

Reviews for Inez Baranay

Neem Dreams

Baranay has risen above her feminine voice and foreigner perspective to strike a neutral unbiased language as far as basic values and issues are concerned. She uncannily conjures splashes of Indian reactions, attitudes or relationships with as much authenticity as she does the American, Australian and British ethos. What makes the novel endearing is the high voltage resonance of the poignant tales of the protagonists woven around the theme of globalisation, leaving a sea wave effect on the readers long after they have finished the read.

The Hindu, 21 November 2003

Sun Square Moon

Inez is a writer. She is a yogini. She has traveled the world telling her stories and her story here is about her art and her yoga, it is about awareness, about creativity, and about her journey through those worlds. It's a story with a disarming honesty She scotches the rumour that yoga produces an empty head and a flaccid sex life. She brings her awareness from yoga to writing and takes it the other way as well. This is one of the few books on yoga that is not trivia.

Norman Sjoman,

author of Yoga Touchstone and The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace. http://www.blacklotusbooks.com/links/gate.htm

With The Tiger

Inez Baranay is very correct and vivid in her portrayal of India's flavours of vadai, coffee and the music season. She exposes the experiences India offers foreigners seeking 'nirvana'. Deccan Herald

The Edge of Bali

Baranay writes evocatively of the Bali landscape, raising serious questions within vivid description. New myths jostle with the old. The Sydney Morning Herald

Sheila Power: an entertainment

A rattling good read that defies that defies pigeon-holing into any one genre. Sydney Star Observer

Pagan

Pagan is brilliantly written. As well as being very readable, it offers a highly intelligent analysis of the themes of Australia's 20th century cultural history. The Advertiser

Between Careers

Like good sex Between Careers gets better and better. The Sydney Morning Herald

Rascal Rain: a year in Papua New Guinea

Her experiences have resulted in a highly readable account of a world left behind by the 6 o'clock news. Cleo

all titles by Inez Baranay will be available as ebooks by the end of 2011 For full reviews and more please visit

http://www.inezbaranay.com

A Passage to Neem Dreams

a meta-text: about the writing of Neem Dreams

by Inez Baranay

Copyright Inez Baranay 2011

Ebook edition

Cover design by Daniel Stephensen

http://www.forgetlings.net

License Note

The author is happy to offer a DRM-free ebook edition through Smashwords. This book is free. You can buy Neem Dreams and other books by Inez Baranay at Smashwords.

http://www.inezbaranay.com

Contents

Introduction

1 How does a novel begin

2 The meaning of India

3 Reading A Passage To India

4 The narrative imperative: aspects of two novels

5 Travels with EM Forster

6 Discovering neem in FNQ

7 Mr Ketkar

8 Professor Nemesis

9 Neem travels Tamil Nadu

10 Creator & narrator

11 Pandora

12 Andy

13 Meenakshi

14 Jade

15 Three main drafts: issues in writing and rewriting: drafts, influences,

16 The writer's setting: The Island, The City, The Coast

17 Appendices: Process Notes

References

Further reading

About the author

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Passage to Neem Dreams is partly a memoir about writing Neem Dreams, partly a critical study of my own novel.

Neem Dreams took several years and three main drafts. I had already been working on it for years when I was persuaded (without much difficulty if I recall correctly) to undertake writing a dissertation for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia where I had begun to teach in the Creative Writing Program. My subject became the writing of Neem Dreams and included themes such as my research in India, representations of India by a non-Indian, issues in creating a novel, issues in fictive character and, as well, the ways yoga practice might be compared with writing practice. Writings that developed the yoga theme were collected in a separate publication, called Sun Square Moon: Writings on Yoga and Writing which was first published in India by Writers Workshop Kolkata (and now is available as a free e-book).

What follows in this book is a selection of writings that began as part of my dissertation (my PhD was awarded in 2003). Some have been previously published as journal articles or book chapters. ('Further Reading' gives links to pieces that have been published and are not all included here.)

What is Neem Dreams 'about'? Let me quote from the following pages:

About India. About globalisation. About 300 pages. About mainly these four characters ... Neem Dreams is about Westerners in India, it's about cultural exchange, it's about how politics and myths, as well as personal products, are made, it's about how globalisation works to perpetuate the powerlessness of the powerless... It will be about what its future readers and critics say it's about.

