[Interview_2] C. Y. Gopinath

C. Y. Gopinath has worked as a journalist, a film director, and a community development worker.

His books include Travels with the Fish (Harper Collins, 1999) and the novel, Book of Answers.

In this email interview, C. Y. Gopinath talks about his new book, Hoyt’s War.

What is your latest book about?

I just finished writing Hoyt’s War. The story is set in USA 2020, after four years of a very Trump-like President called Barry Codbag have made America the most ridiculed and reviled nation on the planet. It’s strange that my main ‘villain’ was every bit as irrational, maverick, and a dangerous loose cannon as Donald Trump.

Campaigning now for four more years in the Oval Office, Codbag needs new and more diabolical distractions to confuse the electorate.

Along comes an ordinary retiring American, Daniel Hoyt, a man who just would rather be left alone in peace. Hoyt knows he’s in trouble when he inherits an ancient but locked book said to contain answers to all of America’s problems.

And Codbag wants it. He knows this book will help him get re-elected.

Hoyt, wanting no part of this, sells the book to a dollar store. But the shop owner quickly realizes what the book could mean, and re-invents himself as a clergyman, claiming that through this book God speaks straight to him. It’s a matter of time before he is working directly with the President.

The President and the pastor make a lethal pair. For every preposterous law Codbag wants to enact, the pastor makes up ‘divine’ evidence that it comes from God’s words in the book. And a gullible nation laps it up.

Codbag wants to turn America into a monarchy with himself as King, in the name of minimum government.

Decriminalize rape.

Legalize cheating in examinations.

Impose a tax on sex.

Create a special Grey Area for people who think too clearly.

Ban the past and future tense.

Now Daniel Hoyt hates a fight; he’s no hero. But against his wishes, he gets dragged closer and closer to a confrontation with Codbag. The government wants the key to the book, and only Hoyt can get it. Suddenly he is the White House’s crosshairs.

Hoyt’s War is the story of an ordinary American who reluctantly takes on the most powerful man on the planet, in a hard-hitting, riotous and all too plausible satire of a dystopian America.

Is it true that Donald Trump was the inspiration for the character of President Barry Codbag?

Codbag undeniably talks, thinks and feels like Trump. But the truth is that I began writing this book in 2012 and finished it in early 2015, long before Trump was even a feature on the election map. So it’s a moot point whether Trump inspired Codbag — or whether Trump could pick up a few more crazy ideas from him.

The rather audacious promotional campaign I am launching actually is based on a series of ‘news stories’ from a certain fictional newspaper called Washington Psst, in which Trump is seen waving a copy of Hoyt’s War and saying it should be banned. It feels completely appropriate to take full advantage of someone as amoral, unethical, unprincipled and self-serving as Trump.

What sets the book apart from other things you've written?

Imagine a story set in the culture and society of one country — being re-written and re-imagined in the socio-political setting of a completely different country. I would go out on a limb and say Hoyt’s War might be the first book in literary history to do that.

In 2011, HarperCollins India published my first novel, The Book of Answers, a sharp political satire along Orwellian lines, set in India. The novel got shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, though its sales in India were in the hundreds. My literary agent at that time, Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Limited, mentioned once that the Indian cultural setting made the story harder to sell in the US.

This troubled me — the story was quintessentially about the madness of the extreme right ideologies that are dragging the world towards chaos. India and America had comparable madness. In 2013 I decided to completely re-write the story as an American political thriller. Patros Patranobis, the reluctant protagonist, became Daniel Hoyt. Prime Minister Ishwar Prasad, heading a parliamentary democracy, became Barry Codbag, leading a federal union called the United States of America.

Mumbai became the Tribeca district of New York. The royal palaces of Kerala morphed into the cotton plantations of Shongaloo, Louisiana, and Kerala itself became the Everglades. Miami and the circus town of Gibsonton.

The story could not stay the same either, I soon discovered. America was heading into its own elections, and the extreme right white-supremacist Christian evangelical environment needed serious tweaks in the story itself. Most importantly, I had to master the different dialects and idioms of the parts of America that featured in my story.

Best of all, a certain Mr Donald Trump landed with a crash-boom-bang on the election scene, bringing his own blustering, aggressive brand of unreasonable madness with him — and suddenly my President Codbag began to feel like the right villain at the right time. Codbag was already Trump, no two ways about it.

Which aspects of the work you put into the book did you find most difficult?

