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The Vikram Seth Chat

'Agar maine Awara Hoon na gaaya hota, to main abhi tak economist rahta'

For all those of us who stayed awake that night, he was on time. The first thing that strikes you about Vikram Seth, in India to promote his latest novel An Equal Music, is his height, which is of Napoleonic proportions.

The writer whom Shobha De predicts will win a Nobel Prize spared more than his promised hour forThe Rediff Chat, hosted from New Delhi, and we are pleased to say he enjoyed it as did those who were online with him.

The poet and novelist mulled over his answers before keying in his replies. The questions came fast and furious, but Seth kept apace, till time ran out. Happily, he has promised an encore after his next book.

Hello, I am here for your questions.

Dear Mr Seth, I really loved A Suitable Boy, which I have just read. I read it in Finnish. Have your other books been translated in Finnish?

Natalia: I'm afraid that no other novels have been translated into Finnish so far, but An Equal Music, my most recent novel, will be translated by WSOY later this year.

Do you have a website or some email address where one can keep in touch with you? I live in America. Studying here

divya: I try to keep my computer in a state of virginal purity. I'm neurotic, rather, paranoid about a bug wiping out my next opus. So I'm not even on e-mail, let alone connected to webs or other spidery devices. But this cyber-cafe (on someone else's computer) is fun.

Vikram Seth: Welcome to the Rediff chat. It is an absolute honour to chat with you, even though it is a 'virtual' thing! How much time did it take for you to finish A Suitable Boy -- working an average of how many hours a day?

Indian: I wrote A Suitable Boy in fits and starts rather than at the rate of a certain number of hours a day. It took me about seven years to write (and about three years to recover from it).

Mr Seth, are you writing any new book??

boy: Not at the moment; I'm too busy answering questions about this one. But I might write a play next -- or maybe a children's story -- or a biography of my great-uncle, a dentist who lost his right arm.

Mr Coordinator. Do we need to repeat the questions if they disappear from the list? I was asking about living and writing in the (warm) shadow of success, but it was way back when.

Arnthrudur: Sorry about the lost question. When you've had a success with a previous book, you're naturally very anxious about how the next one will do. There are all sorts of expectations and doubts. But the thing is to keep your eye on your story and your characters, and let sales and fame and "success" take care of themselves.

Which was your favourite person in Suitable Boy?

Natalia: Cuddles the dog (just kidding). But he was the only character who was given his real name; after all, he couldn't sue.

Mr Seth....your characters in The Golden Gate were very refreshingly real...so what do you observe to be common characteristics/needs of most humans???

Drax: Thanks for your kind comment about The Golden Gate. I'm not sure about what human beings have in common. Part of why I am a novelist is an attempt to find out.

Mr Seth, would you ever write a book like Satanic Verses?

Unsuitable Boy: Come now, don't be provocative!

I loved Beastly Tales. You haven't tried your hand at humour too much, any reason?

Shuchi: There is quite a lot of humour in An Equal Music, if you know where to find it.

Do you think the break in your writing career came when you sang Awara Hoon to the Chinese policemen? That got you into Tibet and Heavenly Lake. Do you believe in luck?

Amber: ji haan, agar maine Awara Hoon na gaaya hota, to main abhi tak economist rahta.

Tell us about the great uncle who lost his arm at Monte Cassini and his what was it German Jewish wife?

Shambu: You're very well-informed. Here are two tidbits: 1. They were both born in 1908; my uncle was in fact born on 08-08-08. (That was fun to key in). 2. My aunt escaped to England one month before World War 2.

You say you don't use computers. Do you write in longhand?

Velutha: I write in longhand and on the computer. But I keep my computer unlinked to anything else for fear of bugs.

David Puttnam was supposed to make Suitable Boy into a television serial. Whatever happened to it?

Balwinder: Channel 4 in England spent half a million pounds on development, including commissioning ten scripts. Then, for some reason, they ran out of money. I was too engaged with other matters to follow things up, and besides, it wouldn't have been much good.

