The Hindi novel, translated into English by Vaibhav Sharma, tells the story of a writer in Bombay, and his struggles to write a book
Writing a novel about the process of writing is risky business, to put it mildly. The great Vladimir Nabokov’s most challenging (and to me, the most rewarding as well) book, Pale Fire (1962), falls in this category although the work-within-the-work is an epic narrative poem, not-quite a novel. Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year, 1998) can be called an ‘anti-novel’, for it is a work of literature about the various failings of literature (it has strong feelings about journalism’s limitations as well).
Stephen King wrote his famous novel Misery (1987) whilst struggling with a cocaine addiction and in the book, the drug is metaphorically represented by a deranged fan who demands he change his novel’s ending. These texts seek to ‘lift the curtain’ for the reader, revealing the inner workings of the author; their style, their technique, the writerly choices they make all day, every day.
Writing process as a world in itself
Manav Kaul’s novel Under the Night Jasmine (Penguin Random House India), translated into English by Vaibhav Sharma, is an intriguing new addition to this subgenre. The narrative follows Rohit, the archetypal ‘struggling screenwriter’ in Bombay, working as a script consultant. A poet in his mid-20s, Rohit is now on the wrong side of 40 and seems to have hit a persistent bout of writer’s block.
He wants to complete his new short story collection with a tale about ‘Mrs Verma’, one of his school teachers who he had a crush on as a teenager. But as he begins writing the story, the ‘ghost of Mrs Verma’ sits beside him, gently rebuking him when he fictionalizes certain details or is less-than-honest about their relationship. Meanwhile, Rohit’s old friend Antima, with whom he had an ‘on-again, off-again relationship,’ re-enters his life just when a much younger woman, a poet called Aru, is clearly interested in him.
The novel’s modus operandi is deceptively simple. Rohit’s romantic misadventures and his hallucinatory conversations with the ‘ghost’ of Mrs Verma — both of these are compared and contrasted with the actual short story Rohit is writing (represented in the book with a different font to make the distinction between the two texts crystal-clear). We see how bits of Antima and Aru find themselves in the fictional Mrs Verma, while the ghost of Mrs Verma pushes Rohit constantly to be more ‘authentic’ in his portrayal.
This melee of voices inside Rohit’s head is a stand-in, almost, for readers’ reactions to his writing. All the while, Rohit is also questioning himself about his method and whether these methods are entirely suitable. See this passage, for example, where Rohit riffs off a Virginia Woolf quote that serves as the novel’s epigram: ‘I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say:’
“Is it impossible to bring the story, the struggles of writing it and the writing process together in a single narrative? The whole account of it, without any edits or cuts. I’ve always thought of the writing process as a whole world in itself, where characters can roam around of their own free will. For me, this process is as interesting as the story. Whenever I’m writing a story, I describe the process within it as well, but before sending it to the editor I remove that part. Who will be interested in such things anyway?”
The writer vs the person
The interplay between Rohit the writer and Rohit the person is also manifested in other interesting ways. For instance, Antima, in her last letter to Rohit, mentions the Jorge Luis Borges poem ‘You Learn’. There are a number of other literary references here (Camus, Marquez, at al) but this one seemed particularly important to me because Borges was especially sensitive to ‘the writer vs the person’ conflicts.
In his classic prose piece ‘Borges and I’, he opens with the fascinating statement, “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one who things happen to.” I saw echoes of this declaration at a number of places in Under the Night Jasmine — being a writer means that Rohit watches his own life as a spectator, almost, rather than a pro-active participant.
The romantic triangle between Rohit, Antima and Aru also throws up increasingly interesting juxtapositions between the writer and the individual. Aru admires the moody, interiority-led poetry that Rohit wrote in his youth — but Rohit wants to distance himself from that phase in his writing.
The reason behind this embarrassment on Rohit’s part is subtle and handled quite delicately by Kaul. You see, while Rohit has come a long way as a writer since that phase, he feels he was happier and more carefree as a person while he was writing these dour, gloomy poems about existentialism (if you’re a writer, chances are you have felt similarly about the ‘work vs life’ equation, at least once in your life).
A story about a story
A well-deserved word about the translation — this is translator Vaibhav Sharma’s first full-length work and he does an admirable job. His translation captures the rhythms of Kaul’s short, briskly told chapters and not once did I feel that ‘in-betweenness’ one sometimes experiences as a Hindi/English bilingual reader (especially when one is reading about characters with a deeper-than-usual engagement with both languages, which Rohit being a prolific reader certainly does).
I particularly liked the way he translated the ‘juvenilia’ that Rohit’s writer character produces in the story-within-the-story. Translating juvenilia is always tricky because the end product is supposed to serve a very specific purpose within the overarching text.
You have to show how this once-callow young writer has matured and so, there has to be a certain distance between these two styles — but at the same time, they cannot be too distant from each other, being products of the same imagination. This is a delicate balance and Sharma maintains it with poise and elegance.
When I had interviewed Kaul back in 2018, there hadn’t been a single English translation of his work published yet. Under the Night Jasmine is now the third in just six years, and I’m glad the English-speaking readers of this country are discovering — and on current sales-evidence, whole-heartedly embracing — the unique pleasures of his writing.
Kaul’s inspirations are diverse: in this book he quotes from various European poets and novelists while during our meeting in 2018, he joked about wanting to name his theatre group “Nirmal Vinod” after the Hindi writers Nirmal Verma and Vinod Kumar Shukla. Under the Night Jasmine is a great exhibition of his gifts — tough to pin down genre-wise but incredibly easy to enjoy as a story-about-a-story.
