Walking on the write track

The author made this drawing as part of a series in tribute to Shaunak Sen’s film All That Breathes. It features Gabby, the black Lab, who died not long after he made her sketch. She was very old and loved mint from her family’s garden

If there's one thing author Amitava Kumar wants readers to take away from his latest, The Green Book, it's to inculcate the habit of walking and keeping journals.
The book, released earlier this month, is the third and final volume in his diary-and-sketchbook trilogy. Like its two predecessors - The Blue Book and The Yellow Book - this volume too is filled with Kumar's original artwork and photographs, along with observations jotted in his diaries as he walks through life.

By the time this reporter arrives at the Bandra cafe where we're meeting Kumar at 11.30 am on Wednesday, he's already scribbled about things he's seen since stepping out of his AirBnB in the morning. There's a hilarious anecdote he's recorded from a journalist friend he was meeting earlier on, who narrated how he had arrived late at an event that VS Naipaul was to speak at, only for the author to storm out of the venue on learning that his name had been misspelled on the invitations. There's also a sketch Kumar has made of the chauffeur driving him around town on his last day in Mumbai. In the cafe, he's insatiably curious, whether it's about our magnetic powerbank, or another patron's high-tech-looking insulin pump discreetly placed on their leg.

"Life springs everywhere. You have to be alert and catch it on the fly," says Kumar, "The idea of being a writer is precisely, I feel, to explore and expose."
A professor of English at New York's Vassar College, Kumar is ever the teacher, pointing out how great literature often begins as jottings made in writers' notebooks, from Virginia Woolf to Shiva Naipaul. From his own notebooks, Kumar shares sketches and written accounts from his travels, walks and even visits to prison, where he was teaching a Bachelor's course in literature to inmates. Throughout the book, he emphasises on the importance of observation, both to be more mindful and also as a crucial skill to become a better writer.

By the time this reporter arrives at the Bandra cafe where we're meeting Amitava Kumar at 11.30 am on Wednesday, he's already scribbled about things he's seen since stepping out of his AirBnB. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

"I passed so many years of my youth when I felt I was not creative, had no sense of direction and was basically wasting my life," Kumar says, "I didn't have a language that I could put down in a diary. If I did, then those years of my youth would have had some coherence. They would have had a shape. It's important to keep a diary so that your days do not blur, are not shapeless, so that they form a story. Otherwise, you will not know what is happening to you. It will be a passive existence. And my job is to rescue every reader of my diaries from such an existence."

It's all very well for a celebrated author such as Kumar to record his days that are peppered with meetings and conversations with literary and artistic heavyweights. One day he's meeting filmmaker Shyam Benegal, on another, he's corresponding with English novelist Zadie Smith. But what would the rest of us even have to put down in our notebooks from our day-to-day lives?

"It is about attentiveness to all forms of life," he underlines, "Yesterday, I was walking in Mankhurd and I saw this [holds up a photo of chickens hanging by their feet from the bumper of a mini tempo]. I wondered what would happen to the beaks of the birds when the van moved. Not that they were headed for an any easier fate at the end of their journey."

It turned out that the chickens had already reached their destination - a hotel kitchen to which they would be taken momentarily. "The hotel workers came and took them inside for what could be described as either a better or a worse fate," Kumar adds wryly.

This focus on bearing witness to all lives, and all that life is, comes through again in the chapter All That Breathes. Kumar writes about a 2022 docu-film of the same title, which tracks brothers Saud and Nadeem as they run a rehab centre for injured black kites in New Delhi even as the anti-CAA (Citizen Amendment Act) protests rage on in the backdrop.

Like the film, which is inherently political but doesn't overplay that card, Kumar's own conscience is a gentle but constant voice through the book. "I'm trying to journal everything I can in order to say that I was here and, in some ways, not to forget what's happening in the world," adds Kumar, who has also devoted chapters to Gaza, climate change, rising communalism in the nation and other issues.

Politics and civic awareness forms a large part of the next project that Kumar is working on: "I'm working on a non-fiction project. Many years ago, VS Naipaul had started a project in Bombay, which turned into a book called A Million Mutinies Now. Three decades have passed since then. Where is India now? I thought, I should take the temperature of the country again, in my own way."

As for The Green Book, were there no apprehensions at all about opening up his diaries for the world to read? "I have no worries about myself. But do I worry that I may be exposing someone else? Yes, I do. For example, I end the book by mentioning a writer friend of mine who lost a child. I wrote her a note to tell her what I was doing," he recalls, adding that there were no objections from the friend to the anonymous mention.

An unchanging mantra Kumar always offers his students is to write 150 words and walk mindfully for at least 10 minutes each day. "Walking and using public transport are ways of reclaiming space and promoting a healthier, more creative lifestyle. My best ideas come when I'm walking. It's a meditative practice," Kumar says.

Of course, his walks in Mumbai have been quite different from his regular strolls in the leafy suburbs of Poughkeepsie, NY. "Yesterday, I was in noisy, dusty Mankhurd, where the area under a flyover had been converted to a park with exercise machines and a walking track. I thought that was a great thing to have done. But I did feel bad for those who were energetically walking there, amid so much pollution, dust and smoke.

"One would likely feel more meditative by walking in a forest or park. But I wouldn't want to say that life can't be observed in urban spaces. For example, on the other side of the flyover, I saw a woman squatting beside a small shrine, lighting diyas and making an offering of marigold. This is also life; there are things to observe everywhere," he says.