My Diary

We keep diaries not merely to mark the passage of time but to remind ourselves that we were alive for the past year.  I’ve always woken each morning, grateful and surprised, I can rise from my bed and see the sun’s light. This goes back to my childhood when I was extremely ill and the family surrounded the bed for a final farewell. It was a pretty dramatic moment for a kid to say goodbye to the world he had barely experienced. I remember falling asleep to the mourning faces, woke feeling feisty, and well at the dawn.

I don’t put my recovery down to any medical miracle but that morning the seed that living and dying was very random entered my thinking.  Or was it fate that I was meant to live?  Either way, I had had no choice in the matter as by the random/fate theory I somehow survived. Creationists, a new term in our lexicon of delusions, believe ‘someone’ made the universe and us humans, like a watchmaker making a watch. It took billions of years for the universe, and us, to appear and we only made it because of chemical combinations that simmered in the seas and cooked us out onto land. There was no creator working on us, it just happened, a trillion to one chance, in my opinion, as to why we walk the earth. We evolved painfully slowly.  The writer Douglas Adams said it more humorously, ‘There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.’

Prayers and invocations to gods are no talisman against death and disaster. If they were many millions would not die in Rwanda, Dafur, Iraq or Afghanistan. Isn’t ethnic cleansing (mass murder) random too? Fatefully you were born in the wrong group and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life, or should I say death, is even more random these days. You could be in a train, a plane, a bus, the market and some idiot decides to blow himself up, taking you with him.   Early this year a lovely orphan child died, and it was foretold. Mala was a turbulent personality and ready to join her adoptive parents. Sadly, she had a bad heart and our best surgeons could do little to save her life.  I was in Paris in May to be beside ‘Bhima’ (I wrote a book on him) who underwent 13 hour surgery performed by the best paediatric surgeon in the world. Now his life is certainly fateful. Born and discarded at birth, because of a physical problem, in a remote Tamil Nadu village, there he is in Paris, speaking fluent French, surrounded by an adoring family and pretty French nurses at his beck and call. As a baby he had no control of his life, he could have died too, not knowing the world, and had little to do with his being in a Paris children’s hospital. Why him? Why Mala?  Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld famously said.  But we don’t know why it happens.

Driving from Paris around Europe in a wonderfully hi-tech Peugeot, I felt re-affirmed that random lives. I’m used to cheaper Indian or UK model cars. This car had a mind of its own; it controlled me. Lights came on automatically when it grew dark, a few drops of rain and the wipers automatically went berserk.  I was never certain if the car was locked as, with the ‘key’ in my pocket, the door would automatically open each time I touched the handle to check if it was locked.  That drove me nuts. I’d send my wife then to check it was locked and stood a safe distance away.  I hate having something like a stupid car making decisions for me. It could drive me off a cliff if its computer rebelled or had a breakdown.

I am not the stuff for pilgrimages to anywhere, as I have no belief in such shows of piety. However, weirdly, I did make the brutally hard trek to Mount Kailas. Now that was as unpredicted as the spin of a roulette wheel.  We have a Ministry of External Affairs (China section) computer randomly pick the names of applicants out of a few thousand to make that trek. My name and number came up and I nearly backed out because of a bum knee but decided to make it. When fate comes up with your name, it’s best to see where it takes you. It was a journey into the very heart of the natural world of mountains and infinite silences. I decided, standing among the mountains, that nature is our god, and nothing else could take that place. So most of the year I worked on the book about my journey to Mount Kailas. 

But the work was interrupted by another unforeseen event. Seven years ago, an American woman producer had called to option my novel ‘Taj’ for a film. I’d turned her down and made the fatal mistake of going with a Bollywood one who went no where. She called mid-summer, out of the blue to ask if the film rights were still available. I was so surprised at her persistence that I admitted they were. Did she wake up one morning and decide she’d make that long distance call?  Without any hesitation, her film partner flew over for the day to meet me. Just one day, a very long journey, as he is a busy man. He was warm, friendly and appeared to know what he was about, rare in the film industry. It was flattering, after all the novel was 25-years-old, though recently reissued by Penguin India. But film making is the most random form of art. It costs money, lots of it, and the roulette wheel can spin it into a fortune and or spin it out back into obscurity. 

The only time a writer can control life is when he or she writes a work of fiction – a novel, play, short story. I spent another part of the years re-working and re-writing, endlessly re-writing, my new novel, The Small House, which Penguin publishes next year. The story’s set in Madras, Chennai, whichever, but the physical landscape remains unchanged.  When we become the creator we can practise the creationist theory with abandon.  But then there are problems with being a creator as often as not the creation goes out of control, characters refuse to do what we ordain and do the opposite, even as we human beings do in real life.  And if there is a creator of our world my sympathies lie with him/it/her as we uncontrollably slaughter each other and destroy the earth that brought us to life.  Like any novelist, the creator must be wondering how to lead us back to its original intentions.  Don’t ask me what the original intention of our existence was. I haven’t the faintest idea.