Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s latest book, The Rabbit and the Squirrel, is a fable for grownups. The author tells Medha Dutta that this story of deep bonds and relationships was written purely as a gift for a friend, with publication not on the cards.
Your debut novel, The Last Song of Dusk, was widely acclaimed and won many awards. You said your second book, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, would be your last, so how did this book begin?
I wrote it for a friend, when she had been leaving the country. I did not expect we might stay in touch, so this was something for both of us to remember a shared, private and impossibly magical time.
How have these years in between shaped you as a writer?
After The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, I had two photography shows. Following this, I served as honorary director of an arts foundation in Goa. On hindsight I see how one labour built incrementally into the next. The photography gave me freedom, and a delight for immediacy. Curation showed me how to edit works in and out of a show, so only the essentials remain. This kind of studied aesthetic culling taught me to write less, bring a story to its tincture. And these skills led up to this little trinket—The Rabbit and the Squirrel.
Did you always visualise the book like this? Or did the illustrations come in much later?
The illustrations are entirely the creation of Stina Wirsen—she loved the book more than I. Consequently, the drawings have a deeply felt, interior rub and murmur, as if she had made the drawings first and I responded later with words. The book was an echo chamber.
Were you and Stina always on the same page?
She is pages ahead of me, so I was merely trying to keep up. When you’re aesthetically aligned, such things flow, no argument, no dissent. It’s like dancing, when I missed a step she covered for me (and
to be honest: she never missed a step).
So, why the use of animal characters? You could have used humans too.
Well, humans wouldn’t have been half as charming as a rabbit or a squirrel!
You are a photographer too. In fact, Salman Rushdie had some flattering words about your work. So, is photography an extension of your writing style?
The two mediums complement each other—you learn to let one form build into the other. I believe we get stuck in these public moulds—writer or photographer or whatever.
But to be a true artist is to be free. Sometimes my instrument is language; and other times it is the camera. These are not mutually exclusive but just different ways to bear witness to life.
Your writing style has been compared to Rushdie’s and even Vikram Seth’s. Your views.
These are flattering if sometimes misleading. I am only a novice. And I am also a bit too eccentric to fall into the mould of writer. I just sit in the corner and strum my own instrument.
Why are the themes of love and longing a constant in your writings?
As they are in my life. In every life you have to recognise which burden you must serve. I see writers serve ideas of exile or gender, artists I know study class tensions. For me, right now, I want to study how life without friendship might be meaningless.
QUICK TAKES
What next?
Perhaps, a photography show
One book you would recommend.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
An author who always awes you.
Michael Ondaatje
If you were stuck in a lift with Chetan Bhagat.
I’d take the stairs
An author from the past you would like to date.
Colette