Em and The Big Hoom took you over 25 years to write and portrays a woman’s mental illness through the perspective of her children, particularly her son, the narrator. How did the book evolve?

I suppose Em and the Big Hoom was the story I always wanted to tell. I began with the notion of pouring out my troubled adolescent heart; I thought I was in a bad place since my mother was bipolar and not like other mothers. I learned quickly that almost everyone was struggling with something or someone or some circumstances or some situation, and so I turned that into “I will write about what I know” — growing up with a mother who was bipolar.

The problem was getting the tone correct. The problem was figuring out the form. The problem was … okay, there was a problem with each of those drafts. In some, I seemed to be channelling my favourite writers. In some, I sounded pretentious, factitious, portentous. Part of the reason I wasn’t getting it right was that I wasn’t giving it my all. Then I got to the age of 40 and decided it was time to focus. I quit my day job, sat down at home and struggled with what I wanted to say.

The Indian journalist, poet, biographer, translator, and author of 14 books in English of non-fiction and poetry recently received India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi award for his debut novel. The book draws on his own family life to provide a haunting, warm, and loving portrayal of a mother afflicted with bipolar depression

The title is derived from the nicknames by which the narrator and Susan, his sister, call their mother, Imelda (Em) and their father, Augustine (The Big Hoom). How did the novel arrive in its present form?

I have always been interested in the ‘how’ of family history. How do we know what we know about our families? Some of it, the good stuff, we are told directly: “Your great-grandfather was a well-known editor of a newspaper that championed the underdog.” I don’t remember how many times I was told that. But I only overheard the juicier stories; you got to them by following threads, decoding hints, asking impertinent questions.

My novel follows that mode: here a letter, there a conversation, here a diary entry. That’s how I managed to get multiple viewpoints, and perhaps that is why it achieved some level of nuance and complexity because it could now be told from different standpoints and in different voices.

What is the relationship between fiction and memoir? What advantages does fiction offer?

When I wrote Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, it was because of my early engagement with Hindi cinema. When I helped actress Leela Naidu write her autobiography Leela: A Patchwork Life, it was because I had met her as a young man and been charmed as much by her grace and beauty as by her kindness to a gauche journalist. When I co-edited Bombay Meri Jaan; Writings on Mumbai with Naresh Fernandes, it was because we both listed the city as our birthplace, because we had met two decades earlier and become friends. Whatever I do is inflected by my choices, by who I am.

What is fiction? It is an account of the other autobiographies we would like to have. It is the writer on the couch of the psychiatrist, Dr Fiction, living out the lives inside his head. It is fiction when the writer tells you it is fiction. And what is non-fiction? This must be collaboratively verified. It is a matter for law courts and journalism reviews, for litigation and slander and libel.

When I am asked whether Em and the Big Hoom is fiction, I ask, who wants to know? Only librarians and lawyers need to know. Readers? They respond to the story.

The novel is set in Bombay (Mumbai), about a family from Goa. Can you tell us your relationship with both places?

In the cities of India one is asked regularly: “Where are you from?” The implication is that the city has no claim on you and you have no claim on it. You must be from somewhere else. My father came to Bombay when he was a boy. He spent the rest of his life here. My mother came from Burma (Myanmar) via Calcutta (Kolkatta) and she lived and worked and loved and died here. Yet my answer is, I am from Goa. I do not know how to explain this. Perhaps it is something to do with how we construct Arcadia in the village and assume that we are in the Purgatory of the city for a while before we head home.

What led you to the actress Helen as the subject for Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb?

I have always been interested in the ‘how’ of family history. How do we know what we know about our families?

I have always had a sympathy for the peripheral so I didn’t want to write about a big star; I didn’t want to write about Bollywood as a whole. Since I grew up watching Bollywood, I had many things I wanted to say about the form, the way in which stories are told. This is all post facto. The truth is that when my editor and publisher Ravi Singh, to whom I owe so much of my writing career, asked who I thought could write a book about Helen, I said, “I can.” I began the next day and began to discover how the polymorphous, perverse form of the Bollywood film would use the extraordinarily versatile figure of a Franco-Burmese woman with a name like Helen.

You started out as a journalist, but at one point described yourself as a poet first and foremost. How or why does poetry define you and your sense of self?

The most of me goes into the poetry. I don’t know how to say anything else about poetry.

In recent years, you have earned considerable acclaim as a translator. This includes Daya Pawar’s astonishing work Baluta, an extraordinary tale of courage and the struggle against age-old prejudices and oppression. What are the challenges of translation?

You need to want to translate. You need to see how important it is, how vital. You need to set down your ego and take on the task of speaking for someone else. You need to respect the original and you need to communicate what you can of the original in your own voice. You need to keep some flavour of the original. You need to be brave enough to ask your reader to step out of her comfort zone and come with you on a voyage into another language, another culture, another world.

You come out of it oddly humbled. Because you now see that your view of language was conditioned by one language and its demands. Now you see past that horizon into others and you begin to see how you will never be good enough for any language.

What next?

I am working on my next novel and I hope that by the end of the year I might have a working draft. There’s another translation coming out in the meanwhile, Half-Open Windows by Ganesh Matkari, a set of short stories that circle around the real estate business in my city.

The interviewer is a writer, reviewer, and critic

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 12th, 2017