It is better to be early than late for a meeting with Aatish Taseer. Polite, he offers delicious coffee in an espresso cup. The coffee is cold, he apologises; he doesn't know how to heat it.
He is casually clad in blue jeans, a striped collared tee and jacket, and his earnestness is hard to deny. A quality that has lent itself to his latest book, The Way Things Were.
Time played providence as Taseer's third novel, steeped in the influence of Sanskrit, hit the stands around the same time as the Narendra Modi government's preoccupation with the ancient language. It was accidental, of course; Taseer had been working on the novel for four years.
In fact, his fascination with Sanskrit started seven years ago when he craved to find his roots. “I had a feeling of lack, a feeling that I had grown up in India knowing very little,” says Taseer.
“I felt that there was no possibility for me to write fiction of any depth if I didn't have that kind of historical reach.”
But what started as an interest opened up a new world for the 34-year-old writer. The euphoria that Sanskrit fanned in him “bled into the book,” he says.
The novel chronicles the history of India through the Emergency in 1975, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and the Babri mosque demolition in 1992, leading up to the present day.
Taseer's protagonist is Skanda, whose father Toby, a Sanskrit master, dies away from his beloved country. The novel is about Skanda reuniting his father's mortal remains with his homeland. The quest for identity is a theme that is recurrent in Taseer's work.
His first book, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009), also dealt with the issue. “A writer should develop his concerns but not abandon them. Identity, for instance, especially in our time [is such] a big thing. Where do you stop with that?” he asks.
“The subject of history and the relationship to history hasn't left me and shouldn't. I don't see my concerns as divorced from a particular moment of India right now.” The recent events have, however, left him unsettled. “I would like nothing more than Sanskrit to have a place of importance in the education of young people,” he says.
But the decision by the Modi government to replace German with Sanskrit in Kendriya Vidyalayas in the middle of a school term is jingoistic, he feels.
“Is there a genuine intellectual interest?
It is not an intellectual inquiry if you are that hysterical,” says Taseer. “If it doesn't have a dispassionate way then it stops becoming an intellectual inquiry and becomes an article of faith.”
Next on Taseer's list is a book on travel in India, which will take at least a couple of years to finish. For now, his love affair with Sanskrit continues.
