Marginalised given voice in Basu’s new novel

For author Kunal Basu, marginalised members of Indian society rarely find literary depiction in today’s fiction and so he decided to depict the essential humanity of the dispossessed in his new novel, which is a story of a gigolo and his quest to become legitimate. Kalkatta, published by Pan Macmillan India imprint Picador India, is about Jamshed Alam or Jami, considered the gigolo king of contemporary Kolkata.

“Wandering the streets of Kolkata at night, I’ve come across various characters that are hard to spot during daytime. Young men, fashionably dressed, waiting in front of hotels and bars have drawn my mind into their worlds, the mysteries of their lives. The story of Kalkatta was born out of such a curiosity, says Basu, author of acclaimed novels like The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, The Japanese Wife, The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist and Racists.

According to him, Kalkatta is a fictional memoir of a gigolo in contemporary Kolkata.“It’s the story of a marginalised person, and his quest to become legitimate a proper Kalkatta-wallah,” Basu said. He says today’s fiction is mostly about the affluent or middle-class mainstream.

“It is not fashionable to write about poor people struggling to find their place in society. When they are depicted, they are shown to be crude, corrupt and as criminals. I wanted to depict the essential humanity of the dispossessed,” says Basu, who has been teaching at the Said Business School, University of Oxford since 1999.

Smuggled into India from Bangladesh and given refuge by his uncle, a leader of the ruling party, Jami grows up in Zakaria Street — a Little Baghdad of the old — dreaming of becoming a pukka Kalkatta-wallah.

When friendship with a local gang disqualifies him from school, he ends up as assistant to a passport forger, and then a masseur. Soon enough, innocent massage leads to ‘plus plus treatments’, and Kalkatta opens its doors, drawing Jami into the world of the rich and famous, housewives, tourists and travelling executives, and occasionally to high-paying and dangerous ‘parties’.

Danger looms, too, from rivals and the police, and the ever-present risk of losing his cover. Jami’s shadowy double life takes a turn for the unexpected when he meets Pablo, a young boy who suffers from leukaemia, and his single mother Mandira.

Made to oscillate between his refugee family, the neighbourhood gang, his massage-parlour clients, even the cultured world of Bengali intellectuals inhabited by Mandira,

he succeeds in becoming a true Kalkatta-wallah, but a stranger to himself. Until his love for Pablo threatens to destroy everything, and drive him away even from his beloved Kalkatta.

Ultimately a work of fiction, Basu says the contours of Jami’s life have been drawn from several interviews he had conducted with men like him over a period of two years.

“The life, I’ve depicted, is authentic, but doesn’t describe any specific individual as such,” he says.Notwithstanding The Japanese Wife was adapted for the big screen by Aparna Sen, Basu says he does not write with cinema in mind.

“As an author of literary fiction, I think of myself as the reader to enthral and entertain. Neither The Japanese Wife nor Kalkatta was written with a film director in mind,” he says.

Every novel, for him, is different in genesis and persona, which is why “my literary journey has been full of surprises and self-realisation”.

“It has made me ever the more aware of the diversity of life and the depth of the human condition. Of course, it has also meant grappling with different modes of story-telling,” he says.

He is now working on a Bangla novel on Naxalism. “My Bangla novel is set in the present times, but harks back to the turbulent 70s. It isn’t inspired by current events, but by that enduring human quality called memory,” Basu says.

Asked any subject he would love to deal with in the future, he replies, “I don’t write about ‘subjects’. I write when a story seizes me, and makes me enter a world I’ve never entered before. I allow myself to be surprised by new stories. I am waiting for one such to appear now!”