‘I’m the pariah of literature in India, thank God!’: CP Surendran on his new novel and the many-shaded rejections

Poet and novelist CP Surendran’s fourth novel, One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B (Niyogi Books), assumes the reader’s intelligence. It is the story of Osip Bala Krishnan, a student at a boarding school in Kasauli, who falls in love with his English teacher, Elizabeth. Named after the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam by his Stalinist grandfather — with whom Osip shares a unique mental condition that often causes him to hallucinate incidents of Russia in the mid-20th century — he is determined to find Elizabeth, after she disappears. In the process, Osip unravels the secrets of why his grandfather pretends he cannot remember his past.

Osip’s journey is aided by his friend, Anand, a god-man on the make; Arjun Bedi, an iconoclastic writer disintegrating under harassment allegations; and the corpse of the school priest, which Osip and Anand kidnap to extort seed money for their adventures. Through a clutch of dramatic characters, the plot traces and connects contemporary themes of transgressive relationships, gender politics, nationalism, individual freedom and group rights, fake news, and power. Sad, funny, and insightful, the novel asks: Can a dysfunctional young man survive in a deranged world, our world? Excerpts from an interview:

Padmaja Challakere: How do the horrors of Stalinism work in the novel — as analogy or prophecy? Does it work as a warning about the potential unleashing of Stalinism or as an analogy of the potentially totalitarian nature of group identity? Could you speak about the section where you quote a letter from Bukharin to Stalin: “Why is my death necessary for you?” Maybe, the human mind cannot accept monstrosity even when faced by it and looks for some reason, some meaning to understand why this is happening: “I who took each word of yours, Koba, like a gift to the kolkhozes and courtyards of comrades waiting to be shot, turned in my deviant wife, sister, and child to the NKVD. Tell me, what’s it that I have done to offend you, my dear Zozo; what crops have I infested in Ukraine with ticks; what spring I held down still-born in the seeds; tell me why you are doing this?” You develop this same inexplicable violence, also with news baron Alok Jain and with Ram Yadav — the Uber driver, who turns out to be the ruin of Osip and his lover, Elizabeth. How did you transmute the political or journalistic material into a fictional mode? I was thinking of the chapter “The Wandering Jew” when Osip goes to visit Ava Lenk, his grandfather’s lover possibly, and she says: “I derived a sadistic pleasure in disabusing him of his notions”: I took him by train to Vtoraya Rechka, on the way to Vladivostok, where M. died in exile, back in December 1938. “How does one survive at all if you are an artist?” Narayan said. His desecration of the Stalin statue came after that trip. “But you don’t need art,” I told him. We all know that, don’t we? You just need bread, milk, and quiet. In any big crisis, the artist would be the first to be dispensed with. He is a burden morally and financially.” (p.245)

CP Surendran: The novels draw many parallels between mid-20th century Russia and contemporary India. We tend to see Stalin as a type of individual, a leader gone insane, compulsively obsessed about things slipping out of his control. A man so totally paranoid that he had to be surveilling millions constantly; often Stalin considered himself to be a victim: he felt that everyone, including the doctors who were looking after him, were planning to kill him. His only choice was then to kill them first. Consider yourself in a duel 24 hours round the clock? But what if a whole group/society takes to the same pathology of behaviour? Lynching (off, or on social media) is a mode of manifestation of that psychosis. Mandelstam talks about in his prose works.

That has already happened. At no point in history have we come to distrust not only the state and its institutions but distrust our neighbors and ourselves too. We trust absolutely no one. The street cameras, mass surveillance, social media tabs, incessant fact-checking, endless identification documenting, the calling out and shaming, the great need to be proven right in all instances without exception, the visceral need to say the Other is nothing, all show a species threatened to its brittle bones, its consciousness undergoing mutation. That we can now legitimately hide our faces behind a mask, carry highly toxic sprays, taser guns without the need of a license, keep washing hands (to say we have no hand in the blood around us?), nearly dying of a need to talk (always a sign of acute stress) during day or night, and to mistake the ultimate purpose of our logorrhea to be denouncing someone or the other, all contribute to collective Stalinism.

That we have invented a technology to enable us to mutate our behavioral genes only goes to show a kind of integration of the means with the end, so one supplants the other. What are you without your phone? Who are you without a follower?

