When Breathless in Bombay first hit bookshelves, its author Murzban Shroff was at the receiving end of both bouquets and brickbats. While he did find solace in the critical acclaim it received both here and abroad (it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize), he was also embroiled in legal cases for over the next two and a half years.
And although he came out the victor, the episode, says Murzban, changed him tremendously. So much so that it took him six long years to release his second book Waiting for Jonathan Koshy.
Leaving his successful advertising career in early 2000s, Murzban’s journey through finding his first love — literature — has been a bittersweet saga.
Telling us how Jonathan Koshy happened to him, Murzban says, “I needed a character that was more entertaining than myself because otherwise I couldn’t have gotten through the litigation. And that’s how I found Jonathan — a jocular gent, a high IQ loser, a man who is full of high-flying ideas and most importantly someone who gets up every time he’s knocked down. Jonathan Koshy changed me completely.”
He adds that he is hardly the same man who wrote Breathless in Bombay seven years ago. “The plan, right from childhood, always was to become a writer. So when I took up advertising, it was just a lengthy digression. In advertising, you peak quickly, so by 2000 I was already at the top of where I could reach in this field and that’s when I got back to writing.
At that time Arundhati (Roy) had won her Booker and my college batchmate Vikram Chandra was already a successful author. However, when I wanted to get into writing, I felt that on Indian bookshelves, there was too much writing and too little literature. So that was the intention when I wrote Breathless,” he elaborates.
And there is only one person responsible for this change and that’s Murzban’s own character Jonathan Koshy. “At one point Jonathan just ran away with the story and I had to say ‘hey, wait a minute’ and bring him back to reality. But the character did shape a lot of the story. And it was a challenge that I took upon myself, to implement ideas that even I would find preposterous, because that’s what Jonathan would do.”
But it’s not an easy challenge to surpass, adds Murzban. Telling us about how he goes about his writing, he says, “I write each story anywhere between 20-25 times. And there are times when I sit at the editing table for 17 hours straight.”
While his intention still remains to contribute significantly to literature, Murzban tells us about his journey ahead and says, “I am currently writing a serious work on India — especially its hinterland. I went on a long trip to several parts of the country and experienced first-hand the problems I want to be talking about in this next book.”
