Chitra Viraraghavan’s ‘The Americans’ – Book Launch at Landmark, Hyderabad (Part 2)

There was a nice moist-eye moment during the conversation when Chitra Viraraghavan’s own hero flashed into the limelight to soothe the parched throat of his damsel in cough-stress … caught in the crossfire between cough and concern, the bottle cap suffered some damage!!

The conversation was lively and energetic and after that the discussion was ‘thrown open to the public’ … the first question itself, I felt, was a googly and Chitra Viraraghavan was, if I am not mistaken, slightly bamboozled by it … ‘what is the message that you want to convey through your novel and its final denouement (one couldn’t miss hearing this word; what with an insistent ‘ment’ denting the air…three times…)?’  Chitra Viraraghavan managed to retain her composure and said that what she wants to say is in the novel and one should read the novel to see what she has to say … very tactfully answered … the questioner was not to be denied, he asked again, the same question … I told Vinod what answer Kamala Haasan had given to a similar question … ‘what message do you want to deliver through your film?’  Kamala Haasan answered, ‘I am not a postman to deliver messages.’  Vinod doubled up with laughter...

There weren’t too many questions and then Chitra Viraraghavan and Sridala Swami were asked to unwrap the novel and the book was launched officially in Hyderabad …

I must say this … the cover is stunning … The Americans and Chitra Viraraghavan in suspended 3D animation atop the city of garbled skyscrapers  and a genie like figure hovering above them all … approaching the city … in animated suspension …

We got ready to leave…Vinod bought a copy and got it signed by Chitra Viraraghavan... he said he wanted to meet his other novelist friend Harimohan Paruvu before we left .… (Vinod should join the company soon … then I can say, 'Vinod, my novelist friend' … ) then Vinod and I left …

(If Chitra Viraraghavan is reading this, then I want to tell her that I didn’t buy The Americans that day as I was seriously out of pocket … what with irregular inflow and arid accounts and all that … I will buy it as soon as it starts raining, hopefully soon, and get it signed by her, whenever she is in Hyderabad …)

(I had wanted to write about the novel launch, but the next day when I was browsing the net trying to see where The Americans was available online, I hit upon Harimohan Paruvu’s blog and he had already written about the book launch (http://harimohanparuvu.blogspot.in/2014/05/book-launch-of-americans-by-chitra.html) and he had written it so well that I left a comment saying that I had planned to write about the event, but since he had written such an evocative account of the launch that nothing more needs to be said … Harimohan was very gracious and replied that I too should write and that he looked forward to reading my account of the launch…so, Harimohan, here it is…)

Chitra Viraraghavan’s ‘The Americans’ – An account of the book launch at Landmark, Hyderabad (Part 1)

When Shruti and I met Vinod at CCD for chai and chat, Vinod asked us if we would be free on 02 May 2014, to attend a book launch.  He informed us that the author is known to him and that he’d forward the invitation.  I received the invite a couple of days later and I saw that the book to be launched was in fact a novel called The Americans written by Chitra Viraraghavan...

Vinod had a couple of times earlier informed me about book launches and invited me to attend.  Many of Vinod’s friends are writers and movie directors and they are all very creative and quite a few of them have written books and Vinod unfailingly invites me to their book launches.  But for some reason or other I couldn’t attend these book launches, but this time I decided I shall attend, come what may… and it was just May...

This is the debut novel of Chitra Viraraghavan and she would be ‘in a conversation’ with Sridala Swami, poet and writer… and then the book would be launched … in Hyderabad … I reached Landmark half an hour early and since it is a bookshop there were very few people (!), so, there was lots of space to move around and browse … there were discount boards everywhere … and whatever book I picked up, I kept wondering, ‘wonder how much this would cost on Amazon or Flipkart or Infibeam’ … I saw some people around the launch area (I am starting to sound like an ISRO engineer at Sriharikota…!!!) and guessed that one of the ladies who looked happy, tired, and tense all at the same time must be the author, Chitra Viraraghavan … and then when some distinguished looking elderly people came over and congratulated her, my guess became a ‘yes’… I could hear her saying that she had been giving interviews to people and publications, and that she is tired and her throat is acting up … she clearly was tired and said she wanted to relax a bit … maybe some mildly fluttering butterflies too … she said to an elderly lady that she’d take a walk around the shop and unwind … then she changed her mind and said she’d actually go out and stroll around a bit … I didn’t know what she did eventually …

By that time it was nearing 6.30, and the seats started filling up … lots of friends, well-wishers, some family members too, I think … a clean shaven gentleman with hair falling over his forehead that threatened to cover his glasses too, was hovering around the author looking concerned … Vinod came in around that time and we caught up with books and pens … and it was Vinod who told me who this man was …  he had reason to be a bit concerned, I felt, when I learnt that that he is Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, the author’s husband and author of novels Jump Cut and Ice Boys in Bell Bottoms … Krishna Shastri then came and sat beside Vinod and I noticed the wonderful pair of leather ankle boots he was wearing … Red Tape? Lee Cooper? or maybe some foreign brand …

The conversation started a little while after 6.40 … it began with the author and her interlocutor (?) sharing some early childhood memories … familiarizing the audience with their familiarity with each other … Sridala Swami, I thought was very good with her comments and queries … there was a comment which I thought took the matter to the heart of the novel, when Sridala Swami talked about the multi generic narrative style of The Americans, and compared it with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas … I particularly like this multi generic narrative style and liked novels that played around with the narrative structure like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, and others (Jai, you are showing off!!!) … and felt that this would surely go in The Americans’  favour … though Chitra Viraraghavan confessed that she hadn’t read Cloud Atlas, she said she was aware of the novel’s multi-generic nature and in case of her novel, different genres of writing came in as a natural feature and these represent the characters’ views of the world and life … to illustrate this point, Chitra Viraraghavan then read out from her book a scene, which she called the ‘item song’ part of her novel, where Shahrukh Khan appears in the dream/ imagination of a girl and serenades and dances with her … there was also a Hindi song interspersed … but the desire to sing was overpowered by the need to maintain correct Hindi pronunciation and Chitra Viraraghavan declined to sing and just read the Hindi song …  properly in Hindi pronunciation … our loss …