‘Scroll.in met Keki N Daruwalla, one of India’s greatest poets working in English, at his Mount Kailash residence in New Delhi soon after the publication of his second novel Ancestral Affairs. Part political-thriller, part-family saga, told in the alternating voices of Saam Bharucha, once the Legal Advisor to the Nawab of Junagadh, and his somewhat hapless son, Rohinton, the novel is an exquisite tribute to the young albeit rich tradition of the Parsi novel.

When did you start writing Ancestral Affairs? And how long did it take you?
It must have been 2011 when I started writing this. And – well – it’s taken me three years or four years – but then, not really. One year, I just sat on it. Kept looking at it, cutting a few words out.

I see.
Then I sent it to one or two readers abroad. Literary agents, let’s be frank. In America. They said they liked the novel, but American readers wouldn’t understand all that Partition stuff.

Right. But what about the angrez? You didn’t want to send it to them?
I hardly knew anyone in Britain. Someone had recommended a very nice person, an editor in New York, and she gave me a very detailed response. In the meantime – while I was writing this – I also thought of the island stories. So I came out with an entire volume of short stories in a little over a year. I’d started desultorily in 2010, I think, to write a chapter or two.

I remember in 2010 we chatted about Junagadh. Saurav and I were planning to go to Junagadh for The Heat and Dust Project and I remember chatting with you about it – particularly, the curious history of Junagadh’s accession to India, which, in fact, forms the opening act of your novel.
Yes, I think I recall. I’d written about ten pages or so at the time. Then, other things took over. You know. The usual distractions of life. But afterwards, I concentrated for about two years at a stretch and the novel came out.

Do these concentrated two years include the archival research? You’ve clearly dug out a lot of stuff for this book…
No, the archival research was done even before – 2009 and 2010. After I was done with my first novel, I wrote two plays. And then I started going to the Nehru Memorial to study the 1947 papers. I’d go twice a week, thrice a week. I was taking it easy. You see, I was also chairing the National Commission…

For Minorities?
Yes, exactly. I spent an entire day there. But I had nothing to do in the mornings, in the evenings. That’s when I would write.

It seemed to me that you’ve been with this – this particular subject – for a long time. There are so many Partition stories – but mostly, we tend to focus on Bengal and Punjab, on the drama of the time, the excesses, the violence. We’ve focussed on the stories of refugees in many forms: narratives, oral history projects, films. This book is so unique because it is a Partition story far less talked about, set as it is, if only partly, in Junagadh, with its peculiar history of accession to India. The accession business is much less talked about in the context of Partition – though it forms a very intriguing chapter of Indian history. It is also unique because of its sophisticated treatment – as opposed to an emotional treatment – of the material, bearing the measure, perhaps, of the decades between then and now. And also, the mark of restraint is perhaps the Parsi voice, equidistant from the Hindu and the Muslim. I’ve rambled a bit, I’m sorry, but I wanted to know if indeed you’ve lived with this particular novel in your head for a long time?

Oh yes. This has been brewing in me forever, and I always knew one day I would sit down and write it. I was in Junagadh for four years as a child [between 1945 and 1948], I carried my childhood with me wherever I went. When you talked about being emotional – or not, that is – you know, once upon a time I used to be blamed in my poems… people would say, “You are too objective. You keep yourself at a distance.” So, that has been, normally, my…

Signature?
Right.

Tell us something about that time.
My father retired in July 1945, at the age of 55. He was a professor of English literature, a very brilliant man.

Where did he teach?
Government College, Lahore. And then, Government College, Lyallpur, which is now Shah Faisalabad as you know. Me and my one elder brother came away with my parents to Junagadh, after my father retired. The two eldest brothers stayed on in Lyallpur. They faced the Partition. It was a very unhappy time for all of us. We used to be glued to the Murphy radio. Some of this autobiographical material is in the novel as well.

But because of the years, there’s this distancing. If you’d written this, say, 30 years ago, it would have been completely different – but then, of course, that is true for any novel.
I am happy with it as it is, wouldn’t change a thing. But then – it is also true – that with the initial material, I could just have written a political thriller about Junagadh, and be done. For example, Fali Nariman told me that I had ruined a perfectly great political thriller by bringing in the son on Page 81!