More specifically in the novel, in One Love..., the Stalinist principle is embodied in the personality of Osip’s grandfather, Menon, a political leader who in his time has killed many of his rivals. He hallucinates Osip Mandelstam — a poet whom Stalin persecuted and finally exiled to Siberia, where he died of starvation in 1938, a year, as it turns out, of some significance to Osip B — asking him, Menon, at home in his sickbed questions of conscience.

In the novel’s actionable present, the despotism of our times is concentrated in the media baron, Alok Jain, in whose fake newspaper Osip finds a job. And there Osip will see that reality is what a billionaire can order to his will, and that he actually has the power to ‘stare a man to his death.’

In the early versions of the novel, Menon, the Stalinist patriarch troubled in his dying days by his past, was not fleshed out in detail. My perspective on him was not clear; worse, it was self-indulgent. It is in the last six months of the seven years of writing that it sort of fell in place (or so I delude myself) and he began living his life, as a heavy presence without the option of redemption.

Menon’s wife, the overbearing, resentful, yet kind and cunning wife, Gloria remembers her washing his blood-soaked shirt 23 times over the years although this is not believed fully by Osip. But the reader, I hope, does not share his disbelief. The grandfather has blood on his hands. It is to absolve himself, at least partly, that he christens Osip, after Mandelstam, a voice representing not just free speech, but also a spirit on the run from everywhere. The non-genetic mental disorder (foie a famille), the clinical condition that Osip B shares with his adoptive grandfather renders him vulnerable to the older man’s hallucinations. But the larger point is that the hashtags and tagging in new media in our world are an extension of the transmissibility of pathological communication, the virality (so aptly named) of the disease of communication, of our (false) perceptions, and falser facts.

The details of the love story between Ava Lenk, the concentration camp survivor, and Menon, and his 60’s trip to Moscow that turns his ideological world upside down is one of the threads that unravels through the book. This thread was present more or less intact even in the earlier versions. It is just that in between I happened to read Nadia Mandelstam’s memoir in two volumes (Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, which while reviewing decades later, Seamus Heaney, characterised Mandelstam: ‘an unmitigated sense of doom,’), and I realised that the Ava Link chapters can mesh easily with our own times in many respects including social isolation and intellectual emasculation. That trip turns Menon’s world upside down. But that also ironically marks the beginning of Gloria’s ascendance or dominance in her relationship with Menon.

The Ava Lenk motif is perhaps spun on too fine a thread. You pull too hard at it, and it just breaks. Too loose and it is of no use, to find a way out of the maze. She, like Menon, her accidental lover, is in her mid ’90s. Osip is not yet 20. Between them, the novel has to cover roughly 100 years of history in a few paragraphs without boring the hell out of the reader who, like Osip, is contemporary. I may say that I wrote those bits with my heart between my teeth.

Padmaja Challakere: This novel could be a film in the way in which you set the scene or use dialogue to build character. Please speak about the role of dialogue when the narrator takes a back seat. The dialogue allows the characters to breathe, to float free of the narrator’s choke-hold. Every time we think the character is one way, you give the character a line, a tone, that gives us a glimpse of their interiority.

CP Surendran: Hemingway says somewhere that Gertrude Stein taught him the art of dialogue, and, then, of course, he became better than Stein. That is so Hemingway. I mean, he can’t but be the master eventually of his mentor, can he?

What I learned writing this novel about dialogue is that one can push a dark and heavy thing along nicely without pages and pages of exposition. It adds to the pace of the book. The other is that dialogue sets you, as an author, free. It is not just essential information dealing with character and plot. It is that you can say a great deal of seemingly extraneous things which actually are connected one way or another in the end. You could talk about butterflies, for instance, (which Osip does) in a passing reference and connect them to migration, a central theme of the novel. Later still, when Elizabeth sports a butterfly-cut of her pubic hairs, both migration and the fleeting nature of her temperament, can be said to be connected. All lines and words of dialogue in this novel are not so programmed, of course. But dialogue, if done well, cuts you some slack.

And yes, you are right, the dialogue you write exerts a nuanced and surprising influence on your character. Dialogue is a means of discovery of your real intentions with characters. Faulkner has a way of writing that never ceases to surprise you. A sentence sort of ends in a comma and you tend to think, so that’s it, but you read on and find, there is a twist and turn to the thought. So, when you write a bit of dialogue for a character, as I said earlier, it is a process of discovery. You begin with one idea and then end with quite another and, meanwhile, the character who set out to be tame in the situation finds that he can be very vicious; it enables the reader, too, to be aware of the undercurrents not so apparent. A layering happens without ostentatious effort.

