RH: What's it like to spend so much time writing about a
protagonist who's basically unlikable, even reprehensible?
BM: I kind of like her, actually.
RH: There are things that I like about her, but she's not
what I'd call endearing or sympathetic.
BM: I hope she's sympathetic. She's tough and vulnerable. I
don't have any control over my characters. At any given time, there
are scores of characters yelling at each other, yelling at me, inside
my head. Some of them sort of take over, and I become totally
intrigued or mesmerized by them. Devi came to me as the opposite of
a character I'd written earlier, Jasmine from the novel Jasmine.
Draft by draft, I came to understand Devi better, and the most
important idea that wrote itself in the second or third draft was that
she prizes clarity over everything else.
What she understands, in retrospect, is that there's a huge difference
between vengeance and justice. Once that idea was articulated by my
character, I realized that in order to make my concept of divine
justice, which sometimes involves great violence, understandable to
the reader, I'd have to dig into and share the Hindu mythology of the
goddess Devi worshipped in Bengal, who was created by the Cosmic
Spirit to do battle with the baddest bad ass of all the demons, the
Buffalo Demon, and is therefore quite violent.
I never saw my character Devi's tale as optimistic. Here's a street
smart, savvy, manipulative young woman, enraged about the fact
that she was thrown out like a garbage sack on the hippie trail, who's
part of a larger design in which some higher power uses her to
restore some kind of balance and purge evil out of our California. I
never saw her as a mean person, more as a person capable of
redemption after she's gone through some of the violence within
herself.
RH: So as you were writing the novel, it wasn't necessarily that
much of a surprise when she burns down her ex-lover's house at the
end of Part One? That's the point for me where I stopped seeing her
as a sarcastic but sweet character and started seeing her as being
capable of just about anything.
BM: I knew she was going to burn down the house in the early
drafts, but I didn't know what would happen as a result, other than
that there was no turning back for her. The final ending of the book
was what came as a total surprise to me.
RH: Earlier drafts didn't lead to that final confrontation?
BM: I don't look at my early drafts in hard copy. I just open
another file in my word processor and start from scratch. Each draft
helps me know my characters better; draft by draft, their voices get
louder and they tell me their adventures more fully each time
through. The characters thicken, becoming more dense and complex.
I hear the sentences better. I do a lot of drafts. In order to get these
very dense, high-energy sentences, I've thought through much
bulkier paragraphs.
RH: One of the things this novel is about is coming to grips with
the legacy of the '60s. The former hippies have put aside the
consequences of their actions; Devi, as the instrument we've
discussed, represents those consequences coming back to them and
forcing the issue.
BM: As a professor and workshop leader, I'm constantly
working with young people for whom Vietnam, the Kennedy
assassination, and so on mean nothing. They're simply statistics. But
Devi's generation is still a victim of those events, they're formed by
post-Vietnam America. I've come to realize that one of the themes
throughout my fiction is the changes in the way America thinks of
itself and is seen by the rest of the world as a result of Vietnam. My
sympathies are very much with people like the character "Loco
Larry," people I see around my neighborhood who were damaged by
the war. The peace protestors were noble -- and both I and my
husband were involved with rallies and vigils at the time -- but the
peace movement also masked a certain excessive narcissism. People
were doing good, but at the same time they were self-indulgently
satisfying their sensual and sexual appetites, and many of them
never acknowledged the fallout from that kind of narcissism, how it
affected the people around them. Many of the people who went to
India looking to escape Western civilization misunderstood and
misapplied Indian traditions, and succumbed to the imperializing
impulse. They thought that their version of India was the way India
really was, without understanding Indian culture.
RH: What separates you from other Indian fiction writers?
BM: I think my work from Darkness onward, so from
about 1985 to the present, is hard for some readers to understand
because I don't fit into any easy slots. I'm a woman who was born in
Calcutta, but I've lived in America my entire adult life and consider
myself an American. My literary soul was formed by literature from
around the world, but especially American literature. I'm an
American writer of Indian origin. I'm not doing an exotic ghetto,
National Geographic Indian number, and I'm not making readers feel
good about those locales -- aren't we quaint, aren't we sweet, aren't
we sentimental and emotionally expressive. I'm showing white
Americans their world in a different way, so they'll never be able to
walk down their own streets quite the same way after reading my
books.
RH: Who do you read for pleasure?
BM: I read many different kinds of authors. I love James
Ellroy's books. He has qualities that I strive for in my work,
particularly an edgy humor combined with a dark vision of society,
as well as incredible energy in every one of his sentences. It must
seem very strange that a very demure Indian lady sees James Ellroy
as a kindred literary spirit, but there you are.
RH: How much do you keep up with modern Indian
literature?
BM: With Indian literature in English and Bengali, as much as
possible. I go to India every year to see my family and during those
trips, I empty out bookstores getting the latest books. But there are
so many languages in India, so many regional literatures with prolific
writers that I can't claim to know all of Indian literature, or even all
of that from the languages I know.
RH: But you know enough of it to know that American readers are
only getting the tip of the iceberg, as it were.
BM: Absolutely. The only writers of Indian origin that
American writers know are the ones who happen to be
credentialized by magazines like the New Yorker and, of
course, published in America. Very often, the writers who are picked
up and given that attention by the American publishing industry are
minority writers who are expatriates. They've lived outside India for
much of their lives, and Indian writers in India don't necessarily see
any affinity with them. It's sad to me that Americans aren't as
interested in reading translations of some of these Indian writers.
We don't see many translations from non-Western languages being
made available to us.
RH: Do you usually spend a lot of time on the research and draft
phases of your work?
BM: It depends on the book. Once the character comes to me, I
know what kind of material will be essential, what I'll need to know.
My last novel, The Holder of the World, made much use of
virtual reality. And as with Devi's job as a media escort, the narrator
of that novel had a very 90s profession; she was an asset hunter,
tracking down people's financial holdings. But the novel was also
about seventeenth century Massachusetts and various trading
companies that established themselves in seventeenth century India,
which meant eleven years of uncontrolled and immensely
pleasurable research. I love history as story, and the details of
customs, manners, and social structures, the way that people thought
and behaved.
RH: Media escorts and asset hunters are both facets of
contemporary culture that perhaps only an outsider perspective
would notice, although you don't necessarily have to be a foreign-
born author to do it.
BM: A writer, in order to be at her or his sensitive and most
receptive, has to be both an insider and an outsider. My quarrel with
certain writers who see themselves only as expatriate Indians
writing about India from outside is that they're too far out. To write
about something, I need to both know it well and look at it from an
odd angle. I don't want to be sneer at or satirize my characters, just
to look at them differently.
RH: That gives you the insight to see them behaving not as
examples of a satirical point, but out of sincerely felt motivations and
interests.
BM: Exactly. That's where I feel I'm very different from, say,
V. S. Naipaul, who all too often in my opinion sets himself above the
cultures he depicts, adopting a patronizing or snide tone. Coming
back to your initial question, that's why I don't see Devi as an
unlikable or unsympathetic character. I can't write unless I've come
to love a character for all his or her wickedness or flaws.
