L U NC H W I T H A B I GOT

AMITAVA KUMAR The Writer in the World

L U NC H W I T H A B IGOT
The Writer in the World • A m i t a v a K uma r

Duke Universit y Press • Durham and Lond on • 2015

 © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kumar, Amitava, 1963–
Lunch with a bigot : the writer in the world / Amitava Kumar.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5911-1(hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5930-2(pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7539-5(e-book)
1. Kumar, Amitava, 1963– 2. Kumar, Amitava, 1963–—Criticism
and interpretation. I. Title.
pr 9499.4.k 8618z 46 2015
824'.92—dc23 2014040367

Cover art: Subodh Gupta, Full Moon, 2011.Oil on canvas,

3 1
228 × 168 cm (89 ⁄4 × 66 ⁄8 in.). Courtesy the artist and Hauser &
Wirth. Photo by Thomas Müller.
 In memory of my mother,
Lakshmi Nidhi Singh (1937–2014)
 After forty years,
what I came
to care about most
was not style,
but the breath of life.

• • •

William Maxwell
 • CONTENTS •

Author’s Note xi

PART I • READING PART II • WRITING

Chap ter 1 Chap ter 8

Paper 3 How to Write a Novel 79

Chap ter 2 Chap ter 9

My Hanif Kureishi Life 14 Reading Like a Writer 84

Chap ter 3 Chap ter 10

The Map of My Village 29 Writing My Own Satya 97

Chap ter 4 Chap ter 11

The Poetry of Gujarat Riots 32 Dead Bastards 106

Chap ter 5 Chap ter 12

Conversation with
Arundhati Roy 37
Chap ter 6
Salman Rushdie and Me 51
The Writer as a Father 110
Chap ter 13
Ten Rules of Writing 119

Chap ter 7
Bad News 58
 PART III • PLACES PART IV • PEOPLE

Chap ter 14 Chap ter 21

Mofussil Junction 127 Lunch with a Bigot 169

Chap ter 15 Chap ter 22

A Collaborator in Kashmir 132 The Boxer on the Flight 183

Chap ter 16 Chap ter 23

At the Jaipur Literature Amartya’s Birth 187
Festival 141
Chap ter 24
Chap ter 17 The Taxi Drivers of
Hotel Leeward 146 New York 192

Chap ter 18 Chap ter 25

The Mines of Jadugoda 151 On Being Brown in America 196

Chap ter 19 Chap ter 26

Upon Arrival in the Past 155 Missing Person 201

Chap ter 20
Bookstores of New York 162 Index 213
 • AUTHOR’S NOTE •

I must have been nineteen or twenty at that time. I was enrolled as a

student in political science at Delhi’s Hindu College, but in a vague and
desultory way I thought of myself as a writer. On thin sheets of typing
paper, I wrote bad poems. Once there was a poetry competition at Lady
Shri Ram College. I went. It is possible that I won a prize, but what
made the occasion difficult to forget was that one of the judges said to
the poets who had presented their work, “If you have nothing to say,
don’t write. Please.”
The man who had offered this suggestion taught Hindi at my own
college. He was a short, chubby fellow. Balding at the top, he kept his
hair long and carefully combed. Like a former middle-order batsman
of my acquaintance, a Ranji player who in the decades that followed
retained some of his earlier flamboyance amid general seediness, the
Hindi lecturer was a bit of a dandy. He was always to be seen in the
company of young female students. I disliked him without having any
particular reason to do so, and his statement at the event made me
hate him more. But he was right, of course, and I must have known this
even then. Like everyone else, I had failed in love and had written about
it—except that I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I had
failed at. If I were to now hear a teacher tell young writers what the
professor said after that poetry competition, I would at least be curious.
I’d want to know how he dealt with that ascetic logic in his own writing
life, and what had been the process through which he had arrived at it.
What were the impulses in his own heart—or art—that he encouraged
without being dogged by doubt? Most important, what had he written
himself? What did he have to say in his own work?
Three decades have passed since that afternoon. During this time,
I’ve written several books, but I’m taken back now to the events that
took place during those years when I was studying in Hindu College:
the poisonous leak in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal; the street
performances of Safdar Hashmi, the activist who was murdered two
years after I left India; the innocent Sikhs who were killed in Delhi and
elsewhere after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Why did I not write
about those events as they were happening? In my own role now as a
teacher, I encourage my students to become journalists. It is not only
that I want them to escape the prison of their petty love stories; I want
them to go out into the world. The world is an extraordinarily rich place,
full of stories, and it is marvelous to see how stories feed the curiosity
of the young. I also offer specific technical advice. For instance, I repeat
to them an anecdote I read in a journalism textbook about Gene Rob-
erts, a former editor of the New York Times, whose first job was writing
farm columns for a small newspaper in North Carolina: “Roberts’ editor
was Henry Belk, who was blind. Roberts recalls that when he showed up
for work in the morning, Belk would call him over and inform the young
reporter that his writing was insufficiently descriptive. ‘Make me see,’
he would order.”1 Make me see, make me see!
Writers are observers. Recently, I read an essay in which the author
had quoted her mentor in college, the writer Annie Dillard. Dillard had
told her class, somewhat provocatively, that rather than travel to a far-
flung place they would be better off if they read a book about it. She
had just returned from Alaska and informed her class that the only
thing she hadn’t already known about Alaska from her reading were the
sunflowers: “Apparently, in midsummer, as they work to follow the sun
circling tightly overhead, their stalks twist until their bright, oversize
heads break right off their slender necks.”2 If a book had contained that
tidbit, Dillard said, it would be worth reading. When I read that anec-

