I am interested in your attention to detail. It takes us to the beginnings of High Modernism in English writing, even further back to the great realist novels of the nineteenth century, but what is interesting is that the detail is always accompanied by feeling. The courtyard, in the opening section in Five Movements in Praise, for instance, has “two rectangles of unexpected grass” (11, italics mine). I can sense that detail is important for you, but a flight away from imminent detail is more persistent. If I frame my question in the larger historical tradition of literary devices, how important and resolute is detail, and the entire history of realistic writing associated with that kind of detail, as well as your flight away from that kind of realistic detail important for you in your writing?

What you are calling detail is for me no different than everything else I am composing. So “unexpected” grass is not a tiny part of a circumscribed whole. I compose holding the human and the non-human equally in my mind, without hierarchy. So I don’t think of foreground or background, each thing has its own place. I compose with light, a person, a consciousness, a landscape, an architecture. The biographical and the non-biographical have equal place. I compose this way because I see this way. It is not something I think about consciously when I am writing. In the European or Anglo-Saxon novel, there is always a separation between the human and the non-human, a clear hierarchy. That has its own historical and cultural reasons. So what you are calling flight away from realistic detail in my work is only a seeing which takes in the universe with its million elements, of which we see very little at a time, because our own emotional and mental vision is usually limited.

What is the place of ritual in your writing? By ritual I don’t always mean a religious ritual, but a ritual of the everyday. You seem to see everyday happenings as rituals. This, I feel, is achieved, not simply by means of an intensified description of specific movements or sounds, but the actual, literal use of the word ritual and several sentences devoted to what a particular ritual may mean. It takes us away, again, from description (what the ritual is) to philosophy (what the ritual may mean: its possible historical connections presented as a hypothesis). Is this deliberate?

I am not a ritualistic person in my own life, in any religious way. But I do have immense respect for the rituals laid down by superior minds in our own Indian cultural and religious traditions, of which the ones in Hinduism are most familiar to me. Of course, today, this sense of ritual has lost all its original meaning and is utterly corrupt.

Perhaps this respect for rituals has seeped into me. I do respect and remember many rituals from my childhood that are hardly practiced now, though some still remain. Say touching the feet of an elder for example. Being older myself now, I realise that this gesture is not simply honoring someone’s age in a literal sense. It is respecting the life lived by that person, everything that they have gone through. It is a subtle thing, but very important.

There is another dimension to my writing about rituals in my work. I respect the ordinary, the everyday, in many ways it forms the basis of life. If I watch the street I live on through the day, experience how it changes over the course of the day, I am impacted by the repetitions that happen, and by sudden interruptions of the repetition. The ordinary to me is linked to the cosmic which also happens every day whether we are aware of it or not. Saying a prayer to the sun each morning has its roots in this understanding. So the description of the ritual must in itself say something when I write it, and in this saying I can go further and discover its ever expanding meanings.

The concept of wholeness and a tragic, serious pain that emerges from this loss of wholeness is consistent in your writing, across all your books. This is a familiar theme that emerges in several writers who come from a geographic or historical context of having experienced traumatic pasts (colonialism, partition, migration etc.). Usually, they’re often framed as ‘postcolonial writing’. What strikes me is that I cannot place your work anywhere near the literary analysis that is associated with this framework. This is because your work is consistently away from the literary devices used by postcolonial writers. You may not, of course, be doing this deliberately, and everyone has their own path to become whole again, but why did you choose this path and stayed on this course? Why was it necessary to move away from realism that most English writers who are or write about the subcontinent rely on? Your work is not even close to what is framed as magic realism, but it has, of course, closer links to that tradition. It is wholly original, unclassifiable.

I didn’t really choose a path. Since my twenties I was attracted to forms which were not part of the linear narrative tradition. So in a way, it chose me.

Let’s first talk about the loss of wholeness and a related pain. I think that there are wounds that I write from, wounds that are impossible to heal, that may be rooted in my own self but have gone far beyond or are wounds that have always existed without any cause. And the tone and texture of one’s work is a response to that, in an unconscious way, and each work is an impossible attempt at wholeness. I keep saying “unconscious” not to avoid answering a question. It is simply what Pessoa says, “If the heart could think it would stop.”

The term “post-colonial” means nothing to me, as I feel colonialism is not over but has taken other forms. Also by creating these terms critics find it easy to slot writing coming from certain areas. I deal with that cultural loss that India has gone through and to me is still going through, in more personal ways. What is it, for example, that I take away when I stand in a cave at Ellora? What is the loss I am devastated by. What is there still existing in these caves that nourishes me even now?

The need to move away from the realist narrative tradition is an acute one for me. Again it is not something which comes from the mind, I would say it is something visceral. Perhaps it is a need for depth at all times, something I learnt from poetry, which I read much more than fiction. I think we should experience something with every sentence.

