In What is Remembered, Suketu Mehta’s first published work since the hyper-energetic and hyper-successful Maximum City, Mahesh is a Gujarati man who lands in New York, experiences a static shock on the carpet of the airport and forgets his mother’s name. No, that is not a spoiler, merely the first paragraph of the book. Slowly, over the years, Mahesh forgets most of his past. The 14,000-word novella, published by Juggernaut, is a whimsical account of Mahesh trying to frame a past in order to anchor his present. Through the grocery stores and taverns of Jackson Heights, Mahesh encounters an Expert Liar, a magical remote control and a man who implores that his heart be listened to.
On a static-filled phone line from New York, Mehta talked about why memory is central to the immigrant experience.
Yes, it could well be called What is Forgotten or What is Recovered. I was looking at the ways in which the memories we have of our childhood are often fake. In my own experience, what I had remembered of Jackson Heights of my childhood, I realised, often contrasted and clashed with reality when I went back to see it. That clash of what is real and what is not is what I wanted to explore. It is also important to remember that much of what Mahesh experiences is not in India but in Jackson Heights, which is a bit of a middle world. That is fertile territory for a fiction writer.
This book is a fictional exercise, an offshoot of the big book you have been writing on immigrants. What exactly is the process a person goes through when he adopts one country and abandons another, so to speak?
In the beginning, I found that the immigrant experience is one of forgetting. A lot of people who come into the United States are leaving their history behind — personal and political. There is a long tradition of that — the Jews who left Europe, the Puritans who left England. Many of the Indians who migrate, when they come here they immediately reinvent themselves. I am fascinated, especially, in how they rename themselves. Motilal becomes Mac. Or Haresh becomes Harry. And sometimes that reinvention, or forgetting, reaches epic proportions. For instance, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana declared that he was not Indian-American, he was just American, that there was nothing Indian about him. But his real name was Piyush! Who’s going to vote for President Piyush? In fact, a very entertaining hashtag took off called #Bobbyjindalsowhite.
Once Mahesh starts discovering bits about his past — real or otherwise — he seems unable to continue to anchor his present without a past. The idea that there cannot be a present without a past…
Often there is a tipping point. I found this happening to a friend of mine in Paris. He is a Gujarati filmmaker, but he was a Frenchman for all intents and purposes. He even changed his name to sound more French, married a French woman. He was, I found out, from a village in Saurashtra, but it would be impossible to meet him and see that. Once my mother came visiting and I was living in Paris and she made this dinner of roti, baat, shak; the classic Gujarati deathbed meal.
He ate three rotis my mother made hot off of the stove, and started weeping. And all these memories came out. He sat there and told me about his parents and how he hadn’t met them in the longest time. He started talking about his childhood. And I had known him for a few months by then, but he had never mentioned any of this.
He spoke English with a French accent. Then, all of a sudden he began to speak in Gujarati, with a sort of Kathiawadi accent. And what had set all of this off was the roti, which penetrated some fortifications he had built around himself. He felt that in order to be French, he had to completely lose his past. There are a lot of people like that.
But then there are people, say Indian hipsters, who live in India and yet are completely disconnected from its past. What explains that phenomenon?
There are non-resident Indians and non-Indian residents. I know people who live in Mumbai and who know where to get the best foie gras in Paris but have no idea where to get the best bhel-puri in their city. But the most foreign country for most of us is childhood. Wherever we are, what we are aspiring for is that connection with childhood. We need to understand where we came from in order to know how to go ahead.
When are you expected to finish the big book on immigrants?
I have been working on it for many years now and, like Maximum City, it is taking much longer than I thought it would. I am following a group of people over several years and they are mostly, but not all, immigrants. The working title of the book is City of the Second Chance. I am writing the last chapter. All I can say is that I want to get it done with and move on to new projects.