This collection, A Passage to Neem Dreams, as its name suggests, courts the influence of EM Forster, both as the novelist who wrote A Passage to India (1924) and a still pertinent writer on the novel in Aspects of the Novel (1955).

I hope my A Passage to Neem Dreams may be of interest to writers, writing students, people with a particular interest in India, neem, memoir, or writers on writing, and perhaps even the general reader.

Inez Baranay

November 2011

1 How does a novel begin?

Stories have so many beginnings and no real ends.

How does a novel begin? The reader says, a novel begins with the first line. The reader says, a novel begins with the desire to read, the desire to read a novel, the desire to read a particular kind of novel, the desire to read this novel. Each of these desires has its own beginning, its own origins.

How does a novel begin? The desire to write has multiple origins, the desire to write a novel, the desire to write this particular novel.

How does a novel begin? The writer says, I always wanted to write a novel set in India, or, these characters insisted I write about them, or, neem appeared as the perfect trope. This is what the writer says when a short answer is called for and the next question already formed.

Neem Dreams begins with the sentence: It is the best tree in the world.

Beginning the investigation raises, first, the question of beginning. How did this novel begin? When can it be said that the writer has begun writing a particular novel?

How far back can you trace the germs, the seeds, the sprouting seeds that grow into a novel? What is its reason for being? Its cause? What are the novel's origins, its sources, its derivation?

As Edward Said says in his book Beginnings:

In each of the following relatively innocuous statements the sense derives prominently from a common sense understanding of the concept of 'beginnings': 'Conrad began his career with Almayer's Folly'; 'Pride and Prejudice begins with the following sentence'; 'Pope began to write at an early age'; 'Before he began to write Hemingway would sharpen a dozen pencils'; 'This is what one ought to do at the beginning'; 'Civilization can be said to have begun in the Near East'; 'As soon as he began to know Odette better Swann started to suspect her'; 'From beginning to end Flaubert was ever the artist'. Of quite another order of meaning are such statements as 'In the beginning was the Word' or 'In my beginning is my end'. (Said 1975: 4)

And so on. Researching beginning was an encounter with the first of several themes that revealed their potential to monopolise the whole of this dissertation.

I began to write when I was a child.

The writing of Neem Dreams begins with the writer's origins, the early addiction to reading and writing, the meaning of reading and writing in her life. Perhaps it begins with the family though not all writers' families are at all alike and they all produce writers. This writer was born elsewhere and came to live in an Australia that was very elsewhere.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was a book of my childhood. Poor sickly Mary's parents died of cholera in India but still India was somewhere you came from and missed, memory of rain and wind-chimes, and it had set you free to go to your secret garden.

I read Kipling's Kim as a child. India was a place of characters you longed to encounter, adventures and experiences extreme and extremely desirable, of knowledge mysterious and profound and yet available to you if you were only there, a place a child could wander about in, protected and connected and working for some mysterious higher purpose.

Neem Dreams begins with a desire to write about India, to set a novel in India. And that desire can be seen as the desire to possess, to make a mark, especially these days when we have post-colonial language in which to wonder about desires like these. It begins with the desire for elsewhere, a desire that is as constant a part of the writer as her height and eye colour.

I began my career with Between Careers.

Neem Dreams begins with the writer's own history of writing and publishing; the books that have already been created, teaching her to write and preparing her to write Neem Dreams. It begins with all the re-inventions of the desires to write, become a writer, to re-discover writing.

Before I begin writing I make a pot of coffee.

Neem Dreams begins when its characters begin to take on a life, that famous life-of-their-own moment in a fiction-writer's life. The writer becomes pregnant: there is conception, not always consciously, there is quickening, there is growth into birth.

Each character claims to be the beginning of Neem Dreams, each character with their own origins, their struggle to breathe, grow, astonish you, be understood, fulfil their destiny.

Neem Dreams begins with the desire to write about yoga in a novel. It begins with the practice and study of yoga and it begins with the discovery or habit of finding fiction the place to search for - what can we call it? - call it truth.

What we call the beginning is often the end. ('Little Gidding', Eliot 221)

Another beginning is the anti-patents arguments in the neem patents issue. Sympathy and indignation are aroused. It begins with the kind of things that arouse sympathy and indignation. Indignation and more: anger, anguish, loathing at the increasing domination in our world of the culture of transnational corporations, and all that that implies. Sympathy for all the movements and philosophies that name and challenge this. Socialism, environmentalism, eco-feminism, and later, the movement against corporate globalisation. What can you do? What is your duty? You are a novelist. Put it in a novel.

