'I'm really a nice and gentle person'

Getting an interview with Upamanyu Chatterjee is a tortuous affair, one which involves navigating the red tape of the Great Welfare State that the author lampooned so well in his Agastya Sen novels.
It takes several rebuffs from his secretary and some frustrated calls to the publisher just to get the IAS officer on the phone.
The run-around seems to confirm Chatterjee's reputation for arrogance.His publisher apologetically explains, however, that "He is like that. What to do?"
In an age when writers are often at the mercy of publishers who want to market them like products, it's admittedly refreshing to see the reverse situation.
Chatterjee recounts how a Calcutta journalist who came to interview him thought his first novel English, August was written by Rahul Bose, the actor who plays the alienated young IAS officer Agastya Sen in Dev Benegal's film. "After that, I stopped giving interviews," he smiles.
Chatterjee is an elusive interviewee (it doesn't help that he keeps checking the time). He refuses to be drawn into larger comments on his work, on contemporary Indian literature, or even, given his penchant for unpleasantly graphic sex, on why so many Indians get nominated for the Bad Sex Literary Award.
He would rather dissect Bhola, the randy protagonist of Weight Loss, but here, too, he avoids quotable quotes, like the one about Agastya being a "morally loose man in a morally loose world". "Me and my big mouth," he says ruefully when the line is quoted back to him.
Weight Loss weighs you down, its bleak portrayal of a debauched life only redeemed by Chatterjee's bang-on-target satirical humour. "It's a conflict between the sensual and the spiritual.
The book is a requiem for a wasted life, about a person who knows that he is losing out, who makes his choices knowing that he is wrong. Bhola's end is awful but it's inevitable," says Chatterjee, adding dryly that the perceived bleakness is probably "a fallout of growing old".
This is Chatterjee's fourth novel, yet he remains famous for his first. Does it rankle? He answers indirectly by talking about his second novel The Last Burden which contained a lot of "unfinished rage" that found expression in Weight Loss.
"When English, August came out, everyone told me, without exception, that because it was so easy to read it must have been easy to write," he says. So he wrote The Last Burden to prove them wrong: "It was difficult to read and difficult to write."
Despite satirising the State, Chatterjee has not been tempted to leave the IAS. He acknowledges the contradiction and the comfort of his choice, but adds that the establishment has been good to him and that he has enjoyed the variety of his postings from health to heritage.
"I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons." Writing is a discipline like jogging, he says. He writes every day with a fountain pen and feels no one should watch television.
What does Chatterjee, who is part of an earlier generation of Indian-English writers, think of the current crop? The outpouring is nice, he says non-committally, but he hasn't read the new authors, not on principle, but because he's "waiting for the dust to settle".
But he's roused when asked about the idea of a Stephanian school of writers, a categorisation he firmly rejects. "They've even said, without irony or comedy, that if Vikram Seth had been educated in India, he would have gone to Stephen's.
It's complete nonsense, just junk," he says with a vigour he immediately regrets. "No, no, tone that down. I'm really a nice and gentle person. Just say he shrugged or something."