JEET THAYIL was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, TJS George. a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years, in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005 he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy. Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India's National Academy of Letters), and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS. Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.
I started work on this book in 2004 at a small coffee shop in Khan Market, New Delhi. My wife Shakti Bhatt and I had left our jobs in the United States to return to India. Our idea was to live modestly, use our savings-and write. At the time we were staying with Shakti's mother, in a first-floor apartment at Nizamuddin East. I'd wake early and drive to the coffee shop to be alone and work. It wasn't easy. The first decade of the twenty-first century was a continuum of dread that seemed to infect every human interaction. Three years earlier, I'd been in New York City. I was renting a converted storefront on the Lower East Side, not far from the World Trade Center. Shakti was in Florida, thinking of moving to the East Coast. We hadn't met. On September 9, on my way to work, the subway halted between stations and we evacuated to the street. I walked the rest of the way, against a tide of fleeing figures, some covered in a phosphorescence of ash and dust. At the end of Sixth Avenue, where the towers had always stood, there was a tall cloud the colour of beaten silver. In the weeks and months that followed, I am ashamed to say I shared the views of many New Yorkers: the rageful rhetoric, the diatribes against 'fundamentalists' that quickly became indistinguishable from Islamophobia. At my lowest, I agreed even with Christopher Hitchens, though my own derangement did not last long. When he and others spouted the blood apologias that accompanied the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, I woke, as if from a drugged sleep, ashamed and determined to return to sanity. I did it the only way I knew, by writing poems. Which is why, in September 2004, at the Khan Market coffee shop, I was already writing about grief as a collective experience. Some poems examined the implications of that long moment the clash between political performance and individual cost, as suggested in "The Two Thousands' or 'War is Work, the intersection between intimate violence and indoctrination as in Two Interventions' or 'View from the Ground' or 'Cut to Bits by the Sickle Moon'. But throughout, the loss was imagined rather than personal. There was a collaborative postcard project with the poets of 7 Carmine. We each used a last line by someone else as the opening of a poem. For my sequence I tried to imagine loss beyond imagination: the loss of a world (a cosmopolitan or plural way of living), the loss of culture (the destruction of literature or art), forgotten touchstones (collective amnesia or erasure), and the loss of a spouse. Upon finishing the sequence, I titled it, 'What Happened to Your Wife, the Dancer? Our new life took shape. Shakti found a job in publishing, while she worked on three novels. I began writing fiction. On April 1, 2007, Shakti died. What had been imagined became real. Horrifyingly the word was made flesh. I moved out of the Delhi apartment we had shared and moved in with my parents in Bangalore. I stopped writing. When I began again, some six or seven months later, the collection I'd titled These Errors Are Correct became what it had been all along, an annotation of private grief. The sequence 'What Happened to Your Wife, the Dancer' was retitled 'Premonition', though the words stayed unchanged. Poems were written without my intervention: the book seemed to write itself. I have no recollection now of working on it, of my surroundings at the time, or in what order the poems occurred.
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