Verve Magazine
Third Quarter, 2001

Shashi Tharoor sat on the sofa, dressed in immaculate white kurta-pyjama, watching a cricket match on television. When I walked in, he stood up, his hand outstretched to shake mine in greeting, his eyes veering inexorably towards the sports action that flickered on the small screen. A cola commercial interrupted the match and he switched the set off, with obvious reluctance and turned fully to me, ushering me to my seat with a wave of his arm and a slight bowing of his tall figure.

"Do you think she is beautiful?" I asked.

"Who?" he responded, with justified bewilderment, as he sat down.

"Aishwarya Rai, in the commercial that was on, as you turned the TV off," I replied with a certain impatience.

"I didn't see it," he said. "Was that her? The problem is, I don't watch enough television or movies or anything and so I don't realise.. ..

There was a small pause and my possible derision may have registered. Tharoor added hastily, "I do know Aishwarya Rai is beautiful and is Miss World - I am not entirely ignorant! And I read somewhere that an American movie critic, seeing a movie of hers, said she had to be the most beautiful woman in the world, so, this is internationally certified. As for her intelligence, well, one would have to find out for oneself." Tharoor smiled, his eyes crunching into slits, his face lighting up with a sense of subtle mischief. I turned on my tape recorder, only to find that it refused to behave, embarrassingly out of battery power, even though I had checked it before the appointment. I explained and Tharoor offered the cells from his shaver, insisting he had to have them back.

THE COMMUNAL DIVIDE

The main reason for Tharoor's most recent visit to India was to promote his new book, Riot: A Novel a murder mystery that tells the story of a crisis of communal divisions in the country. It came about from a combination of factors, Tharoor explains. "There are a number of issues that I have been concerned with for some time, particularly in reference to the communal divide that has arisen in the last 10 or 15 years in our country." These had already occupied him in his earlier book, India: From Midnigbt to Millennium and in his columns in Tbe Hindu and Tbe Indian Express. He felt that fiction would afford him a different way of illuminating some of these concerns. Why this particular novel, this particular story, in this way, was that Harsh Mander, a college friend of Tharoor's and an IAS officer, had written about managing a riot in a Madhya Pradesh town called Khargone and Tharoor was very moved by it. With Harsh's account, he was able to get under the skin of the management of the riot. Tharoor also saw a newspaper article about an American girl who had been killed in South Africa, in racial disturbances, by a black mob who didn't realise she was actually there to work against apartheid. The two images fused in his mind and Riot was born. In the book, which took four years to write, a young American aid worker, Priscilla, is killed in a deserted ruin during a time of communal unrest. Her divorced parents come with a reporter to India, to find out why and hear the truth from various perspectives.

As Tharoor himself says, "Riot is set in a very unfashionable and now largely forgotten time, 1989, forgotten partially because it was a precursor to the bigger event, which eclipsed all else, the Babri Masjid destruction. It was not the big headline story that I wanted; what I wanted actually, was the kind of thing that happens in the real lives of people, in some insignificant town. So, I invented one. What I also tried to do, was to use the novel to explore broader issues of cultural collisions. It is a novel full of collisions of various sorts - personal, political, emotional and violent. I also tried to use differences in two ways: to bring out a certain sense of reality of life experienced and truth, whatever that may be and also to bring out truths in different voices, each believing they know a part of their truth, in a context or framework where there is no omniscient narrator. Ultimately there is only the reader."

Tharoor believes and shows how his life has been a multi-cultural experience, though not particularly a collision of those various cultures that have been part of his evolution. "I have lived in England and America and India and in Europe and in South East Asia - that is a multiplicity of experiences and different cultures, certainly, but not particularly in collision, because I am in these places for very specific reasons." He gives me a potted history of his life, describing it through growing up with his parents, to working with tbe Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I went abroad initially to be a student and then I joined the UN. But, working in Geneva I didn't become a Swiss and working in Singapore I didn't become Singaporean, in New York l am not an American and, if tomorrow the UN puts me in Timbuktu, I will not become an African. Essentially, I carry my passport, my identity, my Indianness with me, wherever I go. And my kids, too, though they have grown up essentially as New Yorkers, since they moved there at the age of five, are very conscious that nationality for them. is beyond dispute, Indian. They know that they are not American. They went to an international school, partly to realise who they were in a diverse world. I myself am a far cry from what Bharati Mukherjee said: "I am an American writer of Bengali origin." I am not an American writer at all but an Indian writer, one whose experience has been pan-Indian."