Beginnings imply not only origins but causes. Aristotle famously said there are the four causes, the material, formal, efficient and final causes. A novel will encompass all those things. The writer's body, the tools she uses, the established form of the novel, the offering of the novel to the world: all these are implied in attention to the beginning. The beginning implies the end.

The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning. (Said 1975: 5)

My childhood included Christian religious teachings so I always knew this about the beginning:

In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1)

And while I have never succeeded in understanding quite what that is supposed to mean, nor taken the Bible as authority, still, it points to a powerful idea that the world itself is based on language. We talk of 'reading' the world.

It begins when you first go to India, breathe in the air of Bombay, dizzying with its masala of petrol fumes and all those spices, cardamom, cumin, fenugreek; of promise and experience, something you have always longed for without knowing what it is.

The novel began in the sixteenth century. (Said 1975: 5)

A novel begins with all the novels you have read before, which begin with all the novels before that.

(To begin....But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that for the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.) (Calvino 1982a: 122)

From beginning to end I was always a writer.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning. (Eliot 221)

What is between, is narrative.

Of all the beginnings, the oldest of these is India.

2 The meaning of India: early travels

I play the game knowing I am the game. That, is the meaning of India. (Rao, R. 1996: Introduction)

This was for aeons the future. That you would be in India. That suddenly you would have to be here. On every level, you tell yourself, it's the next thing to do. Suddenly a certainty rhyming with a tickling little joy. (Neem Dreams )

I'll always be homesick wherever I am. You wrote that line a long time ago and it often re-occurs to you. Always homesick, always missing some place. What are you homesick for? A particular house on its particular property? A city, a region? Being only a walk away from a decent café, being where the whereness of where you are makes you stop still, astounded by the beingness of being here. It's not one place. You get homesick for nature, you get homesick for culture. You get homesick for not hearing your own language around you all the time or you get homesick for running into a decent conversation most days.

You're homesick for how a place used to be and you're homesick for how it is going to be, namely with you back in it.

One of the places you are homesick for is India.

India. The way you always say it. The very word, the sounds that say India. The syllable of intrusion, introdirection, consuming, in. The tongue caressing the palate, a deep-stroking nnn. Arrested on a dental stop: d. Swooning on a widening exhalation of sensation and wonder eee-aahh. Iinnddiiaa, say it, let it roll in your mouth, tasting of cloves and quinine. (Neem Dreams )

But what do you mean by India? You've only been to a few parts of it, it is a vast land, part of a vast sub-continent, famously various. You know the notion of nation is a construct of recent history; it's not a nation you want to go to, it's not even exactly a country.

Faced with such diversity, we can legitimately ask if India is indeed a nation....On the one hand, India is a conglomeration of peoples, cultures, languages, and religions; on the other, it is a territory under the dominion of a state regulated by a national constitution....India, as Jayaprakash Narayan once said, is 'a nation in the making.' (Paz 75)

India is that and more, it's a place we need to be more than that. Raja Rao puts it best:

This exaltation for India, which we Indians ourselves share with others objectively, historically, spiritually, is not an indication by any means of the truth of India, but of the need for an India. (Rao 1996: 17)

It is 1980. You are returning to Australia after eighteen months 'away', though going to Europe had itself been kind of returning – place of your birth and ancestry – and you'd had parts of a hope you'd end up staying away.

It is the longest period you have been away from Australia and your first trip to Europe since you left it as a baby with your parents, refugees leaving the shattered Old World for, and it's not quite a choice, The New World.

Now you have been to Hungary, your father's birthplace, Switzerland, your mother's, Italy, where you were born, some parts of Italy, and you looked hard in Italy for an offer you couldn't refuse, one that would mean staying. You've been to Spain and Morocco, where life was flavored with all the intensity, strangeness, adventure and wonder you still persist in feeling life should always provide. There was cosy Amsterdam, _echt gezellig_ through a long winter: real snow, a fur coat, warm cafés. You are leaving your first mature true-love affair. You've made new friends, re-connected with a few old ones. You have discovered you are an Australian. You have written the first draft of your first novel. You've turned thirty and now you can no longer put it off, are no longer able to say, Not yet, one day. Now you're hearing, Now, it's now, even, Now or never. You're going back to Australia, not knowing where you will live, how you will earn money, sure you will write, no clue how it's going to be.

