PEOPLE
When Hari and Amitava chat
Desai’s mighty penPARESH GANDHI
The last time Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar met they were both in trouble at the Jaipur
Literary Festival for reading from
Salman Rushdie’s banned Satanic
Verses, and were advised to leave India.
The two authors caught up again, via e-
mail, when Kumar interviewed Kunzru
for The Paris Review about his
novel Gods Without Men, which
released this month. Explaining how his
fourth novel came about, Kunzru said, ‘I
got stuck in Los Angeles on 9/11. I’d
been in California for a couple months
and was supposed to fly home to
England the next day, which was not
going to happen. I had a weird experi-
ence involving trying to give back a little
rented Japanese sports car with Arizona
plates, freeways being closed, getting
When Anita Desai writes, the world’s bound to take note. The novelist, who has been shortlisted
for the Booker Prize thrice and is a winner
of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, has
now been picked as a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner award for fiction — the
country’s largest peer-juried prize — for
her 2011 book The Artist of
Disappearance. She is up against Russell
Banks (Lost Memory of Skin), Steven
Millhauser ( We Others: New and Selected
Stories, Don DeLillo ( The Angel
Esmeralda: Nine Stories) and Julie Otsuka
(The Buddha in the Attic).
Amitava Kumar
Hari Kunzru
lost and driving round the perimeter of
ghostly, closed LAX on the tensest day
in modern American history. Then it
involved the LAPD and firearms. Only
my English accent stopped the f*****s
arresting me (the London born son of an
Indian father and an English mother, he
has been described as having ‘a nonspecifically exotic appearance’). It
wouldn’t work so well now with cops
and immigration people in the Western
US — they’ve got English-accented
Pakistanis on their radar. Anyhow, I got
away unshot and found West Hollywood
full of freaked out hipsters telling each
other someone was about to fly planes
into the Hollywood sign. People were
losing their minds. I decided to get out
of the city and drove to Death Valley,
which seemed quiet and appropriate. I
had a very intense few days. It stayed
with me, but I didn’t realize I had to
write about it until much more recently,
in 2008.’ Needless to say, the Jaipur
controversy came up. Kunzru said, ‘My
main reaction is that Indian public life
is weakened considerably by the presence of so many offense laws on the
books. Offense law is a weapon that can
be picked up by all sorts of people for all
sorts of reasons. It’s a dangerous thing
for a democracy to have lying around,
like a loaded gun.’
Salman Khan,
and Somy Ali below
The truth about Salman & Somy
Somy Ali caught the public eye in the 1990s as Bollywood star Salman Khan’s girlfriend and isappeared (after appearing in nine forget-
table Hindi films) just as quickly from the media
glare after the end of their eight-year relationship.
Much has been written about them since then,
but it is only recently that Ali, now a women’s
right champion, has set the record straight. Ali
tells The New York Times that she moved from
Miami to Mumbai in 1992, when she was 15, with
one agenda — marrying Salman. ‘Despite having
moved to Florida from Pakistan at a young age,
Ms Ali somehow persuaded her father to send her
to India under the pretext of wanting to experi-
ence the culture. She had celebrated photogra-
pher Gautam Rajadhyaksha shoot her portfolio,’
COUR TES Y: JORDAN MICHAEL ZUNIGA/SOM YALI. COM
and offered her a role in his next film. Ali had
‘zero interest in being an actress.’ Her focus was
Salman, who was then seeing actress Sangeeta
Bijlani. He broke up with the actress to date Ali,
and the two remained together until he fell for
Aishwarya Rai. ‘It was probably karma for me —
I was so engrossed and selfish about my dream
that I’d ignored the fact that he was with someone
else. It was so wrong, ethically and morally, but I
realized this at 35, not at 16,’ Ali told the NYT.
Depressed, she moved back to Florida in 2000.
And has come a long way since then. She not only
completed her education, but also made docu-
mentaries, launched a clothing line and founded
No More Tears to helps victims of domestic
abuse. But before you even think it, Ali is quick to
point out that there’s no personal history here
(the rumor of Salman smashing a Coke bottle on
her head is well known). ‘I was out with some
friends and had a rum and Coke; he felt I was in
wrong company and didn’t want me drinking, so
he poured it on the table,’ she tells the newspaper.
‘Now I think he did the right thing. But a media
guy blew it out of proportion. It went from one
thing to another... He (Salman) has the most gen-
erous heart I’ve ever seen. He will give the shirt
off his back to someone. In my teenage years if I
learned a lot about being good and doing good, I
learned it from him and his family. He was
beyond wonderful to me… aside from the cheat-
ing.’
Though Ali and Salman are friends again, she
has not gone back to India since 2000 and says
she has no reason to. Her focus, for now, is No
More Tears.
Deepa’s lifetime
achievement
Filmmaker Deepa Mehta added to her list of kudos this month when she was placed among Canada’s cultural
elite with a Governor General’s Performing
Arts Award. Chosen for the Lifetime
Artistic Achievement award along with
Deepa Mehta
JUMANA EL HELOUEH/REUTERS
pianist Janina Fialkowska, choreographer
Paul-André Fortier, theater director Denis
Marleau, the rock band Rush and actress-filmmaker Mary Walsh, Mehta will receive
the $25,000 prize in Ottawa, May 4.
