Sailor-turned-author Kersi Khambatta explored the story of a village in Goa with its oddball characters as both a script (for the film Finding Fanny) and a novel. But the writer asserts that the two are ‘widely different’
If you saw Finding Fanny, the film, Kersi Khambatta suggests you read the book The Village of Pointless Conversation so you know how ‘widely different’ they are. He has written both, the script of the film first and then the novel, which came to be called an extension of the film. Perhaps because the movie was out there first, you have pictures of all the characters that Kersi introduces chapter by chapter — Ferdinand is Naseeruddin Shah, Rosalina is Dimple Kapadia (you spot the difference already, Rosie is majorly fat), Angie is Deepika Padukone, Don Pedro is Pankaj Kapur and Savio is Arjun Kapoor. But read on, and you have here, a whole new experience that Finding Fanny could never give you. Kersi’s writing makes sure of that.
‘The fear in his heart lies down and takes a nap, though it will always be a light sleeper’ — Kersi writes in the first chapter introducing Ferdinand. “Writers are chameleons, switching the colour and tone of their thoughts based on whatever they are reading at any given time. And all of that comes out when the time is right; just sit back and open the floodgates.” He did but then it took its own time. “Blame the boundless enthusiasm with which I launched myself into it. There was no filter. Words and paragraphs poured in, and my fingers could not keep up. At the end of it all I looked at it and said, what’s this sludge of words, this dense, swampy gloop that wants to be a novel?”
A still from Finding Fanny
He gave it to his friends for feedback. “It made them ill. Agents hated it, publishers looked at it like it was an alien life form that might bite. Only I knew there was a hidden cache of gems in there that I had to somehow retrieve. It took me nine months to write that sludge and then two more years to reach in, sift, salvage the good and destroy the rest. Two years to clean up the mess I had created. The movie got made in the meantime.” And before all that, he was sailing. For 23 years, he sailed. “The only thing I miss about sailing is the singular solitude it offers. Your mind roams wild and free, empty of petty worries and thoughts, and every creative cell in your body sparks to life. This may have had a very strong influence on my thinking process, and I am very grateful for it.”
All the characters in his novel are out there, around us, he says, normal everyday humans with their ‘seamy, sordid neuroses out on display’. Rosie represents greed and gluttony, Don Pedro is a poster-child for hubris and selfishness, Angie is a gorgeous 30-something who has no idea how lovely and strong she is, Ferdie is a loser fighting to win and Savio, a whiner battling his own petty demons. It is obvious he enjoyed writing them out in a detailed 312-page book and Kersi agrees. “Prose is and always will be my forte. Screenwriting is a very technical process, the script merely a blueprint for the eventual moving picture in living colour. A screenwriter can imagine all he wants, but once a director takes over, it’s out of his/her hands. With my prose, I am in control of the entire imagery and narrative all the way to the end; that is always infinitely more satisfying.”
The Village of Pointless Conversation by Kersi Khambatta PP. 320, Rs 264 HarperCollins Publishers India
So then why’d he do it, because of the challenge it presented? “Even though there was another work-in-progress at the time, I kept getting drawn back to this story of a village in Goa with its oddball characters, always wondering what I could do with it beyond just script-level, how could I bring them to life in the most vivid and complete manner that they deserved. Was I up to it? Could I get into their heads, under their skin, walk in their shoes, make their individual idiosyncrasies all mine? That was it: Challenge accepted.”
