Arzee the Dwarf is a short novel about a short man with tall plans. It is the first novel by Chandrahas Choudhury, a book critic for The Mint and writer of The Middle Stage, an online literary blog. It follows the eponymous dwarf Arzee over a period of fourteen days as he traverses the length and breadth of Mumbai and interacts with a broad representation of its residents.
Much of the book forms the colourful setting for Arzee's heated ruminations on life and its imperfections, on identity and the conflict between nature and context. The shrillness of Arzee's constant inner monologue is only contrasted, or perhaps intensified, by his puny stature and his uniquely melodramatic view of life (which may also have much to do with his long-time job as a projectionist at an old cinema house named Noor).
Unlike the typical melodrama, however, the nuances of thought and description in the book, and the intricate juxtaposition of comedy and pathos, lift the narrative beyond mere emotional manipulation and into the realm of Shakespearean drama. As does the motley cast of characters, each inhabiting his or her own richly imagined individuality. Choudhury, who was in Bangalore to launch the book a week ago, spoke with me at length on the process of writing Arzee. Edited excerpts from the conversation:
VV: Why did Arzee have to be a dwarf?
CC: It's what gives the character a specific context. The voice of the book, a dwarf's voice, has a higher pitch. It comes with an internal melodrama. You always imagine yourself, and make up stories about yourself, from a particular point of view – being who you are – and that lends your world-view a certain flavour. Arzee's height, in a manner of speaking, heightens his awareness of and response to the various circumstances he's thrown into. It's also more interesting from a characterization perspective that Arzee is a dwarf. He knows he's a good looking guy, but he also knows that he's a dwarf. If he were merely short, if he were five and a half feet tall, say, he'd be like Aamir Khan [laughs]. But him being a dwarf, when I first thought up the character, immediately lent him a unique voice – a voice that has now been substantially worked on – of someone who complains a lot, exaggerates his suffering, but is also someone with expansive and interesting thoughts on the world.”
Yes, I noticed that this idea – the role of the imagination in postponing one's awareness of the present – seems to be a regular theme in the novel, first spoken of by Arzee's friend, the philosophical taxi driver Dashrath Tiwari. “[Man] is convicted by reality,” muses Tiwari, “and pardoned by the imagination.”
That scene with Tiwari worried me a little initially, as I felt I might be getting a little too theoretical there. I realized later that it served to lighten the narrative and state an essential premise of the book, which is that Arzee is a dreamer who lives in his imagination. Over the course of the book he begins to find reality so difficult that he tries to deal with it by affecting a certain cynicism and worldliness. Of course, he eventually finds his way back to his old dreamy nature, even if this later dreaming is somewhat darker for having passed through an interval of peril.
It's almost as if he compensates for his smallness by dreaming big. Can we draw the corollary then that the more perfect you are, the less imaginative you become?
[Laughs] Yes, well, the most perfect person is probably the most boring person in the world. There's no fun in that, heh.
Does writing a short novel have any specific demands?
Yes, some. You can see that it is heavily plotted, so it's harder to maintain the momentum. I've tried to infuse the book with a lot of energy. All of its events transpire over a period of 14 days – in the first day alone, so many things happen that it takes up 5 chapters. You run the risk of losing your reader or ending up with a very contrived narrative if you make it too long. You need to let go of the reins at the point where the reader can make up the rest of the book, where the reader knows your central character well enough to imagine what might happen to him next. So I always knew that it would be short. While you write, you also tend to cut anything that might seem unnecessary, anything that makes the momentum flag. I began with a specific time structure, in which the story begins at a fairly hectic pace, slows down considerably – so much so that at one point it moves backwards into a flashback – and then picks up and accelerates once more towards the end. This initial structure had a nice shape in my mind, and I thought that, so long as I stick to this structure as far as possible, I'd be able to keep the reader engaged.
Does the sense of melodrama in the narrative come from the fact that Arzee's understanding of the world may be tempered by his job as a projectionist? Does cinema influence the narration?
That's never explicitly mentioned in the book. In fact, I tried to underplay the importance of cinema in Arzee's life to some extent, especially once he was away from the Noor and out in the world. It's essential that Indian novels not be parasitic on Indian cinema. There are lots of novels that reference Bollywood in a very expansive way. I wanted to refer to a general cinema, not a particular cinema. You can see that the world of the novel is not a Hindi world. I tried to remove it from that and keep it within a classical English structure.
Yes, I did notice that the language of the book is never an exact translation of the language that the characters might have originally spoken in – the jokes, puns and colloquialisms, for instance, are all very much in regular English – which is a refreshing departure from the often heavy-handed tendency among Indian writers to try and exactly replicate the flavour of a local language in an awkward English.
