Read Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers for Free Online Page B

selfish, incompetent, insensitive and unfaithful, but he gets some of the most beguiling, even likeable, narrative in the book.
    The initials of the hero's name — Ashok Banjara, A. B. — inevitably attracted comment, as suggesting a real-life parallel to the legendary Bombay film star Amitabh Bachhan. There were certainly characters and situations in the novel that might strike a familiar chord in some Indian readers’ minds. But the name “Ashok Banjara” was, in fact, a pseudonym I used during my freshman days in college, when the magazine
JS
thought I needed to be protected against the likely consequences of articles I wrote attacking “ragging” (hazing) on the Delhi University campus. And, at the risk of seeming disingenuous, Amitabh Bachhan is quite deliberately mentioned once or twice in the novel as a separate person, a rival of Ashok Banjara.
    At the same time it is true that I have used real life, or some aspects of it, as a sort of a launching pad for my fiction. It's hardly an uncommon technique; Salman Rushdie, for instance, has often resorted to the same device. It's exhilarating, in some ways, to bounce yourself off real life while being free to soar above fact. The career of any of our film stars may not be the stuff of great literature, but elements from it may suggest themes it is appropriate, even vital, for literature to explore. After all, as my novel suggests, art imitates life, and in Bollywood, life returns the compliment.

5
A Novel of Collisions
     
    T HERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE THE THRILL of publishing a book, though mothers have probably come closest to the experience in having a baby. (Much the same combination of emotions is involved — the thrill of conception, the anxiety of nurturing the spark into full-blown life, the exhausted satisfaction of delivery.) As I write these words I have before me two different editions of my new novel
Riot
— the Indian edition from Viking Penguin, with a stark, powerful cover photograph of a scene from a real riot, with flames and smoke arising from an overturned cart; and the American edition from Arcade, black and red and gold, with an elegiac photograph of the sun setting behind a Mughal monument, bordered with colorful Rajasthani fret-work. The Indian edition reflects the publishers’ focus on the political themes with which the book engages; the American edition evokes an older, gentler image of India, and is subtitled “A Love Story.” My Indian friends all prefer the Indian cover; my American friends are much moreattracted to the American. So clearly both publishers know their markets well.
    The two covers reflect, too, two different aspects of the same novel, because
Riot
is a love story, while also being a hate story. That is to say, it is the story of two people intimately in love in a little district town in Uttar Pradesh, but it also a story of the smoldering hatreds being stoked in that town, Zalilgarh, and of the conflagration in which both are (also intimately) caught up. American readers looking for a love story will also find a novel about the construction of identity, the nature of truth, and the ownership of history; Indian readers expecting a novel about the dangers of communalism will also discover a tale of another kind of passion.
    Both are central to the novel's purpose. I am conscious that, in India, critics expect a serious writer to be “ambitious,” something that some felt I had failed to be in my second novel,
Show Business,
which came in the wake of
The Great Indian Novel.
I believe
Riot
is ambitious in its own way —
The Great Indian Novel
took an epic sweep across the entire political history of twentieth-century India while reinventing the Mahabharata in the same breath, while
Riot
seeks to examine some of the most vital issues of our day on a smaller, more intimate canvas. Who is to say whether the work of the landscape artist is more ambitious than that of the miniaturist? As I said somewhat testily to an