Between the Lines with Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar talks to us about the motions of time, his affinity for journaling and words, and his meditative new traveller’s diary: The Yellow Book.

Q. All time falls as a stream, and collects in a pool of memories. Henri Bergson wrote how we measure time as a complete, immobile line, whereas time is both incomplete and mobile. And definitely not a straight line! What do you think about the gap between how we measure and perceive time?

Amitava Kumar: A change has come about in recent times. When we take a picture on our smartphones it tells us when it was taken and where we were at that time. When I scroll through my phone, I see my children growing up and I am once again a witness to the death of my parents. When I was younger, in my teens, all the years, all the seasons, were distinct. Now, it is all a blur, the years vanishing into other years, like a snake swallowing its tail.

Q. Would you agree that time is about perception? In both The Blue Book and The Yellow Book, how have you personally processed your own experiences of time and space and memories?

AK: In old black-and-white films, passing time would be shown by the turning over of the pages of a calendar. Our hero is sent to prison because of a case of mistaken identity; the calendar hanging on the wall loses many pages; our hero steps out of the prison gates, an older man but with a sense of mission about finding the real criminal. Unlike the film-writer, I’m less interested in dramatic changes; my main interest is in the details of daily life. To keep a record of this dailiness, I keep a journal. Actually, at any point of time, I keep many journals, a journal I open in the morning, a different one at night, and several others in which I can make entries through the day.

Q. As you record your days, in both the books, there is a certain arbitrariness… With the turn of a page, a completely new story and/or illustration awaits. I really enjoyed this element of the books, because so often life itself is of that nature. While journaling, what are some writing practices that you follow? Would you say that there is a certain contiguity between your fiction and non-fiction/journaling?

AK: I am writing these words in a train taking me to New York City. When I was noting down my answer to your previous question, I was thinking of Dev Anand in an old film. Then, glancing out of the train window, looking at the river, I suddenly thought of my publisher, Sonny Mehta, who died around this time of the year a few years ago. A moment later, I got a message from my sister who has just performed the chhatth puja in Patna. I’m telling you all this because I want to stress that yes, of course, our experiences are fragmentary and arbitrary in their order of mixing. We are constantly editing the narrative of our lives in our heads. And if we are journaling, we are doing the same on the page. This sense of producing a legible narrative is common to my efforts in both fiction and nonfiction.

Q. Both your books have titles with colour associations. Tell us about the blues and yellows of the titles.

AK: There is this whole tradition of writers, artists, musicians, even philosophers, producing work entitled Blue Book. In my case, the term had an association with my childhood in Patna because my school handed out a “blue book” to us with the report on how we had done in our exams. A record of the year. So, I went with that title for my first book. The yellow in the title of the new book came to me by chance. I was a guest lecturer in a class at the college I teach. My colleague was teaching a class on creativity and he had provided each student with two journals bound together with a thick rubber band. One journal was blue, it was for recording one’s own thoughts; the other was yellow, and it was for noting down words written by others. I decided at one that my second book would be called The Yellow Book.

Q. Various writers have maintained journals, wherein they have revealed their inscapes and the stories they live behind the stories they create. Who are some of your favourite journal-writers, and how has their work affected yours?

AK: I love the journals of John Cheever, so much more intimate and piercing than the celebrated fiction he wrote. I’m a Fellow this year at the New York Public Library and able to read the diaries of Virginia Woolf; last year, in the manuscripts division of the British Library, I had read Woolf’s travel diaries. Such a marvelous mind, such flowing prose! At the beginning of each year, the London Review of Books publishes the annual diary of the playwright Alan Bennett. I enjoy them a lot. The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray is another source of delight.

Q. If you had to take a masterclass on journal writing, what advice would you share on ‘how to maintain a journal’?

AK: I remember as a kid wanting to keep a diary. My father was a government servant and would receive bound diaries at the beginning of each year. I would stake a claim to one and make ponderous entries for a few days; sometimes I would copy down in its pages whole paragraphs from something I was reading. I don’t know whether I ever recorded the weather or the landscape outside the window. (It is particularly chilly today. Outside my train window, I can see how the fall colours of the trees are beginning to fade. Because of the cold, there are no boats on the river.) My basic advice would be: be sensitive to the moment. Use all your senses to record what you see and feel. Don’t try to be too heavy. Time is passing.

Q. Recently, you visited your native village in India. Tell us about your experiences and/or takeaways from the trip. You have also archived the journey and its effects on your social media handles as well as The Yellow Book. How do you think the passage of time has affected your relationship with your childhood and your childhood home?

AK: The close relationship I once had to my roots has nearly been severed. (I return now merely as a traveler. Instead of roots, only routes.) I journal about such travels in order to record where I came from, where I am going, and the rate at which I am getting there. The last time I went to my village it was in the company of my father and my son. My father wanted my son to learn about his origins. Three months later, my father died after a sudden illness. I think my father was my last link to our rural past.

Q. Our lives tend to get a bit repetitive. How do you deal with the repetitious or absurd mechanics of everyday life to insert a newness and vividness to your days?

AK: Language, language, language. That is the key. A few minutes ago, when I was praising the diaries of Cheever and Woolf, that is what I was thinking about. How alive are their sentences! How particular, and precise, their phrases! You can have new adventures every day but if are not alert to language, do they even translate as new or vivid adventures in mind?

Q. With all the alarming events around the world, from the climate crisis to violent attacks on civilians, what responsibilities do you think art and literature, and the artist and the writer bear today?

AK: To be honest, I feel quite helpless in the face of the world’s catastrophes. I haven’t found release in outrage. In fact, I haven’t even allowed myself to feel too confident about signing petitions pleading for one cause or another. Do they work, all such urgent petitions that arrive in our inbox? And yet, how to never allow oneself to be numb to the suffering of others? I have tried in my fiction as well as nonfiction to act as a witness, to observe and record with as much honesty as possible what is happening around me in the world. Having said that, let me add that I also hold on to the hope that when the need arises, I’ll put my body on the street. I’m not only a writer, I’m also a father, a husband, a human. The pen isn’t the answer to everything; instead, what we need is love, and sacrifice, and infinite caring.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast