Amitava Kumar on why he used a dying man’s SOS tweet during Covid as a narrative device in his novel

In the summer of 2021, I heard the novelist Claire Messud read out an essay at a workshop where we were both teaching; in the essay, Messud described her father drawing on a piece of paper a map of his native Beirut. He was drawing the map from memory; a perfectly accurate map of a city where he had grown up but not visited for decades. At that time, I was midway through writing My Beloved Life, and I came back that night to my hotel room and made a drawing of my ancestral village. As the months passed, the drawing led me to new thoughts. (I’m telling you this because I want to explain this process – visual prompt leading to narrative discoveries.)

I had discovered a story about a teacher in Georgia, who, when his memory began to slip away, started drawing fantastically accurate maps of the route he took to his school and of other places that were a part of his routine. As my story evolved, I also had the father in my story drawing a map of his village. The father in my story has one child, a daughter, and she notices that the map her father has drawn is only of the village as it was during his childhood. Her father hasn’t included any of the places that have come up and changed during his daughter’s lifetime. A map of a remembered village. It is an accurate map but an outdated one.

It was important that the story of the teacher who drew maps was from a place near Atlanta. I liked this because Jugnu, the daughter in My Beloved Life, lived in that city and worked as a journalist for CNN. In trying to imagine the stories this journalist would cover, I found other images. For example, a photograph of Rev Martin Luther King Jr visiting the Gandhi Memorial on his visit to India. The detail that had caught the photographer’s eye in the photo showed the reverend removing his shoes before walking on to the Gandhi Memorial at Rajghat. (MLK had said: “To other nations I might go as a tourist. To India I go as a pilgrim.”) It was an unconventional image, a distinguished foreign visitor taking off his shoes out of respect for local custom. How would Indians of different generations respond to this? I wanted to use the MLK photo to show my characters’ attitudes.

I also found out that at least two dozen Black children were murdered between 1979 and 1981 in Atlanta, and that James Baldwin had written a journalistic report about these murders that was published as a book in 1985, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. In his report, Baldwin had focused not so much on the deaths as on the conditions of the murdered kids’ lives. While researching Baldwin’s writings, I came across an essay by Robert Reid-Pharr in the Berlin Journal that described a teacher’s memory of the young Baldwin in high school. The teacher had asked his pupils to step up to the blackboard and describe a scene from nature. Baldwin chose a winter scene and wrote on the board about “the houses in their little white overcoats”. The image was so striking that when I read it, I thought I should immediately make a drawing. But, dear reader, of all the images I have presented you so far, images that were a part of the thinking about the novel and writing it, how many of these images do you think made it to the final version of the book? Please go on reading to find the answer.

Dodiya’s painting of the aged father, his body connected to a tube, had given me a sense of focus. I could imagine a man dying. The painting provided direction to my writing as I imagined an old man on his deathbed during the pandemic. The images, particularly the one of the film actress Madhubala, were ways for me to introduce an element of whimsical play into the story that I was telling.

However, to be honest, I was unsure about the rest of the images. I didn’t have the kind of conviction I had possessed when I had put my painting of Mohammed Naeem’s lynching in my last novel. My editors in the US and in Canada politely but quite clearly suggested that they were not convinced that an honest narration of stories about ordinary lives needed the distraction of pictures. I hesitated a little bit but this was only because in any other context I would have argued that images, deployed in the right manner, open up a reflective space for the reader. But I quickly made up my mind and deleted all the images you have seen so far.

The only image that is present in My Beloved Life is that of a screengrab I had taken. A journalist in Lucknow had tweeted about his falling oxygen level. He had repeatedly appealed for help but none came. His last tweet was sent when his oxygen level was down to thirty-one. Then, nothing.

I had gone back to facts. In the face of the Indian government’s assertion that it had done everything it could to fight the pandemic and that there was enough oxygen for all who needed it, I felt I needed to tell the truth even though my book was fiction. Fiction because my character reads the tweet and calls her boss at CNN, Roberta, and Roberta tells her that Christiane Amanpour was in London and it was likely that she would catch a flight to Delhi. Would Amanpour really be going to India to report on the second wave of COVID? It appeared unlikely. My character has this realisation in her head:

While Roberta was talking, I could suddenly see Amanpour standing on a boat on the Ganga, the burning pyres of Varanasi behind her, the posh accent delivering news about the fresh 200,000 cases of coronavirus in the country.

Instead of Amanpour, it is my co-protagonist who goes. All of this started with the above tweet that I had read, in real time, by the doomed journalist Vinay Srivastava. In using the image of his tweet I was trying to report on an ordinary life and what sadly for many was an ordinary death.

Excerpted with permission from The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook, Amitava Kumar, HarperCollins India.