Personality - Kavery Nambisan

Sonya Dutta Chaudury

Surgeon-writer Kavery Nambisan was in Delhi attending a writer’s conference when she got the news. “A friend called saying I had been shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. Yes, it feels good but I’m also a little embarr assed (at the attention). After all, it’s only a shortlist.”

It’s a quiet casualness that’s typical of Nambisan’s own life. And of her life choices. From village girl to surgeon. From an intern in England to a practicing doctor in dacoit-infested Mokama in Bihar . She returned to India (like her heroine Nalli in The Hills of Anngheri, when she had had enough of “sunless winters” and felt that “something must be done before the frost settled in my heart’.)

Nambisan began writing decades ago with a debut novel that features medics, dacoits and life in India, entitled The Truth (almost) about Bharat. Her latest book, The Story That Must not be Told, is a tale of Simon Jesukumar, an aging widower, who finds himself stirred by the condition of a slum next door and ends up getting involved with slum terrorists. It’s this book that has been recognised by the Man Asian Literary Prize. This prize, begun in 2006, is still infant cousin to the Booker but it carries with it a cash prize of US$ 10,000 plus a whole lot of recognition. Nambisan shares her place on the shortlist with Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghavi as well as two Philippino authors, Miguel Syjuco and Alfred A. Yuson, and Chinese writer Yu Hua.

Favourites

Comparisons with current Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga are inevitable. Interestingly both write about rural India. But whereas Adiga is bitingly critical in a voyeuristic V.S. Naipaul kind of way; Nambisan’s novels, with their wealth of colourful detail, shine through with a quiet activism. But Nambisan hasn’t read The White Tiger. Of Indian writing in English, she says, “My all-time favourite is English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee (it feels genuine) and the play “Harvest” by Manjula Padmanabhan. Manju Kapoor, Shashi Deshpande and Usha K.R. are also writers I admire because they have stayed true to their voices.”

It’s not easy to meet Nambisan. She lives, with poet-husband Vijay, in a hill town 100 km from Mumbai. “We have a house with a garden in a small colony, but we are the only permanent residents. People come from Mumbai for weekends, for parties, and to unwind.” It’s a quiet life. Still Kavery and Vijay have a lot to keep them busy. “We run a medical centre mainly for migrant labour and also a learning centre for children. The children from the ages 4-14 are taught English, Hindi and Marathi, also subjects like arithmetic,” explains Kavery. The couple don’t travel much, apart from the annual visit to Coorg and Bangalore, where family live. Also in Bangalore is Nambisan’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Chetana (“she’s not a doctor, she a biotechnologist,” Nambisan tells me).

Pattern on life

This has been the pattern of their lives, ever since the day two years ago, when Nambisan decided to retire from active surgery and a well paid job with the Tatas; to move instead to being ordinary GP, with its “sense of wonderful interaction with the community”. At Nambisan’s clinic in Lonavala, consultation is free and medicines are charged at cost.

I ask Nambisan, over the phone from Mumbai, how the couple make ends meet, and how they fund their various projects. She laughs, a little awkwardly. “Yes, people ask that all the time. We fund our projects with our own savings. And I suppose we lead a frugal lifestyle. When we need money, I can always go back to work.”

But for now they are content. They work at their writing. As Nambisan explains, “For 20 years, I juggled a busy surgical schedule with my attempts to write. I wrote for about half an hour in the mornings, maybe an hour in the evenings and a couple of hours on Sundays. But the mind works all the time, doesn’t it? You’re writing all the time, subconsciously… Strangely, I don’t find myself writing more, or less. My daily life as a surgeon was quite hectic. It’s no less hectic now but I do more housework than I did earlier.”

I ask her if she ever sees herself as an Indian Robin Cook; given her wealth of experience in medicine, her encounters with the cartels of organised medicine and her courage in exposing it: One time at a hospital in Chennai that blatantly made money on expired medicines; another time in Kerala where a supposed reputed doctor induced medical conditions in order to be able to operate on them.

You read some of these exposes in her books, I tell her, but in a gentle AJ Cronin kind of way. “AJ Cronin was a teenage favourite,” she confesses. But no, she doesn’t see herself as bound in any single frame — like a medical frame. For now she’s happy with her projects and her diverse writing, of which her current assignment is a non-fiction book on ‘Healthcare’.