I have questions, many of them, and they arise when I walk the streets of cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Kolkata. I observe people and overhear conversations.
I grew up in Madras, studied in a convent school, stayed in Brahmin enclaves, and learnt some Tamil from them. Some Tamil, the rougher kind, from listening to street quarrels. I discovered a forgotten Tamil from reading Thirukkaral passages framed in local transport buses.
At home, we spoke a mixture of Hindi, English, and Tamil. My family has a UP baniya background, with my parents’ families hailing from Aligarh and Allahabad. We don’t wear our caste on our sleeves. My surname, chosen by my parents, says nothing of where I am from.
Schooling was in Chennai at a Salesian Convent that took its motto Virtuis in Arduis very seriously. I was good in my studies, overweight, and awkward. My early influences included these convent years and summer trips to Karaikudi, where my father’s family had a Chettinad-style mansion.
My father’s five sisters and their children would also come down, and I would be exposed to small-town life for a few weeks. I picked up more Tamil, read abridged versions of English classics, saw temple rath processions, animal sacrifices, women carrying milk pots under a hot sun and suffering fits. The family business did well, my grandfather was generous, and when my grandmother passed, the entire town descended—visible displays of grief that were unsettling. We saw Tamil films inside a large tent, we fell ill in turns, I became a volunteer in the kitchen and occasionally in the restaurant that we owned.
I joined Loyola College for a B.Com degree. The college classes were a riot with undisciplined hordes in every room, noise in the corridors, stragglers in the car park, and express trains thundering past on nearby tracks. College strikes happened every year, and student unions were aggressive. In all this, the Principal, a diminutive Father Kuriakose, an early hero, faced the strikers with an umbrella for company. Two Professors kindled my interest in business accounting.
In 1980, I gained admission to the MBA program at IIM Ahmedabad. The two years there were life-changing. Peer groups were smart and challenged me in different ways. The curriculum was based on case studies and there was no single solution to the problem sets we discussed. The campus designed by Louis Kahn was an aesthetic delight. To this day, I credit it for my enduring interest in art and architecture.
I spent fifteen years in Mumbai in the eighties and nineties, interning in a city that taught all comers how to survive, work without fuss, take risks, and compete—and in all this relentless madness, maintain a degree of professionalism. The city transformed in those years, and I am still getting to grips with the nature of that transformation in my fiction.
I worked in financial services in Bombay for a couple of years in a small, innovative company and then struck out on my own. Over the eighties and nineties, I built capital, multiplied it in the stock market, and then went public through a listing in the Bombay Stock Exchange. I acquired a small software outfit that automated bank treasuries, and the promoters joined my team. The finance business imploded and for a few difficult years, we barely stayed afloat—defaulting on our obligations, fending off aggressive creditors. The software business gained traction, but for a product company in a difficult domain like treasury, it was tough to keep growing. A timely capital expansion helped repay all the debt the company had accumulated.
In 1988, I met my colleague Geetha Mehra and we set up a company that incorporated her art business under the name Sakshi. We set up an art library—a modest attempt—and opened galleries in Bangalore, Bombay, and later in Taipei. Sakshi gained a reputation for identifying and promoting artists who stood the test of time.
The tumultuous years of running three businesses took their toll, and I decided to sell the software business. Post 2010, I had time on my hands.
My colleague Geetha Mehra gifted me a book called Jejuri, poems by Arun Kolatkar. I tried to write poems, enthused by the simplicity of Kolatkar’s best. That failed badly, but I persisted with prose. My first attempt, all of 220 pages, failed again. But the seed was sown, I kept writing. My next attempt found a publisher and I haven’t looked back since. Every book has led to another.
In my early years in the art world, artists opened doors. C Douglas introduced me to Speaking of Siva, vacana poetry translated by A. K. Ramanujam. Amitava Das introduced me to Dhrupad and to Sculpting in Time, a book on Tarkovsky. Anandjit Ray showed me how a fish tank could be a dangerous place—for the fish. Souza was a source of madness and instigation. Rekha Rodwittiya was an example of free-spiritedness and intensity. Surendran Nair was a master of complex narratives that resisted decoding.
The last decade has also been an intense wine journey. The wine world has the same creative energy as the world of art and literature. It is a repository of stories and an ode to the sensual side of experience.
I currently stay in Bangalore but still write narratives based in Mumbai and Chennai. In some ways, the separation helps.
