By Deborah Baker

Rs 338

Some writers have a flair for a turn of phrase, for articulating an idea in a way that seems outlandish and yet, just right. Deborah Baker, Pulitzer Prize finalist, novelist Amitav Ghosh’s wife and biographer extraordinaire, has that gift.

You sense it first when you hear this cool, elegant, slightly academic woman describe just what the process of writing a biography is like. Her latest work, The Convert, is based on the life of American Jew Margaret Marcus who converted to Islam, took on the name of Maryam Jameelah, and settled down in Pakistan to help shape jihadi thought.
“I always use the metaphor of falling in love,” Deborah says with a laugh, adding, “Initially, you look at the person with sceptical eyes, but then he works on you, and gradually, you begin to fall for him. Slowly, you see the world through the bubble of this person. Writing a biography is more complicated than falling in love, but you are in this bubble, you’re trying to completely inhabit their frame of mind, their frame of vision, the way they see and interpret this world.”
In her best-known writings, Deborah has inhabited the worlds of writer Laura Riding and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, but looking at the world through Maryam’s bubble was different. “In this case, I had entered the mind of someone who was fairly militant, who had a rigid idea of the West,” says Deborah, indicating “West” by drawing air quotes. “She lived in this world that was divided in two, and was looking at my own country (America) with an incredible amount of rage.”
The “love affair” deteriorated beyond a certain point, as The Convert reveals in its later chapters. But then so do most romances. “At a certain point of time, you begin to see this person’s shortcomings, you begin to feel the oppressiveness of living inside someone else’s world…you begin to look for a way out. You ask yourself, how can they say or believe these things? You’re supposed to maintain a scholarly aloofness, and in my other books, none of these ups and downs in mood swings are evident. But in The Convert, I decided to let them be seen, to show all the stages of our — you know — ‘affair’. In the end, I did become fairly
antagonistic — but we’re friends now!” Deborah quips.
The reason for the “antagonism” becomes evident as Maryam’s story unravels, and reviewers (who point out that Deborah has a knack of matching her narrative style to the personality of her subjects) have described the process as the “taking away of one veil after another”.
Her previous work on Ginsberg (A Blue Hand) too was seen as reflective of the Beat poet’s own non-linear style. “In terms of a narrative style, I’m very suggestible,” Deborah admits. She says: “Allen Ginsberg was not a great prose stylist. He tended to rush through things, his journals would be jam-packed with amazing images. It would be really difficult for a reader to follow it, unless you were really immersed in it. With Maryam, her writing was incredibly logical and her sentences were transparent in a way Ginsberg’s weren’t. But what drives the narrative even more is, what material you have to work with. Sometimes you have letters, journals, audio recordings, video. The question then is, how do you reconstruct this material that in some way mirrors the real thing?”
There were other similarities between Deborah’s work on Allen and Maryam (apart from the fact that her narrative style was reflective of their personalities), Deborah says: “Writing about Ginsberg was a great way for me to rediscover India. Even though I’d been coming here for so many years, he had such a unique way of looking at things, for instance, the way he explained Hinduism in a letter to his friends back home. But in a strange sort of mirror, I heard echoes of Ginsberg’s critique of America in Maryam Jameelah’s critique. Their ideas of alternatives were very different, but just the fact that they had looked at their home country through similar eyes, was to me, very interesting.”
Curiously, it was through a veil that Deborah first saw Maryam, in a photo, which shows her fully clad in a burqa, hands clasped. Deborah recounts, “When I saw this picture of her in the archives (and it’s obvious she was posing for the camera), to me, it was like, what’s the point of having your picture taken if you’re not going to show your face? But then I thought that this was the only way she wants to be seen; maybe she’s self-conscious, maybe she has an ugly face, maybe she doesn’t like to be seen but she wants to be seen at the same time. She wanted to be seen on her own terms, which was underneath a veil.”
In the veil, Deborah found another metaphor she could relate to: “The whole project of a biography is that you want to be seen, but you don’t want to be seen directly, you want to be seen through someone else’s eyes. You want to raise all the questions that are close to our heart, but you don’t want to expose your own heart, you want to use someone else as a vehicle for that.”
Sometimes, being used as a vehicle can have its disadvantages, as Deborah discovered while working on The Convert. Deborah says it all comes down to “is this person an authority on their own life?”
The answer isn’t always yes, she implies when she
says, “Maryam was constantly in the process of telling her own story, writing it as a kind of spiritual moral. There was a real ideological intent to her writing her story (through her letters and essays) a particular way. But what was more interesting to me was the fact that she could never let that narrative be. She was constantly writing it and rewriting it — partly, because she was a seeker, partly because she realised that where she’d ended it wasn’t right. She wanted to create the perfect happy ending, and that kept changing at various stages.”
Deborah herself is too seasoned a writer to wish for conventional “happy endings”. “I think it is a kind of delusion that the biographer has, that you’re getting inside someone, that you’re recreating their character in your book,” she
muses. “You’re enthralled by this creation of yours, that is in some way, going to mirror the real thing. In the end, you know, you’re going to fall short and the question is, do you see things about this person that they can’t see themselves, or is the person you’ve created a figment of your own imagination, your own desires and your obsessions?”