Interview with Salil Desai

Having attended the book launch of Salil Desai's debut novel, The Body in the Back Seat in Pune recently, we were intrigued by his work and impressed with his background of film-making and having contirbuted to many anthologies.

We got talking to the author and here's the unabridged version. 

You have been a filmmaker for a long time now. Why did you move to writing a mystery novel? Wouldn't a film have been a more effective medium of bringing your story to the people?
Actually, I have been a writer much longer than I have been a film maker. I seriously started writing feature articles as well as fiction when I was in college. However, while my articles started getting published in various newspapers and magazines since 1987, my fiction remained unpublished till 2000. But I never gave up writing fiction, though intermittently. In that sense it has always been closest to my heart. It’s strange but my fiction writing also gained momentum after I started making films i.e. about 11 years ago. It’s like one rubbed off on another. As my short stories started getting published in various anthologies, it gave me the motivation and confidence to write a novel. So I turned to my favourite genre as a reader – detective fiction. That’s how I got around to penning ‘The Body in the Back Seat’.
Yes, a film would have been an effective medium to reach out to many more people and I still hope to make my novel into a film. But a book has a beauty of its own and a unique personal touch to it even though the scale of those who watch a film vis-a-vis the book-reading public is not comparable.  Moreover, commercial film-making is a highly money intensive business proposition where one has to depend upon so many other people. On the other hand writing a book – at least the creative part – involves only the writer’s efforts and minimal monetary resources.

How much of an influence did filmmaking have on your writing style? Were you thinking what it would look like on-screen as you wrote it?
I think film-making and penning a book are two separate crafts. You can’t write a book, if you are constantly wondering how it will look on screen. I think quite differently while I am scripting or making a film than when I am writing a short story or a novel. This difference came home to me vividly, when I made a short film Making Amends in 2005 which was adapted from my own short story that I had written earlier. Right from the title to the way the story unfolds on screen – everything had to be treated differently. That’s the main difference between the two mediums - ‘treatment’ and ‘depth’.
Also the basic tool in your hands while writing a book is ‘language’, whereas in film-making it is ‘framing’. Having said that, while penning ‘The Body in the Back Seat’ I too have followed the golden rule of writing i.e. ‘show’ don’t ‘tell’. The audio-visual element in my writing, I must say, has been enhanced since I started making films. I can say it’s been the biggest influence on my writing style – for example something as simple as using dialogue rather than descriptive prose in furthering the narrative. Basically, I think ‘The Body in the Back Seat’ can be adapted into a good film and my thoughts have also turned in that direction.


At Bookchums our focus is on reviewing books, and upcoming authors in particular. Some of our reviewers have found a consistent lack of high-quality work from such young authors (though there are exceptions). What is your take on the latest trend of 20 somethings writing about romance, college, IIT, IIM and the kind? Where do you see this taking the (English) Indian literature?
 Quite frankly, whenever I see these books in book shops, I always wonder who exactly reads them. Because I have not actually seen anyone buy them. So how do they sell and why do they continue getting published is a mystery to me. To me these books seem to have a set formula – how I had fun and got drunk at college, lost or almost lost my virginity and finally some superficial and simplistic assertions about life and love presented as profound insights.
I feel, so long as these books are free of poor language, excessive juvenile banalities and don’t pretend to be great philosophies of living they are as much a genre as any other. They can’t be wished away since they cater to a certain type of reader, though I don’t who that reader is. Having said that, like any work of fiction one can’t get away from the requisites of creating a good plot, good characters and of course the need to tell a story engagingly.



The Marathi literary scene has always been known for its outstanding work, be it prose or poetry. Where do you think things stand with Marathi authors today? Any new faces that our readers should be looking out for?
 Most of the Marathi books I have read are by old masters like P.L. Deshpande, Ratnakar Matkari, V.P. Kale even eminent scientist Jayant Naralikar’s science fiction. The rest of my fascination with Marathi has been mainly due to the powerful plays of great playwrights like Vijay Tendulkar, Madhukar Toradmal, Vasant Kanetkar, Acharya Atre, Anil Barve as also people like Srinivas Bhange.
But in recent times I have not read too many Marathi books. Therefore it would be much too pretentious of me to talk about the Marathi literary scene. But what I am surprised to see is that a lot of popular fiction available in Marathi today is in the form of translated best-sellers. So is there enough original fiction in Marathi today? I don’t know. But my guess is that since writing a book any way does not pay enough, whether in Marathi or English, all the best creative brains in Marathi must have shifted to writing serials and films or plays to a lesser extent.


