In Kunal Basu’s novel Sarojini’s Mother (Penguin; ₹599), Sarojini-Saz-Campbell travels from the UK to Kolkata in search of her biological mother, and takes the help of Chiru Sen, a musician who models himself on Elvis Presley. Two contenders claim to be Sarojini’s mother — Jamuna, a housemaid, and Urvashi, who lives a life of luxury. Traversing Kolkata, Sarojini tries to make sense of the battle between the mothers.
Edited excerpts of an interview with the author:
Did Sarojini’s Mother emerge as an offshoot of you meeting travellers to India in search of their parents?
While flying to the U.S. from India for my graduates studies a few decades back, I’d seen rows of infants chaperoned by a nurse in the economy cabin. They were orphans I was told, adopted from India by foreign parents, travelling to their new homes. The crying babies kept the plane awake, and made me wonder about the enormity of such a passage. Perhaps they’d return some day like sea turtles, swimming back across oceans to their motherland, I thought. But would the continents have shifted by then, offering mere shipwrecks instead of sandcastles? The fleeting thought had stayed with me, and grew bit by bit as I confronted the dementia that plagued my mother in her final years. The idea of motherhood consumed me… the complexities of the relationship between mother and child, and the role of memory in shaping that bond. What if I were an adopted orphan, returning home to search for my mother? What would I be searching for, within and without? Sarojini’s Mother was born out of such musings.
How would you define a complex character like Sarojini?
Sarojini – Saz – Campbell is a normal young lady in many ways — bright student, who’s understandably rebellious against her hippy adoptive mother. Like other adoptees, she’s keen to find the missing piece in the jigsaw of her life, but there is a deeper wound that she seeks to heal. Her journey to Kolkata is thus a journey into her soul.
What went into the making of Chiru Sen, the Elvis Presley lookalike musician in Kolkata?
Since the 60s, Kolkata has been the epicentre of Western popular music in India. Bars and nightclubs like Trincas and the Blue Fox were melting points frequented not only by the affluent but the middle-class. The culture of hippies and flower children in the West found eager footprints, and it was fairly common to find local versions of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other rock stars. Elvis, in this novel, is someone whose body lives in Kolkata, while his heart and soul inhabits the world of his idol Elvis Presley. He belongs here, and yet he doesn’t. Music transports him to an altered reality, which makes him ideally suited to enter the minds of foreign visitors. Just as Sarojini is an outsider-insider, Elvis is the insider-outsider.
Did you revisit certain areas of Kolkata for this story, like the planetarium?
I’d like to think of myself as a thoroughbred Kolkatan, but I wished to see the city through fresh eyes in writing this novel. This included taking a slow ride on the number 36 tram on a blisteringly hot afternoon, revisiting the Egyptian mummy at the Indian Museum, enticing a friend for an invitation to tea at the classy Bengal Club, spending a watchful hour at the sleazy Ghalib bar, and of course, closeting myself with an army of lovers at the Planetarium. I wished Kolkata to burst through the cracks of the novel and add flavour, but never to drown out the story.
Is the search itself a journey of self-discovery for Sarojini than its result?
My novels, somehow or the other, turn out to be tales of search. The passion that fuels such — be it the quest to cure syphilis as in The Yellow Emperor’s Cure , or solving the scientific riddle of racial difference as in Racists — perhaps illuminates what I consider worthiest of all human endeavours — the intense drive to understand our world as well as ourselves. The narratives that I fashion bring these two to an apex. There is indeed a practical angle to Sarojini’s search — the tangibility of finding her biological mother — but also a deep psychological quest, which could teach her how best to live a life despite the trauma of loss.
The women in the story — Sarojini, Jamuna, Urvasi and Elvis's mother — are well defined and have their own little quirks. Are they drawn from women you've observed?
Writing women constitute a key excitement for me. Not only are women multi-layered in personality, but also belie routine expectations. There are nuances to explore and distinctive quirks that illuminate character. Raised by a novelist mother (Chabi Basu), I was subconsciously trained to hone into tone and inflections, gestures and subtle psychological interplays, which have informed my writing. I don’t model my characters directly to resemble people I’ve known, but perhaps they take the circuitous root of filtering through memory to infect my pen.
How long did the book take, from conception to completion?
Conception started much earlier than the act of execution. Even while I was busy writing my previous novel (in Bengali), Sarojini kept visiting me and made a strong case to be written. I had postponed this story for future action, but she jumped the queue and invaded my desk. Once I started, it took about eight months to write the first draft. I wrote two more versions that stretched the whole process to about 16 months. I am a compulsive revisionist, and find much solace in what John Irving said about writing … “Half of my life is an act of revision.”