THE WONDER YEARS

Tharoor was born in 1956 in London, to parents from Kerala, Palakkad District, where the family went every year for holidays. "My father was not an immigrant - he was in London working for The Statesman,waiting for an Englishman to vacate the post here, so that he could come back, at a time when there were no Indians working for the paper in India! Then he came to Mumbai, as manager there, when I was about two-and-a-half or three years old. We lived in Churchgate in Kasturi Buildings and I went to Campion School, near Cooperage. After that it was St. Xavier's for high school in Calcutta, when my father became advertisement manager for the paper there. I was sent to college in Delhi because Calcutta was caught up in Naxalite violence in those days. With all the trouble, one was not sure whether the university would be functioning or whether, if the exams ever took place, the results would be your own or somebody else's!"

From Calcutta, Tharoor went to St Stephen's College, in Delhi. It was not all work for this Jack and he certainly did not become a dull boy. "I had a wonderful time at St Stephen's, really a great experience, which I value and cherish greatly." In fact, on a very short, four-day trip to Delhi in August, he spent part of one, in a debate at St Stephen's. "It is a college that means a lot to me and gave me a marvellous education, almost more outside the classroom than in it! But also, it was a place where you really had a chance to develop yourself beyond academics. I revived the Wodehouse Society, for instance, which did everything from mimicry to practical joke competitions, invented the quiz club, debated a lot -an old Stephenian tradition -ran the Winter Festival, went into student politics and became elected president of the union. ...And at the same time, I did my honours in history and did pretty well at that. So, I look back on those years as almost blissful."

A HUNDRED HURRIES

The young man headed west thereafter, for graduate school in the US, "because I was interested in that experience - with a scholarship at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where I did two Masters and a PhD in a hundred hurries and far too rapidly," he laughs ruefully. "I finished my PhD at 22! Looking back now, I wish I had given myself more time to enjoy life. I defended my thesis on Friday, got on a plane on Saturday, arrived in Geneva on Sunday and began work on Monday. Here, we have people wanting a gap year and I haven't even had a gap month between the ivory tower and the real world!"

The United Nations job was exciting and dynamic. Tharoor worked initially with the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, which was headquartered then in Singapore, at the peak of the boat people crisis. From there, he moved to Geneva again to HQ. He left UNHCR and moved to peacekeeping, again with HQ in New York City and, "For my sins, I found myself leading the team in the former Yugoslavia throughout the crisis there, from '91 to the election of Kofi Annan. That took me out of the peacekeeping department, to the immediate office of the Secretary-General."

His next assignment was even better, judging by the way his face lights up when he talks about it. "And this year he (Annan) asked me to head the Department of Public Information, which again is a rather large and onerous responsibility. It is an interim assignment, for now. My work is not really just a profession. It is not just a job with a salary at the end of it. I really do care about the UN and what I do there; it is a cause for me. Otherwise, I would not be able to devote my life to it. I could no more give up my UN work than I could give up my writing. I see myself as a human being with a number of reactions to the world, some of which manifest themselves in my writing, some in my work. If I gave up one or the other, part of my psyche would wither on the vine."

Most important to Tharoor is that, "I do want to make a difference. At the moment, in the work I am doing, I believe I am making a difference and I would find it difficult to pursue something unless I felt that my pursuing it would make some difference to the world. That is simply the way I am. But it has been like that right from my childhood."

A COMMON INDIANNESS

That childhood in Mumbai, from 1959-1969, was an eye-opener for Tharoor. "It was a great time, in some ways, to be growing up in India, because the bloom had not yet faded from the excitement of Independence. And though some cynicism had already begun to set in, particularly about hypocrisy and politicians, there was simply not a shred of communalism in the air; there was a sense of common enterprise and common Indianness. I had friends in my class from every community and was never made to feel that it mattered what community they were from. One day, the soon-to-be-famous Rishi Kapoor - who was a year ahead of me in school - asked me, after a theatre competition in which he and I had been participating, 'What's your caste?' I didn't even realise that there was such a thing. In fact, my father had dropped his caste name during the Quit India Movement."

