As happened in this case.
Yes, as happened in this case, but it keeps happening. I mean, there was another person who was arrested for raping, a sort of god man. There were massive protests in his favor. There's another god man called Asaram Bapu. He was convicted of rape. There had to be security alerts in three states because it was now a question of people supporting him. You see? It's not just that one community rapes and the other doesn't. It isn't that. I'm talking about the public support that comes out. And then there's sort of [a] ritualistic, almost satanic element to it. It isn't just rape and kill, but there's something so terrible about it that you wonder, what is it? What is it? And you read it. I mean she's one child, but it's happening all over now. And sometimes I wonder, is this something that requires the sacrifice of the most beautiful thing, which is a little girl? Is there something more to it than just carnal lust and brutality?
Is there? How do you see it?
I don't know. Because we are living in this world of feudalism and all kinds of strange beliefs. I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. I don't know how to think about it. None of us know. We are all unable to understand how things have come to this.
Except you are able to talk about it because this entire book is you talking about it.
True. It's me thinking about it, mourning about it, and then finding how much beauty still does exist in the saddest places. How much strength and power still exists. I have in the last 20 years spent time in what people would consider to be the darkest and most hopeless places, but they have not been dark and hopeless. There are people struggling against it, fighting against it, speaking against it. And I don't mean in a shallow sort of sloganeering way, but as a way of life. As a deep, dense understanding with poetry and music. Each of these things has such a deep history. The poets that ordinary people in the book recite, love, and whose shrines they go to, to lay flowers. You look at the power of that. People don't forget their poets, however much violence is done.
Is that what brought you back to fiction?
What brought me back to fiction was just that I had become, as I keep saying, like a sedimentary rock. I have these layers and layers of looking at things. In non-fiction, I have argued, I've fought, I've driven myself, and other people, crazy. But the complexity of it the humor, the love, the maverick-ness, the poetry all of that was accumulating too. I've been writing it for 10 years. I was not interested in writing just about one particular class. Just this whole ocean of languages, beliefs, religions, intimacies and anarchies. The fact is that we are facing majoritarianism, which is actually bordering on fascism not European fascism, our own variety of it. Yet India is a land of minorities. A land whose people are divided formally into castes, religions and ethnicities. People look at India and think it's ... archaic, but society lives in a grid. This book is about people who somehow are off grid and through that off grid-ness, you shine the light on the grid and you look at it, wonder about it.
Maybe we put our hope in the wrong places. Are we wrong to put our hope in democracy, elections?
Well, right now at this point in time, I am not one, though I have been one of those people who has all this time said how little difference there is between the various political parties. But today in India, we are facing a situation where if the BJP comes back in 2019, I don't think there's going to be anything left of what we thought of. With all its flaws, it's not that you'll be voting for a friend, but just for the enemy that you want to have. So I don't think we can afford to leave any spaces unchallenged and unfought, including the elections.
But if all of us think that by defeating Modi or by impeaching Trump things are going to be OK, we got to have some extra iodine every night.
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