Life | Q&A with Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

http://www.verveonline.com/29/life/qna/excerpt.shtml

< Back To Article

Photograph by Preeti Singh

PUBLISHED: Volume 12, Issue 3, Third Quarter 2004

That I was left alone as a child was the most crucial gift my parents gave me.... I was allowed the space to not become anyone in particular but my own self.
The teenager, who curled up in a tree house reading books, has blossomed into an award-winning author. Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvis The Last Song of Dusk recently won the Betty Trask Award, one of UKs most prestigious prizes for debut novels. In an intimate chat with Sangita P. Advani in Mumbai, the new writer on the block mulls over solitude, sexuality and redefining gender roles. By now, theres little we can tell you about Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi that you dont already know from the media. How a Mumbai-born Juhu boy who spent his formative years walking on the beach, has recently won one of UKs most prestigious prizes for debut novels; previous winners include Meera Syal and Hari Kunzru. Or how this former kennel-boy, at the age of just 26, has been called the Next Big Thing after Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, by no less a personage than the august, literary Sunday Times, London. In India, just three months after its release, the hardback version of Shanghvis book, The Last Song of Dusk, is already into its third print, unheard of for an Indian edition. And a whirlwind of pre-launch publicity in Europe and the USA has already made the author a recognised name, ahead of the book hitting the stores there. But unwrap the crackling hype and surprise, surprise the gift you are startled to discover is this: a simply unputdownable story, a writing talent that is dew in its ability to moisten the heart as it glistens over the tale. And then theres Shanghvis stunningly creative language, a celebration of an English thats unapologetically Indian, yet transcendingly universal. Shanghvi uses this magic brush to paint a grand leela of vast themes, of kismet, karma, love and sexuality. How has India inspired your writing? I dont think India has inspired my writing in as much as it has the process of writing. India is naturally and relentlessly dramatic: here, the narrative is of lifes conflict with itself and this drama never folds up, there is no curtain call. The natural chaos of India makes you think in ways that are not always linear and this either broadens your understanding of what is logical, or transcends it entirely. And when you sidestep logic, the world before you is much larger and zanier. To live happily in India you have to bypass logic to some extent. And maybe thats also where magic lies: ahead of the rationale and the explicable. The chief theme of your book is love. And yet every character in The Last Song of Dusk is exiled from the landscape of love. Irony allows you to consider the rapture of love, if only to get to the ruin underneath it. When Vardhmaan and Anuradhas marriage fails because Vardhmaan stops speaking I was only trying to see if there was a failure of love or failure of self. More often than not, I see that love expresses itself in its own language, employing its own quirky grammar. But because we expect love to look and sound in a particular way we miss its various expressions in our own lives. When, years later, Anuradha finds herself in the silent but fulfilling companionship of her husband, she is in possession of a love that has transcended language a much greater avatar of love than what she started out with. Your book is a kind of a paean to music. What role does music play in your life? Music is the canvas upon which I imagine my stories: its the stuff I lay on all the ideas, the themes, the conflicts. I also use music to store scenes as well as to follow an internal narrative. I can play a certain piece of Chopin and know exactly how it connects me to a scene in The Last Song of Dusk. Music is more important to me than literature because it articulates more purely and accurately what language can only hope to accomplish. What role did your family play in your formation as a writer? That I was left alone as a child was the most crucial gift my parents gave me. I shacked up in a tree house until I was 12 or 13 reading books or just being alone. Theres a lot you can learn from that

1 of 2

1/5/2013 3:05 PM

Life | Q&A with Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

http://www.verveonline.com/29/life/qna/excerpt.shtml

its what adds fibre to your character, nuance to your personality. Today, when I see my nephews rush from some kind of a tuition to some other equally annoying music-class-type activity, I wonder where theyll find the time to look at the monsoon puddles or fly kites for unstructured slots of time. That kind of time is far more instructional than any class you can go to. I am grateful that my mother always allowed me to run away from school almost on a regular basis (which, incidentally, I found mind numbingly boring.) I was allowed the space to not become anyone in particular but my own self. Is solitude essential to writing? Non-negotiably so. But how difficult is it for a 26-year-old to be so alone? I imagine you spent your early 20s tucked in a small room, writing away for long hours. Werent you tempted to go out and enjoy life, to party like others of your age? I am not fundamentally solitary but I realise that my craft needs vast stretches of loneliness time to bear fruition. Id rather spend an evening around a dinner table listening to and telling stories to my close friends (instead of being holed up in a room somewhere, writing away. I mean, how boring is that!) But these days I do find myself pulling back, cutting away just to gather the story, just to set it down. My instinct suggests that, in the long term, this will prove detrimental: solitude is important, but our human interactions are elemental. Without them, there is no story. And without a story, there is no storyteller. It is possible to write yourself into a corner, and Im consciously trying to avoid that degree of isolation. Why is your book so sexual? Are you genuinely interested in the sexual mechanics or are you pulling a polemics card on us? If the last 20 years of post-modernism gave us room to investigate race and gender, the next 20 years will study how we form our sexual self and how we construct gender. Were probably at a historically significant time in the discourse on sexuality first, that we are actually having some kind of a conversation over it; and second, that were redefining gender roles. What does it mean to be a man? Or a woman? Are there genders beyond the binaries of male and female? How does gender formation influence our sexuality? These are all important, political and ultimately, hopelessly personal questions Id like to examine in the zone of a novel or of photography. Lets face it. Your book is a hit. Some critics love it. But others have written huge essays of hate for it. What is your take on it? Not everyone is going to like what you write, and bearing that disclaimer in mind, its one thing to make room for subjectivity in a review; but its quite another to allow a review coloured with envy, self-frustration, or the juvenile impulse to make a statement. What has brought me some perspective is my sisters counsel: if everyone loves you, youre boring.

2 of 2

1/5/2013 3:05 PM