You really don't want to get in a plane in Amsterdam and get out a day later back in Sydney.

The cheapest air-fare back to Australia is with Indian Airlines, offering a stopover in India. A friend from Sydney visits. Jude will remain in Europe, live in Paris. ('Why did you leave Australia?' 'The men.') She tells stories about her recent travels in India: holi (an annual holiday, coloured paints thrown about in the streets) in Jaipur, a temple in Puri, the markets where she bought these intriguing little handcrafted toys. She wears a dark red silk pajama-type outfit and says you can get these all over India. It was 1980. Such were our choices.

Their pride, their city, the city of multiple millions, glittery and complex and mean and charming, ruled by a three-headed goddess. Politics, Commerce and Culture flourish in these dark and twinkling miles of movie studios, international agencies, copywriters, the seaside circus promenade, slums and shanties and street people, the crowds of men you saw coming in from the airport yesterday - India! I'm here! - at 2 a.m. on even then-crowded streets crackling with rude vitality, the existence of marginal things in extraordinary proportions. (Neem Dreams )

Gulping in the odorous air, I can just see you as you arrive for the first time in Bombay: the years in Southeast Asia made you a sucker for the dizzy delight of spiced breezes, spiced fuel exhaust, spice in the stenches and perfumes of a place that is so very other you almost feel at home.

The Scent of India is the title Pier Paolo Pasolini gave his travel diary. He describes looking at some Indians on the night of his arrival (it was 1962):

Along the little embankment which contains [the sea] there are some cars parked and near to them, are those fabulous beings without roots, without consciousness, full of ambiguous and disturbing meaning, but endowed with powerful fascination, who are the first Indians with experiences, experiences which desire to be exclusive, like mine. (Pasolini:10)

No one could say it like that these days, even think it, for our gaze has become much more self-conscious. He is talking about the beggars and the homeless, and you can't not talk about them, for although they are among India's greatest clichés, there are clichés that it is worse to avoid than insist on.

Steadying her parcels in the jolting rickshaw, wondering what the comforting thought can be, but among the beggars of India she is only feeling the same dumb things.

Observe the Indians, they'll chase a beggar away, they'll tell you beggars have bank accounts, then they'll throw coins in the bowls of the beggars who line the entrance to temples. The right beggars, the wrong beggars.

Only give to the ones who are crippled. Only give to the ones who'll never be able to get a job.

As if the able-bodied beggars were unemployed because of their own defects.

Weren't they reaping karma?

As if this were consolation. As if you believed that. As if they did. (Neem Dreams )

Pasolini's first night was spent, of course, at the Taj Mahal Hotel, a Bombay landmark, almost as famous as the distant monument it is named for. The Taj Mahal Hotel is also described in Octavia Paz's In Light of India, also near the beginning:

If this book were a memoir and not an essay, I would devote pages to that hotel. It is real and chimerical, ostentatious and comfortable, vulgar and sublime. It is the English dream of India at the beginning of the century, an India populated by dark men with pointed mustaches and scimitars at their waists, by women with amber-colored skin, hair and eyebrows as black as crows' wings and the huge eyes of lionesses in heat. Its elaborately ornamented archways, its unexpected nooks, its patios, terraces, and gardens are both enchanting and dizzying. It is a literary architecture, a serialized novel. Its passageways are the corridors of a lavish, sinister, and endless dream. A setting for a sentimental tale or a chronicle of depravity. (Paz: 9)

And in Anthonio Tabucchi's fictive travel memoir, Indian Nocturne, the luxury of the Taj is in contrast to the squalid slums he has been exploring until now:

The only inhabitants of Bombay who take no notice of the 'right of admission' regulations in force at the Taj Mahal are the crows... [T]he Taj is not a hotel:...it is a city within a city....I watched the women and the jewels, the turbans, the fezes, the veils, the trains, the evening dresses, the moslems and the millionaire Americans, the old magnates and the spotless silent servants. (Tabucchi 21–5)

But you, the way you travel is stay somewhere cheap and go to the best hotel for a drink. You too watch people in the lobby at the Taj for hours, browse in its lustrous shopping arcade, eat your first masala dosa in one of its restaurants. That Japanese woman you met on the excursion to the Elephant Caves invites you for a drink in her room at the Taj. This is your established travel modus operandi: relishing being alone and striking up brief acquaintances here and there. Weren't you in love at the time? You like to travel alone nevertheless. I remember the way you used to ponder whether brevity was the price of intimacy or intimacy the price of brevity.

There are those three Canadians also staying at the YWCA, you smoke hashish in their room and discuss being in India for the first time. The girl was freaked out. There was a discussion I recall whenever I contemplate young travelers, about what kind of local people they meet – people in service, usually, not other students and professionals. 'You're travelling out of your class,' seems to be a sudden, stunning insight for one of the boys. He lends you a volume of James Morris' enthralling history of the British Empire, remember, and you mailed it back to Canada.

Your memories of Bombay have been layered like a palimpsest by subsequent times in that city, layers that bleed into each other.

Take a train and bus to Goa as the boat does not operate in this season. In Goa the beach has been closed, lashed by wild seas and the monsoon deluge. A lot of the guesthouses and restaurants are closed down too. Very few foreign tourists remain in this popular tourist area, a few junkies too wasted to go anywhere. Find a guesthouse; no one else seems to be staying. Electricity blackouts are frequent and everything is sodden, clothes, bedsheets, books, whether it rains or not. Have a long solitary dinner at a private house discretely advertising this service, on a spacious wooden verandah looking into a huge tree, course after course of exquisite Goan Portuguese cooking. The matriarch sits with you a while and gives you a recipe and tells you that Indians do not like the hippies. It interests you that you are not seen as a hippie. You are wearing a cotton sweater from Florence. You used to wear long Indian dresses as a student.

The guesthouse is some distance from the restaurant area. Experience an unforgettable ecstasy, finding your way back in pitch darkness, your senses sharper than normal in the black wet brilliant night, an intense aliveness that is the monsoon.

Your gold-coloured umbrella, bought in Venice and mended in Amsterdam, is much admired; Indian umbrellas generally do not withstand winds and rain of this force. Ah, so while the handcrafts are enchanting, the factory goods are shoddy in this pre-free-trade era, foreign pens and batteries desirable. Browse in antique shops and buy a couple of little brass things, a lamp and a pot (what happened to them?) and a miniature Mogul-style painting, painted not on canvas, not on bone, but on ivory, which you still do not realise it is wrong to buy; a painting you will accidentally destroy in Sydney when in a fit of housecleaning you wipe it over with a wet cloth and smear the paint. A Dutch woman, loud and hostile, tells the proprietor I have a shop too, in Europe and there we do not bargain, we have one price, the same price for everyone! Take buses to towns and markets. Have dinner at a restaurant, on another large verandah looking onto dripping trees. Here you talk to the most charming, witty boy, ten years old, Francis, who works there, lives there as a general kind of waiter and servant. Later he turns up the music and you dance, you two. He's good. Another night you are joined here by a party of wealthy, well-travelled young Indians, jet-setters, who talk with brittle verve of the conveniences of marriage and money – how dashingly confident they are – and somehow the boy's remarkable quality is in the spotlight and one of the men announces he is going to pay to send the boy to a very good school. What do you say, Francis? What do you say to this good man? You have often wondered about the sequel to that now dream-like moment.

In Jaipur in 1980 there is that boy who meets you at the hotel gate each morning to show you the streets and markets, a young unofficial guide, practising his English, maybe training himself in being increasingly indispensable to tourists. People are standing around a man calling to a cow that trots inside this circle and the cow occasionally breaks its orbit to go towards one of the people. They hand over money when it does. At one point the cow comes towards you. What did he say? you ask your guide, who seems embarrassed as he replies that the question was: Who is the richest person here? This is meant to be a demonstration of the cow's credentials, you are the only white tourist here, everyone assumes you fit the bill, but do we believe it was the cow that had picked you out?

There were other, many other, ways to get your fortune told – a bird in a cage could pick out a card for you; a man could read your palm and so on: perhaps this is part of what people mean when they talk of India's 'spirituality'.

India is a promise of spiritual treasures. What are spiritual treasures, where is the possibility of accumulating spiritual treasures so that death will not be the degrading process he has witnessed but something else he can not imagine? Who is he now, to think these thoughts? (Neem Dreams )

Images that yet fresh images beget.