Sometimes people take an excessively laboured view of what is translation and what is original – you can actually translate something perfectly and yet that might not be right for the story, and what is the good of that? I've worked from a certain overall structural principle: not with the intention of precisely translating the dialogues but to lend credibility to whatever's being said. In some cases, I've even left in a few Hindi words for lack of a good enough counterpart in the English. For instance, where Arzee talks of his 'tanta life'. 'Tanta' is a very Bombay expression, about all the troubles one has to face in life, that loses its colour when translated. I've also invented a few English words, like when speaking of Arzee's 'bunty legs'. The word feels right within its context – the reader can figure out what it means from the general sound of it. One needs to take chances with language. Novels should also earn their own concepts. Before the novel, Babur is just a Mughal emperor. But then it emerges that Babur, in the book, is a projector, and that Arzee automatically associates anything bright with the Babur. At some point the word is even used as a verb. So the word, over the course of the book, starts out as one thing and eventually becomes a metaphor for something else – it has an internal life within the book. These are the little details and discoveries that make the process of composition so exciting and rewarding.
Could you comment on the book's narrative voice?
The problem that I faced in the first few drafts of the book is that the narration was very close to Arzee, but it was always from a third person point of view, and without those moments where the narrator steps back and the reader hears Arzee thinking, the balance is not there in the book. This made the narrative very unsatisfying, because there were all sorts of things happening to him and you were always seeing it from the outside. So, for the longest time, I was puzzled about why it felt so flat even though there were so many things happening in the book.
Then why isn't it outright a first person narrative?
That has its own problems – then you can't go outside of a person. Here it's a mediated way in which you can readily move in and out of the minds of all your characters. I think the trick of pulling off a good third person narrative is to suggest a first person narrative within it, without losing the objectivity of your position. I'd compare it to an over-the-shoulder shot in cinema. Lensing in cinema and point-of-view in literature are very similar, in that sense.
I'd like to talk a bit about Arzee and his city. Arzee's is a character that is full of contradictions. He is naive about many things, but he is also given to much philosophizing. His height is offset by his grand vision of things. He is, by virtue of his breeding, a composite Amar-Akbar-Anthony...
Except that he doesn't care for religion.
Right. And he has this inherent shrillness, arising from his physical disadvantage. And then there's the fact of him being a projectionist. I'm very tempted to parallel Arzee with Mumbai city. I don't know if this is something that I'm imagining, or if you consciously intended it...?
Well, for the most part of the book, in the middle sections especially, Arzee's silence and loneliness are contrasted with the energy of the city. He becomes a spectator in other people's lives, visiting the homes of other characters and wandering the streets. It seems to him that everyone except him is moving forward in life in some way. In the beginning, though, he has a different relationship with Bombay, where he is walking around and feeling more integrated with the world – all of which depends on the power that the Noor gives him. Once he loses that power, it's like he falls from the top storey and starts struggling with life...
The correlation that I was trying to make, actually, is of Arzee as Mumbai. The idea is strengthened by the fact that he is a projectionist – Mumbai, in a sense, could be viewed as the country's projectionist, and, well... Am I overreaching?
That's certainly an interesting thought. I don't think I ever went that far in my conception of Arzee. I'll make a note of it, though, and use it the next time someone asks me about the larger themes within the novel. I'll make sure to have it sound like I came up with it myself, hahaha.
Haha. You know how it is. The moment you come up with a theory like that, something in your head clicks, and all other details automatically seem to neatly fit into it – in this case, all the contradictions, the religious multiplicity, the confusion, the fear and the hope, the big dreams, the cinema, everything feels like the general idea of Mumbai, Mumbai as an archetype... But so much for that. Moving on. Does your being a book critic, and your background in literature studies, give you a better insight into the process of writing a novel?
It is difficult to argue that your understanding of something can worsen by having a training in it. It can only be better. Maybe the sense in which you ask this is if my background can weigh me down, and whether I run the risk of becoming imitative of others, having been schooled in a certain tradition. I believe, however, that the knowledge of tradition is what allows for the breaking of that tradition. As long as you don't get bogged down by it or don't see it in a very rigid way, good training can only help.
Well, my question was more in terms of how it might enhance your ability to write a novel, rather than as a factor that detracts from the process.
Ah. In that regard, if you are always in touch with the best books that have been written, and are constantly thinking about how someone has already solved this or that problem – how he opens a paragraph or how he uses a certain stylistic element – well, you learn lots of things subliminally, so you know what mistakes to avoid sometimes. And, as you may know, lots of writers make it a practice of writing essays. It's always hard for a writer not to comment on someone else's work. It's unusual in India that writers here don't seem to review books very much. There are exceptions, of course, such as Amitava Kumar and Amit Chaudhuri. But more young novelists should write about books. A better literary culture can only emerge if people who are schooled in the tradition begin to talk about it. But, yes, I've found that writing about books certainly helps. Besides, I can't forget the fact that it is my work as a critic that has held me up financially all these years while struggling to write fiction.
