TABISH KHAIR: I was born in 1966 in Gaya (Bihar) India. I must be the only internationally-published Indian writer who writes in English, who not just grew up in a small Indian town but was even educated there. I went to the Nazareth Academy, a Christian missionary school, and later to the Gaya College under the Magadh University for higher education. At Nazareth Academy I remember being a well-behaved, and somewhat, an absent-minded student; I was possibly average or below average in everything except literature and sociology. Those were, and remain, my twin passions. As writers most of us start off by writing poems, I guess. There is something about rhyme and rhythm that attracts the human mind. I started off as a poet too. A somewhat bad one, but a poet nevertheless! However, my redeeming feature was that I was a precocious reader and read widely. Initially like all the other children I started off with the staples; Enid Blyton’s vast collection, the Hardy Boys’ series and also Three Investigators by Alfred Hitchcock. Then there were the fare of fairytales and comics—anything and everything that had the printed word and was present in the library. It is not surprising how a person’s reading taste changes or emerges. In my school days, my favourite authors were Jane Austen. Austen remained a great favourite for a long time, along with Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, and I distinctly remember that I disliked Emily Brontë wholeheartedly. Now I find Austen a bit tiring, still love Dickens and Hardy, and worship Emily Brontë. I also discovered Nikolai Gogol in high school and he has stayed on as a favourite. As has Mark Twain. I read most of Tolstoy’s fiction in high school, but am unlikely to want to read it again. Later, as I widened my reading net, I discovered lots of other favourites—Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chughtai, Roberto Bolano and Italo Svevo etc. Though I wrote some poems in Hindi, English was my strong point—a language that I was always sure of. I come from an Urduspeaking family and went to school that did not teach Urdu. And the Hindi that was taught was ‘purified’ in a big way. It could not possibly have any smattering of Urdu words in it. I had to suffer every time I used an ‘impure’ Urdu word by mistake. That led to the low grades I guess. To me there was little distinction between pure Urdu and pure Hindi, because in general, everyday life people around me spoke both a mix of both. English was distinct from the Indian languages because one could never mistake it for anything else. So learning English was simpler. At school a lot of teachers encouraged me to read. My parents were not literary but they knew the advantages of reading, and books. As a result I was greatly encouraged by my parent to read. Not only me, of my the siblings. I call my family an ‘occasionally reading family’, at least for a small town in Bihar. There were books in the family. One of my uncles, Kalam Haidri, wrote in Urdu. Basically I think I just liked reading: it was the one thing I did not dislike doing in school. Maths and sports were another matter altogether. Surprisingly, one of the few awards that I received in my school life was a district gold medal in discus. I realised I was fond of writing and kept plugging away at it. And I accumulated rejection slips. Perhaps, there are no other ways to it but to try, try and try again. I tried to explore what others were doing and cultivate my own voice. Slowly I started getting accepted. In 1989 or so, Rupa—a major Indian publishing house— had a national competition for poetry. I assembled a manuscript on my grandfather’s typewriter and sent it in: it was one of four (out of 700-plus) submitted entries which were accepted. Later on the then editor of Rupa told me that he had thrown my poems away at first; it was so badly typed and unprofessionally presented. But he happened to look at it again, and was impressed by the collection. At that time, I was still in my small hometown of Gaya; the other three winners were big city writers. That was one of those affirmative instances in my life when you begin to believe that perhaps what you have dreamt may work after all. Post Gaya, I studied at the local Magadh University to complete my Master’s. Afterwards it was time to start working and like most people of my generation (who did not pursue the hierarchically superior science studies and became doctors, engineers) I became a journalist. Actually, at the age of 24 or so I fully entered the profession. I had been writing for various papers for years, and working as a part-timer, district reporter for the Patna edition of The Times of India when I was still in college. I got a job as a staff reporter in the Delhi edition of The Times of India. And passed a short stint there as a staff reporter. By then I was almost 30 and had realised that I needed to study more, escape the daily drudgery of journalism which was not conducive to thinking or reading and experience the wider world. So at the ripe old age of 30, I decided to pursue higher studies—PhD—and travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark. And that has been my country from then on. As a writer I am often asked my opinion on several matters. To one question of home I quote a cliché; home is where the heart is. And in some ways, I carry my home in my mind. I guess if India is home, so is Denmark. My life is markedly different because after spending some years in the big cities (Delhi, Copenhagen) I find myself again happily settled in a small Danish town. There is a difference between big and small cities. Both offer different rewards; different frustrations. As a writer, you can only write from life, and there is life everywhere in small towns as well as big cities. But perhaps different kinds of life. I think, these days fiction from small towns is being hugely neglected; we are passing through an overtly big city, cosmopolitan strain in writing and its promotion, at least in English. When people talk of multiculturalism or globalisation they forget that these things exist in very different ways in small towns, whether in Denmark, England or India. This idea made me realise that a lot of writers do not know how complex and mobile small towns can be! Are people same everywhere? Yes and no. One can experience life as various lives. There is no pure and abstract ‘life’ without the greatly impure and concrete diversity of lives. What encourages me to write every day is the fact that some stories have been told too often and some are yet to be told. Then again I don’t know what really makes me take up the pen. I guess I want to talk to people—the 90 percent in the middle, religious or irreligious—who are crushed between ends of any extremism. I am interested in how we narrow down life and love, how we fail to communicate and understand each other; I am interested in what safety means and what danger signifies. I write what I feel driven to write and hope that someone will publish it; apart from that, I live on the margins. And I am content there. That gives me an anonymity and freedom from tags—at least to some extent. Otherwise, life is filled with nonsensical tags—I am almost always described as a ‘westernised Muslim’. There is no Muslim who is not ‘western’ in some ways today—no, not even the radical Islamists, whose very political reactions are determined by western factors. And there is no West without the influence of Islam—from the early Enlightenment downwards. So, as I said I like the anonymity. And prefer to not introduce myself to strangers. And I also have never really believed in political correctness. Political correctness is a comfy middle-class remedy for deeply-ingrained problems and prejudices: racism, sexism or xenophobia do not disappear just because you start avoiding some words. It takes much more than that. I am more interested in laughing at a world that says something and does something else. It is true that a novel is not very politically correct in a narrow sense, but that is because it does not believe in such narrowness; it believes in addressing the diseases, not the symptoms. But I do not just laugh at the world; I also laugh with it. A while ago someone asked me if I worry about the people I write for. Well I believe that as an author I don’t worry about them. But having said that I have a fairly good idea of what kind of reader will get me. My latest offering The Thing About Thugs is a kind of thriller set in Victorian London and featuring Asians and Africans, has just been released in USA and Canada—hopefully it will find its readers in India as well.