Kalyan Ray knows about displacement. He knows what it is like to have to leave ‘home’ and move to a new place, where unfamiliar people have to become neighbours, friends, perhaps even relatives. His family had to move out of their native home in Bangladesh due to floods, political changes and financial ruin. Then life became a whirl of cosmopolitan experiences — growing up in Kolkata; being educated in India and the U.S., teaching in the Philippines, Ecuador, Jamaica and Greece. All this was channelled into Eastwords (2005), a story that straddles the space between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as seen from the point of view of an Indian mind. This time he uses the sensory input of his life in Ireland, melding it with his travels to the U.S. and his early life in West Bengal and produces No Country . The scope of this narrative is sweeping indeed, fragments blowing hither and yon, even as the whole is swept into a deftly crafted tale that comes full circle from death to the resolution of that death.
Excerpts from an interview:
How long did it take you to write this book?
Although the theme of migration, identity and hybridity has concerned me for over a decade, I began to focus on the various areas of research about five years ago. The writing itself took me four years, and the editing, some months after that.
What research did you do forNo Country?
I put a great deal of effort not to let the research show in the telling of the story. But I owed it to my readers to paint the past as vividly and accurately as I could, with its sights and sounds, contemporary opinions and mindsets. So I needed to use numerous books of history, memoirs, and contemporary journals. Just a small sampling will suggest the deep soil in which I planted my branching story of the various diaspora, identity, and hybridity. I found Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 , a marvellous starting point; her insights were unfailingly sharp and clear. These were balanced by Thomas Campbell Foster’s Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland (1846), Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland by WEH Lecky, De Beaumont’s Ireland (1839), TW Freeman’s Pre-famine Ireland, and Liam O’Flaherty’s novels. I ploughed through Alfred Smee’s The Potato Plant, Its Uses and Properties (1846) for an insight into contemporary understanding of the problem. This is just a small sampling of what became a much larger bibliography.
For six months before writing the Ireland segment, I immersed myself in reading contemporary material from the 1840s. Freeman’s Journal (Ireland’s first national newspaper which began publication in 1763), The Nation (founded in 1842 by Daniel O’Connell himself), The Times of London (which had not yet spawned its many namesakes in various parts of the world), The Famine in the Land (1847) by Isaac Butt who was a friend of W.B. Yeats’s father, and a veritable pile of contemporary pamphlets and posters. Later, historical research often corrected contemporary perceptions of events, but I needed to keep in mind that for a novelist, the first reactions, even rumours — especially early rumours — are of prime value and must dye the tempera of the narrative.
For the Bengal sections, apart from English language sources, I delved into a wide variety of vernacular books, newspapers, reminiscences, too numerous to set down in the context of a work of fiction.
Considerable research went into imagining New York City in the 1910s. Archival photographs in various libraries were invaluable, as were books. Such as Kathie Friedman-Kasaba’s Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York 1870 - 1924. Before writing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, I read and re-read Leon Stein’s definitive The Triangle Fire, excerpts from the trial testimony of People of the State of New York vs Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. I was thus enabled to use the backgrounds of each worker I mentioned in my narrative.
Considering you have lived away from India for so long, where do you belong?
Having taught and lived on three very diverse continents, I managed — perhaps unconsciously — to keep a sense of youthful curiosity in each of these very different places and peoples. Their stories, their lore of tragedies and heroes and their separate treasure house of stories kept me learning and asking questions.
There is a great deal of emotion in each of your characters. How much comes from yourself and your own feelings?
As I am writing, I get drawn into the moment and flow of the events — and sometimes I have ended up with a plot curve that I had not consciously plotted. Some characters seem to carve out their destinies. This is not to say that it happens all the time! It is a blessing when it does. I have a general sense where the plot needs to move, but I cannot — and do not — put down strict roadmaps for the characters. Madgy Finn and Padraig Aherne, for example, return to the narrative long after I had thought I had finished with them. That segment just came to me in the dead of night. By the time I was done writing, I was startled to find it was late morning the next day.
Love is shown in so many different forms inNo Country. Do you identify with any of it?
If I did not identify with the many forms of love — or at least recognise the variety and complexity — then there is no point in trying to write fiction. The great Satyajit Ray famously said, “If films are not about people, they are about nothing.” The same is true about literary fiction. It is about life, which is impossible to write about if one does not write about love in its many complexities and forms.
You write about great cruelty in your book, depravity and huge grief… did you choose those particular times in history specifically? The Irish famine, the fire in the NY factory, Jallianwala Bagh...
I have tried to write about credible characters that lived through times and conditions which we recognise from history. Some of the characters actually existed — and what I have introduced in the flow of the historical events are characters that might have existed. The great and cold cruelties that we know lie behind the Irish Famine or the massacre at Jallianwallah is interwoven with stories of street violence or personal acts which could have taken place. Indeed countless such incidents did. All writers of historical literary fiction place their characters in significant juncture of events. Otherwise, we would have boring annals of peaceful lives where nothing happens. But my characters live through tumultuous times. That is what they experience and survive or not.
What comes next? Do you have a new book planned?
I have been immersed in the research for my next novel, which spans 1890 to 1920. The characters are from Massachusetts, India, and Somalia. The theme is the use of religion in the context of militant authority. Some would call this terrorism and others a war of the righteous.
The backdrop is the receding of colonial forces, and how the First World War — and the resultant industrialisation of war — changed the natures of the struggle for identity and independence. As in No Country , there is a mix of fictional and historical characters. At the centre is the riveting figure of a Somali national hero, who is also acknowledged to be the greatest poet in a culture.