But I do think the son’s voice really enhances the book rather than taking away from it. Ancestral Affairs is a clever title.
My working title had been The Haze of Ancestors.

That was unfortunate. I’m sorry, but it was.
[Laughs] So you have to give it to my editor Somak Ghoshal [of HarperCollins India] who came up with this title.

Coming back to the son, though, I really like his voice. It’s an outlier’s voice – indecorous, cynical, constantly talking back at the father, the rage animating it. Yet he’s so very likeable, more so than the father. The fact that he is not a success – and I think Parsis like Bengalis are very unforgiving of a lack of success – is what makes him so interesting.

You know, for the last 30 years, I had kept the son’s story in my head. I’d heard of an incident like that – a young lady is married off after the husband dies, and she goes off to the former in laws! I had tucked it away in my mind and I always wanted to weave a story around it.

[Darjeeling tea and an enormous amount of food arrives. So the rest of the conversation must be imagined taking place to the background music of tinkling china, since the tea is refilled again and again, and indiscreet munching on my part.]

What I find very curious is that you’ve been a poet for a very long time – but then poetry has been your first love. Short stories too – long enough. You took to the novel very late. [His first novel, For Pepper and Christ, published in 2010, is a masterly work of historical fiction.]
I tried my hand at the novel earlier. But invariably, after 30 or 40 pages, I knew they’d be disasters. So I trusted my judgment and I left them exactly where they were.

Did that make you anxious? That you were leaving the novel for very late, if you know what I mean. You were already so well known for your poetry…
My jobs were very hard. Both my jobs. In the police, and then, after 1974 when I came to…

The R&AW?
They were not easy jobs. I was in charge of very vital desks. As Deputy Director, I was told clearly that, “You are going to tell the country when the balloon goes up.” That is very heavy responsibility. Right till I retired as Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee, in 1995, I attended to that heavy responsibility.

After 1995, I took up a novel again. And I wrote it – you know, the Vasco da Gama novel – in two years. Many things happened after – the family… You know how these things are. It was finally published in 2010. Earlier I had planned for the book to be out in 1998, the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s arrival. But life takes you in other directions; you can’t stick to these deadlines.

Can one say, then, that R&AW interfered with the novel-writing career of Keki Daruwalla?Well, it helped me pay my bills!

That’s true.
So I am quite happy.

That leads me to something related. A lot of poets and writers have a certain kind of day job – they are professors or journalists, activists or art curators. Maybe photographers. You know? There is a sort of a continuum.
Or editors. Or they work in publishing firms.

Exactly. So they are dealing with…
Words. All the time, words.

Of course, now you have these MBAs who also write – hours grabbed between their corporate hunts, I presume. But that’s a whole other category. I am talking about your contemporaries, for instance. But you inhabited a whole other world – that must have shaped your perspective very differently. You did not have the luxury of the writerly position – which is often a radical position, a deeply idealistic position.
Very correct.

You were dealing with these urgent matters of security and statecraft, of strategy. Your writing bears a stamp of that tempering, I would hazard. When you were in service did you ever feel fettered by that? Or, on the contrary, did you feel enriched by all that experience?
Well, honestly, I think one moves smoothly between two personas. The R&AW was “office”. The poetry was the poetry. I don’t think the two really intruded on each other. But what do you mean when you say the stamp of that?

Say, Saam Bharucha and the absolute lack of slant in his voice at a heady excessive time. It might seem at first glance that it is the Parsi in him – the sane, distanced voice – but if one listens closely, perhaps one can also hear the intelligence man in him, an acute realist. One who is able to take into account many other forces, wheels within wheels, invisible strings etc. etc.
Thank you. I am glad you said that. And I am glad you made that very insightful observation – about not being idealistic or an activist in that sense. It is definitely a realistic novel, in the traditional sense. I was very clear about that when I was structuring the novel.

Of course, I don’t want to use the word “structuring” – the novel flows. I knew that the initial part would be political. Junagadh – that part I knew so well. While the rest would be a family saga. That much I knew well. But then you can’t plot everything when you start.

