Truth, lies and fiction with Upamanyu Chatterjee

The book is about Lorenzo, a 19-year-old Italian who meets with an accident and, while recovering, dwells on his life and decides he’s dissatisfied with it. He joins a prayer group and a Benedictine monastery, where he stays for 10 years, after which a young companion leads him to Bangladesh, a journey which puts him in contact with another language, the unnerving experience of washing clothes in public, and starting a physiotherapy clinic.

Chatterjee began gathering Fabrizio’s story in 2018 and shared two drafts of the novel with him, allowing him to veto embellishments which he felt altered the essence of the story. “There was a character in the Bangladesh ashram whose background I didn’t know, so I cooked something up. But when I showed it to Fabrizio, he said it’s all wrong, that I was making fun of a very serious guy. So I lopped that part out,” said Chatterjee.

Commenting on the difficulty for a writer to maintain distance and objectivity with a subject, Menon drew attention to the thin line between biography and fiction. “There were moments when I thought, why not pluck the protagonist out of north Italy and drop him into a small Indian town? Apart from the fact that it wasn’t the story I was following, I realised that that’s not what attracted me to the story [in the first place],” said Chatterjee, adding, “I imposed on it a pattern that I felt made the unfolding [of the story] clear.”

In response to an audience question on whether “all lives can be equally interesting” subject matter for writers, Fabrizio said, “It’s true I made a very seminal decision which marked my life. But when Upamanyu told me he wanted to write a book on my life, I thought, who’d be interested in it? So I think all of us have a very interesting life and story inside us. And it’s up to the skill of a writer to find out and express what can be interesting for readers.”