India is a text to be read: you could not have said this in these words then. Or maybe it is a text that one can only attempt to read:

India was a text that I was unable to unravel, a book I could not read. (Cronin 2)

In Jaipur too there are very few tourists. The heat is searing, the rain has not yet come. A scion of a jewelry empire takes you out sightseeing and dining. You look at photos of Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor wearing jewels his business has provided. And you hold in your hand an enormous diamond, for the first time seeing the point of diamonds, while he tells you it will go to the girl he will marry and he is intent on marrying a European.

These images that yet fresh images beget.

Six years later you are back in India. One day you are leaving the mountain resort of Gulmarg and your hotel finds a taxi you can share to return to Srinagar, share with a man from Jaipur and his blonde Italian wife. Kashmir is a long way from Rajasthan, but look. She wears the huge diamond, in the simplest setting, on her right hand. It takes you a moment too long, you missed the moment you could have said, Hey, remember? Maybe he did too.

This is in 1986. Your second trip to India begins with a month at the Yoga Institute at Pune. By now you have realised that yoga is in your life like writing is. The final draft of your first novel, now called Between Careers, is already years old; it has not been published yet but there is 'film interest' and you have embarked on the amusing experience of meetings with film producers and film funding bodies. You have published some short prose and have a half-year New Writer's grant. It's eight thousand dollars, and it is way cheaper to spend six months in India than stay in Sydney. Actually you can make this sum last most of a year if you spend most of the year in Asia. You sub-let your little flat in Elizabeth Bay. You spend two months in Bali before going to India, not travelling, staying in only two places and writing every day.

At first the Institute in Pune is overwhelming. You have met B.K.S. Iyengar in Sydney in 1984, interviewed him for a radio program. Are you a guru? you asked him then. Now you touch his feet.

You touch his feet and would never regret it. You are not the kind to go bowing to gurus, having seen a few of them by now. You spent two or three years doing every kind of New Age therapy – weekend workshops in the power of acknowledgment, chanting, rebirthing, psychic osmosis, past lives therapy even. Everything that is useful and wise in any of these (a bit in some, a very little bit in others) is found in yoga and far more, far less of what is faddish and silly.

I now renounce personal growth. (Neem Dreams )

In a little blue temple at the top of the road near your hotel there is chanting and bell-ringing and the striking of gongs. You have joined Kay here in Pune, your yoga teacher. You share meals and memories and the awesome quality of the teaching at the Institute, go sightseeing and shopping and talk trustingly about your families.

Six weeks on the houseboat in Kashmir follow.

Two long pieces on Bali, two long pieces on India, and the novella and short stories you write on this trip will be published in the short prose collection The Saddest Pleasure in 1989.

So you have begun to create your India but barely. One day there will be a novel.

There must be a novel. There will always be a novel in your life, life and novel forming each other, being formed by each other. Perhaps you are trying to approach truth and reality, perhaps you need to create a world you control, perhaps it's what stops you going mad; you will investigate, later, why there must be a novel, but, back then, even on your first trip to India, you know there must be a novel.

You go to Ladakh and stay there another six weeks, but you have never since published an account of this rather more extraordinary time. This area, its lunar landscape and Tantric Buddhist culture, was previously accessible only to hard-core trekkers but a road was recently built from Kashmir, a rough two-day journey. You are based in Leh and trek to sleep on stone floors in faraway gonpas; you attend festivals replete with possession and supernatural events; they have only recently had to accommodate the addition of touristic spectators.

The tourists' shopping needs are accommodated by an influx of Kashmiri traders, whose presence adds new tensions if you are inclined to notice them.

You spend more and more time at the Centre for Ecology in Leh, reading books on Buddhism. You begin to do voluntary work with Helena Norberg-Hodge with whom you record long interviews that will never be seen. (Her own book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh appears a few years later.) As I write this piece, the colour magazine supplement in a weekend newspaper has an article on Norberg-Hodge's current visit to Australia. Your fascination with questions of culture and tourism and ecology were given voice in your Bali writings earlier that year; here this fascination is enriched. Does tourism destroy other cultures or revitalise them, does it destroy environments, change them, destroy them, what relationships are possible between tourists and locals, what kind of culture is tourism itself?

You meet Tibetans who live in Leh, and hear their stories of the escape from Tibet when the Chinese invaded. You vow to tell these stories when you return.