Yes? This is something I wanted to talk at length about. The craft. How do you approach your writing? There are novelists who know what the last line is going to be even before they’ve started writing; they know, before they’ve put down a single word, how to get to that end. They have to have every step in their head. Otherwise they can’t write.
They make lots of notes.

There is also the other method. Where you trust your judgment and begin – and then you see how it goes. Sentence by sentence, hour by hour, it unfolds.
I fall into the latter category. Though some plotting must have gone on in my mind, I can’t recall. When I start my third book, I’ll start from absolute scratch. But I have two or three sub-plots, and two or three characters in my mind. And I’ll just have to let them develop. I’ll have to select the period, of course. The '60s, '70s or '80s. I can’t set something in this century though. I would be out of date. I don’t know how a call centre functions, for example. I’m not even keeping up so much with Pakistan, West Asia, IS and so on – I am not going to write about these things anymore. I know.

That’s one of the great advantages, I think, of being a senior. You have that choice. You can say, I am not going to write about these things so I am not going to pretend to follow them on the news or keep up or whatever. I am not going to get distracted! What are you writing next?
Well, I am not talking about it yet…

Yes, I do know, books can sometimes be talked away into thin air…
But you could say, he is toying with the idea of a mother-daughter story.

Ah. So after a classic father-son narrative, you…
Want to discard the macho image. (Laughs.)

Do you type straight into the computer? Or do you write longhand?
I type straight. I made the transition fairly early, once the computer arrived.

But before that – for your poetry? Did you use a typewriter?
Very seldom. I had an Olivetti – still have it. But I always wrote longhand in those days. And the typist typed them up for me. But for the last fifteen years, I’ve been typing them straight into the computer. And I have a whole volume with me now. Arundhathi Subramaniam [the poet] is helping put the book together.

What stage are the memoirs in?
Still at an initial stage. About half a dozen chapters done. I’m almost finishing the policing part.

So we’re going into the R&AW part? That’s intriguing.
Very little of the R&AW part will go into the book, I’m afraid. What do say about intelligence? You don’t tattle – you don’t kiss and tell. But in all my years as a poet, I hardly ever wrote about the Parsis. In my entire oeuvre there is only one poem about the Parsis! The Fire Altar and all came about much later – 1990/91?

But Ancestral Affairs is Parsi fiction territory. In 1999, I was invited to Rajkot to deliver a keynote address on Parsi literature. I was a little surprised. I had not heard the term then! I hope, now, that this novel is seen in that light.

Now, here is a craft question for you from a very young writer. We’d planned to do a series on Scroll.in – have eminent writers answer questions on craft from young people who are just about getting serious about their writing. So a young friend of mine, Tejaswini Naik, very enthusiastically sent me a set of questions. Her first question was this: if you have two ideas for two very different books haunting you, how do you pick which one to write first?
Pick the one which is more accessible.

Accessible?
What is easier to write, that is, what is easier to tackle at this moment. Just tackle that first. But if the mind starts roving, don’t get too bothered. Start jotting down points for the second novel also. There are no barriers. In fact, there are people who write two novels at the same time. I am not one of them. I get sold on one idea at a time, all the time thinking of the plot and the characters.

Do you feel guilty when you don’t write?
Well, not anymore, I suppose. Once upon a time I used to. But then – one is ending an innings you know…(Laughs)

One is ending an innings. I never forget that. I’ll be 79 in another month…

Last question. Something to end this chat with. You’ve seen so much of India, you’ve witnessed the last few decades of India’s contemporary history and politics – are you, on the whole, hopeful about the future?
You see, the people – they’ll get my vote. The trouble is too many lobbies, and too many cross pulls. Look at the economy. You’ll have one pull for the socialist economies, one for the factories. The moment there are factories, you’ll have the environmental pull. The cross pulls are far too many for this country. No government can handle them too successfully. Irrespective of who is in power. This is a very complex country, and a very complex people. But somewhere along the way a few hard decisions have to be taken.

Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club, and, most recently, The Heat and Dust Project: The Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, along with Saurav Jha. Keki Daruwalla however insists that her name is really Demonpriya – following the Parsi interpretation of the word – and she is seriously considering using this for her next novel in the hopes that the Devil might help sell more copies.