In The Country Of Longing

In some ways, this book is the result of this amazing collaboration that I’ve had with the writer, Hanya Yanagihara, who edited the Times. And many of these, like this sort of connective tissue of the book, are this idea of lead histories, of synchronicities, of a kind of historical controversy.  Each of these societies is in some ways wrestling with a pain or a historical moment that’s reverberating into the present. And so, in a sense, it’s both. They’ve come out of this kind of decision-making between her (Yanagihara) and me, to choose these different places to be the locus of the same theme.

And then, in a funny way, the sort of elephant in the room, or the kind of present absence, is India, because these are very Indian concerns: worrying about history, skewing of history, that is not a big feature of life in the United States.

On a very personal level, there was this need to be working again, to not, in a sense, be defeated by the fact that the ability to go to India, to think about India, to write about India, to be able to carry on as a writer, that was a very important personal thing in my mind. But the other question, the larger one I was chasing, none of these are cosmetic questions.

They’re raised because of the places one is travelling in, and people are still trying to resolve certain aspects of the past. And that, for me, was very important. If Buddhism was very politicised in Sri Lanka, it was because that was part of what the travelling told me. If somebody in Mexico was still feeling the tension between the pre-Columbian past and the Hispanicisation of Mexico, that was because people were talking about these things. So, one, of course, has lines of inquiry, but they evolve very organically from the travel. They’re not necessarily an imposition on the travel.

I have a very close friend here, Karan Mahajan. We used to always talk a lot about this idea of feeling betwixt and between, and of a sudden situation of liminality that migration brings on. And it was really interesting that the minute the OCI conversation happened, Karan and I stopped having that conversation. And I suddenly realised that the difference was that he was still balancing societies. And for me, someone saying, You can’t come here anymore. You cannot see your family. You can’t sort of step in. So, one would think, oh, what’s the difference? It’s actually a tremendous difference. And the business of the difference between exile and migration was really brought home to me.  

Then obviously, as the years go by, it becomes very laden with other emotions, you know, people dying and that being the new reality. Like my grandmother, she was literally like a friend to me because I lived with her all my life, and there was no right to closure. She just faded away as if she and her role in my life were nothing. 

People are busy, people are living their lives. You can’t stop your life; you know, make a fuss over this thing. You have to kind of carry on. So, there’s no accusation there. But, obviously, in many situations, it’s that small side of things, the stuff you take for granted, that is actually very important.

And then, on the other hand, my husband’s grandmother has just passed away, and she was a great matriarch, and he’s on his way to the funeral and the whole family and extended family are gathering. These things bring to focus that I can’t. And these gestures, things, also make life real.

I certainly do. I’ve spoken more, I suppose, to people who are in a situation directly like mine, like Ashok Swain or Natasha Koh. I mean, the whole relationship with citizenship in the subcontinent is very, very convulsed. And in a sense, the OCI is an emanation of that. I guess, it was just a short-sightedness on my part because I was thinking of this very particular situation of a life in the West, of this document that allows you to live and work in India. But I think there is very much a line to be drawn there. 

I think that with these, with every moment of rupture that I’ve had, whether it’s something like meeting my father for the first time, him being killed, not being able to go back to India, there’s this kind of corresponding need to try to kind of gather yourself together to make a whole, to give shape, but the obvious shape is not that.

If there’s this experience of sitting, as I am right now, in a house in upstate New York, where all of these things feel very far away, I definitely feel a need to give cohesion or a kind of shape to these circumstances, because otherwise, they feel very loose and very hard to hold in one’s head at the same time.

I think that in the US, you’re dealing with a situation that one’s never had because this really was the kind of crucible of hyphenated identities. And in a sense, the elasticity of the American frame of belonging was something that was so marvellous.

The conceit of America was this idea of the ruthless elite in a place where you could participate, merely by signing up, right? It was a country that was written into being, and you could acquire the document, and that document meant everything. It was part of the seductiveness of a kind of American experience. And for sure now, there is very much a countervailing force, and of people who’ve been here long enough, who no longer feel that this is an immigrant nation, and that their presence here, and the length of the time that they’ve been here, gives them a status that a new arrival doesn’t have, which is all very new. 

And obviously, if you want to see a kind of echo, certainly in India, it’s a very different kind of thing, which is a wanting to scrape the past clean of certain accretion, whether it’s the westernised classes, whether it’s Indo-Islamic culture; this need for the idea that India itself is older than the Hindu reality. So, there’s a wish to go this far and no further, and to stop, and have one point of origin, be a kind of source of purity, whereas the other points of origin are seen as corruption.

I think that the sort of change we’ve seen on the level of technology, on the experience of people seeing each other through others’ eyes. And I think that the sort of technological shakeup we’ve seen in the last 30 or 40 years, the kind of migration we’ve seen in the last 30 or 40 years, all of these things have created that experience of people, in very surprising ways, having to see themselves through others’ eyes. And for a long time, it was the experience that people in our part of the world had felt encircled by the European gaze or by the white person’s gaze.

And now I think that there is a lot of movement in the other direction. A lot of people here, who thought that they had a kind of a dominating gaze, are now feeling the experiences of being seen through the eyes of new arrivals. 

So, I think all of this can cause a profound shakeup in our society. 

Very specific, granular. It’s the actual physical abode of my chocolate lab, the fact of my marriage to my husband. I can’t think of more than that now, because I can’t be invested in something as unreliable as that. 

I’m thinking of home as an act of agency and creation, like the parts of the things that I have done to make a home in my home; these inherited identities of nation and religion, like a tribe, mean much less to me.

For me to be able to carry on, I need to be able to live with the idea that I may actually never be coming back. 

It’s a deep hurt. I wasn’t in India for two minutes; I was in India for 30 or 40 years. 

I think, for instance, that we have experiences of certain people who are undocumented in this country (US), and one of the things that is really violent, or as you say hurtful, is this experience that it tells you after a whole life that your life hasn’t mattered or hasn’t counted, or that your time in that place doesn’t mean anything. 

I am that expert person. It’s not that I’m not in sympathy with people that I’m travelling amongst, or that I’m not travelling. But I am that person. I come in with a return ticket in my pocket. So, I’m travelling with that distance, and there’s an acknowledgement of that distance. I think that we shouldn’t be in a situation where the actual fact of being able to organise narrative is somehow seen as discrediting the stories one is in.

There is also obviously craft and expertise, and all of these things are involved. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that there’s also sympathy. There is a distance, and I think the important thing is to acknowledge that distance. 

In one of Kundera’s books, he talks about how the equal blocks of time in a writer’s life are not equal in weight. And that’s what forms that kind of understructure of creativity, a level of the subconscious, like a city or a landscape, really entering your soul. You can’t have that with one, two, or three places. You have that really with the one place. And there’s nothing in that that could compete with Delhi.

There’s an experience of that city that was so formative. Nothing I add to that could ever be the same. I felt very strongly about returning to Delhi. And so, it’s not like Delhi would be my choice, because I would love for that city to be Istanbul or something else, but it’s not. In my case, it is Delhi.