Latitudes of Longing

Much of Latitudes of Longing delves into spiritual realms. Do you consider yourself spiritual?

I have meditated and practiced yoga since I could do these things. Writing for me is a form of meditation. I didn’t realize it, but that’s how it became. Writing is the first thing I do in the morning. The early morning hours are the most truthful.

Two weeks before my wedding, I decided to go do Vipassana, the ten-day torture chamber. People do it when they’re up shit’s creek. I was the fool who did it when I was happy. So I told my partner: You pick the venue, I’ll come out of Vipassana, and then we’ll get married. As difficult as it was, it was very helpful. I got married with this very intense realization that all of this—everything—is transient. And I’m still doing it. You have to live with these spiritual realizations and knowledge and still do your everyday duties. Writing helps me walk that line.

A lot of spiritualism is also questioning, not taking anything for granted. I take nothing for granted, and I’m a stubborn nut. If I don’t agree, I won’t do it. Meditation is great for people like me.

I come from a deeply spiritual family. The couple in the Andamans that the book begins with is inspired by my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was a steak-eating botanist from Oxford, and my grandma, indeed a gold medalist in Sanskrit and math. Both of them renounced the material world and became sanyasis (monks) in their retired days, in keeping with the Vedic stages of life. My own sister is also a sanyasi, in the modern world. She grounds us spiritually. My grandmother (the real Chanda Devi), well, she’s ninety-two years old now and all alone in Delhi at the moment, through this lockdown. And she performs a daily havan (ritual offering to a sacred fire) to uplift the world from this pandemic!

You’re a new mom—what’s that like during this time?

I haven’t found the time to invest in self-care of late, of any kind, even sleep! I was overcoming postpartum depression when the lockdown occurred. We have spent almost three months in a curfew-like situation already, with a few more months to go. So now is the litmus paper test of all those years spent practicing meditation. The only way to survive is to live in the moment, to focus on the daily tasks wholeheartedly and surrender to the love around me. I am very lucky to have my eight-month-old baby girl, Kalika, with us in this time. She’s mastered every lesson that I struggle to learn and shows us the way with her relentless toothless smiles. She has a curiosity for the most ordinary things, like her parents brushing their teeth. It is a curiosity that knows no fear or limits.

Latitudes of Longing is made up of several different, varied love stories. Who is your favorite lover in the book?

Apo, the old man. Hands down. His love for Ghazala is not about how she looks—he says she sometimes looks like a man—or bearing children or anything in the future. It’s in the moment. He recognizes her. He says, You’re a poet, not a poem. I’d fall for someone who told me that. Very often, women are the muses, not the artists. And that’s a nauseating thought for me. I don’t want to be a muse; I just want to be understood.

And Apo is a good storyteller. In a time of pandemic, we appreciate the storyteller. Give us entertainment.

You’ve traveled a lot for work. Do you get homesick? What do you like most about living in Mumbai?

I’m thirty-seven. I’ve been in Mumbai for almost thirty years. I’ve come and gone during that time. I’ve lived and worked in places like Zanzibar, China, Turkey, and the UK. And for the novel, I was mostly on the road for all of those seven years—Burma, Kathmandu, Myanmar, Tibet… I don’t get homesick. Every time I travel, I get further clarity on what I’m coming home to and why it’s so important. The more I travel, the more obscure, the further I go within myself. I don’t miss Netflix or my TV. I miss my loved ones. And stepping out in a pair of tiny shorts or walk home alone at night. Because so many of the places I’ve traveled to are conservative.

What I like about Mumbai: the people and the philosophy. I am a Mumbai girl. Like you have the “New Yorker.” This is what has equipped me to go to all these places and not back off—hardened nuts. When I was posing as a pimp as part of my research for the novel, I didn’t know what to do or say, but I started haggling. That’s a typical Mumbai thing to do—like if you’re taking a taxi, you’ll say, I’ll just pay 20 percent less. Mumbai is an intense place—in its overcrowded chaos, inequality, and relentless movement. Life here is a primer on survival. There is a common Hindi proverb, “Roti, kapda aur makaan,” which summarizes the essentials of life as food, clothes, and home. I once asked a boy living on the streets what was the most important of the three. He laughed at me and replied, “Survival. All this matters only if you’re alive.”

What’s the first thing you want to do post-isolation?

Take a walk by the sea by myself.

Here is an easy one. A central question of your book that your characters seem to explore is: What’s our purpose here?

Ah. If I can answer this question in my lifetime, then I have achieved my purpose! As for the novel, life has a purpose within that worldview, one that I call the primordial instinct. All evolution is guided by the primordial instinct. The one that that took us from the single cell to multicellular beings, from the primordial soup to dominate over the various oceans, lands, and skies. Only to retrace our steps back, but with awareness this time. It is the awareness that qualifies it as evolution, and not regression. With awareness, all life will return to floating as uncomplicated cells in the lake of our origins, waiting for life itself to cease. This cyclical view of life is inspired by the life cycles in nature, such as that of continents, rocks, and water. For instance, a supercontinent splinters into continents and islands, only to regroup as another supercontinent over time.

Your novel subverts the notion of borders and false dichotomies—science versus spirituality, man versus nature, sentient versus nonsentient, etc. Let’s talk about that.

The divergence between science and spirituality will melt away if we view things as a whole. The boundaries sometimes become more important than the values we try to protect. We go nuts just trying to protect boundaries.

As an artist, it’s my job to try to break the illusion created by the myth of self or individual. You know at a party, that obnoxious person who just wants to talk about themselves? We are that species. We are the obnoxious species at the party. We take credit for everything it. We can’t get over ourselves.

We are the most conscious of the conscious, that’s what we say. We’ve given rights to the sentient and made them more important than the nonsentient. Throwing plastic in the sea is not the same as torturing a kitten. But why? It’s a stupid classification. If you view consciousness as a collective, how can we segregate these parts? I see a mountain as a beautiful, living thing. It has life on it. We all have the experience of going on a hike or mountain trail or being in nature. We feel one and whole and we still feel solitude. There’s something beautiful happening there. To pillage it because of some classification—it doesn’t make sense to me. Life exists as a web, and the strength of the novel comes from this idea.

What books or works of art have shaped you?

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy. She’s quite badass.

And I say that four M’s have inspired me: Gabriel García Márquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Haruki Murakami, and Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki is the animation genius behind the Japanese Studio Ghibli. Animation has had a huge influence on me. I discovered Studio Ghibli as an adult. It ought to be as big as Disney. If people just watched it, we’d be in a better world. The protagonists are little girls who are fearless. It’s feel-good and beautiful. Have you seen the film Red Turtle? Watch it.