Writing intimately about neighborhoods and cities that I had neither seen nor lived in was one of the challenges in writing Hoyt’s War.

The Book of Answers dealt with my country, India, and descriptions were textured and detailed because I had experienced them. To get the same level of familiar detail about American settings, I spent weeks and weeks in Google Street View. It is astonishing how much of the world you can now see in continuous street-level view thanks to Google’s mapping software. Once I had a sense of what a street or neighborhood looked like, my imagination added texture and other details.

I have now walked the streets of Tribeca, down to the metro stations; the sea fronting villas of Little Neck Bay, and where East River widens to become Long Island Sound; I have trolled the evening streets of Miami looking for a bar; and sweated in the humid marshes of the Everglades. Dr Basin’s clinic in New York is authentically sited near a waterfront that bustles with streetwalking sex workers in the evening.

I also had to research local government institutions, hierarchies, ranks, so that my details about police, precincts, and officialdom rang true.

What did you enjoy most?

I most enjoyed tweaking the story politically to align it better to the frightening lunacy of modern-day Trumpian politics in the USA.

India and the USA share frightening similarities in their right wing establishments, but in the USA at the moment, a particularly virulent form is in full expression.

For example, in the years since I began work on Hoyt’s War, rape has been a major issue in India — and the whole world saw how easily the Indian male patriarchy condoned and excused it. But curiously, the US extreme right does not view women’s bodies all that differently from an orthodox Hindu fundamentalist. I have heard ignorant Republicans speaking of how the woman’s body “shuts down” pregnancy after a rape; and the number of insane and nearly barbaric laws to pressure women away from choosing abortion.

In Hoyt’s War, I decided to go out on a limb and have the President decriminalize rape in the USA, partly to protect himself when his connection to a real-life rape in the Oval Office surfaces. Of course, he does this in a very Trump-like way, by referring to some spurious ‘evidence’ that rape makes women stronger in spirit, and better managers of men.

This is probably the most controversial part of the story. A reading club in New York with whom I had a Skype meeting went literally speechless when they heard this detail of the plot. You just don't satirize rape, it’s too serious, they said. Yet the reality of how men discuss women’s bodies in America and India and pass legislation to control it — is shocking, preposterous — and far worse that any satire I could conjure up. I can easily hear Trump say that there’s nothing wrong with rape, that it’s one of life’s trials that makes a woman stronger. I can see him producing some victim of rape at a town hall and saying, Isn't she fantastic? Can you even tell she was once raped?

Another pleasurable part of the writing was the stylistics. When I was young, one of my pleasures used to be in trying to imitate the writing styles of authors I loved — P G Wodehouse; Vladimir Nabokov; Gerald Durrell; Adam Hall. It’s a kind of literary muscle-flexing that actually builds skill.

In transposing Hoyt’s War to the USA, I had to change the way I used English. My voice, which had been the sometimes stiff English of a literate Indian, had to became the easy, slangy and colorful English of the American continent. Except that not all Americans speak and use English the same way. A black American from New Orleans would speak it differently from a Puerto Rican in New York.

One of the joys of writing Hoyt’s War was getting the voice right. I learned a lot, I crafted a lot, and I edited a lot. The narrative, in becoming American, also became tighter.

How did you choose a publisher for the book?

The novel has been published by Amazon’s CreateSpace. I have been doing all the things writers are supposed to do these days — send queries to agents, wait for weeks and weeks and weeks, try not to be too depressed by the inevitable ‘compassionate’ rejection letter. But the days of being at a publisher’s mercy are over. Amazon is actually an empowering option. I know I have a great and timely story, and I see no reason to wait and wait till the American elections are over. So, yes, Hoyt’s War has been available through Amazon since mid- April 2016.

Why Amazon CreateSpace? What advantages and disadvantages has this presented?

In the past, I have been wary of Amazon. I released The Book of Answers on Smashwords and on the Apple Bookstore as an e-book, since HarperCollins only had publishing rights for India. I was put off by Amazon’s requirement that anyone publishing with them had to forgo all other channels. That makes them a monopoly — and I instinctively rebel against those. But the traditional publishing route is slow, completely depressing, and based on randomness and lucky strikes. I am still looking for a publisher, but my story is linked to a fast changing political reality and I want to be out there right now. So I am on Amazon — and I’m seeing that it is a huge and viable option — and could actually play a role in helping me get noticed by a publisher.

What will your next book be about?

