‘BAMBAIYA HELPS TO EXPRESS A SUB-CULTURE’
The world may see Vivaan Shah as the son of acting stalwarts, Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak Shah, a theatre actor who has appeared in a few films. It’s the kind of spotlight most young artists crave. But Shah, 29, prefers to shine on his own merits.
It explains why he’s out with a novel, which he hopes is the first of many. Shah’s crime-thriller, Living Hell, is set on the fringes of the Mumbai underworld and follows Nadeem Chipkali, a man falsely accused of murder trying to unravel the truth. Shah’s protagonist is unusual – a lawbreaker struggling to find justice. The writing is languid, the scene almost noirish. Shah discusses the Bambaiya dialect, struggling to get his illustrious family to read his book, and how rejection has surprisingly been a part of life.
What made you write a book in this genre?
Growing up in and around Bandra, Mumbai, in the 1990s, I met a lot of people who were part of the city’s gangs. We played cricket with them and were friends with them, not by choice, but just because they were there. I found the bhaigiri and the milieu fascinating. I also realised that there are a lot of visual narratives about dons and mafias. Authors like S Hussain Zaidi have written non-fiction books about them. But in fiction, hardly anyone talks about small-time operators like the streetcorner hoodlum.
Getting Bambaiya right in English must be challenging. What kind of a role does language play, for you, in storytelling?
I understood the importance of vernacular prose and how to catch the poetry of the streets from Hollywood films of the ’30s and ’40s and Bollywood films in the ’70s. I think it’s my job as a writer to document subcultures in every way possible. Language is a big part of that. It plays a political function too. These are characters who wouldn’t speak English.
Writing your first novel... was it challenging? Was your family a good sounding board?
No. I think I kind of lost their interest as a writer because, over the years, they have been subjected to a lot of my juvenilia. I passionately went to them with my worst work. Now, it’s tough for me to convince them that something I’ve written is worth their time.
Did living in the shade of the giant banyan tree that is Naseeruddin Shah help you get your work published?
I think this is the most important question you’ve asked me. I don’t live under his shadow, I live under his light. However, I hope that the name did not give my email to the publishers priority over other ones.
I admit I have advantage and privilege. It rattles my brain. But I like to think that that’s not the reason my work got recognised, as I have gone through a lot of rejections from publishing houses.
In 2016, I was trying to publish horror/ sci-fi stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and got rejected pretty much everywhere.
People mystify the act of writing too much. You don’t have to go to the wilderness to write.
If you want it enough, you can write in the middle of a traffic jam. It can be pretty mundane and you have to enjoy the process at every level.
I want to be able to act and write in equal measure. The ideal stage of self-actualisation for an artist is if he or she is able to generate his or her own employment. I don’t want to be in the mercy of my phone, waiting for others to give me work.