‘Fiction is purdah for true features’
Dhondy’s autobiography reveals a man who has given his all to causes and never cared much for others’ opinions of him
1 What is this book’s title a reference to?
I was asked by my publishers to write this “autobiography” a few months ago. The name came after several rejections from my editors, who didn’t want to call it Parsi Custard or The Scribbler’s Tale or indeed 20 other suggestions. They finally and enthusiastically accepted Fragments Against my Ruin — but not every incident or encounter is endowed with a resonance of ruin. The title is a shortened quote from TS Eliot, and like him (and everyone else?) a life’s recollections are all we have as time catches up…
2 Some of your characters are familiar from other books, but their names are different. Why is that?
When the publishers first approached me for an autobiography, I asked whether I hadn’t already done that in my trilogy, Poona Company, Cambridge Company and London Company. My editor and agent Priya Doraswamy said, “Yes, but that was fictionalised. We now want the ‘true’ account and besides, in your fiction you haven’t covered your TV and writing years or your interaction with illustrious and known characters such as VS Naipaul, CLR James and Charles Sobhraj, to name but a few.” So I agreed.
In The Bikini Murders, a novel I based on my acquaintance with Charles Sobhraj, I changed the names of the characters not simply for legal reasons, but because my creativity — such as it is — would inevitably take liberties with their descriptions and actions. Fiction is the purdah for the true features.
Nevertheless, in the trilogy, I have by and large used the real names of very many but not all the characters. In Fragments Against My Ruin I’ve taken the risk of naming everyone.
3 What was it like scripting the film Jinnah, which makes a hero of someone you’ve denounced for his role in dividing the subcontinent on the basis of religion, and subsequently professing surprise at the massacres that resulted?
Yes, I did write Jinnah, the film, and I’ve recalled how and why in Fragments... Yes, I did and do consider the Partition of India a tragedy. I was induced by the producer Akbar Ahmed and my good friend Jamil Dehlavi, the director, to suspend my native, nationalistic or Marxist “prejudices” and read a couple of accounts of those events, among them Stanley Wolpert’s biography of Jinnah. I read them carefully and came to the conclusion that Jinnah wanted to win an argument and got landed with a country. Partition is still to me a tragedy, and modern nation states declaring themselves religious is, to me, a step backwards in history.
I hope the film humanised Jinnah, whom I portrayed as shaken to the roots by the consequences of what he had been the stubborn instrument of bringing about.