'I lived with a kind of blindness'

Journalist-turned-writer Aatish Taseer’s much-anticipated debut novel The Temple-goers is finally out. Set in today’s Delhi, Temple-goers is the engrossing saga of a narrator rediscovering his city by forging new friendships and renewing old ties. Through his eyes we discover a varied set of people — politicians, writers, gym instructors, designers, language teachers and creative writers — exhibiting different ideas of India via their actions and words. In this brief email interview, Taseer talks about what Delhi means to him, and the political aspects of his novel.

Apart from Delhi, you have lived in London, the USA and a boarding school in south India. Did your experience of these different places ever overshadow or obliterate your Delhi years?
No, they intensified my memories of Delhi. And I suppose living in those other places, feeling in some ways cold to the things that in India would have been my inspiration, made me realise where my real material and subjects lay. But it would be churlish of me to ignore the fact that I had lived with a kind of blindness in Delhi — on a basic level, to dirt, poverty, to human relations, in which there was often an element of casual violence; on other levels, to culture, language, and aspects of high civilisation that had been all around me in India as I grew up, but that I had not had any means to assess or regard. Living in the West did not give me those means, but watching them regard not only their own civilisation but that of other places as well, forced me to look at my own place in new ways; Delhi, and India too.

 

Your protagonist Aakash is a multi-layered character. Did it take long to create him?
This is hard to describe as most of it happens during the writing. But yes, Aakash had a sweeter, more vulnerable twin in an unpublished story I wrote, now three years ago. When I developed that character for the novel, darker elements crept in. They had perhaps always been there.

To what would you attribute the political undercurrents in The Temple-goers?
A question like this from someone living in India surprises me. India is full of politics. You can’t take a pee in India without the wall you’re peeing against being festooned in political slogans. Every lunching lady, taxi driver, gym trainer and heiress has a political opinion, especially in Delhi. As for The Temple-goers, it is less concerned with politics than with the question of what an Indian regeneration is to mean. Is it going to be some bland dystopia growing from a third-rate borrowed culture? Or is it going to be a thing of substance? So far it is not clear what the new energy that has entered India will amount to. But what is clear is that if we go quietly the way of malls and blue glass, this “Indian renaissance” would be a very disappointing thing. n