Mr Gosh, goodfella

I met a rude man who wasn’t me on a plane to Goa. He was going home. So was I. He told me he built hotels. He refracted the day’s light into my face off a watch so big it appeared to be related to a grandfather clock. When he heard what I did for a living, he started to sneer.

‘Why y’all writers go to Goa?’

'Who all?' I asked, and caught myself just in time to prevent a spontaneous localised follow-through: ‘and all.’

‘Now dis Gosh also, no?’

‘You mean Ghosh, Amitav Ghosh.’

‘Ya, Gosh. He’s here, no? Goodfella? Or just--dis dat--one more outsider?’

Yes, I said politely, refraining from obliterating his face with stale airline omlette. Mr Ghosh has bought a place in Aldona, a quiet, somewhat picturesque village a few kilometres upriver from where I live. And yes, he’s a good fellow.

I’ll stick up for my new neighbour. It’s born of familiarity. Mr Ghosh and I have been intersecting for a bit, you see.

It has happened in usual and unusual ways. The usual way is the way a person intersects with a writer of growing stature. First, with pride. Then with joy, and more pride. And so on, soaking up The Circle of Reason; The Shadow Lines; In an Antique Land; The Calcutta Chromosome; The Glass Palace; and more recently, The Hungry Tide.

As much as I cherish these intersections, the unusual ones too have filled me with, well, fulfillment. Indeed, these have been so many I sometimes feel like I can call him Amitav. So many do. A person who interviewed him for a listings-magazine article about somebody else. People who attended his housewarming at Aldona. (I was travelling then, alas, and had to suffer the ignominy of people telling me “You know, the other evening at Amitav’s…” I responded weakly with “Ah, how is he?” while they curled upper lips at such a rank outsider.)

And so, to other intersections.

I badgered Mr Ghosh several years ago to write an article for a special three-part Millennium Series I was editing then at India Today. He politely turned down the emailed request. Then I phoned him at his Brooklyn home. He turned me down. Then I told him I would be in New York for a couple of days, so could we please meet? He suggested that I call him when I got in.

I did. First, he suggested we meet at Dean & DeLuca’s ('Ah,' trilled Dayanita Singh, a photographer friend of his and now fiercely Goan resident, when I recounted the tale to her this past April. 'He wanted to get rid of you quickly.') Then he changed his mind, and said why don’t I get to Brooklyn and he’d collect me near the subway station. ('Ah,' I trilled back, ‘See.')

So I took a train from mid-town Manhattan to Brooklyn, and somewhere, after Wall Street and under the East River, saw bankers mysteriously change into basketball players. Mr Ghosh drove me to a pleasant restaurant by a neat park and bought me excellent Mexican beer. He patiently heard my spiel about how important it was for India Today to publish him in the special issue, and how it would be pointless to publish without him.

He politely turned me down, suggesting both that he didn’t have the time, and that he didn’t agree with the political orientation of the magazine. The issue sold out—and I managed to get several big names to write—but I sorely missed Mr Ghosh.

Several years later, in August 2005, I bumped into him in Kolkata, the day after the reading in that city of my debut novel, Tin Fish. I had gone with some friends to the pub at the Park hotel. The edgy and excellent local jazz/blues band Skinny Alley was playing.

‘There’s Amitav,’ my brother-in-law pointed out. ‘You know him?’

‘Of course I know Amitav. I’ve met Mr Ghosh before.’

I sauntered over to Mr Ghosh and yelled over the noise. ‘Hi. We met in New York.’ Mr Ghosh hadn’t a clue.

‘You bought me beer at that place in Brooklyn in 1999,’ I reminded him.

‘How nice,’ he said politely.

‘I’ve also written a book, you know. Just had the Kolkata launch yesterday.’

‘How nice.’

'It's called Tin Fish.

'How nice.'

‘Enjoy,’ I breezily told him, one novelist to another, and promptly, gleefully, got tanked on all the beer my brother-in-law bought his brother-in-law-who-knew-Amitav. What the hell.

Then we started to be neighbours, Mr Ghosh and I.

I walked into Crossword Bookstore at Pedder Road, Mumbai in October the same year and saw Tin Fish on the same shelf as Mr Ghosh’s books. Thrilled, I opened one of his. He had signed his name in an elegant flourish, black ink. Energised, I signed mine name in inelegant caterpillar, blue ink. So there, I thought, and swaggered out.

We were soon neighbours again. Wespennest, a respected German literary magazine brought out a special issue to highlight Indian writing during the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2006. A friend sent me a copy. Among others, there was an essay by Mr Ghosh, an excerpt from Kiran Nagarkar’s powerful God’s Little Soldier, poems by Adil Jussawalla, Arundhati Subramaniam and Ranjit Hoskote—and an entire Tin Fish chapter, a deconstruction of Indira Gandhi.

I got tanked again. Gleefully.

Now I hear he has signed up for a few books with Penguin, my publisher in India. I don’t know if this information is correct, but I do know it is downright neighbourly.

Goodfella, Mr Ghosh.