The nine little windows and a litmus test

Meeting William Dalrymple is a pleasure. He has been giving interviews since the morning, he is a bit tired now but answers every question courteously. It is late afternoon in his peaceful farmhouse off Mehrauli, skirting Delhi. His new book, Nine Lives was released recently. Before our interview begins, he poses for a quick set of pictures for a cover story that is to appear soon. After some lighthearted banter, he says, “Fire away, Partha.”

What made him do this book? “To open nine little windows onto an India I didn’t know. The other nice thing was to humanise the exotic.” He continues, “It was a book I longed to do. It was very difficult to get a handle on it.” Of all his books, it had the longest gestation period.

He found the form to it quite fortuitously when Chiki Sarkar of Random House sent him off to interview Devadasis in the South for her book Aids Sutra, a study of the spread of the killer disease among sex workers. He realised that if he were to do a book on people then it would have to be stories about individuals. Dalrymple feels indebted to Daniyal Mueenuddin’s, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, for giving an insight into the people of a country (Pakistan). The shadow of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also hovers over Nine Lives, he is convinced. The nine people in the book are tinged by both the tragedy and the comic absurdity of life.

Dalrymple describes his new book as, “Nine non-fiction short stories.” The nine people featured are exceptionally brave individuals tried repeatedly by fate. Rani Bai in The Daughters Of Yellamma, a Devadasi forced by circumstances to be a prostitute; Tashi Passang, Tibetan Buddhist monk and former Indian Army

soldier marooned in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, in old age in The Monk’s Tale; Hina, also known as Lal Peri in The Red Fairy, born in Bihar, pushed by history into Bangladesh, going to a Sufi shrine in Sind, Pakistan, only to face possible death at the hands of the Taliban; Kanai, the blind Baul in The Song Of The Blind Minstrel trying to get a grip on life on life through music, are but four people who deserve a lot more and better from life.

“What is new about this one is that it’s largely a Hindu book,” says Dalrymple. His earlier works dealt with ancient Christianity (In Xanadu),

Islam and its relations with the Christian world (From The Holy Mountain) and, in different contexts, both White Mughals and “The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857). He says all his books deal with religion and politics — often the two are intertwined — because of his background. “My brother was a priest, my uncle was a priest…” It is important “To understand religion and the compulsion it gives to life.

Religion is like a litmus test.”

Nine Lives is a deeply touching, sensitive book. While he is comfortable being a family man, William Dalrymple is also a happy sceptic, as a writer writing about a culture not his own. As a parting shot, he declares, “I have never been bored here (in India). But I do fear I’ve never understood this country. I am full of questions, which is not a bad state for a writer to be in.”

— parthafm@gmail.com