Literary Reflections: Saikat Majumdar on Identity, Sexuality, and Immigrant Ambitions

What inspired you to explore themes of intimacy, desire, and identity? How exactly did you conceptualize the complex relationships between Kaustav, Avik, and Sunetra.

The nature of childhood friendship – particularly the erotic limits of such a frie ndship between adult men who imagine themselves as heterosexual is what is at stake in this novella. I think I was driven by the idea of pansexuality – attraction to multiple genders – as a utopian ideal which is sadly beyond the reach of most people. In this story, Kaustav’sattempt to break out of his heterosexuality breathes closely next to his childhood friend, Avik and his wife, Sunetra. Kaustav knows Sunetra has been intimate with Avik, and this knowledge shapes a strange desire for her in Kaustav which has life-changing consequences for all three of them.

Disruptive desire is a powerful subject for me. The Firebird was a novel about a young boy’s destructive obsession with his mother’s life as a theatre actor. The Scent of God was the story of romance between two classmates in an all-male boarding school run by a monastic order.In this novella, I imagined Kaustav as a gay man trapped in a straight body. All three characters are immigrants in North America, with varying degrees of success. Old friendship and a marriage bind them together but they are pushed in different directions by their ambitions. What the strange sexual desire does to this little group is the subject of this novella.

In any fiction, characters have inner as well as outer lives. The outer lives of all three characters are rooted in their immigrant professional identities. But inner and outer lives are not separate. Difference in career ambition creates cracks in a marriage. Friendship and sexual desire powerfully shape inner lives, sometimes in ways that are difficult to openly talk about. But that’s how life is, isn’t it? We’re shaped by both the drive of work and the play of desire. And a human narrative is shaped by how the two work and play with each other.

My fiction always revisits places I’ve been, whether or not the story is real or invented. The genuine feel of a place is important to me, and for that I need to have known the place myself. As for Kaustav’s character being mine – that’s a difficult question, no? I identify as queer rather than gay – I think most people are queer whether or not they know it. I have imagined pansexuality as a universal humanism – though like Kaustav, it is also a failed dream for me. But the erotic has many articulations outside the sexual, as I hope comes out in this novella.

Honestly, I don’t think of all that while writing fiction – it’s just the need to articulate in language and narrative a powerful, sometimes hidden impulse. But now that the novel is done, I hope it makes some people realize that no matter how they consciously identify themselves, and whatever lifestyle they lead, there is queerness is most people, perhaps all of us. What we identify as normative sexuality exists only as a forced ideal, to serve the needs of the state and the market. But individual happiness and fulfilment comes from strange and unexpected places.

Characters don’t listen to you, they run away from you and start doing their own things. But that’s how you realize the story is really alive.

It always means a lot when writers whose work has resonated with me are moved by my writing – be it the form of fiction, or the artistic exploration of strange desires.

A non-fiction book, The Amateur, on self-taught and amateur reading cultures comes out this autumn. Also a kind of desire – a hunger perhaps, for language and education.