G Sampath

New York-based novelist Siddhartha Deb's book of narrative nonfiction, The Beautiful And the Damned: Life In The New India hit bookstores in India earlier this month. I quite enjoyed interviewing him over email, and this Q&A first appeared in print in the DNA Books page on Aug 28, 2011, though in a heavily abridged form for want of space. Posting here the complete interview.

What was the transition like, from fiction to nonfiction? Do you think of yourself primarily as novelist who also writes nonfiction or as a nonfiction writer who also writes fiction? Which form gives you a bigger kick?

The transition to nonfiction was difficult for practical reasons. I had to fund long stretches of reporting, and that was difficult at the beginning. I also had to spend a lot of time away from my very young son, and I didn't enjoy that at all. But writing nonfiction is easier in the sense that the boundaries are more clearly defined, and so it's harder to go wrong. If you're reasonably methodical, you can produce something that is, at the very least, acceptable. With fiction, there are no clear boundaries, at least for me, which means there are many more ways to go wrong but also a shot at transcendence, at magic, at creating life out of even nonsense, all of which I rather like. Since I'm desperate to return to fiction, let's take this book as a novelist's foray into nonfiction.

You no longer live in India. How does this geographical translocation affect you as a writer? Apart from other things, especially in terms of choice of subject matter? Do you find America a better place to write from?

My first two novels were set in the north-east of India, which was not the most career affirming move to make while trying to survive as a writer in New York. So, in that sense, I've never been writing for a western audience, and my choice of subjects has been determined on what interests me rather than what sells. And if I possess something of the outsider's eye in writing about India because I've been living in New York, I should add that the outsider's sensibility was honed earlier by the experience of having grown up in the north-east, and of being pretty hard up for a good many years in India. As far as New York being a better place to write from, that's not a guaranteed thing. But the city did push me harder, especially in the beginning. It taught me a degree of professionalism, gave me relatively easy access to an enormous wealth of books and other material, and handed me a surplus of hard-earned confidence.

Can you explain, perhaps with an example, what you mean when you say New York pushed you harder? Also, you say it taught you a degree of professionalism. Were you not professional enough before you moved out of India?

I worked very hard in India, but never as hard as when I got to New York. Working harder isn't always a great thing, but for me it was useful in a number of ways. I had access to a far greater wealth of material, especially books. I can illustrate this by the fact that when I walked into Columbia University's Butler library on my second day in the city and asked the man at the desk how many books I could check out, he said that there wasn't an upper limit. You could, in fact, if you wanted to, take thousands of books out. But in case this begins to sound like a parable of how wonderful America is, let me again assert that only someone like me, used to being somewhat deprived for books in India, could have been excited by the fact. It was the experience of scarcity that made abundance valuable. Otherwise, abundance isn't abundance; it's just the normal order of things, which is slightly boring.

But how did New York push me? By not responding for many years. I sometimes meet magazine editors who ask me to write for them, not knowing that I pitched them years ago and never received a response. I learned to produce many, many more drafts to produce a good first draft. I learned to be edited, which is occasionally a painful experience -- there is, for instance, an American tendency to overedit, especially among young editors -- but also a really vital experience. I learned to honour deadlines, and word counts, all of which I was doing in India anyway, but in New York I did it under greater pressure. I forced myself, when writing an 800-word review of a book, to try and read everything, or almost everything, that author had written. There were no extra dollars for this, but it did help me set myself apart in some ways and get repeat assignments. New York, as I've said somewhere else, taught me to listen carefully to my "inbuilt shit detector" (that's Hemingway) so that I could be brutally honest with myself and know when a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire piece wasn't quite working. I don't mean to suggest that I wouldn't have learned this elsewhere, or even in India. I do, however, think from my work with publications in India that being properly edited isn't really a part of the writing experience there in a big way.

When I asked whether being in New York affected your choice of subject matter, you interpreted my question in terms of choosing subjects that may or may not interest a western audience. But I was wondering about choice of subject at a more gut level -- and it appears to me that your location did have an impact -- for you say that your next work of fiction may be about New York. Now, if you hadn't been living in New York, would you have considered writing about this city at all? On the other hand, you have someone like Rana Dasgupta, who lives Delhi, and so far as I know, never lived in Bulgaria, but his novel Solo is set in Bulgaria. Or Kafka, for that matter, who never set foot outside Europe, but whose America I sometimes think is the most definitive work of fiction on America. So in these two cases, location did not seem to influence choice of subject matter. My question was more academic - to do with how you operate as a novelist. Let me put it this way: because you live in New York, do you find the city pressing itself upon you as a candidate that must be explored in fiction? Which neither Sofia nor America could in the imaginations of Dasgupta or Kafka?