This Week in Fiction: Jhumpa Lahiri

Your story in the summer fiction issue, “Brotherly Love,” concerns two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who are born in Calcutta, fifteen months apart, during the Second World War. The brothers are very close yet have opposing personalities. Subhash is cautious and placid, his younger brother Udayan outspoken and adventurous. When did you start thinking about these brothers as fictional characters? Were you aware at the outset of the ways in which their differences might gradually push them apart, particularly once Udayan becomes involved with the Naxalites, a group of militant Communists?

I knew from the beginning that the story would involve two brothers. Tollygunge, the part of Calcutta where Subhash and Udayan grow up, is where my father grew up, and where I spent a lot of time during visits with my family. At some point—I may have been a teen-ager, or perhaps a bit older—I learned that two brothers, who had become involved in the Naxalite movement, had been killed in front of their parents and some other family members. It was a story my parents heard second-hand from relatives, and that I then heard third-hand from my parents. In other words, the facts and details were sketchy, but I knew that there had been two brothers, both very bright students, and that either one or both of them had hidden in a lowland when the paramilitary raided the neighborhood. I wanted to understand what had happened, and why, and that was what sparked the story. From the narrative standpoint I thought it would be interesting to have only one brother become involved politically, and I began to distinguish them as individuals. However, I should back up and explain that in the beginning the second brother was largely absent. The first attempts began with Udayan, and the narrator at that point was his female niece, a character who had never known him. But this scheme wasn’t working, so eventually I switched to the third person and introduced Subhash, as well as Gauri, the young student Udayan falls in love with. Once that triangle was in place, I was able to move forward with the plot.

The story is taken from your new novel, “The Lowland,” which will be published in September. In the excerpt, as in the novel, Subhash and Udayan explore more and more of Calcutta as they grow older. You’ve spent a lot of time there—what was it like to imagine the city in the years before you were born, and to conjure up India in the wake of Independence?

I relied a great deal on my impressions of being there. I was often idle on our extended visits to Calcutta, left to entertain myself or to observe things. Since we always stayed with family members in their homes, I was exposed to their day-to-day reality. As the focus on Tollygunge deepened I began asking my father to talk about his memories of it before he left India in 1964, and I read a few books about the history of Tollygunge, and also about the history of the Tolly Club specifically, a country club founded by the British at the end of the nineteenth century, which I, like my characters, had passed by many times in my life without ever entering, in the course of taxi rides to and from my paternal grandparents’ home. The club looms large in Tollygunge, but by now it’s utterly sealed off, impenetrable to non-members. So of course I was curious. I gathered that there was a swimming pool inside, which was an added allure, given that we tended to visit Calcutta during summer. By the time I was a child the club was open to Indians, but my father’s family wasn’t a part of that world. And so it was one of those basic symbols of class difference, something that helped me to better understand the various layers of society in Calcutta, and the contrast that exists in that city, between extreme poverty and privilege. On a personal level, it made clear the circumstances from which my father and his family had come.

While Udayan is at university, in the nineteen-sixties, he becomes a fervent supporter of the Naxalites, who are demanding an equitable society and willing to use violence as a means to achieve their revolutionary ends. When did you first learn about the movement? Were you aware of the degree of terror their actions induced in Calcutta when the movement was at its height?

I was first aware of Naxalites as a young girl. The movement was at its height in the early nineteen-seventies, and I would hear my parents and their Bengali friends talking about what was happening when they got together in one another’s homes in Rhode Island. Information was very limited back then, and everyone was speculating, and everyone seemed tense. I picked up on the energy of these conversations, finding them at once intriguing and impenetrable and unsettling. I had no sense of the political context as a child. But over time, as I grew older, I began to get a sense of it, given that a few of my extended family members had been involved in the movement when they were students in Calcutta. It was only once I began to grow curious about what had happened to those boys in my father’s neighborhood, and was inspired to write about it, that I started to learn about the Naxalite movement formally. As for how the movement affected life in the city during the late sixties and early seventies, I read a number of books on the topic, and watched some films, but found conversations with people who had lived through those times the most helpful source of information.

As a reader, it’s hard not to make comparisons with more recent history, and to think about the way acts of terror have marked life in America and elsewhere since September 11, 2001. Do you want us to make those connections? Is this something you were thinking about as you were writing the novel?

I began to conceive this novel in 1997, before the events of September 11th took place. But I spent years simply working on one scene, and running aground, and eventually setting it aside. I began working on the book in earnest in 2008, but to be honest, I was not thinking of what had happened in New York as I was trying to conjure Calcutta during the Naxalite period. While I was writing the book I felt that I needed to seal myself off, temporally speaking. On the other hand, during those years I was living in New York City, and part of my every day consciousness was informed by the aftermath, physical and emotional, of September 11th and the awareness that other attacks could take place. It wasn’t until just a few months ago, when I learned about the Boston Marathon bombings, that it struck me that those brothers could have been a version, forty years on, of Udayan and his comrades. One difference is that Udayan and his comrades wanted to create a revolution, whereas the brothers in Boston seemed to want only to cause harm.

In the aftermath of any kind of terrorist attack our first impulse is often, understandably, to condemn those responsible and seek vengeance. In “Brotherly Love,” as in the novel, we know who Udayan is before we learn what he was prepared to do. It makes the act of judgment far more complicated. Do you think you’ll have any readers who will believe he deserves his fate?

I’m certain that some readers will believe Udayan deserves his fate. As I was drafting the book, and as I began to show it to early readers, the reactions to his character were already very strong. As Udayan’s creator, I don’t condone what he does. On the other hand, I understand the frustration he feels, his sense of injustice, and his impulse to change society.

“The Lowland” is set in Calcutta and also in Rhode Island, where Subhash moves to pursue an academic career, and where Udayan’s wife, Gauri, later joins him. You’ve been living in Rome for the last year. Has that changed your perspective on those two places? What was it like to be finishing the novel in Rome?

As I said, the idea for this book has been with me for fifteen years. I wrote it entirely in the United States, in Brooklyn and on Cape Cod, though I went to Calcutta at one point to conduct interviews. When I arrived in Rome the manuscript was complete but still needed some final tweaking. Working on it here felt very cut off from my new reality, which was probably helpful, given that Italy plays no part in the book. And it was also a relief, simply seeing the pages on a new desk, in a new physical space, and to be away from my study in Brooklyn, which is filled with all the books I’d read and all the boxes full of old drafts. I imagine that being immersed in Italian, speaking and reading it all the time, accommodating another language in my brain alongside English, may have had some impact on the final editing. In a way I felt more intensely alone with the book here. But the geographical distance was clarifying, and in the end it enabled me to regard the novel with greater objectivity.