Saikat Majumdar interviewed by Amit Shankar Saha
Amit: Your new novel traverses the trajectory of bodily desires and sexual identity, a theme that was also dealt with in your previous novels, but obviously each work is different and distinct. There seems to be a spectrum that you are exploring. Is it a conscious effort or they just happen to be?
Saikat: I feel themes come to writers at certain points of their writing lives – rather than writers going and consciously seeking them out. There is something strange about this process that is hard to describe. Once gripped by a theme that rings true, a writer needs to do a lot of conscious work to make the writing happen – be it research, thought about craft, endless edits – but the initial choice of subject/theme/image/experience is not quite in one’s control.
I did not realize when disruptive forms of sexuality – those that don’t fit into normative models of productive citizenship – became a theme for me. But now that I look back, I realise that my second novel, The Firebird, possibly the novel with which I found my writerly voice, was suffused with disturbing desires – the Oedipal longing of a young son for his actress mother, the decadent sexuality associated with the lives of actresses, and several other strange instincts. The Scent of God was of course a story of the breakdown of the making of the heteronormative Indian man with a traditional academic and professional life, against the backdrop of intricate hide-and-seek between celibacy and desire in a Hindu monastic order; in The Middle Finger, too, artistic pedagogy became an erotic force, shaping the relation between student and teacher. The Remains of the Body is possibly the most sexually experimental of my novels so far. I’ve tried to describe it either as a failed dream of pansexuality – the attraction to multiple genders at the same time, or as the narrative of a gay man trapped in a straight body, much the way sometimes birth-assigned genders don’t feel right for some people. It is also about the erotic limits of male heterosexual friendship, and the role of a straight woman in this delicate triangulation.
Literature, I have realized, is powerful when there is an uneasiness at its core…something unsolved and elusive but perpetually bothersome. Disruptive desire is such a thing. It rarely knows fulfilment, and hence it is invested with an eternal narrative energy. As if it’s always seeking, and running, and panting, and looking for something that it can never get. I love it when this energy shapes my novels in both a larger and an intimate sense. In the larger sense of the narrative and the characters, and in the more immediate sense of the individual sentence. Unfulfilled erotic energy that must always hide itself infuses the sentence, be of narrative or dialogue, with a strange, throbbing motion, which I admire on the level of form. The themes too, take you on quests for identity and fulfilment that you cannot find along the designated courses validated by society.
Amit: Desire and ambition are to be fulfilled and achieved respectively because their origins are from the body and the mind respectively. There is this dichotomy between the body and the mind where one requires fulfilment and the other achievement even though both are stimuli in human life to effect some deed. This interplay of the body and the mind is interesting since they often intersect and when the spectrum of sexual identity is taken in full then the points of intersections becomes multiple, leading to many peculiar situations. Are your novels an explorations in that direction either consciously or unconsciously?
Saikat: That’s a very interesting question! For me, writing becomes truly artistic and imaginative when it deploys the entire sensibility – human and possibly going beyond it. At the very least, this involves the kind of unity between the intellectual, emotional, and the sensory that T.S. Eliot had envisaged in the figure of the true poet uniting the sound of a typewriter, the smell of cooking, reading Spinoza, and falling in love. So in that sense, there is no real distinction between the body and the mind. Eliot again – the poet should write with their heart, mind, and digestive tracts. The division between the brain and the heart – that too, is a false one – unless they come together, one is not a real writer. I think desire too, brings the body and the mind together. So much desire plays out in language, in conversation, in images; it is scarcely the work of just the body. Likewise with ambition – it is not just an abstract force of the mind, but it also involves the body. Ambition makes people project their bodies in certain ways, live certain kind so life…and what about ambition in the domains that involve physical excellence, such as sports or performing arts? So I wouldn’t place too much on this distinction.
But as it happens, desire and ambition play a curiouslyentangled role in The Remains of the Body through the institution of the heterosexual marriage. I guess you could say ambition clashes with desire, or perhaps what is left of the latter in a slowly dwindling marriage. When a mediocre but successful man is married to a talented but struggling woman, masculine power has a particular way of taking over, even within a supposedly ‘liberal’ marriage. Love can become the insidious weaponization of power – “I know what’s best for you, honey, let me help you get there” – that kind of thing. That kind of soft power weaponization, that kind of emotional pushing in the name of love, with the full but invisible force of patriarchy behind, I think, has ruined much conjugal happiness and harmony. Something like is at work here. So crumbling desire and troubled ambition – they do have a relationship in this novel. But a relation that is slowly and insidiously destructive.
Amit: You had said that this is your most “erotically adventurous” novel. No doubt it is compared to your earlier works. Was there a deliberate attempt to do so that the taboo on eroticism that is natural is normalized? Or was it just the demand of the content of the novel and you chose to write it in no other manner than the manner in which you have written it? Obviously a triangular relationship is often seen in plot constructs of other works but the triangle that you form is different and the way you tackle it is also different. Was it just a creative exercise or was it manoeuvred by consciousness of some purpose or theoretical issues?
