[dropcap][M[/dropcap]eanwhile, the artist tosses in his bed, miles apart in the world of dreams. The cover has come off his shoulders and one bare haunch is revealed by the dropping collar of the T-shirt which has been sagging with overuse. Dark circles under the eyes look in the direction of the peeling ceiling.

The English clock ticks ten minute overtime to compensate for which he wakes up ten minutes earlier. At another corner of the room is the burnt Napoletana which still gives coffee, one of the fuels for his long rummage, though its rim has been blackened blue one fine day when he left it on the hot plate and went shopping for diverse articles upon return from which he found his room up to the brim with smoke. The artist does not like early mornings, he especially detests the sun breaking in from the side of the curtain though he made sure this year he got a courtyard-facing room looking on to rotting tyres and Jacques’ innumerable long cigarette breaks. For an eye-mask he has his silk-scarf on which he no longer uses for any other purpose. In the damp summer, he is forced to take on his grandfather’s dressing gown as additional cover for the heating was never reestablished since he defaulted on the payment of rent in April, an unhappy circumstance which he cannot seem to get over at the eerie turn of events. Colours splotched across a cracked plate formerly used for a palette, an empty bottle of Argan oil, a broken camera sundered with disuse, various objects, an earring, one of a pair of high heels, a dysfunctional refrigerator, a mop-brush, recovered from the streets, a poster of Catherine Deneuve’s backside on the mirror, all complete the sundry objects that line up the prized paraphernalia of his existence.

Groaning, he looks back on a future that he is yet to attain but which glows beyond the screen of his nightly unconsciousness before a bastard mosquito spoil it all with a burstbubbling pinprick.]

Paris Review
C.R./2026

Interviewed by Joseph Brodsky

…a 4 BHK facing the quieter recesses of Bombay’s Apollo Bunder, with fishermen unloading their catch and the Neo-Gothic tower of the Sassoon Docks stretching out over the haze of the sea. Two servant boys bring chai and pakoras on a silver plate which they arrange neatly in front of us taking instructions from their master as to what to prepare for dinner. Outside the monsoon rain is tumbling in drastic droves, while inside besides a mahogany table he is comfortably dressed in a light Cashmere sweater and hand-stitched moccasins. The walls feature a few Pam Shatels as well as top artists including Gandbhoy, Boske D., Develowda and Randip Choddri.

There is a general chubbiness around his face with a couple of blush marks that bely a quiet prosperity. His socialite wife comes in to ask what she should wear for the dinner party the day after and he assures her everything looks good on her. We have had a quick round of his improvised cupboard where, if word is to be believed, are contained 18,001 titles because a famous writer apparently once said his library contained eighteen thousand.

J.B.: It must have been fascinating to write something of the magnitude of Memoirs of a Young Artist, Recently Born (MOYA, RB). You have talked about it in the novel (?) but elsewhere you have been reluctant to discuss it. What was it like to have conceived something so large and to be forever struggling to bring about to fruition?

C.R.: It was fascinating but especially trying. The last two months I had to leave student accommodation because of impending repairs. As I lay writing in June, a drill went above my head as if it wanted to bore right into my cranium. I had a girl who was a neighbour and she had a spare flat in one of the northern suburbs and she said she could hand it to me if I took care of her four and if I was willing to give her a few bucks which would make for her summer allowance which I was able to pay for with an anonymous don of 200€ that I received in my mailbox. Jacques was reluctant to discuss the source...

J.B.: So Jacques is real?

C.R.: Perfectly real. Put him in one of the posters outside Metro cinema at Kalbadevi and he will replace one of the saadu uncles from Marathi comedies.

J.B.: You were talking of the money you received from an anonymous benefactor.

C.R.: I had an Afghan friend who formed the inspiration for Reza and it might as well have been he who lent me that crucial helping hand which allowed me to finish that first draft with which I was able to leave Paris in peace. I never found him out again, my emails to him went unanswered. I am told later that he relocated to Kabul but I cannot be sure. I sent him a finished copy through post at the address he gave me but never received a reply. He was my only friend in Paris in those days and I regret having lost touch with him this far hence.

J.B.: You are fluent in Armenian?

C.R.: Old Armenian, you mean (laughs). It was the joke that went too far. A friend of mine suggested that I had a name which resembled a city and a river in southern Armenia and I took it seriously, I mean seriously enough to incorporate into a long narrative where a couple of Armenians go around the park challenging destiny and inviting for themselves the meanest of adventures possible. Till that time I had not even met a single living Armenian and I offer my apologies to anyone concerned with that nation if I have inadvertently hurt feelings by very ingeniously claiming to be one of their own. It was a fun ride, though.

J.B.: You mean you have no Armenian connection whatsoever?

C.R.: Let us say my mother met a member of a bhaand-paether troupe while on her way to a pilgrimage in those parts and what emerged out of the meeting I have too much of politeness not to enquire into or let us say she read so much of Armenian authors especially Kishmishjaan and Badamian, while on her way to the summit with me in tow, that I emerged white as the snow on the bords of the Mt. Ararat. How is any of this relevant to the task we have at hand, when creation as an act is difficult enough not to care about such specificities? Whatever you say, Farzdan is possibly going to pass off for the most famous Armenian in History.

J.B.: Method is very important to you in your craft as a budding scriptwriter?

