Jai Arjun Singh: Writers without reading

Any professional book reviewer knows there are days when one despairs of the grind of reading literary fiction, and days when concentration reserves fall so low that even Jeffrey Archer can seem highbrow and impenetrable. At such times, I turn for comfort to one of the mass-market novels that bear the insignia of low-investment publishing houses like Srishti. The sensory experience of reading these books begins with the titles, most of which are splendidly ungrammatical and contain at least one set of ellipses and a word in all-caps. Their very prefaces can make the heart sing; sentences such as “The insect of writing a novel was born in my Department of Brain during my graduation days” point to the treasures that await in the main narrative.

At one point in Pankaj Pandey’s The Saga of LOVE Via Telephone...Tring Tring, the narrator-protagonist glimpses a pretty girl in college:

“She emerged through the lane from her classroom with open hair, walking next to hundreds of students, some standing right in her path. Without getting perturbed, she walked across the lawn, went to the library, returned her books, and walked back on the same path before disappearing out of sight.

It was amazing.

I have never seen a girl behave in such a different manner.”

When first I read this passage, I spent some time contemplating its mechanics. Did it perhaps have an ironic undertone? If not, what was so special about this girl — apart from her evident ability to twist the laws of physics by walking “next to” people who were “right in her path”? The penny dropped when I realised that here was a time-worn romantic scene from Hindi cinema — the moment when the hero sees the heroine for the first time, sauntering in slow motion, books under her arm, seemingly unmindful of the people around her (who in any case have been blurred out for maximum visual impact).

The young author had pictured a movie sequence and written a straight report of it, unmindful of the fact that there are certain fundamental differences between the two mediums; that the filmed image of a beautiful girl walking towards the camera – intercut with shots of a beautiful boy watching raptly – conveys a mood with more immediacy than the dry words “She emerged through the lane” printed on paper. (You want to replicate this mood in prose? You need to at least aim for something as colourful as “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta...”)

This epiphany helped me make sense of other enigmatic bits of writing, such as the following sentence from Novoneel Chakraborty’s That Kiss in the Rain…Love is the Weather of Life: “Random lightning appeared as evil chuckles of destiny on the pitch-dark face of the sky.” Think of a dramatic Hindi-movie scene punctuated by lightning flashes – perhaps one where a villainous Prem Chopra-type is “chuckling” at the misfortunes of the hero’s parents – and you see where the author is coming from (if not where he is going).

In recent years there has been a glut of aspiring writers who are – as fans and consumers – steeped much more in popular cinema than in literature. In itself this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: watching well-written and well-made movies can give you an understanding of narrative structure and other elements of good storytelling. A reviewers’ cliché has it that a book reads like a “readymade screenplay” (often insinuating that it was written with an eye on its cinematic prospects), but like anything else, “visual” writing can be skilfully or poorly done. For example, one can identify the cinematic influences in Arnab Ray’s horror novel The Mine, but the book isn’t a derivative pastiche of B-movie moments: it has a voice of its own and a sense of how to explore a character’s interiority. You can tell that Ray has had a prior life as a reader.

But generally speaking, in the brave new world of commercial fiction, the idea that a good writer must first be well-read is increasingly seen as quaint. “I don’t read books – I write them,” is a line I often encounter while eavesdropping on Facebook conversations. (Don’t ask.) In this view of things, all you need to become a writer is to have had interesting life experiences (“interesting” being defined very broadly — you’re in Cafe Coffee Day with a date, and your ex is sitting at the next table? That qualifies) and to have watched lots of films. As a boy tells his girlfriend in Tushar Raheja’s bestselling Anything for You, Ma’am: An IITian’s Love Story, “When God is giving us such a good chance to live a movie, why should we despair? Right now it is a perfect script for a masala movie.”