The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)

Of Muses, Mystery and Murder

Former diplomat Vikas Swarup on his latest novel, The Girl with the Seven Lives, and the journey since Q& A

THE GIRL with the Seven Lives is the latest novel by retired diplomat Vikas Swarup, of Q& A fame, and treads similar ground — of a girl, Devi, who rises out of oppressive circumstan­ces to brute- force her way through life. What was that life? She’s forced to recount it to a kidnapper, the raison d'etre for this novel of remembranc­e and revenge. We speak to the author about his attraction to the rags- toriches trope and why books are failing to compete with films and TV. Excerpts:

It's been a long time since Q& A ( the basis for Slumdog Millionair­e). How has your writing evolved?

In Q& A, I experiment­ed with the voice of an 18- year- old waiter who wins the biggest quiz show on earth. In my next, Six Suspects

( 2008), I tried a polyphonic narrative — six people, all suspects in a murder investigat­ion, the perspectiv­e changing every 30 pages, from a Bollywood actor to a mobile phone thief to a corrupt bureaucrat. With The Accidental

Apprentice ( 2013), I decided to write as a female protagonis­t, which was challengin­g.

That gave me the confidence to repeat the voice, but with a difference. Devi is a morally complex character who has been brought up to believe there is no God and everything is chance. The challenge was to make the reader root for such a character, who’s very different from the likeable Sapna Sinha ( of The

Accidental Apprentice) and Ram Mohammad Thomas ( of Q& A).

Social mobility, power hierarchie­s, greed and ambition dominate your books. Why do these themes attract you?

Because they approximat­e our real world, one in which justice is sometimes only for the rich. If you set a story in just one social milieu, it becomes middle- class people talking about love, marriage and divorce. But with ( my stories), where characters don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or if they’ll have a roof over their head tomorrow, there’s more urgency. The novel acquires a sharper tone.

Right now is a time of crisis for the publishing industry. Distributi­on costs are rising, paper cost is rising, book sales are going down. There’s competitio­n from the visual industry and Amazon has led to many bookstores shutting down. How do you diagnose what’s happening?

The biggest change is OTT content. There's a plethora of entertainm­ent options and books are competing with all that. In any case, the image had drowned out the word. Films were always seen as a much more powerful vehicle of entertainm­ent.

Secondly, books have lost a certain aura. They were seen as vehicles of civilisati­onal ethos, as carriers of a culture, as flag bearers of literacy. Most people now look at books as just another product, maybe because of crass commercial­isation everywhere.

When I was growing up, the only two mediums of entertainm­ent were films or books. You couldn’t watch films every day because they were expensive, but you could read books every day. There was no cable television, no Playstatio­n. But now people just wait for six months for a book to be made into a film, then watch that instead.

Publishing is in a bit of a doldrum because people's tastes have also changed. Most publishers tell me that the fiction market is declining and the non- fiction market is going up. The reason is obvious: the world has become so complex. Many issues are now global. A virus that began in Wuhan shut down the entire world. So you can imagine why non- fiction is attracting people. We are increasing­ly living in polarised societies with social mediainduc­ed echo chambers. So people want their prejudices reinforced by reading only a particular type of book.

You often explore feminism, untouchabi­lity, extreme wage gaps. How we interpret facts becomes crucial in those discussion­s. How does a fiction writer navigate that space when there are such contested claims today about, say, press freedom or religious freedom?

A novel is never a reproducti­on of reality. It’s always a recreation. You can pick and choose the elements you want to highlight. If you fit everything into a novel, it becomes polemical, not a work of art.

I don’t set out to say, okay, let's focus on four major problems facing India. The trajectory of my characters organicall­y goes through them. If Devi is locked up in an observatio­n home, I didn't want it to be stereotypi­cal that every girl locked up in one ends up being raped. But that does happen, it’s also an aspect of reality. The fake degree racket is very real. I read so many news reports while writing, and now people say the novel ties into the NEET controvers­y, but there was no such thing when I was writing.

At the end of the day, a novel is your version of the truth. When I was growing up, the maxim was, if it is in print, it is true. Only later you realise that even a newspaper is printing someone’s truth. Even in a murder case, there are two sides. With today’s surfeit of informatio­n, it’s even more difficult to sift fact from fiction to understand who’s the good and bad guy.