You sit in the Main Street at the New Residency Towers in T Nagar and there’s the new and sensational novelist of the season sitting before you. Aniruddha Bahal seems mildly amused by the publicity circus that surrounds the launch of his book Bunker 13, but he’s there in the middle of it all, not merely traversing the Indian metros, but other parts of the world too, as part of the promotional activity. “I would be happy if more people read the book,” says this arts and philosophy graduate who briefly dominated the limelight as prime mover and shaker with Tehelka.com, the portal that orchestrated the sting operations revealing corruption in high places. Now the limelight is on him again, this time for a novel that’s receiving accolades and you want to know if all that attention is easy to take. “I am enjoying it,” he says, “Every author wants his book to do well.”
Of course, you tell him, Bunker 13 and MM, the novel’s protagonist, are but Tehelka and Bahal himself. There’s more amusement. “People like to believe that,” says he, “But I had begun the novel sometime in 1996, much before Tehelka happened.” Bahal was with Outlook then and he took a couple of months `unpaid leave’ to begin the book. “50 to 60% of the book was written then,” he says. He admits that writing is a result of the sum total of one’s experiences, but, he reiterates, the novel is certainly not autobiographical.
The novel is perhaps not autobiographical, you muse, as you race through its pages. Shockingly unusual and explicit (we are Indians, thank you very much) the plot is about MM, a journo, who lives life dangerously with drugs, wild sex, corruption and arms dealing. This isn’t certainly the Great Indian Novel. MM is our country’s most interesting fictional anti-hero in modern times. Halfway through the plot, MM is talking inside your head, disconcertingly so – as he deviously wends his way through a maze of intrigue.
Bahal began his life as a `salesperson’, you learn, selling office automation products in Calcutta for a few months. After a brief stint of dabbling in business, he joined India Today in ’91… “That’s where my journalism career began,” he says, “People ask me whether I’ll take writing full time… I think I’ll do a lot of writing and a lot of journalism – my life will be alternating between the two.” Being a recognisable face, he feels, will not spoil him for further investigative assignments. “People’s memories are very fickle and short,” he smiles, “Even the accolades are very fickle…”
“It’s flattering,” he admits to you, of reviews in the international press that have likened his writing to those of Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and a Hunter Thompson. “But I have a long way to go, even if they have compared me to those guys.” The reviews in the media have been thick and fast you notice, many billing Bunker 13 as India’s first foray into the thriller genre. But Bahal tells you, “I would not like to slot my book.”
“Writing is a very intrinsic and internal process,” the man says, telling you that he enjoyed the making of Bunker 13. His second book? It is very much on, and he’s working on it. But he cannot worry too much about high expectations after a good first offering. “You can’t write if you think too much of what people will think of your writing.”
You change the topic once again to Tehelka and how it changed his life. “The Tehelka experience taught us a lot of things – it hardened us to a lot of beliefs. It kind of opened our eyes to what a certain system of governance would react to you if it was found on the wrong side of things,” says Bahal, “We got a lot of goodwill from the ground but then, the moment we needed help, no one would stick their necks out.” It’s a legacy of your colonial past feels Bahal saying, “It’s a sort of grovelling towards power. A grovelling to a system.”
But, there’s Tehelka, you tell him, then there’s Bunker 13. “That has in a way hurt me,” retorts the author, “People look at the book through the prism of Tehelka, which is not what it should be.” Then you return to the premise that MM could be Bahal and that somewhere within Bunker 13, there’s Tehelka.
This premise, you infer, could be wrong – facts are sometimes, weirder than fiction. Nevertheless, Bunker 13 marks the Coming of Age of Indian fiction.
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