The Blue Book

Author: Amitava Kumar

• I like the sentences written by my friend Ian Jack, a regular contributor to The Guardian, Granta and the London Review of Books. I especially like his reports from the subcontinent because in India even reporters can often sound like bureaucrats.

• ‘Danger: Imagination at Work’ would be one of my favourite road signs, if novels were roads.

• In my copy of his book Mofussil Junction, Ian had written: ‘The truth is impossible. The big idea is to try to tell it.’

• After the December 2012 gang-rape of a young Delhi woman on a bus, the father made a remark in an interview that has stayed with me. He told the foreign journalist, ‘I heard once that to escape poverty you need to work like a horse and live like a saint.’ I liked that. I think my novella will be titled Live Like a Saint.

• When I was a student in Delhi, I would go to ISBT and catch a bus that would take me out to the small towns in the hills. Almora, Bhimtal, Rishikesh. The trip was inexpensive and I relished

• What matters in the end, however, are the stories that people offer. I value that encounter more than the place.

• During our aimless walking around the gutted Notre Dame Cathedral, Amit pressed me with questions that I didn’t have answers for. Why had the election results surprised so many? What makes it difficult for educated liberals to see the truth about the ascendancy of right-wing forces? Why are we so ineffective in our dissent? I didn’t have any answers for these questions, or at least I didn’t have answers that would fit as opinion. Instead, for the past several years, I have wanted to address such questions obliquely or even directly only in fiction.

• A writer I enjoyed meeting in Mildura was Helen Garner. I had read her brilliant 1972 piece called ‘Why Does the Women Have All the Pain, Miss?’ Garner was an English teacher in an Australian school. One day her thirteen-year-old students began to giggle and ask questions about the defaced art in their textbooks. The students were curious—and utterly ignorant—about sex and Garner decided to answer their questions as truthfully as she could. Her

• A writer I enjoyed meeting in Mildura was Helen Garner. I had read her brilliant 1972 piece called ‘Why Does the Women Have All the Pain, Miss?’

• So, here’s a pro-tip about travel: literary festivals cannot compete with literature—stay at home and read a good book.

• If Mary Ruefle’s work has its own sly voice, as a person, too, she is wholly herself. You cannot email her. If you visit her website and click on the contact button, you will read the following line: ‘Surprise! I do not actually own a computer. The only way to contact me is by contacting my press, Wave Books, or by running into someone I know personally on the street.’

• Would she be willing to do a virtual reading if we arranged a meeting by Zoom? I offered this possibility and said that she could think about it. She didn’t need to think about it. She said, ‘I would rather die.’

• Did I want anything from the items of jewellery? I shook my head to say no, but then picked up a necklace of prayer beads that I had seen my mother wear. This crystal necklace didn’t look expensive and was light enough not to add to the burden of my sorrow. Take it, take it, my father said.

• On the way to my classes in the morning, I sometimes touch the necklace where it sits near my mother’s portrait. It is a way of remembering my mother.

• The realities I was describing, when presented in my mother tongue, became so much more immediate and sensual. I would read my own words, now in Hindi, and the hairs on the back of my neck would stand. Sometimes, I would cry.

• And this is the second:

• When I think of my youth, I’m suddenly running down a long, endless corridor. The sun is hot. It sits still, bleaching the bones of the afternoon. The running figure screams over and over again, ‘What a waste! What a waste!’

• When people ask me about some of my favourite pieces of writing advice, I always remember William Maxwell’s words: ‘After forty years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.’ I wanted to catch life on the wing, as it were. I wish I knew the names of all the birds where I live.

• When people ask me about some of my favourite pieces of writing advice, I always remember William Maxwell’s words: ‘After forty years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.’

• I had read about the frangipani in W. Somerset Maugham’s novels but never realized, until I saw the sign in Lodi Gardens, that it was the familiar but still very beautiful champa.

• And my favourite, the gulmohar. I always think of the lines of Dushyant Kumar’s ghazal: ‘Jeeyein toh apni gali mein gulmohar ke talle / Marein toh gair ki gali mein gulmohar ke liye.’

• The opening line of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan had an effect on me: ‘The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers.’ I liked that the sentence remained direct even as it gestured towards a terrible history.

• It would take time for me to understand that strategically placed, seemingly simple sentences could develop into devastating drama. The writer who was a master at this was V.S. Naipaul. He often crafted a complex arrangement within the space of a single sentence. Nothing need appear forced or false. Here is a line from his The Enigma of Arrival that I chose nearly at random: ‘To go abroad could be to fracture one’s life: it was six years before I saw or heard members of my family again; I lost six years of their lives.’ This

• It would take time for me to understand that strategically placed, seemingly simple sentences could develop into devastating drama. The writer who was a master at this was V.S. Naipaul. He often crafted a complex arrangement within the space of a single sentence. Nothing need appear forced or false. Here is a line from his The Enigma of Arrival that I chose nearly at random: ‘To go abroad could be to fracture one’s life: it was six years before I saw or heard members of my family again;

• It would take time for me to understand that strategically placed, seemingly simple sentences could develop into devastating drama. The writer who was a master at this was V.S. Naipaul. He often crafted a complex arrangement within the space of a single sentence. Nothing need appear forced or false. Here is a line from his The Enigma of Arrival that I chose nearly at random: ‘To go abroad could be to fracture one’s life: it was six years before I saw or heard members of my family again; I lost six years of their lives.’

• The writer who was a master at this was V.S. Naipaul. He often crafted

• In a book I was reading, I came across a piece of dialogue involving Naipaul. Upon being asked whether he liked any American authors, Naipaul had said, ‘Do you know the first sentence of the short story “The Blue Hotel” by Stephen Crane? About the colour blue? … I like that.’ I soon found the story in a library. This is its first sentence: ‘The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background.’

• His books have been my companions for much of my adult life; A Seventh Man, his imaginative work on migrants in Europe, inspired my very first book, Passport Photos.

• ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait,’ the critic Anatole Broyard noted. I was trying to create a family album, accurate for who I was as a writer at that time in my life.

• A photograph is easily printed and reproduced and shared on social media. A drawing, on the other hand, is a more deliberate act. It slows me down. I do it in order to slow-jam the news.

• A part of me feels that the purpose of art is to open up a space that is, at least for a while, free of politics. That feels like freedom. Perhaps for that reason, we writers often let our eye linger on small, seemingly irrelevant details. We can be reading about a riot but will have noticed that the murderer holding the knife has the nail on his pinkie painted red.

• I also wanted to be a writer. When one is young, one wants to be many things. The ambition lasted a few years and then I turned my attention to other pursuits. Later, this ambition came back stronger. There was a reason for this: when I was older, I had more things to write about, and it became easier to write. So, that’s the first thing I need to say here: writing begins with waiting.

• That is the second thing I need to say here: if you have nothing to write, observe the world and record its ways.

• Behind all this speculation is a dictum that is attributed to the late John Gardner: ‘There are only two plots in all of literature: you go on a journey or a stranger comes to town.’

• It has been nearly twenty years since the night in a newspaper office in Delhi when I came across a copy of a fax V.S. Naipaul had sent in response to a reporter asking for his rules of writing. (‘Avoid the abstract; always go for the concrete.’)

• ‘Novel’ is derived from the Latin ‘novella’, another word for what is new or, as I understand it, in the news.

• As a child, I often rehearsed the eventuality of my parents’ deaths. I suppose it was a stand against fear. When I was older the fear went away for a while. It returned when my parents grew older, and I began to write about death.

• There is a story that I wrote down in my not