What made you write this novel?

I was absorbed by a series of large canvases, at an extended care centre in the east end of Montreal, where my mother was staying for a few years. The place was full of canvases. Landscapes, cityscapes etc from old Europe perhaps. I would be sitting in the hallways or lobby of this place with her and I would study them in details. Because they were done in great detail! They had no relationship with each other. One of them had a plaza with buildings in it…along two large streets. The others were city scenes from Europe, perhaps a few hundred years old. Kind of random scenes but while staring at them  I sensed a certain magical connection between the cobblestones, some of the faces, their expressions, almost like the faces were trapped in the canvases and wanted to walk over and talk to the characters in the other canvases.   

The atmosphere at the centre was extremely peaceful…Kind of fondled a sense of calm.  I have always liked Breughel, Goya and a few others who did similar work, but with people’s faces as prominent centrepieces and structures like barns, carts with wheels, people moving along a large landscape. Each face had details. Each body muscle showed some emotion—fear, suspicion, jealousy, elation, pain, anguish, tension, paranoia, happiness all reflected in the detailed faces. Like they were fleeing a plague or reacting to an injustice or in Goya’s case simply turning an edict upside down by a snarky expression.   I hit upon the idea of a triptych…like three canvases that would reflect the same story unfolding in stages. I advanced the idea to four canvases.  There is probably no word for it. Perhaps quadripartite?

I also have my ideas about the current post -9/11 world we live. The notion of an American empire in decline is very much on my mind and the minds of everyone else. I strongly feel that the US as a domineering power is slowly on the wane. Even though in terms of innovation, science, technology etc, it still holds sway, the cultural and intellectual decline of the US has reached peak (!) or pitiful proportions. The level of intellectual debate in the US has descended into a cesspool. The way CNN/Fox and their prettied up men and women newscasters, display a shallow earnestness and discuss world hunger without even skimming the surface of what’s happening show that superficiality has reached epidemic proportions. The Emperor has his pants off and is telling the masses to eat cake… It’s really scary and pathetic. I believe that all Empires from Babylon and Hapsburg to the Gupta, Mongol, Roman, Greek and British empires, all went through economic expansion, colonial plunder, over extension of its armies, then disaffiliation, decadence and absolute and reckless decision making leading to decline. The US is in decline, although it will always be a superpower with economic clout. So, I used these concepts to come up with a story line about a reclusive philosopher/painter, living in a bohemian enclave in Paris, who embeds his thoughts on the rise and fall of empires into four large serialized canvases, which represent two stages of rise and two stages of decline of empires. His works however are lost, stolen and auctioned off indiscriminately and their sequence and serialization is disturbed and his body is found floating in the Seine. A murder has happened. A murder of ideas and the solution lies in the clues embedded in the paintings.  And I have brought in scenarios in Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, France, England, and India. The main protagonist is a Montreal graduate student of Quebecoise-Pakistani origins. He goes on a hunt to recover and bring together the paintings. His girl friend is from Argentina. There are also several other characters from different nationalities and it reflects the pot-pourri of people who come together to solve the magic behind these disappeared paintings. When the main protagonist finally discovers the last canvas, he also discovers the need to re-discover some thing as basic as the concept of ideas, ideals triumphing over spontaneity and so-called common sense. In other words there has to be a sense of utopia. About a society that is better than that which we inhabit now…and without empires. So, I am naively insistent, I suppose, about a better world.

Why would people want to read a novel like this? It is not young adult, horror, crime, sci-fi, chick lit?   It sounds too serious.

Well, I think its time for some changes…in reading habits and sensitivities. People have to get deep and not be in a chat room intellect mode. Dangerous and ominous things are happening in the world. Never mind the environment, which everyone pays lip service to, but there is an assault on civic society, fundamental rights, freedom of speech and the right to move around and the current food crisis is a perfect example of how the after effects of free trade, globalization, seed-cloning, heavy use of chemical fertilizers is beginning to show up. Its not just crop failure, but this wilful push towards corn-ethanol that has played a major role.. War is a way out of this debt-and-deficit-financing. And this generation seems skipping over the debates and only enjoying or drowning themselves in the phobic and terror aspect since 9/11. But having said that, the novel is an adventure novel that criss-crosses many countries, even goes back and forth several decades. It does not have steamy sex scenes, some yes…sorry!...or gruesome CSI-style forensic foreplay but there is a sensuous, passionate and magical tour to the kernel, the source of the novel—that is an ideas revolution.

Who are some of the writers who have influenced you?

Honestly speaking I am not an avid reader. I love theatre and while I have not done any for quite a while and especially since I wrote my first novel, Recovering Rude, I have done less reading and more brooding, I would say! There was a time when I would read theatre books more than I read novels…However I love the works of John Le Carre, and I like the styles of Paul Auster, Ian McEwen for a variety of reasons. I like novels where the story moves, chapter by chapter, if not page by page. I like things to be visual and dramatic. And yet pensive and reflective of the times we live in. So, I also like very much Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag and their reflections and Nadine Gordimer. Because they inspire me. They believed in ideas shaping the world. In terms of essays and poetry I have loved Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Baraka and the whole beat gang, because they were so intense, conflictual and thinking people. I love poetry with a beat. A thump to it.  And I do perform my poems often in Montreal.

