‘Poetry should be listed under fiction’: Watch Jeet Thayil on ‘The Book of Chocolate Saints’
‘I write novels for the same reason I write poetry, because otherwise I would be on medication.’
“I always think of it like getting on a boat and sailing out into the open sea, not knowing at which beach your boat will end up,” said Jeet Thayil, author of the recently published The Book of Chocolate Saints, responding to questions from Scroll.in (video above).
The questions were channelled for Scroll by writer Mridula Koshy, who added a few of her own to turn the exchange into a conversation. Thayil expanded on the limited role of facts versus imagination, the process of writing a book, and his motivations as a writer as well as those of his characters.
Thayil’s novel has a dizzying cast of characters, but the central one, Newton Francis Xavier, is an amalgamation, of among others, artist Francis Newton Souza and poet Dom Moraes. What would they have been their thoughts on reading the fictionalised character based on their lives? “Dom Moraes would have been amused. He would have smiled sardonically,” said Thayil.
Apart from expressing strong opinions on how poetry should be categorised (fiction, not non-fiction), Thayil also revealed that he wrote an original manuscript which had to split into three parts. So, with the first two – Narcopolis, published in 2012 and The Book of Chocolate Saints – having become standalone novels, we can definitely expect a third.