Looking Through Glass

"Mukul is a close friend now. I didn’t know him when I first read the novel, though, and I loved it. Again, it was a time where I wasn’t thinking of myself as any kind of writer. I was reading for pleasure and for curiosity. This book just drew me in. Again, it has magical realism. Again, it’s about history. But it works very differently. Rushdie is interested in an epic span of many decades. His images are very startling. Images drawn in marker pen, you know? Broad colours, big outlines, startling stuff. Mukul is, to my mind, using magical realism more subtly, and with more complex colours. And because he is a historian, he knows that period very well. In this book, a young photographer in 1980s Delhi is heading somewhere on a train. The train stops on a bridge over a river—or, as it often gets in the dry season, half-river and half-sandbank. As the man leans over to take a photograph, he falls off the bridge with his camera, falls through time, and when he lands on the river bank, he realises he has time travelled back to 1942. So, he’s in a strange position. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When he meets people, they find his dress and way of speaking a bit funny, but they don’t see him as an alien. They don’t realise he’s from the future, because he’s not carrying too many things – his suitcase has remained in the 1980s. He realises that he can’t escape this time period, and he has to live there. People befriend him, thinking him to be homeless. They think he has memory loss and give him shelter. Except he doesn’t have memory loss. It’s just that he’s from the future and he can see the disasters and trauma these people are heading towards. We meet a Muslim family in Lucknow. They are making decisions. Pakistan, at that time, is a kind of political gambit, even a joke. It’s not real, you know? It’s something the Muslim League is talking about to get more power and leverage. But suddenly it becomes more and more of a possibility. This family in north India has to make a decision about what they are going to do. There’s a grandmother who runs a great newspaper for women. There are people with love affairs and secrets. And all this is going on at a time of great Hindu-Muslim conflict. Gandhi makes the decision with Nehru and Patel of the Congress to declare ‘ Quit India ’ in August, 1942. On one hand, it was a brave, quixotic decision. But what it does is completely bury the Muslim moderates within the Congress who were fighting to say that India should stay united, and that Muslims had a place alongside Hindus and all other religions. That they didn’t need a separate country. They are cut off by this Quit India movement, and kind of disappear in the minds of the secular nationalists. In the book, magical realism continues throughout, a man is standing, a truck passes, and suddenly he’s just plastered as a two-dimensional image on the truck and he is gone. The Muslim disappears. It’s brilliantly done, it’s very funny, and it helps achieve what one is always trying to do as a historical novelist: to put yourself in the skin of characters who don’t know what’s coming. Sometimes their decisions lead to certain outcomes, other times their decisions are completely irrelevant because greater forces swat aside their agendas. Kesavan shows that beautifully. I was startled by the wisdom and sagacity of this book. It’s a real favourite."