You are of Indian origins and do you get any inspiration from the Indian subcontinent, in terms of literature?

Very little really, as far as literature goes. Indians who write in English have been putting out award winners. I think it’s past the stage of exotica. But there is still a lot of delving in exile angst. I have lived nearly 35 years in North America, mostly in Montreal, but a little in the US. And of course I have travelled the world and lived in Kolkata and elsewhere in India. So I have run into literary samplers from all over the world.  But, as I said as long as the people from the subcontinent continue to write quaint growing-up stories and generational and cultural-conflict bound stories, or Tom-meets-Krishna stories, I will not be excited. Indians are spread out all over the world and they should write about the world. Not about themselves. They should deal with issues and not just incidents. I must state though that whatever I have read of Sarat Chandra and a little bit of Rabindranath Tagore, I can say that these two giants were so far ahead of their time in writing about social conditions with such deftness and subtlety, that they easily tower well above Chekov, Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Bellow and all the current greats from the Indian subcontinent. Maybe Anita Desai and Amitava Ghosh are writers in that towering genre. I like them a lot.

You are an engineer and former senior management executive in a large Canadian company. What made you get into writing novels?

The two are not exclusive. I was writing plays at night and rehearsing on the weekends. I live a multipolar existence. But more importantly, once I crossed forty five, I decided I would not spend the rest of my life working sixty hours a week, trying to hammer sense into others and make sense of a world where salary earning had become an end by itself and the work environment does not really produce socially conscious friendships. It’s all outside, amongst artists, poet friends, pub crawlers, writers, filmmakers who have a deeper sense of the world. I love engineering, but mostly I love the businesslike logicality inherent to engineering. I love to think and help strategically, at a high end. Artists and creative workers need a little of that. Madness is good for the soul, but precision is necessary for productivity while creating conscious art. So, it’s kind of cool to have been an engineer who is mad about a lot of things… One of the things I have mastered is writing while I am flying on trips. The whole plane is sleeping and I am typing away. I write, whenever I am travelling and during breaks. I do not have the good habit of writing everyday. I wish I did.

Do you have other novels in the works?

Yes, I do. But it’s at a very rudimentary stage. I also have the idea for a two-person play… Lot of short stories are in the works..

You have published two Novels without an agent? How was that possible?

Well, I did have an agent for my first novel. She was pretty well-known and she tried very hard for me. But it did not pan out. The publishers themselves like my works and chose to publish them. I would like an agent, yes. I respect what they do. Because they are very practical about what will sell. But they could be too clinical and exclusionary. Meaning heartless and prone to using the delete key too much. And I still understand it. I belong to a writer’s group and the experiences of all of them seem to be to get rid of everything that is an appendage to the core idea. Like Hemingway, roll the carpet out clearly and without fuss. So maybe I will learn finally. But one needs to be edited… It’s an enormous technique.

Tell us something about The Fourth Canvas

It’s a novel that I have broken up into four episodes. Kind of jives with the idea of four stages of the rise and fall of Empire. But there are also four key characters and I have followed their evolution while homing in on the final discovery of the Fourth Canvas, the final painting that will solve the four part essay on canvas. Bringing the canvases together assumes a magical element. There is enormous detailed coding done on the paintings and the main protagonist, Claude, the McGill graduate student not only decodes what is in the paintings, one by one… but towards the end, goes through a series of very sad happenings in his own life….but what is key is that he gets to the source of the ideas, he cracks the code and in turn changes his own life radically. He is able to grasp that in the final analysis, what counts is praxis. Involvement, and not theoretical muckraking. His friend Clara, who comes from an Argentinean background, is fiercely independent and carries her own ghosts.. She is also able to break out of the torpor that holds them down to an otherwise bleak Montreal existence and she also finds her bearings and Latin roots in an extraordinary way. Claude’s father is a Sufi poet in exile. He is clumsy and wonderful, but very accommodating and his life also turns many corners and revolves around the finding of the Empire paintings. It is an adventure story. It is tense because there are certain sub textual prodding and manoeuvring going on between some key characters. . But is a novel about ideas. Ideas and Idealism triumphing over incidents and single issues. The Fourth Canvas really takes you back to 11/9, the fall of the Berlin wall. With the fall of the wall (a good thing), there was also an insidious decline in the value of belief systems, of wholesome interconnected ideas, even utopia as a vision. Dystopia has taken over since then, the so-called notion of common sense and reactive ideology. Tit for tat. Us and Them. It is now time to discuss it. That is what Fourth Canvas does. The reader gets to travel to Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, India, Cuba, England and France…and of course the streets of Montreal.