But when you return you can't place your essays on the Tibetans in Ladakh or the Ecology movement there and anyway you fall into that post-India condition: a more intense than usual feeling of being displaced, a period of disorientation ('loss of the East' as Rushdie reminds us [Rushdie 1999: 176]), of maladjustment, even a kind of derangement, ridiculous exaggerations of response (hating shops where you can't bargain, hating streets without crowds and too many white people). It's horrible when you can't get a job and it's horrible when you have to work at anything but writing.

Years later you create a character in a novel who had spent seven years in Tibet and was fiercely dedicated to its cause but this novel (Sheila Power 1997) was a camp satire and Tibet had become a cliché of celebrity endorsement. People can read the character Saul as a send-up of fashions in rich Americans' liberal concerns but he is meant to be a romantic hero (soul) albeit in a fakey melodrama world. I would like to think that the odd reader will begin to know and care about Tibet's plight, and even that that will make a difference. How horrible this world is.

(And of course there is more to be said on the way the West makes Tibet a supernatural exception to customary knowledge of the way the world works, the way it needs to make Tibet a fantasy land of universal natural wisdom, as I am reminded, as I write this piece, by reviews of two new books on Tibet [Orville Schell's Virtual Tibet and Isabel Hilton's The Search for the Panchen Lama].)

You try to return to India several times in subsequent years. You try to arouse interest in non-fiction book projects: you propose to retrace the journeys of Isabella Bird, an eccentric nineteenth-century solo woman traveller; you propose to visit a range of Westerners who have made India their home. Doesn't happen.

But you do manage to go in 1995. By this time, you already know quite a lot about your India novel. More years have passed, you've been suicidal and you've been blissful, you don't live in Sydney any more, you have been to Papua New Guinea and the USA, you've published five books. You are going back to India, again with the assistance of a grant, and travelling specifically for the novel. The next two trips to India are the neem travels.

3 Reading A Passage to India

Another kind of travel to or within India had begun long before I set foot in the country.

I first read E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India (APTI) sometime in my student years, my teens. I was then reading a novel by a living writer. Any memory of this first reading has long dissolved. It seems that certain moments have always been unforgettable – Mrs Moore meeting Aziz in the mosque, a crazed Adele tearing out of the caves, the courtroom scene, the crowds that... But I begin to cite unforgettable moments known from subsequent and recent readings. It is impossible now to tell exactly what effect or impression that first reading had.

What did remain was a sense of the India Forster depicts, and a sense of the possible attitudes to it. There are four main English characters in APTI and they might stand for the available attitudes of foreigners-abroad, especially of the English in India. They could be seen as examples of types it was possible to identify with, or types by which you could identify foreigners in India.

Adele is eager to embrace the experience of India, with a naïve passion to see the 'real'. Yes, they were already saying that, in the 1920s or earlier: 'the real'. The search for the real place in the place has become a predominant convention of travel.

It seems at first that Adele is the one who is going to form some kind of real relationship with the place or people, but her naivete and ignorance are quite a match for her goodwill. And, in spite of her Bloomsbury connections, her conventionality is a match for the implicit desire struggling for expression against the sexual repression some critics emphasise. At the caves, whatever happens or does not happen there, whatever the cause of her distress, Adele immediately runs to her 'own kind', the imperial British.

Mrs Moore – she's the one with the immediate natural sympathy towards India, instinctually behaving with sensitivity and respect in her first encounter with Aziz in the Mosque. Maybe she'll have a real relationship there, find the real, but she leaves the place, does not appear to defend Aziz and disappears as a person in the narrative to become a mythical 'Esmiss Esmoor'.

Ralph is the imperialist Britisher to his bootstraps. He is squirmingly hateful, unfailingly true to that role.

'We're not pleasant in India, and we don't intend to be pleasant. We've something more important to do.' (Forster 1954: 50)

This is the attitude inherited or re-invented by the transnational corporations that play their part in Neem Dreams. I suspect that Foster the writer enjoyed creating Forster the author (or implied narrator) who permits himself to comment:

One touch of regret – not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart – would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution. (Forster 1954: 50)

Or is that Mrs Moore's comment? Forster's focalisation often implicates the implied narrator in the viewpoints of Mrs Moore and especially of Fielding.

