‘The Elsewhereans’ might be Jeet Thayil’s most experimental novel yet

It’s a dark monsoon afternoon in Goa and in Kerala when Jeet Thayil and I meet over Zoom. It’s so dim on both sides that the air feels shared. His laptop is propped up on an anthology of Paul Bowles, and between us, through pixels and weather, the mood of The Elsewhereans, his dreamlike, borderless new documentary novel, lets itself in. “It is a kind of happiness to endure darkness in the afternoon with the expectation of rain,” he writes somewhere in the book. And we begin there, in that happiness.

It’s been just two weeks since Thayil, a musician and author of the Booker-shortlisted Narcopolis, moved to Goa to escape familiar faces. He hasn’t nearly succeeded. “I wanted to not be at home,” he says. Home in this sentence translates to Bengaluru, a city where his parents resided, but in another might mean Mumbai, Kerala, Delhi, Hong Kong, New York, Paris—places he’s briefly called home. In each city, he has written himself in and out as poems, novels, songs. Narcopolis, These Errors Are Correct, Low, The Book of Chocolate Saints, all feature them. Themes of memory, faith, addiction, displacement, the dreamscape of grief run through them like a writer’s obsession. But his latest, The Elsewhereans, might be his most intimate and experimental yet—a novel built like a family photo album, flickering between memory and invention, documenting what can and cannot be remembered.

Even though it had all the makings of one, Thayil says he always knew The Elsewhereans wouldn’t be a memoir. “The great advantage of switching to fiction is that it allows you to dip into the minds of so many characters, which immediately opens the book up.” The novel follows Ammu and George, and the life they built, the homes they left behind, and the cities they salted into memory.

The book began, Thayil says, when he decided to become a son, leaving Delhi for Bengaluru when his mother fell ill. “I stayed and helped,” he says. “And I’m very, very glad I did.”

In the ease of doors left ajar in their Bengaluru home, it turned out that writing wasn’t such a lonely profession after all. “I would be working on something and wouldn’t be sure about a date or detail. I’d just walk across and ask.” His mother, then 90. His father, now 97. “They remembered everything. Names, dates, the order of things. They corrected me sometimes.” No phone calls, no waiting. Just the walk across the hall, a question asked and a memory handed back. He typed it on the spot before it slipped away again.

But writing about the living means asking them to live again. “I had to ask their permission,” he says. “Because they’re characters in this book, and they’re doing and saying things they never did in real life, as well as things they did. There would also be our extended family who might read it and mistake fiction for fact, but you can’t police a reader’s imagination, right?”

His father, however, didn’t mind. “He knows what it means to do any kind of writing. He makes a lot of allowances for art.” His mother felt differently. “She wasn’t happy when she heard some of the details,” he says. Still, she gave her permission. Maybe not so much for what was written, but for who was writing it.

By the time The Elsewhereans shaped up as a book—something with weight, with corners and spine—his mother was gone. She never saw the book cover, never saw that one photograph she couldn’t bear to look at make it to his cover. The photo showed another woman, on a motorbike. A close friend of his father’s, when he was in Vietnam. She looked like summer: brief, beautiful, unbothered, out of reach. “I want to tear her photo into a thousand pieces,” his mother had told him. But the photo became the first thing a reader sees.

I ask him if writing this book helped hold onto his mother, even as he was beginning to lose her.  It was hard, he tells me. But writing became something to steady his hands. The last chapter was written in the hospital room, the words arriving as the machines beeped and the hours bent inward.

The Elsewhereans reads like one long sentence between birth and death, moving through Kerala, Vietnam, Hong Kong, New York, Paris. I ask which city hurt the most to return to in language. Hong Kong, he says, and then talks about growing up there and having studied in three schools on the island. I can’t help but interrupt, “Were you ever expelled?” The smile arrives before he can stop it. “Not expelled, but suspended. More than once.” The principal’s name—Rivers Moore—has stayed with him. “I used to call him Rigor Mortis.”

We look at his boyhood days like we’re rearranging furniture, moving it slightly, stepping back, unsure if it looks better or worse. The present, by contrast, feels less uncertain. With the earlier novels he had to wait for them to feel real. This one? It galloped. On social media, readers are highlighting ‘undying sentences’, tagging him on homemade reviews, sending collab requests and DMs with way too many exclamation marks.

Does it bother an author to be read wrong? “Once a book is out there,” he says, “it no longer belongs to the writer. I’ve been a reader much longer than I’ve been a writer. I must have responded to many books in ways the writer wouldn’t have welcomed.” 

If books no longer belong to their authors, neither do the stories we tell about their lives. An article I had come across while researching Thayil, strangely, began with the line: Former Drug Addict and Writer Jeet Thayil... It felt crude, as if doing drugs was a profession that came with a pension plan and performance reviews. The man on my screen now—open, unguarded—speaks about sobriety without ornament. “My relationship to language hasn’t changed with sobriety. It’s just gotten easier to get work done,” he adds. “Writing is a lot of work. Earlier I didn’t have the patience to confine myself to one room.” These days, what unnerves him isn’t withdrawal but a messy desk, “I think if you have a cluttered mind, it really helps to have an uncluttered workspace.” He slants his laptop to show me his desk, spare, almost spartan, except for Joan Didion and Anton Chekhov.

He is staying at Birdsong in Moira (he says the name like it’s the title of a poem), far away from the faces that have become characters in his latest novel. The Elsewhereans cast also includes his relatives, their gestures and quirks folded neatly into the fabric of family lore. Did members of his extended family respond well to their fictional counterparts? He looks like he’d just gotten away with it. “For now, there’s an ominous silence.” A beat. “Hopefully it will stay that way.”

Thayil’s happier fielding less literal questions. Like when I ask him whether the body holds memory differently than the mind. “The body doesn’t play tricks, unlike the mind,” he says. “Smell, light, even just walking into a room—these can bring back memories you didn’t know lived in you.” While writing this book, especially the part about his own birth—a long, difficult labour—his grandmother’s voice returned to him. And her stories. “She had a wealth of stories, including those the family would have rather buried.” It’s clear with The Elsewhereans he has done her proud. Even if she might have added a few footnotes.

In recording his parents’ lives, Thayil has traced the shape of his own. Did writing this book then make him confront his choices? Did playing a son make him wish, even faintly, that he’d been a father too? "The way my life played out, it wouldn’t make much sense to have had a child. But yes, I do understand now why people have kids.” In the breather between questions, it occurs to me that this book is his bequest, his heirloom. And the reader its keeper.

What working on this book did do is remind the 65-year-old writer that he is probably in the last phase of his life. He doesn’t sound grim when he says this. Just like someone who’s opened every window in the house to let the dusk in. He’s writing more. He calls his books projects. And he wants each one to be unlike the last. A mother-son duo crime novel is already underway in Goa. The other stories shift in the dark, tap their feet, impatient to be let out and onto the page.

The Elsewhereans by Jeet Thayil is out on Harper Collins; ₹699