Will we see Salil Desai writing in Marathi?
 Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the command, fluency and idiomatic craft to write Marathi narrative fiction, like most people of my generation who were educated in English. My spoken Marathi is good but ‘writing’ is altogether a different adventure. I was very active in theatre during my college days and wrote a number of Marathi one-act plays as also a two-act play. May be I might just dare to attempt a commercial Marathi play at some stage. 


Coming back to your book, your main characters come across as being the Prabhat Rd/Bhandarkar Rd types. Was there a particular reason for choosing that kind of characters? Why did you not source them from the more cosmopolitan population of Pune that some believe is better representative of what Pune is today?
I think, when one writes the first book, one tries to write about characters and settings that one is most familiar with. Secondly the central plot and theme of ‘The Body in Back Seat’ works well precisely with the type of family and characters I have chosen. If I had chosen to set the story amidst the more cosmopolitan population of the city, perhaps the impact would have been diluted. Thirdly, I have always wondered why Marathi characters are missing from most Indian fiction in English. I mean you have North Indian characters and South Indian characters and Bengalis by the bucketful, but somehow Maharashtrians are under represented. Here, I had a story in which the complex blend of conservativeness and modernity of a contemporary urban Marathi family could be explored beautifully and so I told it.  


You also touch upon the issue of ragging and the life scarring effects it could have in extreme circumstances. What do you think about the current policy situation in this matter? What more could be done to make a difference?
Well, personally I have always found the concept of ragging perverse. If wanting to crassly humiliate somebody junior or weaker than you isn’t sadistic, what is? I just can’t swallow the ‘boys will be boys’ or fun aspects of it. As regards the policy, well ragging has been made a serious, punishable offence in most states, but as always, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I personally don’t think college authorities are at all serious in tackling this menace. In fact they are as insensitive about the issue, as society as a whole. Otherwise, how does one explain the fact that the first reaction of most college authorities is to try and hush up a case of ragging that occurs in their institutions?
Only a zero-tolerance policy by college authorities and the police will help. Secondly, I think it should be drummed into the minds of students that there is nothing macho about ragging. Only then will it reduce over the years.


I read somewhere that PG Woodhouse and Agatha Christie are among your favorite authors. On the Indian side, which authors would you say come close to the brilliance of these authors in their genre? Why?
Yes, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie are among my favourite authors, although my favourite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I also love to read Somerset Maugham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Ruth Rendell and many more. On the Indian side, I think only P.L. Deshpande, the great Marathi humorist, was as good if not better than Wodehouse.
However, since both genres, detective fiction and humour, have not really been given an opportunity to develop as far as Indian writing in English is concerned, we have not seen the emergence of brilliant authors in this genre. Otherwise, if authors like Surendra Mohan Pathak (Hindi), Ratnakar Matkari (Marathi) and many more can write best-selling popular fiction in regional languages, then there is no reason to doubt that an Indian writer can also produce great work in English in these genres.
Now that the Indian publishing scene in English is really opening up to all kinds of writing (rather than just heavy angst and chick or lad lit), I’m sure we can produce brilliant authors in these genres too. Some wonderful pioneering work has already been done by authors like Manohar Malgaonkar, Kalpana Swaminathan, Sudhir Thapliyal and Ruskin Bond to name a few.


If not mystery/crime, what would we find Salil Desai writing about?
I write crime stories because I think they are a wonderful platform to write about the complexities of human nature interestingly. Apart from detective fiction, I would love to write a Wodehousian kind of hilarious comedy, for which I think I have a forte.
I also like writing short stories in all kinds of genres – right from dark humour to poignancy to horror to the twist in the tale type of yarns. In non fiction, I particularly like writing travelogues and light ‘tongue in cheek’ pieces, although I can write almost all kinds of articles.
 

What do we see from your desk next?
On the heels of ‘The Body in the Back Seat’, my next novel is again a murder mystery, which is due to be released later this year.  It is about a group of young friends who decide to start a detective agency because they are bored of their routine jobs. Their first case is a murder investigation for proving the innocence of their close buddy, who has been arrested as the main suspect. If the book does well, I hope to develop it into a series.
I have also completed a collection of short stories and have just begun work on another manuscript.