Author’s Note
• xii •
dote I immediately saw in it a lesson not about choosing books over
travel, but about developing an eye for a story or at least for unusual
details.
The writer who for me has been a master of narrative, expert at see-
ing and also at seeing through, is V. S. Naipaul. Here is Tim Adams de-
scribing what Naipaul told him during an interview in the Guardian:
“My wish is to fix a scene with a very bright picture and to move along
like that. . . . People can never remember long descriptions. Just one
or two images. But you have to choose them very carefully. That has
always come naturally to me, of course.”3 One of the recurrent themes
of Naipaul’s writing is seeing—or showing—how writing is learned. In
his epic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, a newspaper editor named Mr.
Burnett, a London man, gives Mr. Biswas the sense that the city was
populated with stories waiting to be told. He encourages Mr. Biswas
to write stories with a jaunty edge. Mr. Burnett also offers his younger
protégé elementary lessons in precision and clarity (“ ‘Several’ has seven
letters. ‘Many’ has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same
meaning.”).4 Mr. Burnett’s instructions to Mr. Biswas were notable,
but what pierced me was Naipaul’s account that the single line that
came to Mr. Biswas every time he wished to test a new ribbon in the
typewriter was the following one: “At the age of thirty-three, when he
was already the father of four children . . . .”5 The half-finished sentence
momentarily lights up a whole dark universe of desire and futility. The
despair got to me, and I was unable to finish reading the book while still
a student at Hindu College. When I began reading the book again, I had
come to America. This time I read it to the end; I had already published
my first book, and the threat of extinction was not so immediate any-
more. During this reading, I noticed the comedy in the novel. Life had
become bearable. I was no longer reading Mr. Biswas as a self-help book.
The windows of the A. H. Wheeler Booksellers kiosk at the railway
station in my hometown, Patna, are full of self-help books. Books that
teach you how to become successful; the art of writing letters; how to be
healthy; how to think and grow rich; and twenty ways to remove wor-
ries. There is a specificity to the eclecticism that I recognize: thrillers
by James Hadley Chase and Jeffrey Archer, astrology books in Hindi, a
book on numerology, and autobiographies of Swami Vivekananda and
Adolf Hitler. The self that is assumed in self-help is a submissive and

Author’s Note
• xiii •
yielding one, unusually open to any and all comers; it takes any strug-
gle, even that of a mass murderer, as a lesson in self-improvement. Per-
sonal transformation, understood as advancement in social status, is
the goal. That is the moral of the visit to the Patna station book kiosk:
the train always stops for success.
In May 2014, India elected a new government by a landslide. The
vote was widely seen as a mandate for Narendra Modi, the chief min-
ister of Gujarat State and leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata
Party. Modi’s platform had stressed development in an economy that
had been in decline for decades; this stress on economic revival was in
sharp contrast to Modi’s previous avatar as a nationalist with sectarian
prejudices. He is accused by many of abetting the deaths of more than
a thousand Muslims in the riots in Gujarat back in 2002. Modi’s new
focus, on the perils of a stagnant economy instead of on his party’s ear-
lier support of Hindu assertion against claims made by minorities, was
accepted by his voters as a lesson in self-transformation. One might
even go so far as to call it self-improvement. And as with other sto-
ries of such transformation, there was a great deal of simplification.
There was also a great deal of forgetting. The belief in development is
impossible without a degree of unquestioning optimism and amnesia.
For the moment, there are many people in India who are eager to forget
the murders of Muslims and instead put their faith in the promise of
economic self-help. The essays in this volume are memorial acts. Like a
photograph that shows abandoned shoes, stones, and dried blood on
an empty street after a riot, this collection insists on what is absent.
Who once stood at this place? What happened here? What is the story?
Thirty years after my encounter with the Hindi lecturer in Delhi, I
present here a record of what I have to say and the ways in which I have
learned to say it. There is self-help in these pages (How to be a writer?),
but the writer here is interested in examining the borders of the self
(What divides the writer from the rioter?). Written or published over
nearly a decade and a half, the pieces are assembled here in four sec-
tions: reading, writing, places, and people. Those four themes are my
north, my south, my east and west. I want to thank the editors of vari-
ous publications or anthologies who commissioned these writings and
helped put them in print; my immense debt to Shruti Debi at Aitken
Alexander Literary Agency, who read the manuscript and guided it to-

Author’s Note
• xiv •
ward publication; and the team at Duke University Press, particularly
Elizabeth Ault, Laura Sell, Michael McCullough, Willa Armstrong, Dan-
ielle Szulczewski, and, last but first, Ken Wissoker, who has been a true
collaborator in my writing over the past several years.

Notes
1. Melvin Mencher, Melvin Mencher’s News Reporting and Writing (New York:
McGraw Hill, 2011),249.
2. Virginia Pye, “China of My Mind,” New York Times, December 29, 2013.
Accessed July 31, 2014. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/29
/china-of-my-mind/.
3. Tim Adams, “A Home for Mr Naipaul,” Observer, September 11, 2004.
Accessed July 31,2014. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/12
/fiction.vsnaipaul.
4. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 311.
5. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, 330.

Author’s Note
• xv •