Home run: Wknd sits down with Jeet Thayil to talk about his deeply personal new book
It's a 'conundrum of a novel', says Jeet Thayil, of his new book, The Elsewhereans.
It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding.
The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways.
The reader isn't meant to know which is which. 'I want you to wonder… to keep guessing,' Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add to the sense of confusion.
A few years on, he enters the tale, born in the backwaters of Kerala, followed by his sister Sheba Thayil (who would also go on to be a journalist and writer). The family would move from Bombay to Bihar, then Hong Kong and New York; the novel unfolds also in Vietnam, France, Germany and the UK.
As it traces his teen years, when he 'lived to defy and dismay my father', and builds itself around his deep love for his mother, what emerges is Thayil's most personal novel since The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017; a pacy, autobiographical work that also married memory and fiction).
Incidentally, in 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, for his debut novel, Narcopolis, about opium, Mumbai and one man's struggles with drugs. (The novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.)
'This is a story about a family of Indians out in the world,' says Thayil, 65.
Excerpts from an interview.
* Where did the idea for The Elsewhereans come from?
This is material I've been saving, or hoarding, all my life; material that never found its correct form. The novel — discrete stories, some written in the third person, some in the first, set in different eras, on different continents — assumed its true shape only towards the end of the writing.
Some of those stories were gratifying to relate. For example, the story about my father starting AsiaWeek in Hong Kong. They sold a majority stake to Reader's Digest, which sold the shares on to Time, and then Time eventually shut AsiaWeek down. This is a story only journalists in Asia, Europe, America and India knew about, that AsiaWeek was a magazine run by Asians for Asians, in the '70s, and that it was killed by Time… Like that story, there are others that illuminate forgotten corners of history.
* This is also a book about your difficult relationship with your father….
For most of my teens, I tried to be the opposite of what he wanted me to be.
My father (now 97) is gifted in many ways, but not so much when it comes to the minutiae of fatherhood. He comes from a long line of conservative Malayali Syrian Christian men for whom parenting is about distance, punishment and anger. But if you don't have a relationship where you're also a friend to your children, you miss out on a lot. The child may end up self-destructive or recalcitrant.
For a long time, I wanted to upend his image of himself by becoming the black sheep, by doing things that would have made any parent upset.
I think of it now as a waste of time, but… that's how it was. I don't think I got over that very childish way of dealing with myself, my parents, and the world until my 40s. I was living in New York, working for a newspaper, trying to get by, and I realised it takes so much space in one's head to define oneself in opposition to a single person or idea. I realised it just wasn't worth it. It seems like a basic lesson, but it took me ages to get there.
* Your love for your mother forms the sort of nucleus of this book.
She was always my biggest champion. And yes, she is the moral centre of this book. Her story begins the narrative and her end ends it.
In terms of our financial lives, if it weren't for my mother, I wouldn't be writing novels. I'd be working, earning a living, trying to pay the rent. She was the one who, right from the beginning, invested small amounts of my father's earnings.
My father had very little sense of money as a living quantity. She always did. Which is why I can afford to spend the day writing a poem or a song. In that sense, I suppose I owe her everything. I wanted to chronicle her life in The Elsewhereans.
A life can be remarkable, but unless you put it down, unless you record it in some way — not necessarily in the form of a novel, but in some way — what's the point? All those extraordinary moments are gone.
* Her death (six months ago; aged 90) was an emotional trigger to the ending of the book…
Yes… I knew it was finished the moment she passed away.
Obviously, I couldn't do anything for a while, but once I got back to work, I finished it very quickly. I rewrote portions, added the last few pages, and it just put a lock on the book for me.
* Did the idea of a documentary novel, a blurring of truth and reality, make The Elsewhereans easier to write?
At first, I thought it would be a work of non-fiction, but that would have made for a narrow narrative. One can't inhabit other people's heads and other people's lives in an immersive way unless one is writing fiction.
At the same time, a number of elements here are factual, taken from life, with actual photographs, letters and documents. Which is why I think of it as a documentary novel.
The point is, life isn't easily categorised. Life is open-ended. It doesn't have labels, and it doesn't have happy endings. I like the form of the documentary novel. I might do another in the same vein.
* You suggest that we are all on a lifelong journey, never belonging to a place. And yet you capture how the world is turning to hate because of ideas such as nationality and race…
As someone who began travelling at the age of eight, I've known for a while that all travellers are not equal. A traveller of colour understands this before they begin to understand cultures other than their own. It's more than the colonial-era hierarchy of the visa process. It's also a question of belonging. As the world becomes increasingly intolerant, it becomes increasingly intolerable. When divisions between nations and races deepen, you realise there are places you are not welcome. For me, the sense of being an outsider has always had an upside. It has sharpened my perception.
* Are we all Elsewhereans then?
All of us. There's a moment in the book that describes what it's like to feel like a foreigner in one's own house. Even if you've never left your hometown, you might feel as if the world around you has changed so much it doesn't feel like home anymore.
* Given that it is set across 70 years and a dozen countries, what did the research for this book involve?
I looked up accounts of the various time periods and places in which each chapter is set.
I interviewed my parents over the course of about three years. That was a useful thing about moving to the family home in Bengaluru in 2018. I started work on this book in 2020. As soon as I knew I was going to write it, I began talking to my parents about the past. They remembered a lot of it, in striking detail.
Then I looked at my dad's notebooks. He kept extensive notes of his years as a journalist.
I went through a lot of material and asked both their permissions before I started to write.
My mother may not have been very pleased with the idea, but there's no way she was going to say no, which is why the first epigraph in the book is Czeslaw Milosz: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.'
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