I have two books in progress right, one non-fiction, called Letters to a son @ McGill, and one fiction, titled Balman the Matruist.

Letters started as something I wrote to my son who started undergraduate studies in McGill University in August last year, traveling from Bangkok (where we live as expatriate Indians) to Montréal, two oceans away. With his consent, I posted a few of the letters on medium.com, and later on the International McGill Parents Facebook Page.

The response was emotional and heartfelt — and the idea for a book of such letters, called Letters to a son @ McGill grew out of that. One post, on loneliness on the campus, quickly went viral, garnering 22K views. I reposted on the McGill parents Facebook page, and began receiving replies from parents as far afield as California and India. Comments included —

Thank you for sharing your Letters to a son at McGill. They each touch me in a deep and spiritual way. Please continue to be as generous in sharing your (and your son's) experiences. (Fred Cohen)

Thank you. It brought tears to my eyes. (Andree Vezina)

Thank you! This is SO timely given all that is going on in the world, and certainly recently in Quebec and across Canada. Our daughter carries a Canadian passport but has only lived in Canada since beginning her studies at McGill- your writing is touching and relevant to all of us - thank you! (Michelle Rath)

I began working on the book in earnest when I realized that there are so many conversations waiting to happen between fathers my age and their millennial sons and daughters. These kids will live their lives in a world engulfed by crisis. Old rules will not apply. Snowballing technology change, violent politics, climate change, natural disasters and wars will define their world. What can I tell my children to prepare them for this world?

I coined the word maltruist for my next novel, Balman the Maltruist, to signify ‘great harm caused by someone trying to do great good’. The story is set among the Luo tribe of Kenya — where Obama’s father came from, incidentally — and tells of the interaction between an American missionary with dollars, and the Luos of Western Province, and the crafty, charming and amoral Indian who plays the intermediary between the two, translating each for the other, and inserting his own conservative Hindu values and hang-ups into the translation.

The story is written in two voices, the Indian’s, and in every alternate chapter, a young Luo man called King. Through these two we see a culture through two very different eyes. To understand them and their daily hardships, I lived for a month among them, in a hut in a village with no water or electricity, eventually returning to Bangkok with the disease so many Luos die of, malaria.

I will not say more, lest I spoil the story for you.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

Certainly the exercise of recrafting an existing story in a dramatically different cultural setting and voice, as I have done in Hoyt’s War, is certainly an achievement that gives me a great deal of pleasure when I think about it.

I suspect that when I finish Balman the Maltruist, I will get similar joy from having told a story in two gentlemen’s voices, one Indian and one Luo, in alternating chapters.

How many books have you written so far?

My four books so far are:

• Travels with the Fish (HarperCollins India, 1998): A freewheeling and tongue-in-cheek of my globetrotting adventures through places from Chicago to Jerusalem, Turkey to Thailand, and Kerala to Bali; 
• The Book of Answers (HarperCollins India, 2011): An Orwellian satire of a man who inherits a book of answers to India’s problem but doesn’t want to make the world a better place — and the Machiavellian prime minister who uses the closed book to plunge his country into pandemonium, anarchy and chaos, just so he may win an election; 
• Hoyt’s War (Createspace, 2016): One ordinary American’s war to get America back from a lunatic, Trump-like President who has made America the most reviled and ridiculed nation on the planet; and 
• Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand for Indians (Lonely Planet, 2012): A custom made Lonely Planet guide to Thailand for the growing numbers of Indians coming here to vacation.

Interview _ C. Y. Gopinath

C. Y. Gopinath has worked as a journalist, a film director, and a community development worker.

His books include Travels with the Fish (Harper Collins, 1999) and the novel, Book of Answers.

In this email interview, C. Y. Gopinath talks about his writing.

When did you start writing?

44 years ago. I was twelve, living in Delhi, and I wrote a James Bond spoof for a national youth magazine called JS. After college, I went to work for JS as a traveling reporter, won a national award at 19 for Best Indian Journalist under 35. I’ve been writing since then, but journalistically. Fiction is a new bend in my road.

I never really thought I’d be a novelist, although I’ve toyed with the seed of the idea of my first book for nearly 20 years -- a man who doesn’t want to make the world a better place, just wants to be left alone.

Here’s how I got yanked into novel writing, by a young man I’d never met: In 1998, a collection of my travel writing was published in India by Harper Collins, and enjoyed critical acclaim as well as some moderate sales. In 2004, the copyright reverted to me, and thinking that the book had a little more life in it than 2,000 copies, I sent a chapter out to some 700 American literary agents. No one bit, of course, though a few were kind enough to murmur words of encouragement.