Padmaja Challakere: What would you say to the person who says, mistakenly perhaps, that this is not fiction; it’s a memoir. What would your response be?

CP Surendran: Fiction is the memoir of many people. What can you imagine that has not happened? Even the future is only a version of the past. And in fiction, there really is no future. Everything has happened. Otherwise, it could not be written.

In One Love..., some of the stuff has been helped by what happened to me personally. But in a good novel, what befalls one character is what has befallen the readers in one way or the other.

There were instances in the novel perhaps too close to real life, which my publisher thought will get us into trouble. One of them involved a kind of genital mutilation of Osip in one of the last chapters. My publisher had the larger interests of the book in mind. Since I no longer believe in myself blindly or know with any certitude what is good for me, I cut these passages out.

Padmaja Challakere: What I have most enjoyed about your writing is the humour — an irrepressible humour of language. Flashes of Oscar Wilde and Wodehouse, even! Despite the dark themes and the suffering, there is joy and hilarity in the language. Do you see yourself as a comic artist, in a sense?

CP Surendran: Those are great comedic names, but I don’t think I had them in mind while working on this novel. But I do think I am a bit of a comedian, though I find it increasingly difficult to laugh these days. But even the tragic situations, the kind that makes our lives so uncertain, so anxious, so unhappy (and so unnecessarily so) can be seen at a distance through the telescope of humour. It becomes someone else’s, brings in a moment’s respite. And in this, in this function of distance, the language plays a great role, as much as the plot and characters, the eccentricity of description frames the incident or the persona so sharply, and we have a better and clearer look at these as spectacles.

That each object and feeling can be named. That it can be named again so it is not exactly what it was meant to be to begin with, that the gap between the original intentions and what they can be interpreted to be is a great function of the language, as it opens up explorable space for character and action that was not there just a moment ago.

Padmaja Challakere: As a leading writer with a rich body of work, an arc of distinctive writing, a prolific body of original work, could you talk about the literary establishment and the awards system?

CP Surendran: I am not sure if I am a leading writer. I don’t know who is a leading writer anymore. I can think of leading salesmen. But not leading writers, though some of them have got leading awards, about which exotic and elusive inanimate matter, I have no idea how they look or smell. No awards or recognition for poetry, not for columns, not for fiction. I doubt very much if I would ever be granted the assurance of formal recognition that an award implies. Mine is pariah writing. An untouchable of the language, perhaps.

What I can certainly say of myself is that One Love... is my best shot in prose so far. That, unfortunately, means not much these days, when the written word is, more than ever likely, divorced from the lived experience. As I said earlier or tried to, the political correctness of our age goes against the grain of experience. In a recent note, Chimamanda Adichie talks about the new generation’s need to ‘out-angel’ each other. The result is a sanitized life afraid to make mistakes, fall to rise, become a better person. There is no art without suffering. One Love... is about people who fall, and not quite rise.

To say about our times with its complexities in the lives of six or seven characters has been an exacting enterprise. To many, this novel might come across as transgressive reading. And the award committees and juries are stacked with (really) good people with a lot to lose. In a recent column, I wrote that it is not enough that you write well, you have got to also secure a good conduct certificate from the nearest police station, counter-signed by group rights campaigners. If we are honoring the writer or the artist and not his/her creation, the entire tradition of the arts would need to be cancelled; it is a Cultural Revolution of sorts, except that Mao is not leading it, but well-intentioned groups who are in charge. Nabokov, Hemingway, Woody Allen, Enid Blyton… the list multiplies as we speak. And there are great heroes, like Gandhi, Tagore, and Picasso in whose names many awards and fellowships are instituted. All of them have erred. Would that give us license to cancel them and the awards in their names? Would those who benefited from these honors forfeit it? Let me extend it: those who have benefited from their patriarchal largesse, a house, a legacy, a little money, a job, a gift, give it back?

I would like One Love... to be read for what it is: a testimony of our times. As for awards and honours, I would not be surprised for the jurors to glance through the book surreptitiously, and then keep it aside, like a punishable — and perishable — thought.