A LIFE BEYOND BORDERS

JEET THAYIL'S THE ELSEWHEREANS IS A QUASI-MEMOIR ABOUT FAMILY, BELONGING, INHERITANCE AND, ABOVE ALL, LOVE

- Shougat Dasgupta

At 65, Jeet Thayil remains a sleek, honed physical presence, even on a Zoom call, as befits the son of an athlete.

It's a detail we learn early in Thayil's new book The Elsewhereans, a 'documentary novel' as the subtitle says, a quasi-memoir about family, belonging and, above all, love.

I received the book in the week that home minister Amit Shah made now-standard remarks about English, about the “mentality of slavery” that afflicts those who insist on speaking it as if to abjure their so-called mother tongue. Thayil reminds me that he wrote a poem decades ago with the line “our mother tongue is not our mother’s tongue”. That we still remain so conflicted, so unable to claim English, and the varying ways it is spoken and written in India, as a native language is embarrassing.

Thayil's novels, poetry and music, for example, could only ever be written by an Indian writer, even as they're written in a 'global' language—the product of a mind shaped by India's particular postcolonial, and for that matter precolonial, history. “We're in a stage of our national evolution,” Thayil says, “where we all feel like outsiders.” In a city like Delhi, “dislocation”, he adds, “is location”. It's an embrace, as is the story told in The Elsewhereans, of uncertainty, of travel as a means of finding not just oneself, but others.