The following interview with Indra Sinha, author of “Animal’s People,” was conducted over e-mail while he was in India on his recent book tour. He lives in a wine-making region of France, and was kind enough to indulge my questions about “Animal’s People,” his writing childhood, and the art of making wine, amongst other things. He also told me that Animal, the main character of his novel, would be happy to answer a few questions, so that interview is also included. [read Sepia/Sandhya’s review of the Booker-shortlisted novel.]

What is the one thing that Animal’s People was never supposed to be? A polemic.

How long did you take to write the book? Were its origins a short story? It grew out of notes I was making for a screenplay. But did not come to life as prose fiction until the character of Animal appeared. He immediately began haranguing me and I learned eventually that the best course was just to write down everything he said. The actual writing took about three years, over a five year period.

Obviously your work with the Bhopal Medical Appeal and their newsletter was your research basis. In the first place, how did you get involved with the cause? A man from Bhopal approached me on the basis of the work I had done with Amnesty International and asked if I would help raise funds to start a clinic in Bhopal. You can’t just start something then walk away, so I then became involved in fundraising to keep it going. The clinic is now in its thirteenth year and we have given free medical care to more than 30,000 people.

In 1994, you “published an appeal in The Guardian asking for funds to start a free clinic for the still-suffering survivors of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. This led to the founding of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. The clinic opened in 1996 and has so far helped nearly 30,000 people.” Is a little bit of Elli in you? Nothing at all.

Why did you choose to set this book in a fictional town, rather than in Bhopal itself? Because I wanted to free my imagination and to concentrate on the characters. This book is about people, not about issues. The disaster that overtook the city of Khaufpur is always kept sketchy, the Kampani is never explicitly named, it is just the Kampani, and as such is not simply Union Carbide or Dow Chemical, but stands for all those ruthless, greedy corporations which are wreaking havoc all over the world. In Jaipur at the literary festival Vickie and I met Alexis Wright, who has written of the aboriginal peoples’ struggle against Rio Tinto Zinc, in Bombay we spent time with Sudeep Chakravarti who has written a powerful book called Red Sun, about the Naxali and Maoist movement in India – again tribal peoples forced off their land by mining corporations and steel companies, including Tata, which is trying to get Dow off the Bhopal hook.I was really struck by the description of the factory. “Eyes, imagine you’re in the factory with me. See that thing rising above the trees, those rusty pipes and metal stairs going nowhere? That’s the place where they made the poisons. It used to be bigger, but bits kept falling off. Each big wind pulls more iron sheets loose. We here them banging like angry ghosts.” In fact, I kept going back to it. You’ve visited the plant? Several times. It is as described, I have been there many times. However I wish people would not automatically assume that Khaufpur is literally Bhopal in every little detail. Khaufpur is a city of the imagination and at one point I had thought of calling it Receio and setting the story in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in West Africa or Indonesia, because the story is really about how powerless, disenfranchised people deal with the monstrous injustices that are heaped upon them.

The San Francisco Chronicle says that you have a magic realist inheritance. Is that a style that you identify with your work at all? No. There is no magical realism in Animal’s People. There is a two-headed foetus which talks, and Animal has an unusual aptitude for learning languages of all kinds (and even inanimate objects talk to him), but one should never forget that everything we know is from Animal himself and none of it may be true. By his own account Animal hears voices which tell him to do and say things; he has “mad times”. Or conversely it may all be a true account of a crazy imagination. I doubt if there is much magic in madness and as for realism, Animal says, “To believe in what you can’t see or hear, and deny what you do see and hear, that you could call crazy.”

Tell me about your relationship with the author Mulk Raj Anand. What was the best advice he ever gave you about writing? Mulk was a family friend and I knew him from the age of about six onwards. When I was a child he told me to write. When I was grown up (and used to meet him in London) he urged me to write about my childhood. The Death of Mr Love is dedicated to him. In it I quote a piece of advice that I later followed myself with Animal’s People. He says (this is from memory), “burn your so-good stories and poems, give me a true picture of our poorest people.” Never in India’s history has there been such need of writers who tell the stories of the forgotten people, those for whom India is neither Incredible nor Shining. I wish Mulk had lived to read Animal’s People.

You have created this amazing website khaufpur.com, which takes us into Animal’s world and city. What was your favorite part of this project? Did it remind you of your copywriting days in any way? Khaufpur.com is a work in progress, albeit in temporary abeyance while I was in India and out of regular broadband contact. I liked the horoscopes, and the ads for Dr Ali Faqri’s all-conquering medicaments.

Speaking of copywriting, what part of that aspect of your career helps you most when you’re writing your novels? Copywriting is of no use whatever in writing novels.

You’ve been compared to Salman Rushdie (you both used to work at the same ad agency back in your respective pre-novel days) in almost every article I’ve read about you in the British press. What do you have to say about that? Everyone pigeonholed as an “Indian writer” is inevitably compared to Salman Rushdie, but Salman is unique. His writing has this marvellous fecundity – every sentence could burst open and hatch a new story.

I was interested in how Zafar asked Animal not to curse the first time he met him, but at the end of the book, he throws caution to the winds and allows himself to use the same words that used to trouble him. And, Animal says, “If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it.” Did editors question Animal’s use of language at all, and ask you to tone it down? I guess Zafar has learned something from Animal, not about swearing but about living. No editor has objected to the swearing (and there are now about 20 editors in different languages involved). Some readers and critics have said that the bad language was “unnecessary”. I informed Animal, who said, “have these cunts spent even one day in Khaufpur? They can fuck off all, and you too.”

