Art isn’t about truth at all, but without it we’d be lost: Anil Menon

THE PUNCH: How central have words and stories been to your professional and personal evolution?

ANIL MENON: Aren’t we all in the grip of stories? It starts with belting out nursery rhymes and before we know it we’re riding off on various idiotic quests. 

THE PUNCH: You’re a computer scientist. What drew you to fiction? How did your workshop with Clarion West shape your writing? 

ANIL MENON: I worked in software for quite a few years. It was great fun but after a while, it stopped being interesting. Computers can’t really deal with ambiguity, the immeasurable, or lack of closure. Fiction can’t do without these things, and I found myself thinking more and more about writing stories rather than designing algorithms. I went to Clarion West to see if I would be any good at it. I’ve realised a good writing workshop doesn’t really teach you to be a good writer. It makes you a “bad” reader. You suddenly start to see that stories are designed, that there is a subtle logic to fiction. It spoils reading, but in return you become a better writer. At CWest, I also discovered that I had something to say, and when I returned, I told the missus I’d give this writing thing a year. Well, it has been a very long year.

THE PUNCH: How conscious, if at all, are you of the genre (speculative fiction, sci-fi or sub-genre, mundane SF) you write in — and your target readers — when you write?

ANIL MENON: The genre doesn’t matter much. For me, the genre label only applies to the story, not the writer. I work on a story and only after finishing do I worry about where to place it. Occasionally, I get invited to submit something, and then of course I have less play. These days, most of my short stories are very much in the here and now. 

THE PUNCH: Your stories, even though SF, remains in the realm of possibility, of things that seem credible. They seem to convey the idea of “near future” as against “distant future”. Is that deliberate to make stories credible and do you have to work on this purposefully? Do you consciously avoid tropes like time travel or aliens or parellel dimensions? 

ANIL MENON: Well, I don’t see how it is possible to write a story about the far future. That’s because I don’t believe the far future will have humans. I mean, as a species, it is highly likely we will transform our biology radically. The signs are all around us. But the moment we write a story, we introduce humans one way or the other. We have no choice. We cannot imagine a story without humans. So, science-fiction can no more bridge the gap between today and that distant tomorrow anymore than a chimpanzee can bridge the gap between its thoughts and the Shakespearean sonnet. 

THE PUNCH: Is short fiction more liberating or harder to write than novels?

ANIL MENON: For me, short stories are definitely more fun. Both for reading and writing. The best are stories 

such as those by Naiyer Masud; they are short stories that feel like novels. 

THE PUNCH: Let’s talk about a few of your short stories. A short story you published in 2008, “Into The Night”, tells the story of 82-year-old Kallikulam Ramaswamy and his last days with his daughter Ganga on an artificial island. An elegy for a man’s life, it’s also a reflection on our ways of grappling with the future, of how, in the end, we realise that there is no way of dealing with the future, except perhaps to learn to adapt and ultimately allow ourselves to drown into its waves. Could you tell us about its genesis? 

ANIL MENON: I know quite a few bewildered Ramaswamys in the US. It is staggering to consider the amount of change they’ve seen in their lives. Their wives are creatures of situation; they adjust. But the men, they tend to be creatures of place in the way the Bodhi tree is a creature of place. You can’t uproot them and expect them to remain whole. In the end, their refusal to be happy is all the resistance they can offer in utopia. I was glad to be done with the story. It took me to some dark places. 

THE PUNCH: Could you also tell us the stories behind some of your other well-received short stories, like “Standard Deviation” or “Archipelago”, which was nominated for Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Prize in 2005. How did they happen? If you were to go back to them now, is there anything you’d like to change?  

ANIL MENON: These stories came out of Clarion West. From that period, there are only two stories I have no desire to change. The first, “Love In A Hot Climate”, is about this guy Purushottam Deshpande, who convinces himself that Milton Friedman has invented a time machine and needs someone to bring it to market. The second, “A Sky Full Of Constants”, is about an Indian physicist whose wife, also a physicist, commits suicide 

over a philosophical quarrel with the universe. 

THE PUNCH: Your first YA novel, The Beast With Nine Billion Feet, set in Pune in 2040, was published in 2009 and delved into the social and ethical issues of genetic engineering. The story of 13-year-old Tara and her elder brother Aditya, it features liquid computers, emotional cars and illusion pods. Dealing with some tough questions, the novel is also deeply disturbing. What was its genesis?

ANIL MENON: I had been reading a lot of American YA fantasy and they all had these great wars between good and evil. I felt the Mahabharata epic was much more on the mark. There’s no good. No evil. Just passionate people who are all convinced they’re totally in the right. I had also been thinking about how there was no market in places. Most of humanity is stuck where they are born. If people could vote with their feet, then the world might become a lot better place. So I wanted to imagine how it would be in a world filled with artificial islands. That turned out to be too complicated, so I took a smaller piece of it, namely, how a couple of kids living in Pune encountered the new world. It turns out they are the new world, but of course, the reader has to find this out the hard way, munching one page at a time. 

