And the story begins!

And the story begins!

“The midnight had come upon the crowded city. The Palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the mad house: the chamber of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child; the midnight was upon them all”, Charles Dickens.

Memory is related to loss

“I used Charles Dickens’, as the first paragraph of my book, because his Oliver Twist was my first big, fully fledged novel. I think I was 12 at that time and I didn’t understand it. I re-read it some years back and since then, I have read it many a times. More than the scholar, the city, it is an incredible story. It has stayed with me for a long time, says Raj Kamal Jha, an eminent Author of ‘She Will Build Him a City’. Jha along with Vu Tran, fiction writer and Professor at University of Chicago came together to discuss the subject of ‘Importance of stories and fiction’.

“When I was reading your book I was struck by one line where you say that memory is essentially about losing. It’s about loss more than anything”, Raj Kamal Jha

Vu Tran said that he is a fan of fiction. It’s amazing that people can make stuff up out of nothing. It’s fantastic. People live because they can make things up. It could be speculated that hope is also a fiction. And hence people need fiction.

I aim for the sky

“When I read Oliver Twist at 46, I could see the young boy stepping beyond the loss of his mother. I saw him finding people around him who care for him and I could see that as a father of a six year old son,” Raj Kamal Jha.

“You mention that there are those darker, political layers as well. Those lines that you pull are rather dark. It’s a sense of foreboding, foreboding light of Delhi. There is darkness in your novel and that at times is, disturbing”, commented Vu Tran.

“I say I am fan of fiction but at the same time I work in a daily newspaper. One of the things you learn at a daily is to look beyond the lines. Look where television cameras cannot go. Talk to people who cannot speak for themselves, which is essentially looking in the dark. When something is neat, clean and fully lit up, it’s not so much fun. It’s so much more fun to walk about in the dark, to stumble across things. With a torch that you are not sure whether it will work,” responded Raj Kamal Jha calmly.

To story or not to story, is a stupid question

The hopes of Indians are really high. If you see the numbers, it’s staggering. 600 million people with high aspirations. “To me as a fiction writer, what struck me was what if the hopes are not met. We talk about a flat world. It’s a level playing field, if you study diligently, work hard you can get things done. But what if that flat world shifts a little bit. What happens when you fall into dark places? So, this book of mine was written thinking about that,” explains Jha.

“That’s the kind of crisis that the Americans have been living with. That’s why we Americans are not the happiest bunch, because we are filled with hope and ambitions. You can do whatever you want as long as you work hard, that’s just not true,” said Vu Tran. But Delhi, for Vu Tran, has more of a touch with the reality of the world, heading at the same time on its way to become another New York or Los Angles.

There’s a bit of US in every city. It has its wonderful aspects. It’s remarkable if you could build a city for yourself. But again the point to ponder is what if you cannot. As a journalist one wrestles with it intellectually. As a journalist one has to think about the politics and economics of the idea. Bur for the fiction writer, it laments them. For them, it’s about bringing those different people together.