The other reason is our own world here on the subcontinent. We live in a complex culture, encountering difference every moment. The self is questioned, fractured, injured, or made whole, all over the course of one day. The imagination responds to this. Our contemporary subcontinent is not a result of eliminations, as in the West, it is manifold, fluctuating and paradoxical, containing the very old and the very new. How would a strict realist form contain this? Geography must mean something. Here, we are writing against, writing for, carrying forward the seeds of pain and doubt. Belief and defiance exist together.

You call my work wholly original. I don’t ever think of that when I am working. That is for others to comment on. When you say each work of mine is very different, it is because each time I begin anew. There is no given form I can take on before I write. That is the thing about writing that is not realist: each time it is a discovery. So one begins in a precarious position, entirely in the unknown. And you have no idea whether it will all come together. But it is a joyous thing, although difficult. Which is why it is near impossible to imitate a Kafka, a Sebald, a Chejfec. There are people who try but they are weak attempts, because they have not begun from the same core of necessity.

I think that in India, many writers, in all the languages, especially in the generations gone before, have needed realism to convince themselves that they have left behind the irrational, the ritualistic, what is said to be the backwardness of this land. They wanted a release perhaps from myths and legends and gods. A release from vague and light versions of the mystical. At a certain time this may have been justified. But now we should have the faith to be ourselves, in all our chaos, in all the force of velocity of the million elements here that meet and clash, meet and part, meet and merge.

I do not in any way wish to undermine here the great realist novelists of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries who were masters of the form. But I do think that form might have reached the end of the road today.

Thanks very much for that thoughtful response. I think that your response brings me to another question about genre, particularly poetry. There is something intensely poetic in all your work, even when you’re writing prose. The question of rationalism and irrationalism is also connected to genre, I think. Even the most rational minds in other artistic forms, often resorted to irrationality in artistic forms. I’m thinking of a Ritwik Ghatak in film, or an Utpal Dutt in theatre. The latter also said that the greatest loss of modern Bengali theatre is the loss of poetry. Unlike the great heydays of Girish Chandra Ghosh’s nineteenth century theatre where historical characters spoke in poetic metre, the 20th century modern theatre of his own time, had lost the ability to communicate in poetry. What is the place of the poetic in your work? I don’t mean your book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards, or even individual works which can be categorised as ‘prose poems,’ but the poetic in all your work.

Raul Zurita, in his introduction to the great anthology Pinholes in the Night, calls Juan Rulfo’s short story a poem. It is to be noted that he has included it in this book of Latin American poetry. So it is a way of using language, a vision, that Zurita is discerning in Rulfo’s work. The “form” becomes immaterial for him.

In prose, normally, as opposed to poetry, question and answer are closely related. In the poetic question and answer are distant from each other, sometimes even unrelated, because the space created by the poetic is always vast.

In the poetic, the world is suffused through the whole, each line produces or builds depth, one is never outside, describing the experience, but inside it. This, for me is important. It allows me as I said earlier to cut through things and go to the heart.

Any prose writer who writes in this poetic mode will have crafted their sentences with utter care so that each one speaks. The Polish writer Bruno Schulz comes to mind, or Proust, and Hermann Broch who is a master, his Death of Virgil is nothing but a long prose poem.

What you are responding to is a quality. Let us also remember that the poetic runs in our blood as human beings, it is the ineffable heart of lullabies, prayers, chants, song–things that everyone has known intimately over centuries and I believe we all still need. It is us giving voice to things outside the rational. And the opposite to the word rational is not irrational, it is imagination and poetic truth, a truth which is always provisional, but allows us to live more completely.

A question about the city, and the city of Bombay in particular, where you have been living for more than two decades now. There has been a burgeoning academic scholarship on what is now called the ‘Bombay school’ for some years now, particularly the work of Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Arun Kolatkar. While the representative figures of this school, if we exclude Jussawalla’s brilliant “Missing Person” and some poems from Trying to Say Goodbye, or even Mehrotra’s conscious efforts at surrealism, focus on naming Bombay and particularising it to its specific detail in a William Carlos Williams kind of attention to particularities, you constantly try to strive for abstraction in your writing of the city . The city is called “City,” the town “Town” and so on. In your recent book, Extinctions, there is a closer examination of particularities, and the city is Calcutta in some places, or specific objects from Calcutta in a particular time, but the flight to abstraction is constant and imminent. How do you think the city enters your work, the city of abstraction, not the city of particularities as we have seen in an earlier phase of Indian English writing?

I abhor that saying of Williams, “No ideas except in things.” Literature does not mirror the world, it disturbs the world, holds it up to its gaze, penetrates it for the subterranean immensities it contains. So what you call abstraction is really a looking at things where the connections between them, over them, around them, beneath them, begin to show, and each element gives off its texture and feeling and form, till they no longer remain grounded in their own particularities. As if they were not things, but formations, breathing their own breath, in a landscape of continuity. We come back to that seeing of the human and the non-human on the same plane, equally. Again, I am not striving for this. But I know when it’s not there, when I am not able to see it.

To me, the crux of language is to be able to go vertically in through the crust, the mantle and the molten core of our being. Remember Tukaram’s

“We are here
To reveal
We do not waste
Words”