‘The novels I write are pretty much an excuse to indulge my delight in language’: Rohit Manchanda

Rohit Manchanda is the Betty Trask Award-winning author of A Speck of Coal Dust and The Enclave. The former is set in the early 1970s and follows Vipul, a young boy growing up in a coal town in Bihar, as he navigates the path from childhood to adolescence and from innocence to acceptance. The latter takes place in Bombay of the early aughts, where Maya juggles a string of lovers and faces an internal, mid-life reckoning that destabilises her career, relationships, and ego. Both novels are peppered with unusual characters – from comic book stealing swamis to socialist typographers – that shape the protagonist's life, pushing them into new spheres of thought. Manchanda's novels are laced with a unique wit and style that can transform the most ubiquitous moment into existential arcs. In an interview with Scroll, Manchanda unpacked the philosophies and inner lives of his characters. Excerpts from the conversation.

A Speck of Coal Dust was initially released decades ago and has now been re-released alongside The Enclave. It's hard not to see them as companion books, or The Enclave as a spiritual successor to A Speck. Do you feel they are connected in some way?
In the sense of the plainly evident, there are many differences between the books. A Speck of Coal Dust is about an 11-year-old boy growing up in the hinterland, out in the coal fields of eastern India. The Enclave is a city novel, a Mumbai novel. There are common elements I bring into play, such as the inner life of the protagonists. Vipul’s inner life is what I’ve been most concerned with in A Speck of Coal Dust, and Maya’s inner life is what I’ve been most concerned with in The Enclave. Thought processes and one's view of the world are vastly different between an 11-year-old and a 40-something-year-old. Yet, a child also has a very clear idea of where they belong – Vipul dreams of the American countryside, and he’s overpowered by what he sees in comic books. Similarly, with Maya, there’s a certain confoundment in the life she’s leading and in the things happening around her.

It’s so interesting that in both Maya and Vipul, there’s a sense of an India that’s changing and full of hope. For Vipul in the early 70s, there were the nascent freedoms of liberalisation and a blossoming friendship with the USSR, and then you go into Maya in the 2000s and you have the economic boom followed by the crash. A character like Maya couldn’t exist in Vipul’s childhood. And a character like Vipul couldn’t exist in Maya’s life.
That’s a very insightful point because I strongly feel that we are all products of the times that we grew up in and the times that we live in. I suppose that’s a reflection of what I was trying to do, which is to ask: How does the world act upon us? How do we act in return?

You mentioned earlier that you think the novels are different in tone, and I think in tone, yes, but in terms of style, not so much. There’s a quote from Maya that encapsulates the way your novels are written. Maya laments the loss of “the classicism and cadence of late 19th and early 20th diction.” You seem to be very embedded in that diction as well.
That question haunted me when I was writing The Enclave, in particular. With A Speck of Coal Dust, the writing was a lot more instinctive as it was done a while ago. Some of us do have a greater love for language than others: A greater love for the idiosyncrasies of language, whichever language it might be, and a love for the texture of it. To find the shades of meaning or a precise nuance, one turns to late Victorian and Georgian English, whose authors did it beautifully. Whether it’s Thomas Hardy, PG Wodehouse, or Oscar Wilde. For me, it’s a bit of a shame that that style has been pretty much forsaken. I also believe in the idea of the narrator-protagonist. I subscribe to the idea of a novel written as if it is not through simply the eyes of the narrator but also through the eyes of the protagonist. If Maya has this love for late Victorian diction, then I thought, well, as a narrator-protagonist, I should adopt that sort of diction all the way through for Maya so that it consistently seems in her voice as much as in mine. And as I said, a lot of the novel is to do with the life of the mind, the life of Maya’s mind. I also bring in a more current style of usage because, after all, when one is living in the mid-2000s, one’s language is going to be influenced by the more recent styles that everyone around us is adopting. And part of my novel is a slight satire, I suppose, on that as well, where people sometimes go overboard in trying to pick up the language that’s the fad of the day. I’ve described how, at the Centre where Maya works, this is a weakness that people have. Sometimes, it’s perfectly understandable, so I’m not berating anyone for doing that. It’s a temptation to be as current as possible.