THE PUNCH: Your new novel, Half of What I Say, which has been shortlisted for the Hindu Prize, is about many things. A “polyphonic” novel told through many voices — switching from first to third person, it is at once a story about love, crime, literature, technology, philosophy and satire. It is a complex novel that essentially underlines the assumption that we understand the world through stories. How did you decide on its form and structure? Were there too many drafts? 

ANIL MENON: Oh god, yes. I thought I would never be done. It went through a lot of rewrites; it was like drawing on a sand-dune. I eventually decided the right genre would be something that had the energy of pulp but also literary writing’s attention to detail. You’re right that Half Of What I Say chases a lot of rabbits. 

There are two ways to write such a story. One is an austere minimal approach in which the author pursues silence. This is the road taken by Beckett and contemporary French minimalists. The other is the carnival, in which the author drowns the reader in noise. This is the road favoured by Bollywood and the great Russian novelists. It is also the road I chose for this novel.

THE PUNCH: Some reviewers have pointed out that Half of What I Say is an examination of the interplay between truth and fiction. As a scientist and a fiction writer, what is your relationship with both? 

ANIL MENON: Science’s great dual isn’t religion, but rather, fiction. Science always tries to fit causes to events. Fiction seeks to fit reasons to events. I define story as something that replaces causes with reasons. Philosophers are still arguing over whether reasons are a kind of causes, but I agree with Wittgenstein, who started the quarrel: reasons aren’t causes. I thought it would be interesting to have a story try to undermine stories.

THE PUNCH: In a world marred by untruths and falsehoods, can fiction save the truth, helping us understand the world better through stories?      

ANIL MENON: I wish that were true. Science deals with things that aren’t necessarily false. Art deals with things that aren’t necessarily true. Neither can speak about truth directly. So for me, art isn’t about truth at all. But we would still be lost without it. Science can help us choose between preferences, but it can’t give us preferences. Or as my friend Athena Andreadis put it: science will give us the spaceships but fiction will give us reasons to get into them. To the extent we will need reasons to do things, we will also always need fiction. 

THE PUNCH: As a writer, do you ever have apprehensions about not being understood or your words having found an alternate meaning, different than what you had intended to say? What place does semantics have in your approach to a story?

ANIL MENON: No, I expect the novel to be misunderstood. Or more accurately, misrecognised. Misrecognition, or anagnorisis as the Greeks called it, is a big deal in Half Of What I Say. Fiction is said to have given us the notion of personhood, but I think what it really gives is misrecognition. Any claim about a situation — the basic narratological act — is tantamount to a claim about how the narrator (mis)recognises it. 

From misrecognition, one gets the notion of point-of-view, on which more complex notions such as personhood, may be constructed. We have come to think that if something is true, then there must be only one recognition of that truth. Misrecognition, which fiction effects by substituting reasons for causes, lets us escape this monotheistic prison. You get many truths, not just many versions of the truth.  

THE PUNCH: You grew up in Mumbai. What memories do you have of the city? 

ANIL MENON: My memories are as motley a collection as the characters in a BEST bus. Strange, sad, embarrassing, beautiful. When I am in the city, I can’t wait to get out. When I am away from the city, I long to return. The city is home, yet I stay in the houses of friends and relatives. So on and so forth. All the other cities I love, I learned to love because I first fell in love with this godawful city. 

THE PUNCH: Who are your literary influences? Who among the current crop of sci-fi or speculative fiction writers, both in India and elsewhere, do you admire? 

ANIL MENON: I have always admired the stylists. Writers like Joyce, Anthony Burgess, Russell Hoban, Raja Rao, G. V. Desani, Salman Rushdie and so on. On the other hand, at the moment I am having a major romance with modernist Urdu fiction. These guys are as miserly with nouns, verbs and adjectives as vegans are with salt. I am willing to read any south-Asian author; I’m fascinated by the subcontinent’s stories. But the truth is, there is something to be learned from any novel. 

THE PUNCH: With the changing technology, do you think it has become easier for sci-fi writers to imagine new stories?   

ANIL MENON: Yes, definitely. The genre may have outlived its usefulness. On the other hand, SF writers are fiendishly imaginative, so it is a good idea not to bet against them. 

THE PUNCH: How and when do you write? Do you follow a regimen or write in spurts? How important is it to inhabit the space of your characters? Where do you pick up your characters from? How crucial are the ideas of time and space to your writing? 

ANIL MENON: I like to get up early in the morning. I do some writing every day. When I’m not working on a large project like a novel, I work on short-term projects like short stories, reviews, essays and so on. As regards characterisation, it is a very mysterious process. For example, it is much harder to imagine a new face or a new voice than a new personality. At least for me. But why should that be? I don’t think anybody knows. Still, I know I’ve succeeded when I want to hang around my characters, because if love has any measure it is in the desire to spend time with someone. Space and time are important but not in relation to physics. It is space and time with respect to the emotional landscape of the characters. For example, how does a character experience humiliation? Continuously? Intermittently? How do they arrange their bodies? Do they shrink? Stiffen their spines? Do they have an idiotic smile? When characters feel things intensely, time seems to stop, other events retreat to the background. That sort of thing. 

THE PUNCH: What are you currently working on? 

ANIL MENON: My short stories are published all over the place. And people who’ve read my work have mostly read my spec-fic stories. I’m working on a more eclectic collection of my favourite stories.