What are the odds of a writerly couple launching new books within days of each other? “Not only that,” says Zac O’Yeah in all seriousness, “both books have yellow on the cover.” Then he adds in a conspiratorial whisper: “But my book is selling better.”
That finely developed sense of the absurd, and deadpan humour are the hallmarks of the Swedish writer whose Digesting India: A Travel Writer’s Sub-continental Adventures with the Tummy was published slightly ahead of wife Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angel.
When City speaks
Zac is no ordinary travel writer, imposing his prejudices on a city and ignoring things that don’t fall into a pre-constructed pattern. He lets the city speak to him, tell him its story, and not just the story of its food and drink, of which he partakes with both professional and personal interest. Cities also tell him their history literature and culture. They become living beings, and Zac is the city-whisperer.
Interestingly, Zac learnt English in India, and the mix of European sensibility and Indian expression is unique. He once told an interviewer he is a South Indian reborn in the Arctic Circle. “I didn’t take tension,” he says of a movie hall being torn down in Bengaluru – no local could have put it better. “It felt,” he says, “as if I was writing local history at the same time as history was being erased around me.”
I have lived in Bengaluru much longer than Zac, but he knows and values large swathes of the city I know nothing about. He lived in the Majestic area when he first came here three decades ago. The detective in his popular series is called Hari Majestic.
Digesting India starts in Bengaluru, moving through its famous bookstores, legendary drinking establishments, and eateries. Food reminds Zac of writers, and writers remind him of R. K. Narayan and soon enough we are told of meeting the man who created Malgudi to discuss Tamil food habits, thus neatly pulling it all together.
Apparent digression is one of the charms of the book; soon everything is connected and inevitable.
Like staying at the Beach Hotel in Kozhikode where Somerset Maugham had worked on his novel The Razor’s Edge in the 1930s. A query about Maugham elicits the response: “Your mom? What’s her name?” More fascinating is the connection between The Gundert statue, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse, the rock band Steppenwolf, and Zac’s link with it all. ‘Connections’ might be an alternative title of the book.
Beyond history books
You won’t find many of these stories in history books – some are known only to local residents who heard it from their grandparents. The cultural history of food and alcohol through the route that Zac takes around India is fascinating. “The longer you stay in India, the less you know,” says a character in a book that was filmed as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
A part of Zac seems to agree, but the literary and visual fixative he has used in Digesting India will ensure the stories remain in our minds.
