return. Murari admits that it has not been an easy transition to live in “exciting but exacerbating India” after living away for 30 years. “I don’t regret it. Sometimes, I feel restless, dislocated. Though I have come home, it is not quite home,” he says quoting Tom Wolfe: “You can never return, you can never go home.” |