You also see the beginnings of a love for English with Vipul in A Speck. There was a passage where he was listening to the BBC radio, and at one point he thinks about the beauty of the sound of words, and the cadence with which the hosts speak. It also becomes a point of connection for him with his Lithuanian teacher.
Yes, that’s right. Thank you so much for circling in on these particular points because, for some of us writers, our principal preoccupation can often be with language and not so much with storytelling. There can, of course, be a life we wish to portray; there can be specific incidents we wish to recapture. But I find that the novels that I’m writing are pretty much an excuse to indulge my delight in language. It’s an act of self-indulgence, a solipsistic act that one engages in. I was writing for myself and unto myself. And if the novels find readers that get engaged, good. Otherwise, these are notes for myself, so let’s see where we go with them. One of the reasons again that I was doing this rather self-absorbed exercise is because I just wish to explore the magic of language. And I’m not saying by any means that the language I use is magical or anything like that. It’s just that there is magic in language. And I wish to probe it. I wish to go with the flow and see where it took me. And then, of course, stories, episodes, events, conversations, and thought processes suggest themselves, and they become nice pegs to hang everything on.

When I read A Speck, the one thought I kept going back to was the idea of relentless, brutal change. And I felt empathetic with Vipul because this is the first time he has had to navigate that. He has to see people disappear. He has to face the idea of death. Similarly, with Maya in The Enclave, there’s a returning idea of the Law of Diminishing Returns and pleasure lessening the more time you invest into something. I think the two – brutal change and the Law of Diminishing Returns – find Maya and Vipul in similar situations. What’s your opinion on this?
This is a point I found deeply perceptive in your review of A Speck of Coal Dust because nobody else has picked up on this particular dimension before. I hadn’t given it much thought for A Speck, but I did for Maya in The Enclave. It was fascinating to read because it made me look at A Speck through another lens that hadn’t been handed to me before. With The Enclave, I wished it to be a novel that chronicles a certain seismic change in the life of a protagonist. She falls out of favour in her job, and it all explodes where her lovers are concerned. She has to chuck her existing life away, cut her moorings, and move over to something completely different because nothing less radical than that will do for her. I was also looking into the kinds of things that would bring about such a watershed moment. Why are some of us, in a way, more susceptible to this crisis than others? I think that’s because, like Maya, some of us can be a lot more self-willed than others. She may have subterranean quirks and be very independent-minded, but she also has a sense of hubris and vanity. Whether at her workplace or in private life, she treats certain people and situations with great disdain, like her lover, Santiago, or the poetry sessions she attends. And I’ve found that this vanity leads to an unhinging of sorts; You start taking yourself too seriously and get a little too puffed up. The world is very unforgiving about that.

I was trying to portray what is known as “hamartia” in Greek tragic theatre. The idea – which I found very attractive – is to start with the protagonist at the top of their game, comfortably enjoying the fruits of whatever’s around them. It’s a state of indulgence and happiness, and they’re taking delight in being themselves and in the world that they’re in. And yet, sometimes, for such people, things fall apart, and there is this gradual deterioration of that happiness. So, I began to write about Maya’s journey in the spirit of hamartia, when things once enjoyed come unstuck. Certainly, all sorts of unforeseen things can be inflicted upon one. But very often, I found that people lead to their own downfall. People shoot themselves in the foot and court disaster.

I find this fascinating because when I was reading The Enclave, Maya is obviously, as you’re saying, courting disaster. But to me, that was self-willed in the sense that she yearned for disaster because she wanted to leave her existing life. The ghost haunting her throughout the novel is that she isn’t writing, so she needs valid excuses to implode and focus on her work.
Oh, absolutely, yes. I think now you’re delving into Maya’s subconscious and conscious being. Before the unravelling, she had this great hangnail in her mind that kept pricking at her: that she was never getting anywhere with her writing. And that’s where she senses a calling.

Yet she’s happy to suffer all these distractions, partly because she’s also savouring them for the first time. Whether it's the distraction of having a polyamorous life or indulging oneself materially, she loves it. And I think again, it’s because some of us are victims of our time. If Maya had the opportunity to indulge in these experiences in her late teens, she might not have felt so adrift in her late thirties and early forties. She reflects upon this and says, well, perhaps it’s because of the kind of India I grew up in, in the 1980s and nineties, when experiences like the ones she craves weren’t particularly possible.

But Maya senses this great vacuum inside her, eating away at the back of her mind. Once she’s had a taste of all the things and experiences she craved, she can clearly see that she has to navigate a new path in her life, one focused on writing. But for that to happen, one must give it all up and start afresh. To create fresh circumstances in which she may write, she invites a complete meltdown.