Poetry is an inward journey, but a novel moves outward: CP Surendran

Tell us about your upcoming book Tears of the Crying Squad.

Tears of the Crying Squad, which might be retitled as 'Hadal', is about what we do to each other when there is no accountability. It's the world seen through the eyes of an imaginative, perverse, loveless, lonely, psychotic police officer. He is modelled on a real guy, breathing and alive, just like you and me. In fact, the story is inspired by an actual incident that happened a few years ago, when a lady from the Maldives who was visiting India, was branded as a spy smuggling cryogenic rocket secrets out of the country. She ended up in a jail for nearly five years before she was declared innocent. The real life police officer was responsible for building the story around her after she declined sexual favours in return for a visa extension.  

As a people, we were always great story tellers and of course we prefer myth to history, fiction to fact. I had met the woman twice and her story stayed with me. That meeting, to some extent, was the starting point, I suppose, of writing this book. The novel at one level is about how imagination takes over reality.

What do you draw from when writing poetry? 

An economy of words, I guess. Poetry to me is about words--not ideas-- and how language yields with luck and talent, a moment of luminous insight. Often a good poem is one which turns the word-- and the world-- on its head. The other thing I suppose I might have drawn from poetry is an ability to visualise in terms of images and phrases. Hopefully it worked. 

You have written novels, poems and a screenplay. How does the process of writing differ for you in each of these areas? 

Fiction is really hard labour. You have to sustain a thought through pages. Your narrative has to have structural consistencies. It has to turn -- to my mind-- at some point and surprise both the author and the reader. You also need to be physically fit like a long distance runner, and believe in the project. So it's a bit of a surprise to me why there are so many novelists!

Poetry on the other hand is relatively easier for me. It can be sparked off by an image, a misreading of a word or sentence, an observation or by reading something truly inspirational. Poetry, I would like to think, is an inward journey; a novel moves outward.

Screenplay could bring both categories into play. Each scene is both visual and logical. But unlike poetry and fiction, a screenplay is highly enabled by the contribution of the director, actors and the crew. They could interpret a pause in so many ways, inflect a word to another dimension. A screenplay finds its fruition as a collective effort. It's to that extent, a less solitary project.

Your first two novels have been set around real events - the Naxalite movement in the 70s and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. What prompted you to explore these events in the form of a novel? What is it about writing fiction that excites you?

That's a good insight. Primarily I see not much distinction between reality and the imagination. There is not much you can imagine which is not real. ET might be green and small, but it is still anthropomorphic. So real events for me are good enough to build on. The excitement and creativity are in finding for yourself what you could do with your material. As readers might see for themselves, Tears/Hadal is based on a real event, but it has been completely fictionalised.