The boy became a reader and with that, a writer. "My father, working for a newspaper, would get seven papers at home and he would bring with him, three or four others, that came by air from other cities. I grew up very much a newspaper junkie, not to mention magazines. I read widely and eclectically -it helped that TV didn't exist and neither did computers~ I was either playing with friends - which I did a little of but I was an asthmatic child - or reading and writing. I became curious, very early, about the world I lived in, starting with the immediate country I lived in and started reacting to it through my own writing and that is what in the end, has never really left me."

His 'real' writing came with The Great Indian Novel the first chapter of which recreates, as it were, the Mahabharata in a way that is shocking to the traditionally, conventionally minded. Tharoor's Krishna is a Keralite and the epic has an acid twist that is not just appealing but thought provoking, as well. His books are not easy reading, they tell stories as they relate history, sometimes pedantic and always absorbing, with varied forms and points of view. "My point of view is in India.. From Midnight to Millennium -that's where I have nailed my colours to the mast. In fiction, I have tried different things but it is never my point of view alone. In The Great Indian Novel it is that of the narrator who has been there, done everything. In Show Businessthere are definitely a number of points of view and the protagonist is not a particularly sympathetic individual. I hope people don't think that is my point of view!" Tharoor adds, "In Riot there is no one point of view, there are a number of them and ultimately the one that matters is that of the reader."

Show Business, was a different kind of kettle for this particular fish. Tharoor says, "I did some research for that. I came down to Mumbai and watched movies being shot -and, God knows, some of them deserved to be shot!" He laughs uproariously. "I talked.to a few directors- no really famous actors -just to get a; sense of it all. The details are right, the physical descriptions are as I saw them. But, it is also a novel of ideas; all the details are subsidiary to the larger theme that the novel is trying to portray. I was look- ing for new metaphors to explore the Indian condition and cinema is a marvellous one." .

CLEOPATRA'S ANTONY

Theatre too, was part of his growing up. "I did a lot of acting in school and college," Tharoor remembers, "culminating in playing Antony to Mira Nair's Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra. Still, every time she (Mira) sees me, she says, 'Oh, my Antony!' Good joke between us, that. I enjoy the stage and acting but, the closest I come to it now, is reading from my novels." As for movies, he sees most of them on planes, since he finds no time during the working week.

There are other interests that spark Tharoor's life. Cricket is a passion, "which I have deprived myself of, this hour," he smiles and I imagine a smidgen of a plea in his eyes and tell him to switch on the TV, if he really wants to continue watching the match. An obviously polite disclaimer precedes his fiddling with the remote control and the volume is turned down, with some reluctance. "I played cricket - I once said I wanted to do so very badly and I did! I peaked as a batsman around age six and it was downhill thereafter. The thing that comes closest in my life to mindless entertainment, is watching cricket. If I genuinely had the time - and this is an idle fantasy -I would follow the cricket tour through the West Indies or Australia for six weeks, just going from match to match." And, what else? "One feels sometimes, that one could do more with human relationships and friendships. One could certainly learn more, develop one's interests and tastes. I have always believed that idleness is the greatest sin; it is something I cannot abide. My children always say that if I find them lying in bed staring out the window, they get hell." .

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

And somewhere along the way, his personal life has been left behind. Tharoor is terse when he says, "I don't particularly want to talk about it but those who know me, know that I am separated from my wife. That happened a couple of years ago. That's all I really want to say about it. After all, the whole point of a private life is that it is private." A web site, which he had already given me permission to quote from, reported him stating, "In some marriages, sadly, you sort of fall out of love with each other. It's very painful all around."

Every novel has an end. What does he see as the end to his journey? Tharoor is puzzled by the question but clear with his answer. "I am 45. I am not looking at an immediate prospect of retirement. I would never stay in any profession beyond when it ceased to be exciting or challenging. If it ceased to be that, I would find something else to do."

It is time for me to leave, with TV crews clamouring outside for attention. I get my copy of Riot signed and am sent to the door, a wistful glance cast back at the TV set, which still flickers images of run-outs and bad catches. It was a pleasant morning. And, as I reach the India Habitat Centre lobby. I realise that I have Tharoor's batteries still in my recorder!