“AS A writer, I am very lazy and slow,” said Kiran Desai, author of the Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss, on the second day of the on-going DSC Jaipur Literature Festival on Saturday.
Desai, who landed in Jaipur along with boyfriend, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, on Thursday evening, was responding to a question about her next novel, which is wrapped in mystery. Reminiscing about her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Desai said she wrote when she was in her early 20s.
Having left India with her writer mother, Anita Desai, at 14, she said she felt as if her life would never be whole again. “I thought that India, in a whole way, would be lost to me,” she said. Her first novel was written with a “realisation” that she wanted to write, with Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among her major influences.
“I had written it when my life was not whole,” she said. In The Inheritance of Loss, Desai said she was writing against what she had written in her debut. “I was fighting to find an in-between place to write from. This was the pain of my second book,” she said.
But now that she is working on her third novel, Desai thinks that it was a “typical” immigrant novel. And she has found yet another way to structure a novel. “It is the subject that forces the form and the length of the novel.”
Talking about her mother, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize thrice but never got around to winning it, Desai said: “Unlike me, my mother is an extraordinarily disciplined writer. My life is so different from my mother.”
As a child growing up in Delhi where she went to the Loreto Convent, Desai said her mother would be happy to see her off to her school. She said: “As a child, we yearned for her as she was always on the verge of departure. She has an innate sense of exile and distance.”
“There are people who write and there are others who are deeply into writing. It’s a part of their being. My mother is one of them. She is so deeply an author,” Desai said, talking about the quietness and silence of her mother’s writing room.
Desai, who finds Internet distracting, said she had managed to stay away from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
“I have managed to avoid that,” she said. Desai and Pamuk, who were supposed to attend Sri Lanka’s Galle Literary Festival, pulled out from the festival without elaborating on their decision on Friday.
On Saturday, India refuted the Galle festival’s charge that their decision was prompted by New Delhi’s tough visa restrictions and not as a protest to the alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka. The Galle boycott campaign includes authors like Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy.