The Lord's Play
AC: I was thinking about the title of the book, which I understand comes from the Hindu concept of leela. In some ways that's about seeing human behavior from a distance, right? So that you can see these patterns of behavior, but without judgment.VC: The way it's usually translated is "The Lord's Play." But it doesn't mean that our lives are lessened by this perspective. If you do that, then you're overlooking the profound seriousness of play. It's play in the sense of pleasurable interactions between things that seem opposite. So, as the guru in "Sacred Games" puts it, if you have good, then you have evil. All these pairs of opposites make up reality itself: for every proton, an electron. These opposite dons against each other make up the universe that surrounds us -- and that in a sense to our consciousness remains forever elusive.
And you're right, there's also a matter of distance. The mandala comes up a couple times in the book. One is the mandala that Sartaj sees the Tibetan monks making, which he looks at twice -- and which is also the figure of the book. Later, when Gaitonde goes looking for the guru, the structure of the guru's ashram is a mandala, if you look at it overhead, the symmetry, the circles within circles and the various buildings inside.
In a sense, any vision of meaning can be profoundly life-giving and humane. The religion Katekar's widow practices -- her personal relationship with her deities gives her strength. But the same thing turned into a macroscopic, guru-like vision allows him to see individual humans as ants crawling about, and then he has no compunction about taking life away. These kinds of narratives, when they get very large, like the narrative of Marxism and Leninism that turns up at the end of the book, offering another vision of heaven, the worker's paradise, somewhere in the future, allows you to say things like you have to destroy the nation in order to rebuild it. And again therefore, the paradox of story making.
Rasa: The Sublime Taste
AC: I wanted to ask you about the difficulty today of publishing something so large. I understand there's a pressure sometimes to keep books to a standard 300 or 250 pages. Were you pressured to cut the book down?VC: I have to say that none of the editors or the publishers reacted to the length of the book adversely. I never felt any pressure to chop it down just for the sake of making it shorter. After I finished the second or third draft, I showed it to my wife, Melanie, and we sat down for a couple of months to really edit, cutting away things that seemed extraneous. But the version of the manuscript that we sent out to my agent and then to publishers remained pretty much the same. I told them, in London, New Delhi, and New York, is there anything here that can go? People had ideas, and then we would try to implement the idea and take something out. But even with the insets, which look as though you could take them out without disturbing the story, we found by doing that, you lose an essential layer of emotion and meaning, you lose some of the essential feeling, the rasa of the book.
Sanskrit aestheticians used this word, rasa. The notion was that during the drama of a play, during the narrative, you have lots of emotions that come up and disappear. One scene has laughter, another has tragedy. What you as an artist are supposed to do is arrange these emotions in a coherent way to leave the viewer with this sublime taste after the play is over. That was the rasa, the essence -- "rasa," essentially meaning taste. It's the core feeling that lingers, that stays with you, that's stable. And that would change entirely if we took out one of these parts.
