Indian love call

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is treated more like a Bollywood celebrity than a writer in India. Following the huge success of his first novel, The Last Song of Dusk, the 27-year-old author has been escaping into the Himalayan foothills each week to work on his second novel, so great are the demands on his time and so intrusive the presence of photographers (they have been camping outside his home in Bombay). It all began when Shangvi's debut novel, a love story set in 1920s India, was praised in Britain last year and won the Betty Trask Award. By the time it was published in India, controversy was raging about its explicit treatment of sex. Shanghvi's grandmother lamented that no one from a decent family would want to marry the author of a sexually provocative book, Shanghvi recalls. The novel's Berlin launch was attended by German actress Katja Reimann, who announced to everyone how much she loved the book and gave an impromptu reading. Translations into Portuguese and French followed. Last month, Italy bestowed upon the book the prestigious literary prize, the Grinzane Cavour, for best debut novel of the year. 'I am over the moon,' Shanghvi says. 'What makes it so special is that the Grinzane Cavour Foundation has [in previous years] honoured the works of three of my favourite writers, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, and Michael Cunningham.' Shanghvi says he hopes to escape the fuss and explore the work of other writers during a trip to Hong Kong. 'The city's bravura, chaos and enterprise, I'm told, has much in common with Bombay.While I'm there, I'm keen to share ideas coming out of an excitingly post-modern India, contemporary Californian writing, and most importantly, hear more about writing out of Hong Kong.' Lush, musical, almost technicolour, The Last Song of Dusk, has divided literary critics from New York to Delhi. Some are smitten by its exuberance, others find it over the top, but all agree it is like nothing that has come out of India before. Hip, clever and extravagant, it is a novel that dances between comedy and heartbreak, between satire and magic realism, as it follows the fortunes of Anuradha, her husband Vardhmaan, and Anuradha's orphaned cousin Nandini. Shanghvi says negative reactions are as important as praise. 'If everybody loved it, I would fall asleep. If you didn't feel strongly, then it obviously didn't provoke you enough.' He also counters suggestions that the book is 'over the top' or the charge that he employed magic realism, saying the writing was inspired by India itself. 'India has an inherent genius for drama, which I don't see outside. I've become increasingly conscious of that, because I live for six months of the year in California. When I come to India, I find the colours much more intense, the sadness more fierce, the beauty more subtle. 'But also there's a certain philosophic resignation to the shape and conditions of life you have to have in a country like India, if you want to live. In the west, there's an intellectual response. I mean, I get what you have to do in the west, because I go in that very logical, very rational mode when I'm in California. None of that, quite honestly, works when you are in India. 'To live happily in India, you have to bypass logic to some extent, and maybe that's also where magic lies - ahead of the rational and the explicable. You've got to resign, you've got to surrender, and recognise there is a much larger force all around you, and if you don't surrender to it, you're always going to be in a state of unhappy conflict with the extraordinary forces around you. 'I was trying to preserve the Indian tradition of oral storytelling in the very western space of the novel. Let's face it - the novel is a western creation, and storytelling has always existed in the oral shape and the oral tradition in India and all across the world. I wanted to preserve the kind of intimacy, the kind of drama, the kind of oneness you experience when you are talking to somebody and telling them a story.' The novel's genesis dates back to Shanghvi's impoverished student days in London, when he would tell his friends stories and they in return would buy him drinks. 'I realised that my calling could be storytelling,' he says. Up to that point, he had been running a catering business (to help fund his studies) and cooking for the family. After completing his masters in journalism in the United States, he began contributing to the San Francisco Chronicle and Indian newspapers, but his mother, fearful of a writing career, insisted he open a pizza parlour because 'everyone is ordering them these days'. He is 'unspeakably relieved' that he will not be baking pizzas for the rest of his life. 'I wanted, inside the framework of a novel, to be able to question some ideas on how we form our sexual consciousness, where or what are the parallels between ethnicism today (it used to be called racism and colonisation) and certain ideas of karma, the philosophy of what goes around comes around.' His treatment of sex has caused the most controversy, especially because it is expressed in the character of Nandini, a gifted painter who ignores Sherman, the man who loves her, to use her sexuality to further her career. 'The only thing more threatening to the male gaze than, say, homosexuality or bisexuality is female sexuality, which is why women have to wear purdah in certain parts of the country,' the writer says. 'So threatening to the male is that kind of sexual force - which in India is known as the Kali force, that female energy - that they have to combat it by suppressing it, and I think that when you have a character like Nadine, who was so in control of her sexual self and so happy to use it in any way, that it was very threatening to the Indian critical establishment.' The gay sex between Edward and the dashing Raghubir has also been scrutinised in India. 'It wasn't so much the sexual act as the sexual identity I was interested in exploring, and how you can use that identity on some levels to express yourself and manipulate others as Nandini does.' But the central issue of the The Last Song of Dusk is love. 'It's so huge that it is no longer there in its hugeness. It can't be experienced for its hugeness. Anuradha and Vardhmaan have so much love between them that it kind of separates them. Or that Nandini loves Sherman so quietly that she herself can't hear the sounds of that love until he has gone away. Or the fact that Edward is waiting for love that never comes, but at the end you get a sense that it wasn't that he wanted love as much as he wanted to give love. 'So it is about the ironies of love, and the manifestation of those ironies. I think we have a predisposition to talk about love in the language we are used to, and it is only later we recognise that love has its own language. 'And I think it is being open to that language, its grammar and its punctuation, and accepting that for what it is. It is too huge to be condensed into the shapes that we want it to be.'