This is your first book of poems in 20 years, and one gets the feeling, going by its wide variety of forms, subjects and tones, that they've written over many years. Am I right?
Yes, these are poems written over more than 20 years. Some of them go back even further than those I have already published. For example, one particular poem, No Further War, a sonnet, harks back to one of my earliest poems published under P Lal, Mappings in which I wrote another poem, Close of Play. Both have the same first line, and it's exactly the same argument. The title poem has its genesis even further back. I was a little reluctant to publish it because I didn't quite understand what the poem was about.
That's an odd admission - aren't poets supposed to know what's they're saying?
I liked the title, it casts a kind of crepuscular light on the other poems within. (But) I have never written quite so incoherently as in Summer Requiem. I kept working at it, but there's a danger that you can keep working on a poem to a point where it loses its spirit. I hope I haven't reached that point. (As I said to myself) If it is a good poem, even if it goes against all your expectations of clarity, even if it has a mysterious penumbra, put it out now into the world. You can mess with it too much.
The poems in Summer Requiem are also far more melancholic than your earlier poems.
Yes, I was young (then and) I didn't regret my lost youth. (As I asked myself) Am I willing to bring out thoughts that have a darkness to them, or inexplicability to them? The answer is yes. After all, what am I afraid of? That people think that I've once been sad - who hasn't been? The poems that often speak most to other people are those that come out of something that's a common human experience. Loss and sadness.
You'll be getting the 'Poet Laureate' award at the Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai later this month. Your thoughts.
I am very pleased to receive it. Writers lead a very isolated life and it's always very nice to receive some kind of recognition. But it doesn't make me think any better of myself or my writing an iota. My writing is what it is - good, bad or indifferent. The real awards are to mean something to individual people; if some kind of insight, solace, sense of humour, or empathy, is communicated across the membrane of our separate selves.
Jon Snow, who interviewed you for Channel 4 earlier this year, revealed that you play Candy Crush first thing in the morning. Is that true?
Of course I play Candy Crush - I'm at level 505 or something. And I've never bought one of those things. I've done it through a natural ability to waste my time. But I will say something - on my present device I have not downloaded Candy Crush. I kept it on my iPhone 4-something, so that it's well isolated. It's only purpose is now as a kind of crush device. On my grave, instead of year of birth or death, it will just be written: level 620.
Are you on social media? You were trending on the India Twitter list recently.
I call it TWOT - trending worldwide on twitter. To 'twat' is to be at the head of a bubble, but then the bubble will burst. But I don't follow social media at all. I'd better, because in A Suitable Girl, many people do.
And when will A Suitable Girl be published? How far have you come with Lata's story?
That's something I will not talk about. But it's a 60-year jump from A Suitable Boy - that was set 40 years in the past when I was writing it and this one in the present. One aspect would be - how controlling Haresh is as a husband? Did he allow her to follow her own star, own career? Could she set up her school? Then came the children and grandchildren. This (present book) is really about the dohatri (granddaughter) and dohatra (grandson), and find 'a suitable girl' for the latter.
gargi.gupta@dnaindia.net, @togargi