Saikat: No, no, there is never anything deliberate about the process of writing novels. Once you’re gripped by a subject and decide to give in, the novel dictates its own process. I think the central question driving the novel, and particularly the protagonist, Kaustav, is what makes this erotic element pervasive in the novel. When does one feel suffocated by sexual attraction that is determined by gender? Why can’t this attraction break forth the limitations of gender? When this is no longer a merely intellectual question, but one felt intensely on the level of the body, the erotic becomes the defining lens through which he experiences his relationship with the two other people in his life – his childhood friend Avik, and his wife, Sunetra. Even though there are only two genders at play here, maleness and femaleness have been cast as the dominant binary in the normative construction of society. Kaustav’s questions about his erotic relationship with Avik’s body, when refracted through the body of Avik’s heterosexual partner, Sunetra, becomes a desire impossible to name. Is it straight desire, is it, gay, or is it just queer? Impossible as it is to name, it starts to colour every aspect of their interaction, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. That is perhaps what explains the omnipresence of sexual energy in the novel.
Amit: The title “The Remains of the Body” has echoes of the title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “The Remains of the Day”. Is there any conscious allusion in your novel at any level with Kazuo Ishiguro’s work?
Saikat: No, nothing with that novel, which, by the way, I love! But there is something about the expression “remains”, which I find both evocative and poignant. I think I wanted to evoke the idea of remains not as something physical, but rather as an emotional entity that recedes through time and memory. Of course, whatever remains of the body, between the two friends, is still powerful enough, particularly for Kaustav. The intimate memory of Avik’s boyish body, its solidity and its arousal, melt into and conflict with the reality of his adult, aging body. Kaustav’s wonders about his intense physical awareness of his friend’s body and the question as to why this awareness is not eroticized. What, therefore, are the erotic limits of male heterosexual friendship? Are these limits, too, heterosexual? Then there is Sunetra’s body – the remains of which, beyond what is socially acceptable in their situation, is revealed to Kaustav only in the strangest of situations, towards the end of the novel.
Amit: Much of the initial chapters of the novel skirts the familial domestic space and concentrates either on the individual or the friend circle in academia. But in the later part especially the White Christmas part with Avik, Sunetra, Manan, and Kaustav, the novel grips with its drama where human relationships are at stake cutting across sexual issues. Moreover the actual simmering tension of the novel between the certainty of laid-back corporate life of luxury and the uncertainty of academic pursuits of idealism and restlessness of visionaries manifests within a domestic space. The whole debate between the pragmatists and the theorists come into the picture. It takes the novel into multiple layers of investigation and intersections of meanings. And how certain marriages can be suffocating because of suffocated ambitions even though they apparently don’t seem so. I don’t know what question to frame in this context but just can you elaborate on what were your intentions behind the plotting of the narrative?
My previous novels, such as Silverfish, The Firebird, and The Scent of God, and to some extent, The Middle Finger, tried to make the most of Indian cities and their carnivalesque character. As a short novel set on quiet North American suburbs, the attention, in The Remains, fell much more sharply in the inner lives of the characters, and the obvious and hidden intimacies between them. The apparent quietness of these suburbs are also deceptive, because they hide the simmering energy and anxieties of the immigrant, their aspirations and their competitions, sometimes for that very quiet suburban life. Some of the key conflicts in this novel are around the disparate nature of immigrant ambition, which takes its toll on a marriage. The issue is not just between the desire for the safety of corporate life with its obvious material rewards and the more adventurous ambition for a life of academic research in the sciences – but also between the aspirations of a talented but troubled woman and the convictions of a mediocre but domineering man. Such men always “know” what’s “best” for the woman, and certainly so if they are married to them. But there is also the façade of a modern, liberal marriage, so it’s a kind of soft bullying where love is weaponized. You don’t see what I’ve done for you and the family and even for shaping your career – that kind of thing. I don’t think I “plot” narratives as such, but I imagine characters – and the action flows from them. Given who Sunetra and Avik are, I feel this had to be the fate of their marriage.
Amit: I loved the ending especially because there is no dynamite bursting climax and even when sexual issues come back they inhabit an understanding space albeit an unfamiliar one. Did you have any other ending in mind or was this the only logical ending possible seeing the temperament of the characters involved?
Saikat: I think I arrive at some kind of closure at the end in terms of what happens to the marriage. But a marriage is just a legal and social marker. The larger reality of the relationship(s) between the three characters cannot be contained that way and therefore cannot have any narrative closure. These realities always spill beyond the last page of a book, but I’m not responsible for them anymore. Nor do I know what they do, or what happens to them after that, even if they promise or hint intriguing behaviour. Relationships change when there are secrets between people, even when some parties are unaware of the presence of such secrets. Avik and Kaustav have always known everything about each other, at least the facts of their lives. Suddenly, that is no longer the case. But love is greater than knowledge, sometimes even greater than the naming of flaws and vices. That’s the beauty of love, of its fragility and transience of human life – “forms etched on water” – which is the only reminder of the fact that we’re alive as long as we have life inside us.
Amit: Thank you for giving your time to us and sharing your thought. Wishing the book a grand success.