‘I let a novel speak through its settings’

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To ask the question, ‘why play sport’, is in my view analogous to asking the question, ‘why live life’,” says the impassioned prologue in Rahul Bhattacharya’s first book Pundits From Pakistan.

Thirty-two-year-old Bhattacharya’s first book won the 2005 Crossword Popular Book Award. His second book, The Sly Company of People Who Care, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Mr Bhattacharya, who lives in Delhi, is a cricket fan. “If your are a committed cricket fan you basically have to sacrifice the rest of your life.”
For Mr Bhattacharya, who worked as a cricket correspondent, cricket was an educative way of knowing about the world particularly the ex-colonial societies. “I can say that reporting on cricket fuelled my interest in a lot of other things.”
Talking about the Indian cricket scene he conceded that there is too much of cricket. “You can’t have the same anticipation for all the matches or invest the same emotion.”
From a cricket buff to a writer, Mr Bhattacharya said his journey was an unplanned one. “I ended up with the book the same way as I ended up being a sports correspondent. I had come out of college and had no idea what I was going to do.”
His first book that documents the 2004 Pakistan tour of the Indian team was voted the fourth best cricket book of all time by the Wisden Cricketer.
Mr Bhattacharya said all he wanted to do when he set out for the tour was to write about cricket on a larger canvas, “about cricket as an expression for life”.
Most of the people, including his mother and sister didn’t know he was writing a book. “Writing a book is like an embarrassing thing. It’s a presumptuous thing to tell someone ‘O am writing a book,’” he said.
His first international assignment was Guyana and it paved way for his second work, a fiction. “At that point I wanted to explore the world outside cricket. The thing that worked was that I really wanted to go to Guyana. I was simply curious.”
Talking about the reception to his first book Bhattacharya said he was too young to know what responses are and what they were meant to be. “I had no idea how the publishing works. But all in all the book was well received.”
The Sly Company of People Who Care, written in the form of a travelogue, is a memoir of an unnamed narrator, an Indian who much like the author is in Guyana, “To be a slow ramblin’ stranger”.
Mr Bhattacharya, however, asserted that his relationship with Guyana is very different from that of the narrator of the book. “The idea of the book was not to say that I did this or that. It’s a book that explores through new relationships between people, races, men and men, men and women. It illuminates what happens when you throw people, societies and civilisations together. Because that’s what the Caribbean society was, where people displaced from different parts of the world were brought in as indentured labourers and were asked to grow things for the European colonisers. Think of all the energies that might have been brought in, all the creative possibilities, friendships, adventures, the friction that would arise and what is the consequence if you bring all these together.”
Mr Bhattacharya, who has been hailed as an heir of Sir Naipaul, said VS is the undisputed master inspite of the fact that people have reservations about his writings. Encountering Sir Naipaul’s works in Guyana was unavoidable, he added.
Still a new entrant on the literary scene, Mr Bhattacharya, who has been to a few literature festivals lately, admitted being tired. “The small fests are getting big and the big ones are getting bigger, I just wonder how long is this going to last?”. “This is essentially not a performance activity. Writers write in private and readers read in private and this will be the relationship always,” he asserted.
Talking about India, Mr Bhattacharya called his relationship with his country “a lot more ambivalent”. “India is a place which has so many problems that feel insurmountable, often a (feeling of) complete helplessness that is not easy to deal with.”
For a writer, he said, India is a difficult terrain. “You feel confronting India is an absolute challenge. But as a writer you have to and I want to confront it.”