But one day in 2005, I received mail, and then a call, from a young literary agent called Nathan Bransford, to whom someone had forwarded my chapter. He’d liked it, and wondered if I had any plans to write fiction. I’d just come out of angioplasty and was feeling quite fragile those days.

I told him I probably could not write fiction, but over some weeks, Nathan persuaded me to try. That’s really how I wrote this opus. Nothing like someone who believes in you to put some wind in your sails.

How would you describe your writing?

They say an author’s first book is autobiographical.

To the extent that I have woven together themes and melodies that have been part of my life, it is autobiographical. But this book, to me, uses social satire to lay bare the absurdity of where we, as a species, have brought this planet and ourselves.

Through the eyes of a man who’s trying his best not to get involved in the madness, we see how ridiculous we’ve become.

Who is your target audience?

Your question presupposes a rational process that wasn’t really there. I’m more of the tell-a-joke-and-see-who-laughs school.

I know that my parody will resonate with a certain kind of person, both in India and outside.

As a writer, though, I am focused on my words, not on my readers.

Who influenced you most?

If you mean which writers have influenced me, that is a difficult question, because one is always watched by a panel of one’s muses. In my case, it’s [Vladimir] Nabokov, John le Carré, and Gerald Durrell, as unlikely a chamber orchestra as you could put together.

If you meant which human being has influenced me the most in this writing, I’d say without hesitation that it’s this 27-year-old literary agent whom I’d never met and who, for some reason, devoted sizable chunks of his time and persuasive powers on a remote writer. He really kept the faith for me till I began to feel it.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

The dominant themes in the Book of Answers have of course emerged from my work and life. For example, the importance of questions has somehow been a recurring theme, one that has acquired increasing depth and meaning over the years.

When much younger, I used to write a satirical column in India called Dr Q, who was this hot-air scholar of false erudition. The questions were made up mostly, but the poker-faced answers, both technical and profound, were entirely made up.

In my work in development in Kenya, questions took on greater value and we developed several tools and processes to deepen the quality of people’s enquiry. I developed a framework called the Continuum of Enquiry, which suggested how people’s questions and information needs change as their sense of proximity to HIV increases.

It seems somehow climactic and fitting that my first fiction work is about a sealed book with answers to all the world’s important questions.

Do you write everyday?

Writing the Book of Answers has been a great discovery for me of how language, memory, imagination and meaning interact.

I write often but it has not been a daily discipline. Let’s say my work permits me to write in stolen packets of time -- in transit lounges, late at night at home, in taxis, and so on.

I separate writing time from thinking time, and have noticed that my characters and storylines develop most energetically when I am walking, something I do every day. The characters then seem to take on a life of their own -- they walk, they talk, they interact, say unexpected things to each other, and suggest developments.

It’s a strange feelings, to be an onlooker while my own characters tell me where to take their story.

The sessions have become easier over the three years the story took to develop.

It took me a long time to find my writer’s voice, perhaps most of two years. But once I found it, the story and the details began to flow.

Story-telling is a fractal process -- the level of details one needs seems not to be different whether you are looking at a chapter or a paragraph -- or even a sentence. That has been a wonderful thing to realize.

How many books have you written so far?

My only other book, published in 1997 by HarperCollins India, is called Travels with the Fish. It is a tongue-in-cheek travelogue of my mishaps and discoveries in diverse countries all over the world, as narrated to the Fish, a skeptical armchair traveler whose main knowledge of the world comes from the National Geographic.

What is your latest book about?

The Book of Answers took me just about exactly three years to write, starting around March 2005. It’s my first fiction work, but its provenance goes back deep into my life and my work and thought.

It’s the story of an Indian man -- half Bengali, half Keralite -- called Patros Patranobis who inherits a locked metal-bound book with, purportedly, answers to all the world’s pressing current problems: wars, inequities, suffering, corruption etc. But Patros, in common with about 99% of humanity, does not think one man can make any great difference to anything. Besides, all he wants is a quiet life with his partner, Rose Jangry. He sells the book off within days to a junk store. And that’s how the story gets going.

It’s about how a locked book turns into a deadly weapon in the hands of a corrupt politician and a self-appointed godman.

