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Kamala Das

Novelists, every one of them!

After Arundhati Roy got a whopping advance from the publishers for her novel, The God of Small Things, most Indians of her age group have been attempting to write novels that will appeal to the western world. Their English is faulty but, for sheer persistence, they should be awarded some kind of prize.

I am the poetry editor for a national magazine but, these days, I seem to receive more prose than poetry. Everybody wants to make it to the top. Everybody wants to be taken to London and New York for autographing copies of their books. Everybody wants Salman Rushdie's words of praise.

The dhobi who comes on Wednesdays to iron my clothes and linen mentioned shyly that he had just completed a novel. "Can you send it to a London publisher?" he asked me, with a tremor in his voice. "I did not know you could write English," I mumbled, feeling embarrassed a moment latter. Perhaps he felt hurt.

"I was in Madras for three years," he said. "In Madras, everybody knows English…" I read his manuscript that very night. The story revolved round a king who loved his beautiful daughter so deeply that he permitted her to marry the man of her choice -- a dhobi. But, instead of living happily ever, after she fell out of love and sent her husband to jail on false charges. There was tragedy looming ahead in the following pages. The princess lived a loose life and eventually contracted AIDS. It was then that the jail bird was released. He nursed her most tenderly and helped her to die in dignity.

The story had a contemporary flavour. I liked it. But I did not know any British publisher. No publisher knew me either. I rang up two publishers one in New Delhi and another in Hyderabad to seek guidance. "If you have written the book, we shall publish it," each one said. They disliked the idea of publishing a book written by my dhobi.

"A dhobi must wash and iron clothes. Why should he write a novel?" the third Indian publisher I approached asked me unabashedly. I had to soothe the author's feelings by presenting him with a shawl. "You may find some use for it in the winter months," I said. "I do not have any prejudice against America," said the dhobi." "Amma, please find me a publisher in America."

Today, my cook, Visalakshi, an orthodox brahmin lady from Tripunithara, handed me a notebook. "It is a novel set in the vicinity of a temple," she said. "Please translate it and sent it to a London publisher. When you receive 35 million for it, you and I shall share it."

Even the autorickshaw drivers are envious of Arundhati. They wish to take time off for writing novels that will appeal to the western audiences. "I shall put in some sexy scenes," said an auto rickshaw driver who stops by now and then to drink water. My cook is shocked. She cannot endure the topic of sex.

"Visalakshi amma, you are a hypocrite," said the man. "Don't you read the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata? Don't they contain a large measure of sex?"

If Arundhati wins the Booker Prize, I shall have no peace sitting here, reading all the manuscripts thrusts upon me by the people living around me, novelists, every one of them.