Mr Seth.. how do you feel about this comparison between you and Rushdie. Is there really such competition or is it hype?

Cosmic Girl: I feel probably the same as he does: it's a lazy comparison, but what can one do about it? Anyway, it won't succeed in creating bad blood between us.

Has sexuality mattered a great deal to you? You are ambiguous about sex in your last great book.

Nathan: Sex and sexuality, I imagine, matter a great deal to everyone, not just to writers. How much sex I put into a book depends on the kind of book it is. I know that sounds banal, but that's the way my writing works.

Who is Phillipe Honore, and what does he mean to your life?

Amber: I might answer your question (but then again I might not) if you spelt his name correctly.

Vikram, are you a happy person ?

saras: I'm not an intrinsically unhappy person. I do value happiness. At one time, however, I didn't. I thought it was Byronic and cool to be glum.

(trying for a third time) Tell me, Mr Seth, was there a race between you and Mr Rushdie about who would finish their novel first? And how did both of you come up with similar themes?

abhiram: sorry about the lost questions. No, no race; in fact, complete ignorance about the fact that the other was writing a book about love and music. But it's not such a coincidence. After all, India is big, and love and music are very general themes. It isn't as if we were two teenagers from Hokkaido writing about mousetraps. Now that would probably imply collusion or competition.

Yahan toh koi response hi nahin milti. Chalo phir koshish karte hain -- Seth sahib do you get irritated when people read too much into your novel and assume that they are getting to know the real you?

mee: Maaph keejiye, itne saare sawaal aa rahe hain, ki main keep up nahin kar sakta hun. Michael in An Equal Music is not me. Nor is Amit in A Suitable Boy. But there are bits of me scattered throughout my novels. I have to enter the mind and heart of all my characters to some degree, even Charlemagne and Cuddles.

Mr Seth: How come you are not seen much on the Indian media ?

Mohan Das: I'm a bit of a recluse. I do a lot of publicity when a book is published, and then I disappear. It's been a long time since my last novel; that's why I haven't been around.

Hello Vikram, do you like being famous or is it just incidental?

Babbal: There are one or two advantages to fame: greater access, a bit of an ego-boost. But on the whole, it's a pain: there are a lot of difficult demands on your time, and people who don't know you feel they do. Still, at least, unlike movie stars and politicians and sportspeople, you can have a meal in a restaurant without being recognised. Your face isn't part of your fame. And celebrityhood is, blessedly, rapidly followed by nonentityhood!

Why are you determined not to answer any questions about your contemporaries? Don't you read any of them? Chaudhri? Ghosh? Roy? Seally? And now Jha?

Kishenchand: I don't read many novels. When I was writing A Suitable Boy, I tried deliberately to avoid reading Indian novels, for obvious reasons. But I couldn't resist reading the latest R K Narayan when it came out. He's a wonderful writer, the greatest of us all.

Hi Vikram, I have read so much about you but nowhere is it mentioned about your wife or gf etc..why don't you reveal on that front?

srinivas: behave yourself! Why the heck should I reveal my life to someone I don't know in a public forum like this?

In your books passion (which is by nature unruly) always seems to go wrong. You seem to advocate a level headed commitment, -- carefully arranged marriages. Is it your conviction or is passion gone wrong just such a good material?

Arnthrudur: No, I don't believe passion always goes wrong. Watch out for my fourth novel. (What I mean is that in the circumstances of my particular characters, things didn't work out; but that's no reason why they shouldn't, given a different set of people and circumstances.)

Hi Vikram, you are an adorable writer, wish you could write something great about India, that once again makes us feel proud of our country. By the way are you proud to be an Indian?

wait: thanks. I'd like to write about India again, but the only way to write well about a place is not to force it. Yes, I'm proud to be an Indian. But I don't think this should imply a denigration of any other nationality, or -- most crucially in the present circumstances -- of any religious or regional group within our country.

