After her life turns several hairpin bends, Devi―the protagonist of diplomat-turned-writer Vikas Swarup’s latest book, The Girl With The Seven Lives―lands up in a beauty salon in Mumbai. The tician is described in much detail. “I found myself gaining focus and confidence as I washed and dried her feet, cut and shaped her nails, used a pumice stone to exfoliate the rough patches on the soles of her feet, and massaged her calves with a rose-scented lotion, losing myself in the rhythm of the strokes and the soothing music playing in the background,” says Devi.
There is perhaps some irony in the former spokesperson of the external affairs ministry and former High Commissioner of India to Canada writing about how to “tweeze, wax, thread, tint and apply makeup with finesse and artistry”. Swarup laughs when I point it out to him during a Zoom chat. “I have never set foot inside a beauty salon, so I had to do a lot of research,” he says. “I read many articles and watched YouTube videos to understand how exactly these manicures and pedicures are done…”
And therein lies Swarup’s wizardry as a storyteller―making fiction fun. Even as he deals with heavyweight topics, his writing bears just a touch of the outlandish so that you know you are in a made-up world. Living inside Swarup’s imagination is a little like playing a high-octane video game. There is the slightly off-kilter feeling of not knowing where you are headed or how many detours you will be made to take. All you can be sure of? One heck of a ride.
From serving as a muse to a millionaire banker in Delhi to living in an observation home for girls to volunteering at a dera run by a fake godman, to working as a nurse in Pune to becoming a beautician in Mumbai, Devi’s seven lives move along at a rollicking pace and are tied together by a gunman who holds her captive and forces her to recount her past. Bizarre? Maybe. But boring? Not even close.
“What I love most about fiction is that it allows you to go wherever you want to go,” says Swarup. “So, if tomorrow I want to write a novel set in Ecuador without ever having set foot in Ecuador, I could do that, with the help of Google Maps, and by learning about Ecuadorian history, politics, culture and society.”
Currently, however, he is not in Ecuador. He is very much at home enjoying retired life with his artist-wife Aparna and preparing to enter the publicity circuit for his fourth novel, which comes after a break of 10 years. “When you are in a regular job, you treasure your weekends. Now every day is like that,” he says with a smile. “Sometimes you don’t even know if today is a Saturday or a Monday.” He is also experiencing the empty nest syndrome, with both his sons having left home and being busy with their careers. He says his younger son Varun, who studied music at the McGill University in Montreal, has inherited his and his wife’s creative gene, while his older son Aditya, who invests in startups, has a more logical bend of mind.
Behind him on the computer screen, I can see a huge book shelf that dominates the room. He says his love for books developed because he had nothing else to do in his childhood. He grew up in Allahabad in the late 1960s, when there was no internet, cable television or Play Station. Books were easily available as his grandfather had a 10,000-book library. Swarup initially binged on thrillers and mystery novels by Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean and Irving Wallace, but soon progressed to classics by Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, among others.
Currently, he is reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer, on artificial intelligence. Which is fitting since OpenAI has used all three of his previous books to train its models. Perhaps what is most appealing about his books―from Q&A, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, to The Girl With The Seven Lives―is the light touch with which he handles heavy topics like corruption and bribery. There is a jauntiness to his writing, and an ease with which the story flows, as though he birthed it whole, instead of fitting it together piecemeal. This, of course, does not mean he is not trying to make a point. There are pithy shots of wisdom. In Six Suspects, for example, when a rich girl falls in love with a poor boy, the boy quips, “I don’t know whether to thank God or Bollywood for this remarkable turnaround.” Or take this one from Q&A: “The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.” Then there is the tagline of The Accidental Apprentice. “In life, you never get what you deserve: you get what you negotiate.” The best thing about Swarup? He can see the satire in life’s greatest solemnities.
In his latest book, it feels like one is flipping through a newspaper, as Swarup takes a dig at every evil in Indian society, from honey-trapping and sexual abuse to poverty and educational fraud. He has set his stories in India precisely because of this. “I have always wanted to write something closely connected with my country,” he says. “That’s why all four of my novels are rooted deeply in the Indian milieu.”
It is the country’s sheer diversity that attracts him, the fact that there are “a billion Indians in India, each of them having a billion stories, and you can choose any story that you want”.
That is why he never runs out of ideas. And that is why each of his previous novels has been adapted into movies or OTT series. And if this one were to be made into a movie, who would he want to play Devi? “I can’t think of anyone better than Alia Bhatt,” he says. “Not the glamorous Alia, but the deep Alia of Udta Punjab.” Going one step further, if they were to make a movie on him, who would he want to play him? “I think I’d like to play myself,” he says with a laugh. “I could dye my hair and de-age myself using AI.”
THE GIRL WITH THE SEVEN LIVES
By Vikas Swarup
Published by Simon & Schuster India
Price Rs499; pages 401