There's a common complaint about first novels that the writing in them can get too stylized and self-indulgent. Yours, however, shows less reliance on artifice and a more classical approach to writing, without ever turning clinical or losing sponteneity. I imagine it was a difficult balance to achieve.
I'm of the opinion that, as far as possible, it is not the author but the novel that should have a discernible style. The few risks that I did take with the plot only worked because of the high pitch of the narrator. The reader is attuned to it right from the start, the moment she is introduced to Arzee's way of speaking. A lower pitch, in this case, would have felt wrong. Finally, though, it's just a matter of working with your own words long enough to know what the key of a particular book should be, if that pitch is right for the book. The same style of narration won't work for another book. In the case of Arzee, the balance that was more difficult to achieve was the double tone of laughter and tragedy. The book has a primarily comedic structure, but this is heightened by the various tragic elements within it. Novelistic narration can be very complex. The key is in getting the narrative arc and the internal logic to work. That's also the fun of it.
As a critic, you are probably well acquainted with the pitfalls, some of the cliche problem areas, of a first novel. Did you consciously go about avoiding any of them?
There are two or three such cliches. One is that first novels are often autobiographical, often in a very obvious way, and written in first person. Another is that they tend to get alarmingly long – five or six hundred page blockbusters with nothing left out of them and every possible angle explored. Thirdly, they can sometimes be very over-written, as the writer is yet to find a mature style. I tried as best as I could to avoid some of these problems. The key is to limit yourself to what's integral to the story, and to cut mercilessly. Your editors, and the re-reading of your various drafts, of course, make all the difference to the quality of what you end up with. Another thing that I notice, always, is that in many novels the side characters are neglected. It is a minor art of the novel to flesh out the secondary characters, so that they balance out and act as foils for your main character. When you hint at their lives alongside that of the central protagonist, you also enrich the overall narrative.
There's a point in the book where Arzee moonlights by dressing up as a fizzy drink, as part of a promotional campaign. This, of course, is the kind of thing that dwarves are traditionally associated with, in their public perception – as entertainers and performers, in circuses, films and product promotion, dressing up in ridiculous costumes. They are hardly ever seen to be serious people worthy of serious jobs.
The object of ridicule is exactly what Arzee doesn't want to be or want to be seen as. It's his worst nightmare come true. It's also a way of showing that commercial values and promotion have become pervasive and all-powerful in our society.
In the same portion, Arzee runs into another dwarf in an elevator, a dirty, downbeat, washed up character who seems in every way Arzee's opposite.
Ah yes. The scene that you mention was needed to set the alarm bells ringing in Arzee's mind – and by extension, in the reader's mind – signalling that Arzee could also end up the same way if he doesn't watch out. Speaking of which, the other day I was rather pleasantly surprised – some readers are extremely perceptive, you know – at a reading at Pune a week ago, this man who hadn't yet read my book and had landed up on someone's recommendation, came upto me and asked me something during the signing at the end. He said, “You've read from all these sections, and I know who all the central characters are and what they do, but does Arzee, at any point, see anyone else in the novel who's the same height as him?” Very smart man. He understood the necessity for counterpoint, for context, in the narrative.
There is much symbolism in the book. Arzee himself seems like he has been so weighted down by the problems of the world that he has almost been physically compressed into his dwarfdom. And there's the bit where Arzee is walking past a church at night, sees a statue of Christ upon the cross, and fills with an audacious empathy – that he too is suffering for an uncaring humanity's sins.
I felt that could be both real and comic, in a sort of double way. While the character does suffer in a very real way, the injudicious way that he regards his suffering gives the reader something to laugh at. It's a natural impulse – to immediately equate your own suffering with that of someone else's, however absurd that comparison might be. And that absurdity, in the eyes of a third person, makes for good comedy.
The story of Arzee has several universal themes and off-beat characterization. It seems to lend itself quite well to theatrical or cinematic adaptation.
There has been some small interest in film rights, since the book's launch. Ideally, however, I would wait three or four months before I allow for adaptation. It has, after all, only been ten days since the book's launch. Indians, being immersed in a filmic culture, tend to automatically assume that your main interest in writing a novel is to be able to sell the film rights. At this stage, I would like to discourage talk about film rights, purely because I'd like people to view Arzee as a book first and let the book find its own place in the world. After that, of course, an adaptation would be great. It'd be a different work altogether, of course, as it would have to rework several of the literary devices used in the book. It all depends on who might make it, though. It could end up as the worst kind of hammy tearjerker.
Maybe you should approach Danny Boyle, ask him what he thinks.
Heh heh. That's certainly an idea. Let me write to my agent.
(An abridged version of this interview appears in the Sunday Herald, issue dated 12 July 2009.)
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