While Patros watches, helpless, the country is riven by a series of Orwellian legislations. The more Patros tries to rectify the harm he has unwittingly caused, the more he is targeted by the new draconian laws.

The Book of Answers will hopefully be out later this year. It is right now in the submissions stage, and my literary agency, Curtis Brown Ltd, is handling the process.

Which aspects of the work you put into the book did you find most difficult?

The trickiest bit was finding the voice.

In my first draft, I used the first person voice, but began to review that after several people told me that the writing sounded too flowery and verbose. Perhaps, I thought, I was trying too hard to sound ‘literary’ in my eagerness to appear authorly rather than journalistic. With just over 150 pages done, I went back and rewrote the book in the third person.

This got me an earful from my literary agent, who said that I had ‘killed’ my voice, the one thing, in his view, that set my writing apart from others’ he’d seen. “Anyone can write journalistically,” he wrote to me. “But you had a unique and compelling voice. That’s gone now.”

At that time, I was moderating a meet-up group of writers in Bangkok, and sought their opinion on first versus third person. Apparently, they agreed with Nathan. So I went back and rewrote the entire book -- close to 270 pages by now -- again in the first person.

I think this painful process became the one that polished my writing with every iteration.

In the first person, you can only write about what you see, hear and think. There is no God’s-eye-view, you are not omniscient as in the third person. I had to jettison huge tracts of my third person writing, and figure out new ways to reveal those details to the reader. This entire process was probably the most difficult part of doing this book.

What did you enjoy most?

To realize that the process of writing fiction generates its own facts was a wonderful discovery.

Of course, the details always emerge from one’s own life, and to that extent, most of the times I can pinpoint where I borrowed narrative from my life experience. But the magical moments are when you suddenly see a bit of story that is not in the least bit familiar to you from your own life story -- and you realize that something fundamentally creative has happened there.

Another wonderful aspect of this process for me has been watching the story play itself out in my head. My mind is most active when I am in motion, so my evening walks are among the most fecund periods of my day.

There was a stage when my characters acquired a personality and life of their own, literally ‘enacting’ entire scenes in my head, seemingly with no help from me. This was always a thrilling time -- it was as though the characters were telling me what they should do next.

I remember Thomas Harris, author of the Hannibal Lecter books, saying something like this when explaining why he had written yet another book, this one on the childhood of the cannibalistic protagonist. At that time, I remember laughing and thinking, This man was just exploiting the franchise with a new book, giving the lemon one more squeeze. How can characters dictate [a] story to the author? But I must say that I am [now] a little less skeptical of this process.

What sets the Book of Answers apart from other things you've written?

The fact that it is fiction, for one. My only other book, Travels with the Fish, was a rollicking travelogue that compiled traveler’s tales from my many years of quixotic traveling. It was, in a sense, easy writing.

Humor is quite effortless for me, and I could draw all the facts I needed from my personal experience. More wickedly, I could fabricate my own life story where the details were murky, and no one would be the wiser.

To counter this, I set up a skeptical listener, the one I was telling the stories to, the so-called Fish. The Fish was an armchair traveler who matched my accounts with what his readings of the National Geographic had told him the story should have been.

It was a useful device: I wrote with forked tongue and had the Fish to alert the reader when I was crossing the thin line between fact and fiction.

In the Book of Answers, the problem was the reverse: I had to avoid any semblance of reality even though I was drawing upon it. Events and personalities had to be viewed through a distorting lens so that their original details could not be discerned by any reader.

What will your next book be about?

There are several ideas. One book, provisionally titled The Book of Maltruism or perhaps just The Maltruist, builds itself on the theme of unintended harm caused by intended good when people with ideas and notions of how the world ought to be set about ‘improving other people’s lives’.

Another theme is about a person so overwhelmed by the bottomless abundance of knowledge in today’s world, and so deeply frustrated that he will never know it all, and that you could go through your entire life without meeting a single other person who knows the things that you know -- that he begins to fill his ignorance with false erudition. He makes up knowledge, becoming a poseur, a professor of punk wisdom. I have the character -- I am yet to develop the story.

More at OhmyNews International.

Related articles:

• “A printed book gives you something a digital one does not — a sense of a journey.”- Interview with C.Y. Gopinath, By Voicu Mihnea Simandan, simandan.com, January 25, 2012
• Finding relief in fiction [Interview], By Nikhil Varma, The Hindu, November 14, 2011
• The Book of Answers [Book Review], By Collin Piprell, collinpiprell.com, July 19, 2011