When they said poetry would not sell, you wrote poetry. When they said a big novel would not sell, you wrote a monster novel. Did you do it consciously or to prove a point?

Lal: No, not consciously, but out of a rash impulse towards economic suicide. Actually, I was impelled forward by the characters in the two novels you mention, and economics didn't even enter the picture.

Mr Seth: A profile in The Guardian recently quoted your old poem Dubious "Some men like Jack and some like Jill. I am glad I like them both". Any comments?

Mohan Das: That was an incomplete quotation. Here is the poem in its entirety:

Dubious

Some men like Jack And some like Jill/I'm glad I like Them both/but still, I wonder if This freewheeling Really is an Enlightened thing/-- Or is its greater Scope a sign Of deviance from Some party line?/In the strict ranks Of Gay and Straight/What is my status:/Stray? or Great?

Hi: I really liked your Kim Tarvesh bit... the letters unscrambled to you... did anyone ask you about it before? ihteerp

P Sundaram: There are others. Shiv Market on the last page of A Suitable Boy; and Keith Varms, the solicitor in An Equal Music.

(trying my luck again and again and again and again and again) hi Mr Seth! a lot of people say you're gonna win the Nobel prize for literature...comment

Rakshanda: you are persistent. Winning any prize should not improve your opinion of your own writing, and not winning it should not make you think any the less of your work.

Do you earn enough by writing?

Rahul: Yes, but I didn't expect to. As a poet, you can't earn enough from your writing, and until I'd written A Suitable Boy I always thought of myself as a poet. Anyway, A Suitable Boy shouldn't even have been published, given its length and setting, let alone sold in any numbers. I never expected to be able to support myself on the basis of that book, and I'm really lucky that I was proved wrong.

Could I have your Email ID?

Amit Solomon: No. Or if you like: No No No No No No No. But it's nice of you to ask for it (once).

Is selfishness central to your success as a writer?

Lal: to some extent, yes; you've got to make time for yourself and your characters, even if you can't be there to some extent for other people. But if you're too selfish a person, you wouldn't have any human sympathy to give to the people in your books.

Do you think the advent of modernism has made it much more difficult for writers to write like Dickens, about the bare essentials of life? Love, for instance.

Abraham: Not modernism necessarily, but too great a sense of self-consciousness vis-a-vis the writers of the past and present-day critics. Love, death, passion, honour, ambition, etc are now treated as the province of so-called airport novels; and that is nonsense. Why should non-schlockbuster novelists not write about these things that are so central to human life?

Why did Lata marry Haresh and not Kabir... why why why...

Miss Lata M: Now, now, you know better than to give the plot away for those who haven't read it yet. As for why, do you think I decided the matter? Lata decided for herself, and I'm not sure I approve of her decision.

Mr Seth, at least say bye to me... Otherwise I will really drown in my pool of tears...which is filling up really fast.

divya; bye; don't drown; I haven't taken my Life-Saver's Certificate yet.

Is love/despair/romance a necessary ingredient for a best-selling novel? Couldn't Michael's fixation with his teachers, for instance, been a rich enough plot?

sandip: no, it's not a necessary ingredient, but it isn't something to be necessarily avoided either. You just write a book as you see it, that's all. (I wasn't avoiding the question, I just thought that I'd answered it indirectly in my answer to Abraham's question.

Mr Seth, did you ever study writing?

Indeed: not prose, but I did study verse with the wonderful American writer Timothy Steele. Read him if you want to read someone whose work will give you pleasure and insight.

Mr Seth, I could not understand the end of SB. Why did Lata marry Haresh? Could she be happy? If she HAD to choose, why not Amit, who is more similar to her? I am not Indian and I found it very strange.

Arnthrudur: so where are you from? I'm curious.

Well, it's been a pleasure and an experience! Thank you very much, everyone. I'm signing off now. Wish my exhausted fingers well.

Photographs: Atul Chowdhury