'A result of all my bumbling': a chat about What's wrong with you, Karthik?
A conversation with my publisher (Picador India) about my debut novel What’s Wrong With You, Karthik?
You can pre-order the book here and here.
(You can see a condensed version of this conversation on the book’s Amazon India page)
Picador India: One of the strengths of What’s Wrong with You, Karthik? is its motley cast of characters, each of them so closely observed that one wonders if the novel is autobiographical. Is it?
Siddhartha Vaidyanathan: It seems that a part of the fun of writing a novel is to reveal secrets and settle old scores but the honest answer is the more I tried to model characters on real people the harder it was to keep them true. So I let my characters respond to different situations, and it became clear that the less they resembled real people, the more interesting they got. Karthik is a fiercely observant twelve-year-old. He is alert to changes of mood and quirks in speech. Like many nervous kids, he is constantly on the lookout for danger signs. Put him among adults with elevated expectations and classmates with boisterous energy and he is bound to be hyperaware.
Q: What would you say are the major themes of the novel?
The guilty pleasures of boyhood. The allure and dangers of hypermasculinity. Finding oneself as an adolescent. The tangled nature of friendships. The environments that foster learning. Why it is so difficult to be a good person. What schoolboys find funny.
Q: It is commonly believed that humour writing is a tall order, and What’s Wrong with You, Karthik? is uproariously funny. Does comedy come easily to you and was thus an obvious choice of literary style?
I admire people who can tell good jokes. I try and tell some myself. The challenge on the page is to spring the joke on the reader when they least expect it. The advantage on the page is you can observe characters closely, from multiple angles, for as long as you want. You can enter a fictional corporate meeting, watch a junior employee who is about to present to a group of top managers, notice a mustard seed stuck between his teeth, make him conscious of the seed, and watch him try to furtively get rid of it. The humour emerges from the accuracy with which the scene is portrayed. The way he struggles to eject the seed, first with his tongue, then with fingernails, while searching for a reflective surface, all the while fretting about his managers watching him. A good writer can bring out the comedy.
My characters inhabit a world where I could stretch the limits of the absurd. An all-boys school is a free-for-all. And a deeply conservative household throws up plenty of unintentional humour. Once in their element, the characters found ways to make me laugh.
Q: Even though the novel seems to have been written with a deep fondness for its fictional universe, there is also a kind of Dickensian critique of utilitarian school systems. Was this intentional?
Karthik is new to this elite school. He has spent six years in alternative schooling and has only now joined the academic rat race. As an outsider, he sees the contrast. He is also clueless on how to prepare for exams. It is obvious that your grades don’t reveal your intelligence or account for your innovativeness, creativity and sensitivity, but it takes time for a child to come to terms with this. Especially a child whose parents are as demanding as Karthik’s. Each of us will know someone who has been left broken by the system simply because they didn’t figure out how to cram textbooks and crack exams. I am not thinking of Dickens but of Orwell and his atmospheric essay on growing up, filled with lines such as: ‘It is not easy to convey to a grown-up person the sense of strain, of nerving oneself for some terrible, all-deciding combat, as the date of the examination crept nearer ...’
Q: We often find Karthik turning to Lord Ganesha in times of distress, although it is usually as a reflex or under instruction from his family elders. What role do you see religion playing in the novel in the context of a twelve-year-old growing up in a god-fearing middle-class family?
Children have a fascinating relationship with gods. They include them in their pretend-play, argue with them, reveal to them their fears and dilemmas, thank them profusely, apologize to them for every tiny gaffe, and consider them faithful companions through their journey. Sometimes they embrace gods from other religions, too. This behaviour is well outside the sphere of organized religion, like visiting places of worship and performing ceremonies and rituals, which is what obsesses the adults in Karthik’s family and the priests in his school. I wanted Karthik to engage with both the personal and the public version of religion.
Q: Who should read this novel?
Teenagers and young adults may relate to what they themselves are going through. Adults may be transported to a time when they grappled with the trials of childhood. Parents may get a peek into the dilemmas their children are facing. Teachers may glimpse why their students can be so difficult.
Q: Will there be a sequel where we might meet a college-going Karthik or Karthik as a young professional? What sort of man do you think Karthik grows up to be?
I haven’t thought about a sequel. Maybe Karthik will go on to start a rock band. Or become a computer programmer who spends most of his time arguing with people on Twitter about why Sachin Tendulkar is greater than Virat Kohli. Who knows!
Q: How long did it take you to write this book? Tell us a little bit about your writing process for this novel as opposed to your journalism work.
It took six years. That doesn’t include the two years when I wrote a fictional memoir – with the same characters and storyline but in an adult voice. I didn’t like how the adult was drowning out the child’s thoughts. And some jokes seemed forced. So I began afresh.
My journalism is fast-paced. I spend a few hours on a column. A feature takes a week or two. Most of my writing is about sports and a sense of urgency can help when describing a passage of play, especially when writing immediately after a game. The writing of this book was glacial in comparison. I needed time to understand my characters. I had to have a firm grasp on how they would react in different situations. I had to find a voice that worked best for Karthik. Not that I sat around and waited for inspiration. I tried to find a few hours every day for my writing. I wrote several drafts and rejected them. I wrote in the first person and in the third person. I wrote on a laptop and on paper. I added to some scenes and subtracted from others. Sometimes I felt I had found Karthik’s voice. Re-reading the same passages the next day, I saw I was off the mark. This book is a result of all my bumbling.
Q: Who are some of your favourite novelists?
RK Narayan is an inspiration. Swami and Friends was the first book I fell in love with. There is a line in the first chapter where the narrator says: ‘While the teacher was scrutinizing the sums, Swaminathan was gazing on his face, which seemed so tame at close quarters.’ For a while, I was obsessed with how my teachers looked from close and afar. The book is full of insights from a child’s vantage. I have delighted in reading it even as an adult.
I love V. S. Naipaul’s early works. Miguel Street is a rare gem. Other favorites: Mark Twain, J. M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Guy de Maupassant, Akhil Sharma, Anton Chekov, Mario Vargas Llosa, Chinua Achebe, Vivek Shanbhag.
I am drawn to short stories and short novels. They often convey more than they say.
Q: Elevator pitch for What’s Wrong with You, Karthik?
When you are twelve and eager to be noticed, with your conservative middle-class parents setting the bar high, gaining admission to an elite school is a triumph. Karthik Subramanian hopes to grow into an academic superstar … until he finds himself utterly out of place in his new environment. Forget thriving in this new school, he now has to find ways to survive. Set in a Bangalore in its final years as a ‘pensioners’ paradise’, this book speaks to anyone who, as per Flannery O’Connor, ‘has survived childhood’ and who now has ‘enough information about life to last him the rest of his days’.