From an interview with Mint about my new novel, City of Incident
With City Of ... I had started with just little flashes of incidents (in Mumbai) that I remembered, little scraps of detail that I saw/read somewhere, sights that haven’t quite left me, things I have been carrying around for years and have never forgotten. And I was unable to make sense of them, vis-a-vis my own relationship with the city and its people. With this book, I was aware that I needed to tell a story, that it had to capture the essence of all these little things—for me they are memories, but in literary terms they are just images. I wanted to construct a sense of what it means to live in a city, where so many things happen—small and big tragedies.
I think of cities primarily as people’s spaces and not so much as geography or an urban plan. And when you tell the story of a city through its people, you are bound to use a kind of fragmented approach because that’s just what the city is...I think every (form) has its limitations. If you ask me if I would do this form of writing again, I would say no, not in the near future. Usually, you need certain preconditions for interconnectedness or multiple-perspective stories to work: There’s this central incident and you come to it from different ways—what happened before it, what happened after it; and all the characters involved have a role to play. In film, you would see this often; the most famous one is, of course, Rashomon (directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1950).
City Of Incident does something similar, except that there is no central event. Bits of the information of one chapter will feed into the next chapter, and you will know a little bit about the characters, but ultimately, the only thing you will know a lot about is the city itself.
Link to the full interview:
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