Much of the book is written in the present tense. I’m curious to know why you made that choice. What were the challenges of executing this? Animal’s choice, but it’s actually written in a mixture of simple present, various past tenses, but the defining characteristic is his use of the present perfect. If you think of these as notes in perfume, base, mid and top, you get the ripe stench of Animal.

As I was reading the book, I kept praying and wishing for a “happy ending.” In a sense, you delivered on that, though I least expected it. Why? It was not a happy ending, nor an unhappy one. It was just a goodbye point in a story that has no ending. Yes, there were two marriages, but there were also deaths. In Khaufpur, as in Bhopal, it is meaningless to look for large resolutions, justice, all those Hollywood things …there is no justice and probably never will be. Yet the people involved will never give up, when hope is gone they will fight without hope.

Can you see this turning into a film? We’ve just signed a deal.

What was the most interesting thing about the Booker experience? (And, of course, congratulations.) For me it was meeting the other writers and the fantastic book bloggers. The media attention was always going to be an evanescent and superficial. The thing is not to believe that being involved in the Booker suddenly makes you important or more than you are.

What are you working on now? A novel set in Greece a long time ago.

You grew up in Bombay. Now you live in the countryside of France. How the big metropolis seep into your writing and your imagination? Bombay is my hometown and a place I’ve always loved. It’s there in my first novel, The Death of Mr Love but I don’t see myself returning to Bombay or to India in future fiction.

Who did you read as a kid? Tell me about your reading childhood. My mother was herself a writer and had a huge collection of books and decided tastes. She started me off on Gorky when I was eight. “Childhood”, if I remember, opened with a funeral scene. I’d rather have been reading Superman comics. After Gorky, Turgenev and Pushkin came Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and a slew of Soviet children’s books. There was Dickens of course, and all the English children’s classics. A book I much prized was “The Guide to Fairyland” Dion Clayton Calthrop. Later I found Joyce, Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and William Faulkner. I read everything Enid Blyton ever wrote and the Wishing Chair, the Faraway Tree and the Ring O’Bells Mystery remain favourites.

What are you reading right now? Red Sun, by Sudeep Chakravarti, The Sea by John Banville (glorious prose), City of Falling Angels, by the marvellous John Berendt, The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh.

How and where do you write? Laptop, wherever I can plug it in. Garden by the sea in Goa, balcony above Pushkar lake, endless late night hotel rooms, at home I work in my library overlooking our little river, the Vert.

Stephen King’s ideal reader is his wife. He writes all his books with her as his audience. Do you have an “ideal reader”? My ideal reader would be the sort of intelligent book blogger (of whom happily there are several and I have one or two in mind) who are extraordinarily well read, read for pleasure and don’t have axes to grind.

Tell me about the grape harvest in the Lot. What does it have in common with the writing process? The vines come into leaf later than you might expect, the black gnarled stems in spring stand out against a sea of yellow hawkbit. A great deal of careful pruning produces large and juicy bunches of grapes. Sun and rain are both needed, though careful husbandry can to some extent offset a lack or excess of either. When the grapes ripen and are pressed, the skins are brought to a distillery nearby where they make brandy and whole valley is filled with the scent of gentle fermentation. Across the Lot from us the valley is wide and green with vineyards. It’s the heart of the Cahors wine region and the source of the famous “black wine”. I don’t know how much of it percolates into my writing but a good deal certainly goes into me.

Q&A with Animal, from Animal’s People

Several interviews with the larger than life character Animal can be read in the Khaufpur Gazette. Here is a recent Q&A, which will be of most interest to those who have read or have started reading this novel.

Tell me what music you’re currently listening to and what it says about your current state of mind. That is, what’s on your playlist today? Jashn-E-Bahaara from Jodha Akbar, I too can sing like Javed Ali, just listen. Now ask what is history what is fiction, what is truth?

Have you seen the movie The Bhopal Express? What are your thoughts? Seen it? I starred in it, bloody, alongside Naseer and Zeenat. In that scene when everyone is running for their lives, don’t you see me? I’ve kept on asking Mahesh (the director) to give me some dialogues, or a song to sing, but he said my talent would shame the other performers.

What’s going on between Nisha and Zafar nowadays? Do you still eat lunch at pandit Somraj’s house everyday? Nisha Zafar? So boring. I go often to Panditji’s house in the Claw but since all this Booker Shooker attention I’ve developed a liking for mutton so I have made one raw silk kurta to wear with my kakadus and I’m going all the time with jarnaliss to the hotel Jehannum. I said to the manager, “will you throw me out like your doormen refused entry to that old lady who came wearing slippers?” Actually, Sandhya-ji they threw her out because she was poor, even though she was willing to pay for a meal. Cunt’s kind of embarrassed, says “You are welcome, Animal.” So I say, “And if I smoke a beedi by your pool?” “Smoke, smoke,” he laughs, but you can hear his teeth grinding as he goes away.

Religion. You’ve seen it all. Ma Franci’s vision of the apocalypse. Muharram. Hindu festivals. What’s your take on it? The best thing I ever heard on this subject, it’s this little girl who is asked what she knows about god and she replies, “She’s a horse”.

This article points out how the Indian government is trying to roll out the red carpet for Dow Chemicals to invest in India again. What say you to this? Sandhya-ji, how do you feel about it? Is it okay? If not what will you do about it? Will you call anyone? Will you write about it? Will you mention it at the next smarty party you go to? The Bhopalis, like our Khaufpuris, have suffered a catastrophe that the world has forgotten. Nobody fucking cares, that is the truth. Even now, Bhopalis and Khaufpuris are walking to Delhi again to see that weird little Prime Minister guy who looks like a monkey passing wind. He’ll treat them with contempt, like always,who isn’t fit to wash the dust from their feet. You, people like you, he might listen to. If you know these things and keep silent, your silence is a bigger obscenity than any word I might utter.