C.R.: There is no method. You take someone you know and put them in a situation you have been through and you make them react exactly as they would have done if someone of their sort were put in such and such situation. All my characters are those I have known, someway or the other, or have heard from someone or the other I have known, in a way to be able to make it known credibly how such and such sort should react to such and such situation in front of a larger audience, of who I do not know or have not heard of.

J.B.: Why are all of your characters forever torn between love and the material struggle, be it in Constantinopoli (2012), Gift of the Geese (2022) or Ramboutou (2025). Is it not possible to talk of more sensible things, such as dictatorships in various parts of the world, or of the growing food crisis, the submerged islands invaded by the rising waters?

C.R.: Would you rather have me write of world wars and distant rebellions when a war is raging in my existence making me unable to see what is going on beyond the wiper of the windshield? Is it not Farzdan who says one should write of that which is the most immediate to oneself, a poor man must write of his poverty a rake of his many loves. That is the way a narrative is conceived especially one which is convincing and which is bound to stand the test of time as to the matter evoked at hand. The work in question is a faithful chronicle of the time that I lived, seen from the perspective of the man in question who was living it. You want me to become like those journalists who were to write of expensive cutlery when their salary could barely afford a two-room flat in south Delhi or even Dwarka or such outlying parts, those I wrote about in MOYA, RB and I saw amply in my practice as a newspaper-space salesman in a highrise? At that time, I was particularly touched by the irony and that convinced me to quit my job among other things and try my luck elsewhere. It is by a stroke of chance that I became a writer later and began toying with the same idea evoking it in different contexts later. I am sure there are many travel writers who make their living inventing fiction where it would handily replace truth affixing pictures to illustrate the same.

J.B.: How did you get the idea for the fictitious glossaries and the fictitious foreword by a university professor?

C.R.: I was tired of the academic world as well. In fact, I applied for a fourth master to some third-rate institution and they wrote back saying, No, Sir it is enough, you have so many qualifications you would make our professors stand out like embarrassed schoolboys. I had a blank future ahead of me. I said to myself chuck it, if I am not going to ride on their piggybank anymore let me use their authority to sell my books though it is true not an item more has gone off the racks because of their purported weight.

J.B.: Tell us something about The Parable of Mahendra Namardi. It is my favourite part of the story especially when you weave it into something as unconnected as the heart troubles of Roland Cassard (C.R.) and his then-girlfriend. What formed the genesis of this meandering discourse? Was it inspired from something real or it was just by stroke of chance that you were led far away into a rambling discourse which I find at once fascinating and incisive.

C.R: The parable is inspired from what a friend of mine told me of a factory supervisor from Bihar who when workers would string out after their daily shift would count the rotis they had got as part of their salary package. That was his job, or the part he took most pleasure from. The workers would of course try everything, quadrupling the rotis in bunches, putting them in their pockets, sticking them together with some nearby available sticky rice so that two may be counted as one, even bribing him with some of their share, but nothing seemed to work with this out-and-out crusader. Apparently his motto was Na khaaonga, na khaane doonga. Of course he was beaten with laths when hunger got the better of miffed countrymen.

J.B: How important is Constantinopoli as a work in your career as a writer ? You have said it was the first real concerted piece of fiction on your part, before this you were just scribbling many texts to eke up a living?

C.R.: To understand what happened in Naples, one has to understand what I was going through and why it was important for me to get away from my sordid life in Paris, and make something concerted out of my many works. I was tired of writing to please many but secure a few and by this time a need got hold of me to create something that would be more everlasting, something that would withstand the test of time above the sea of banal reminiscences. Thus, was born the genesis of the fictional sketches that formed the basis of Constantinopoli. Too bad, I never found a publisher to take forward the proposition.

J.B.: Was it not hard being rejected initially. I mean you had a bright career, a scholarship to study at Oxford, and you had staked all on the line to afford a measly flat in which you could sit down from dawn to dusk inscribing chapters to all glory.

C.R.: I got so many rejection letters that I could make a garland of them like bank-notes worn at public weddings in India.

J.B: Was it true that you were facing laptop troubles upon the act of composing or was it another of your inventive ruses to point to the act of creation, and the reality of the creator as the inevitable task of creation gets in progress and the narrator dons the robe around himself right up to his forearms to cover his elbows as he draws the puppet strings without any attention being drawn to the artifice?

C.R.: It was a hilarious story. I went to a showroom not far from Place de la République and they had a scheme where you could try one of their laptops for a period of a week in exchange of your identity papers which you could get back if you were not satisfied with the service or for any other reason. I borrowed the laptop and sold it to an African for 100€. He was particularly happy with the deal of course for 100€ for a laptop was not something commonly heard of in those days. But then two days later I knocked on his door saying the machine had a faulty processor in fact and if he wanted he could come with me to a magasin and have it replaced for a new machine during the time they repaired the old one which took about a week. Luckily for me, he did not speak much French and when we went to the showroom to get my identity papers and to pledge his, he thought nothing was wrong but in fact he was getting value for money for a service that was newly procured. I cannot tell you if he went back indeed to reclaim his old machine for by that time I was begone from Paris like a fly from under the debris of a falling building.

J.B.: What is the inspiration for someone as real, or hyperreal rather, as Farzdan?

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