Had films come with author’s note, life would have been much easier for critics and audience. They would have been able to see complex narratives from the writer’s perspective. When Homi Adjania’s Finding Fanny hit the screens many could not follow the cinematic language of the film because it was unlike the usual Bollywood stuff in terms of language and characterisation. There was a lot to read between the lines in the script essentially thought and written in English. But Deepika Padukone’s presence demanded mass reach and hence Hindi translation. Writer Kersi Khambatta has now expanded the story to bring out his first novel “The Village of Pointless Conversation” (Harper Collins).
It is more of an exception rather than a rule but there are well known cases of novelisation. For instance E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial directed by Steven Spielberg (1982) was novelised by William Kotzwinkle in 1985. So was Gremlins a 1984 comedy horror film written by Christopher Columbus which was followed by a novel of the same name by George Gipe.
After turning a couple of pages of the novel one finds an Oscar Wilde quote where he talks about his distaste for clever people. It joins the dots for many who found Finding Fanny out of sync with the times. Of course, it is. It’s meant to be. It is about simple people in a clever world. Some of them sound foolish and others in trying to be in tune with the times look pretentious. It is only Angie, who is not concerned with how the world looks at her, and it makes her the voice of the film, and now the novel.
For those who watched Finding Fanny and those who didn’t Kersi’s novel is worth reading. The prime reason being the way he introduces five ordinary people and deftly fleshes them out in the narrative egging us to make them our own. He claims that they are all imagined with bits of him and people he knows in the characters. One may relate to Ferdie, the pivotal character whose old flame is reignited on receiving a letter –– something similar happens to many of us when we come across our first crush either in person or on Facebook. Then there is Savio whose constant whining about life is ubiquitous as is Don Pedro’s arrogance and self-centeredness. We may not be far away from Rosi’s avariciousness or on how Angie allows herself to be led by others without caring a damn about self. Kersi has charmingly weaved the plot and characters making us feel good about some of the foolish human attributes that these characters display.
With already two film collaborations with Homi for Being Cyrus and Finding Fanny, one expects more from Kersi’s stable of oddballs in lazy surroundings.
Edited excerpts from an interview:
On how the book came into being following “Finding Fanny”
The book version was, in a sense, my retelling of the story the way I saw it unfold. There are cinematic constraints while making a movie: budgets, too many people invested and hence too many opinions, all these factors eventually drive the final cut. I thought the movie plot was too simplistic, too clean. The characters did not achieve their full potential, somehow. In the book, I had no constraints. I steered their lives, their character graphs the way I saw it. It was liberating, to pull them out of a cinematically-constrained cocoon, and let them grow.
I chose this to be my first novel because of the challenge it presented. Everyone said, keep your first book autobiographical. I thought, no, it will be fun to write about five hapless, bumbling idiots in a little village in Goa, as far away from my comfort zone as could be possible.
On how the content was treated differently for the novel
A novel gives you that endless potential to experiment with characters and situations. You are restricted by nothing but your own imagination, unlike a screenplay and a movie which are very technical constructs. This book in particular is very different, and not just the end; the entire unfolding of the characters, their quirks and idiosyncrasies differ widely from what made it to screen. All in all, it's a whole new experience to read the story; it's not a prose-version of the movie.
On every chapter dealing with one character and gradual peeling off layers
Five voices; if I did not separate each, the story would have been very one-dimensional. These are five distinct personalities experiencing the same circumstances; their viewpoints, insights and reactions will obviously be widely different. Plus, it's a handy tool to let each character grow by itself, unaided by others.
On choosing Goa as the backdrop
I love Goa, and Goa’s charm lies in its villages, the hinterland where the real people live, not the beach-shack owners and tourists and hustlers that thrive on its coastline. Pocolim is an imaginary village, which could be renamed Anywhere, Goa.
On using the road trip to bring forth multiple human attributes
There is a dynamic about a road trip that is very raw, honest and stripped of any artifice. People are discomfited when on the road and that provides a setting to make them more vulnerable. The scenery is continuously changing, every bend of the road throws up new circumstances; how each character reacts to that is an opportunity to say something about them, their fears, their insecurities. Again, it is merely a tool, a device to tell a story, which, in this case, is about going off into the unknown on a harebrained mission to find some chick last seen 37 years ago.
On introducing narrators to the story
Again, it is merely a device. The narrator is Bob, a taverna-owner in Pocolim. A taverna in any Goan village is where all the gossip happens, where the tall-tales are spun over shots of arrack. It is a repository of stories, and I have always liked the old-fashioned construct of a bartender being the chap who sees and knows everything. People open up to bartenders, tell them their darkest secrets when drunk: it's the comfort of talking to a complete stranger, whose job it is to smile and listen as he gets you progressively hammered.
On his next project
A couple of movies in the pipeline. The next book is a a work in progress, a steady page-a-day story about freaks and sociopaths we encounter all the time in Mumbai. A more ambitious yarn, with time-shifts and based around some actual events, with an undercurrent of gritty reality and the inherent criminal in all of us just needing a trigger or catalyst to bring it out. I like how it is progressing, so far.
