The point at which I knew this book was going to be written came one afternoon on a street in Ubud, Bali, when Rukun Advani and I were drooping in the heat, on the brink of giving up the search for Walter Spies’s second home. And then Nyoman Gelebug drew up and opened the doors of his car.
Until then, nobody had appeared to know how to get there, and every taxi driver had refused us. As if by magic, Nyoman turned out to be a native of Sidemen, East Bali; he knew exactly how to reach the house in the remote village of Iseh, near Mount Agung. Standing in fields full of ripe red chilies in front of the house, with the calm blue volcano on the horizon, it immediately felt as if the book-in-progress had the blessings of Walter Spies.
Born German in 1895, Spies spent most of his life in Bali, where he met both Rabindranath Tagore and the renowned dancer Uday Shankar. He wanted to learn Sanskrit and come to India to research Indian dance forms, but he was drowned at forty-seven when the ship on which he was a prisoner of war was bombed and destroyed. In part, this book imagines what might have been had he made the journey to India.
Since this is a novel in which fiction and history overlap, I have relied greatly on the help of other people as well as books.
In Bali, Janet de Neefe provided many pointers, including to the splendid Agung Rai Museum to look at the paintings of Spies and his contemporaries; she also directed me to his estate in Tjampuhan, now the Tjampuhan Hotel, where his simple thatched cottage is perfectly preserved. In Djakarta, the writer Dwi Ratih Ramadhany gave me crucial help with Balinese names and Lans Brahmantyo of Afterhours Books gave me permission to reproduce material from John Stowell’s magnificent biography, Walter Spies, A Life in Art (Jakarta: Afterhours Books, 2011). This rich, beautiful book is filled with illustrations and translations from the letters of Spies, from which are drawn many of the words he says in this novel. Rahul Sen made sure the book reached me, passed hand to hand all the way from Djakarta, via Singapore and Jaipur.
Only in one of his letters does Spies speak of Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Bali, and it is not reproduced in Stowell’s book. That letter (Letter 56, dated 21 September 1927, in Hans Rhodius: Schönheit und Reichtum des Lebens Walter Spies—Maler und Musiker auf Bali 1895–1942, Den Haag, 1964) was obtained for me from the British Library by Professor Francesca Orsini. However, it was in German. Katharina Bielenberg translated it into English and lines from her translation now constitute one of the epigraphs. I have lost count of Katharina’s many kindnesses, this is only the most recent.
I first came across Walter Spies in Cristina Jordis’s dazzling travelogue, Bali, Java in My Dreams (translated from the French by George Bland, London: Harvill, 2002). It made me want to know more, and I turned to Colin McPhee’s A House in Bali (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), a poetic memoir of his life in Bali, especially its music. For a sense of Bali in the late 1920s from the Indian point of view, I have relied on two astute, learned, observant books in Bengali: Rabindranath Tagore’s “Javajatri’r Patra” (“Letters from a Traveler to Java”) in Rabindra Rachnabali, vol. 19 (Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1968), and Suniti Kumar Chattopadhayay’s Rabindra-Sangame Dipamay Bharat O Shyamdesh (The Islands of the Indian Ocean and Siam with Rabindranath) (Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1940). Manishita Dass, ever-resourceful book sleuth, not only got hold of both the books for me, she then read my first draft and checked my translations.
As always, Myriam Bellehigue did a detailed reading of the first draft, and gave me a clearheaded sense of its problems.
One of the fortuitous happenings during the writing of this book was that I picked up, purely by chance, a novel by the eminent Bengali writer Maitreyi Devi. She was a relative of mine, a paternal uncle’s wife; her book had always been in our house, but I had never read it. When I did, I was deeply moved, as well as struck by parallels between the protagonist of her autobiographical novel and the protagonist of my book. I began translating it, and eventually a few passages became a part of my novel. For permission to reproduce these passages from Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate (It Does Not Die), I am indebted to Rupa Sen and Priyadarshi Sen. The translations into English are mine.
The two extracts from Tagore’s writings included here were originally published in “Thoughts from Rabindranath Tagore,” English Writings, vol. III, p. 58, edited by Sisir Kumar Das (Delhi: 1996); and “Mone Pora,” from Poems (1922; reprint, Calcutta: Visvabharati, 2002).
The particulars of Beryl de Zoete’s life would have been lost to all but scholars if not for the work of Marian Ury, whose premature death put an end to the biography she was writing. Her lively, sympathetic essay, “Some Notes Towards a Life of Beryl de Zoete” (Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, vol. 48, no. 1, June 1986) provides a great deal of information. The extract about Aisha is taken from “Siwa,” a lecture Beryl de Zoete gave at Dartington in March 1941. It was published in The Thunder and the Freshness, the Collected Essays of Beryl de Zoete, edited by Arthur Waley (London: Neville Spearman Ltd, 1963).
For events relating to the Second World War in India, I learned a great deal from the outstanding scholarship of the historians Indivar Kamtekar and Yasmin Khan. Various online archives, including those of the British Library, provided invaluable information on the war in the East Indies and India. Radhika Singha supplemented her essay “A ‘Proper Passport’ for the Colony: Border Crossing in British India, 1882–1920” with patient answers to my questions about colonial-era travel. For the specifics of passenger berths on merchant ships, I am grateful to Captain Soumitra Mazumdar.
Memoirs by Alan Moorehead, Rajeshwar Dayal, Santha Rama Rau, Madhur Jaffrey, and Nirad C. Chaudhuri allowed me to inhabit the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Raghu Karnad’s Farthest Field provided an intimate study of an Indian family caught in the war. My father-in-law, the late Ram Advani, who was born in 1920, was always available for the odd, specific questions that only someone who had actually lived through those times could answer.
Thanks also to Arundhati Gupta, Partho Datta, and Teteii for letting me pick their brains about the experiences of their families. To Elahe Hiptoola for a helping hand with Urdu. And to Piku, Soda, and Barauni Jungshun for letting me in on the daily, loopy joy of their world.
I am deeply grateful to everyone at MacLehose Press, Hachette India, and Atria Books who make publishing such a happy experience: especially Poulomi Chatterji, Paul Engles, Avanija Sundaramurthy, and Priya Singh. To Rakesh Satyal for making the American edition possible and for seeing it through with such care, and Thomas Abraham for his affectionate, laconic calm through turbulent decades of friendship and work.
Several editorial sessions over the years took place on the most beautiful and hospitable terrace in all of France, at the home of Miska, Koukla, and my publisher and editor Christopher MacLehose. Despite ten years of working with Christopher, his ability to transform manuscripts with exasperating, anarchic brilliance is still astonishing to me—as astonishing as the fact that I have survived four books and lived to tell the tale.
My mother’s descriptions of life in a many-branched joint family in Jaipur and her recollections of the 1940s have helped me construct this novel’s world. Also woven into the fabric of this book—and my life—are glorious musical afternoons with the late singer and writer Sheila Dhar; I have drawn on her stories about Begum Akhtar, some of which feature in her Raga’n’ Josh (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). She once informed my mother with characteristic drama that she, “the other Sheila,” was my “foster mother.” My mother took this gracefully in her stride, as she has done much else. This book is dedicated to both Sheelas.
Finally, as at the start, Rukun.