A uthor and copywriter Tharun James Jimani remembers the morning after he read about the gruesome assault on Nirbhaya in 2012. He recalls the shock and horror and the numbness that followed. But what infuriated him was the attitudes of people, particularly of friends and family members.
"It was mildly surprising to watch politicians and media mercenaries actually argue that there could be another side to a gang rape. But to hear family members or friends, people you love and respect, question why a girl was out at night at all was blood curdling. It was infuriating that a lot of parents distilled what happened into a moral lesson for their daughters – look at what happened to that girl because she went to the cinema with a boy! And then somewhere down the line, the anger sort of just coagulated. There was this collective resignation, this decision to just agree to disagree with people over a certain age. You can’t be at odds with someone over the most basic human value – equality of all- and still be friends with them. As long as that’s the stand we’re taking, I’m afraid nothing’s actually going to change."
In his second book, Mornings After , which will be released on August 29, Tharun’s characters’ lives are shaped and changed by such incidents, big and small. Mornings After is made up of several such nuanced encounters with Indians in their late twenties and early thirties; encounters that see them grappling with social, political and cultural issues that cover a gamut of current events.
In an e-mail interview, the Delhi-based author, who hails from Thiruvananthapuram, talks about the book and its plot. Edited excerpts.
What does the title say about the story?
Mornings After is primarily a reference to one of the protagonists, Thomas, and his struggle with alcoholism. But Thomas and Sonya, who are lovers, and their group of friends, are all in a sort of hangover from their varied pasts for much of the story. Not that they are in a state of despair or regret necessarily; just a general state of waking up one fine morning and wondering how they ended up waking up where they did, stuck in a routine. The title is of course also a nod to the contraceptive pill, and the sexual liberation it championed. The crux of Thomas and Sonya’s inner struggle is understanding and re-interpreting gender roles and identity as an urban Indian couple.
Are Sonya and Thomas representatives of the youth in today’s metros, battling their own ambitions and social expectations to find their comfort zones, emotionally, financially and physically?
Sonya is in her late twenties, and Thomas is closer to 33. They’re outliers more than representatives. I’ve only ever been interested in the outliers. Thomas genuinely believes he’s the last of his breed- a struggling artist in an era of overnight social media celebrities. Sonya is a doer, she’s a feminist, and she stands up for what she thinks is right. I think she is a hero in a way the vast majority is not. Thomas and Sonya are only representative of most people their age in the sense that both groups make compromises for financial, emotional, physical comfort. However, these two are actually aware they’re compromising.
The Torso is a creation of a superhyped breed of celebs. How much do such macho creations contribute to popular images of the male?
I saw this video on Facebook recently about how the newly sexualised male – athletes and film stars - is giving boys all over the world body issues. But I couldn’t help thinking that all these years we’ve been putting these impossibly perfect women on magazine covers and ads, and nobody thought it a bit strange that these women didn’t represent 90 percent of women we know in real life. But a decade of well-built men baring their chests, and we’re up in arms against the unfairness of it all. Thomas is one of those guys – he’s a Beta Male, and his fight is the fight of the 90 per cent.
The Torso is the consummate Page 3 creation – he’s a Bollywood matinee idol, he bashes up the bad guys without losing his bad boy vibe, he fills his movies with "item girls" and somehow still delivers the most sexually charged performance to his hyper-male, hyper-heterosexual fan base, he’s got a history of misogyny in his personal life. He’s the anti-Thomas. The irony is that Thomas is called upon behind the scenes to script The Torso’s resurrection after his latest – and worst yet- transgression.
Mornings After attempts to present a slice of a young society in transition. What do you feel are the overriding concerns and fears of the youth of today?
I think the greatest clash of our times, of people in Thomas and Sonya’s age group, is internal. It’s the duality- the clash between who you think you are in private, in the company of your friends, and the person you turn into around your family. We’re all liberals and progressives at the pub, aren’t we? On Facebook? But then there’s that blind eye you turn to a regressive comment, that argument you just don’t want to get into because you’re only visiting relatives for a few days. But if you can’t be you at home, what chance have we of being true to ourselves anywhere else? Closet liberals are the worst. Nothing reduces your opinion of someone like listening to them change into that other person when their mom is on the phone. At least the other side is consistent.
Coming from a middle class family yourself, what were the kind of social pressures you have had to overcome to walk your path?
My parents are probably why I took to writing more than anything else. We didn’t have all the cable channels, we were still on dial up when I left for college, but we always had a library’s worth of books. They may have wanted different things for me, but they’ve always been accommodating and appreciative of my wanting to write. Having said that, I’m not really blazing down unexplored territory. I have a job like everybody else, I have my responsibilities, it’s all pretty boring really.
Which were some of the most interesting books that you read last year in 2015?
I’ve actually just been picking up random second hand books at this market near my flat ever since I moved to Delhi. I think Gone Girl and Purity are the only books I sought out and read in a long time. They were both pretty amazing. But the most interesting book I’ve read in a while is this Lou Reed biography I picked up for Rs. 50.
Do cinema and popular literature reflect the angst and expectations of young India? If not, which media does?
I find it really difficult to identify with most of Bollywood. The movies that stay on the screens, anyway. I watch Malayalam films when I can, but they’re naturally Malayali-specific. Books – there are plenty of good Indian authors, but India is a massively diverse group to represent, isn’t it? There have been some web series in the last few years that I thought represented urban India realistically, and really well. Pitchers and Ladies Room come to mind. Hip Hop Homeland is a great watch. And a lot of writers are doing a much better job of documenting life in the twenties online on blogs and magazines.
Your book deals with a wide range of social issues that are challenging the ideas of family and society in India. As a youngster from Thiruvananthapuram, how do you see yourself and your characters in the midst of these sweeping changes?
I left Thiruvananthapuram for college almost 15 years ago and never looked back. But a key difference between a teenager in the city today and people my age is that we had to unlearn a lot of the stuff we were brought up on when we left home. We had to undrink the Kool-Aid because it was so, so toxic – morally, psychologically, in terms of gender equality, even logically. I had to learn that friends could be family too, that kink is okay, that the really great rockstars and writers probably had lives as well-planned and routine as those of corporate bankers and serial entrepreneurs. The characters in Mornings After are in the process of unlearning, too; they’re unlearning fictional truths about themselves in real time as a very real tragedy – through the media coverage of the Nirbhaya case- plays out on social media.
