Debut novel, gen-next Tharoor heads for stars
I can't escape my parentage, I don't want to, says Kanishk Tharoor
Bengaluru: Kanishk Tharoor, who arrived in Bengaluru for the launch of his debut book, Swimmer Among the Stars, has just wrapped up The Museum of Lost Objects, a radio series for the BBC. It allowed him to delve into his love for history, a love that isn't the least bit surprising, should you take a moment to consider what growing up in the Tharoor household is like!
I arrive at Cinnamon a good half hour before the launch of Swimmer Among the Stars is scheduled to begin and sit myself in a quiet corner with a copy of the book. A number of reviews online had talked about the fact that Kanishk Tharoor's stories came from all over the place – experiences from his travels, real life experiences and inspiration drawn from political or historical events. The book opens with Elephant at Sea, a surreal story about an elephant arriving in Morocco. It's his sense of humour that jumps out at you – Kanishk has a wonderful way with words – I was in the midst of wondering if the elephant was a metaphor and why it was there and what was happening, really, when a phone call from him interrupted that little reverie.
Bengaluru traffic decided that our interview was to take place on the phone and I found myself straining to hear him – Kanishk is an extraordinarily soft-spoken, although a very honest man. “I'd never planned to write a collection of short stories and I didn't write them all at once,” he said. “They were written over a period of ten years, the oldest happened when I was about 18.” He was no stranger to the art even then, however – Kanishk grew up surrounded by books and literature, which he owes to two very erudite parents. “I read everything, from hand-me-down Enid Blytons, to English translations of Persian books,” he said. "One of my favourite books was an abridged version of the Shahnama."
Writing, he says, came naturally to him, it was a world he couldn't help but be drawn to. “I was surrounded by writers, so the world of writing was never an opaque thing. My brother Ishan and I have been writing since we were little children. It was a natural thing to do." He was in his twenties when he began to pay attention to the craft, at graduate school, where he also met his now-wife, Amanda Calderon.
Does he find himself in the shadow of his father, at least here in India? “When I started out, yes,” he agreed. "I can't escape my parentage and I don't want to, either. I'm very proud of dad and everything he has done. As writers, though, we're completely different, in terms of our styles and our temperaments, too.”
Entering the world academia was a very real option at one point, said Kanishk. “I found that fiction always had a greater appeal for me, though. That comes from my family, too. We always took a lot of pleasure in books, it was an intellectually charged atmosphere all the time.” Being a writer meant understanding emotions over ideas, a journey he describes as a “descent”.
“When you're a historian, you're dealing with ideas, more than anything else. My entry point into a story could be political or historical, but I need to descend into something much more granular, something more human, really, to tell a story.”
Is he a disciplined writer? He'd like to be, he said at once. “I can have bouts of being extremely disciplined, which are usually followed by bouts of total indiscipline!” He is working on his first novel at the moment and says, "I wake up in the morning, drink plenty of tea and sit down in my pajamas to write what I hope will be a lot!” His wife, Amanda, is his first reader.
“She's a wonderful poet and understands the economy of words in a way I just don't, as a writer of prose,” he said. “She can spend a whole day playing around with ten lines. There's an approach to rhythm and understanding what word goes where that only a poet can have. I don't want to be presumptuous about what she might learn from me, though! I think, at the end of the day, it's about a similar, overarching interest.”