Q and A with Neel Mukherjee

Neel Mukherjee, joint winner of the Crossword Fiction award for his first book, Past Continuous, talks of his two homes UK and USA, and imagining the lives of strangers

The first word that comes to mind when you think of Calcutta, UK and the USA.. what do each mean to you?u00a0

There is no single word that I associate with these places, more like entire complexes of emotions, associations, experiences and memories. As for what each of them means to me: I think of Calcutta as the hell that I was very lucky to escape; of the UK as my adoptive country, my home, if you will, so inevitably giving rise to the very familiar mixture of comfort, irritation and anger that whatever we call home does in all of us. USA is a place I go to visit friends and to get uninterrupted stretches of writing done, without the usual annoyances, habits and the pockets of inertia that characterise daily domestic life, so I think of it as a kind of haven.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0

What are your earliest memories of Calcutta... can you adapt to 'Kolkata'?
My earliest memory of Calcutta is of going with my father every evening to the drugstore around the corner from where we lived in Park Circus, for a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I couldn't finish; I barely managed more than a few sips. I left the city well before the change in name so it'll always remain Calcutta to me.

You've said you love imagining other people's lives... any anecdote you'd like to share?
There is one incident, from 15 years ago, that would indicate that I'm almost certainly wrong about this wild fictionalising. I was an undergraduate then, preparing for final exams in the college library and, therefore, bored out of my mind. I used to do a lot of staring out of windows and my attention snagged on one person: the college gardener, whom I often used to see walking by the impeccably-tended flower beds. He was a middle-aged man, scruffy, sometimes unshaven, his stubble flecked generously with silver. He had straight, flat, greying hair, fat, stubby fingers and he wore baggy jumpers and baggy trousers. I imagined a life entire for him:
wife, two young children, suburban working-class home just outside Oxford. I even imagined details of his life: the kind of breakfast he had, what his wife cooked for dinner, the kind of car they had, the route he took to cycle into townu00a0... On a cigarette break one day, I said hello to him and quizzed him about the names of the flowers in the beds. To my astonishment, he didn't know the name of a single flower. I spluttered, 'Bbutu00a0... but, you're the college gardener.' He laughed and said, 'Oh no, I'm David Wiggins', and skipped off. I had been speaking to the Wykeham Professor of Logic of Oxford University.

The book is published by Picador India at Rs 350