‘Both Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap have said this, we had no idea how far ‘Sacred Games’ would travel’: Vikram Chandra

You come to Mumbai twice every year, even though you have been living, writing and teaching in the USA for close to three decades now. Much of your writing is about Mumbai, or Bombay. Is Mumbai still what you call home?

It’s one of my homes. The other one is the Bay Area in California. I guess you could call this the modern transnational condition. Transnationalism has always existed, and modernity allows us to move further and faster. I was recently in Singapore, and watched Malaysians do the grinding commute to Singapore for work daily. Think of all the Indians who live in the Gulf — they commute less often, but modern media still lets you keep links. You get on that daily WhatsApp video call with your mum.

There’s the persistent sci-fi dream of superfast transport. I do wonder if people will be doing daily cross-continental commutes in a few decades. It sounds like a fantasy, but it’s important to remember that a trip halfway across the globe in less than 24 hours would have seemed like a crazy fantasy not so long ago.

You come from a family of prominent writers, all women. Your mum Kamna Chandra wrote ‘Chandni’ for Yash Chopra, among other films, your sister Anupama Chopra is a well-known journalist and the other sister Tanuja Chandra is a screenwriter and filmmaker herself. What’s dinner-table conversation like?

It’s sometimes about films, but it’s not always shop talk. Like any other group, we talk about politics, cricket, food, and so on. It would be pretty boring otherwise. And we’d all end up writing pretty boring stuff.

Is your idea of the city stained with nostalgia or are you up-to-date with its goings on…the local concerns, the society scene, have you driven on the Coastal Road?

I use the Coastal Road frequently. I’m currently really interested in the history of the city, especially the history of the film industry. I’m not sure to what purpose, but it’s another lovely rabbit hole to fall into. I’m discovering lots of interesting connections between people, intrigues, ambitions, failures and successes. When you do this, you start to get some idea of what made the city.

Your last big novel was ‘Sacred Games’, which enjoyed even greater glory when Netflix launched in India with a series on the book. It also brought Bollywood to Netflix, and ‘The New York Times’ called it “the 30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade”. Are you happy with how things shaped up?

I couldn’t be happier. I think both Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap and others have said this: we all thought we were making a good thing, but we had absolutely no idea how far the series would travel. One kind-of-unsettling example is a crime documentary set in Denmark that I watched recently. It’s about a murderer and his friend, and these guys frequently filmed their activities, as we all do now. The documentary uses a lot of that footage. In one shot, the camera pans across the room and flits across a screen that has their Netflix avatars on it. The murderer’s avatar was Sartaj, and the friend’s avatar was Gaitonde.

Do you think that with so many OTT streamers now in India, novelists are writing books that are potential screenplays? I mean is the idea now to turn the novel into a film or series?

It may be so, but I don’t think I’m really qualified to have an opinion about this. I’ve kind of fallen out of the habit of reading contemporary fiction, whether it’s Indian or not. Most of my current research is set in other times, so I’m usually reading fiction written decades ago, and criticism about that fiction, and non-fiction about those periods.

Tell us about your next book, what are you toiling over these days?

I can’t say much about it because I’m not sure what it is yet. This is my usual frustrating method — I discover what the book is as I write it. I’ve had people look baffled when I say this, but it’s actually quite common among writers. There is an industry term for people like me: “pantsers,” people who write by the seat of their pants. Sometimes this tribe is also known as “gardeners”. Then there are the “architects,” who plan everything before they execute. EL Doctorow said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I was astonished to find out that George RR Martin, the author of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series of novels, is a pantser. One would think he would be an architect, given the complexity of his fictional universe and his plots, but he’s a gardener. We have it from the man himself, who said, “I’m much more a gardener than an architect. In my Hollywood years when everything does work on outlines, I had to write outlines all the time and I always hated it.”

I get a vague sense of the next section of the book as I write, and maybe the one after that. I’m midway through the book now, or at least I think so. I might be very, very wrong.

When do we get to read it?

I honestly have no idea. I’m a very slow writer—I’ve only published four books over a lifetime of writing. The time each has taken has varied, I think because the form and style of each one has been different. The weird chimera I’m constructing right now is in a shape I don’t quite recognise, so I’m ambling along an unfamiliar road in the dark that Doctorow describes. Quite fun, really, but also frustrating.

All writers are political. What is the current mood in California, it is famously liberal and anti war. Do you feel much of the world is veering towards the right wing now? 

Fear, uncertainty, and inequality have always led to people looking toward authoritarianism. It’s comforting to think that there is an overarching force that will vanquish all these dangers by applying absolute discipline and stopping dissent. And we seem to have a desire to worship, to project perfection on the Great Leader. 

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about cults, and cult leaders always promise solutions and future happiness. If you aren’t yet happy, it’s because you’re not practicing and praying properly. You’re given rewards for loyalty and obedience and for acting against the enemy. It’s a very reliable formula that’s been working for thousands of years. You can adapt it to various contexts, and it continues to function.

The world has never been a perfect place, but the current times seem particularly unsettled, what with continual wars, climate change, economic ups and downs, and such. Also our media puts all of this inside our living rooms constantly, every day. The doom-scrolling amplification of the danger signals is really effective. The algorithms recognise that unhappiness and controversies make apps sticky and keep you online. I’m sure you and everyone else have noticed the daily stress. We all want relief from this, and authoritarianism is the easy answer.

Your older daughter is going to college this year, how are you feeling?

I’m really happy and excited for her. It’s an amazing place for her to be at. I’ll miss her, but will really enjoy her becoming the person she is meant to be. Kids need to be independent to grow into adults, and I’m glad she’s going off to do her adventuring.