Fielding, the English schoolteacher, has 'gone native', at least in the eyes of the other English. Fielding lives among Indians and makes clear his distance from the prejudices of The Club. He is open to a brotherly friendship with Aziz. Fielding's basic decency, his unposturing naturalness, are established. If Fielding inevitably feels (as what outsider does not?) frustration, it is not due to xenophobia, but a more complex mismatch of temperament. And he does get frustrated:

There seemed no reserve of tranquillity to draw upon in India. Either none, or else tranquillity swallowed up everything, as it appeared to do for Professor Godbole. (Forster 1954: 77)

(Godbole is the Hindu sage in APTI.) Fielding becomes impatient with what he sees as the 'exaggerated phrases' – and implicitly, the emotionality, the vehemence – expressed by Aziz:

'Yes, but the scale, the scale. You always get the scale wrong, my dear fellow. A pity there is this rumour, but such a very small pity – so small that we may as well talk of something else.' (Forster 1954: 266)

Fielding is essentially English, embarrassed by the wrong note, the wrong scale, universalising his sense of what scale is wrong. The author might be revealed in Fielding's character, exploring his own responses to India.

Incidentally – or not – Forster biographer P.N. Furbank points to another character as identifiable with the author:

Forster's profoundest portrait of his young self is Ralph Moore in A Passage to India – Ralph, whose brief apparition at the end of the novel is so moving and central to the book's design. Aziz gets the impression, at first, that the timid, strange-looking Ralph is 'almost an imbecile'. But there is 'one thing he always knows' – he knows when people are being unkind; and with this sureness over spiritual and human matters he is the agent of such reconciliation as there is in the book. (Furbank 1977: 262)

Nirad Chaudhari dismissed the novel, saying, 'Both the groups of characters in A Passage to India are insignificant and despicable' (Rutherford 71). Both Aziz and Fielding do have their silly side, but are not so easily dismissed, being complex characters, whose doomed struggle to attain an ultimately impossible friendship is conveyed with sympathy for both.

These types recur throughout English fiction of the Raj, for example in Paul Scott's quartet of novels, The Raj Quartet, which was made into a popular television drama series The Jewel in the Crown in the early 1980s, at which time its apparent debt to APTI was noted by critics (Spurling 274, 344).

But even Forster could not write outside certain lines that were firmly drawn. There is not even the suggestion of an idea of a more intimate long-term relationship between an Indian and an Englishman. Let alone an Englishwoman.

Forster's own homosexual experiences in India inevitably formed part of his knowledge but would have been unthinkable as subject matter. Even in 2001, V.S. Naipaul, the Caribbean-born writer who has published extensively on his own travels in India, on the eve of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, derided Forster's writing on India, employing homophobic language to do so:

[Naipaul said:] 'Forster, of course, has his own purposes in India. He is a homosexual and he had time in India, exploiting poor people, which his friend Keynes also did.'...

Asked whether Forster had contributed anything to the understanding of India, Naipaul was withering. 'He encouraged people to lie. He was somebody who didn't know Indian people. He just knew the court and a few middle class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce.' (Kelso 2001; see also Advani and H.S. Rao)

These comments were widely discussed at the time; well-known Delhi publisher and author Rukun Advani commented on the irony of Naipual's prize coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the publication of A Passage to India: Naipual, of Indian origins, 'stands for...elite, White, European heterosexual civilisation' and his vision of India is 'excoriating, condescending, snide and mercilessly fault-finding' (Advani 2001). The Englishman Foster, on the other hand, offered a vision that was 'world-tolerant, humane, sympathetic, androgynous, eclectic and genuinely cosmopolitan' (Advani). (I will return to Forster the writer.)

The central question of APTI is not 'What really happened in the caves?' The central question, broached in its first pages, is 'Can an Englishman (a Westerner, we would say now) and an Indian be friends?'.

It takes the whole long complex novel to come to the mournful conclusion: 'Not yet'. The possibility of such a friendship, Forster thought, could only be entertained when Indians were citizens of their own independent nation, a view emotively expressed in the novel's last page by Aziz:

Aziz...cried: 'Down with the English anyhow. That's certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most...we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then' – he rode against [Fielding] furiously – 'and then...you and I shall be friends.' (Forster 1954: 317)

Independence was not achieved until nearly twenty-five years after Passage was published.

Edward Said, who says:

I have always felt that the most interesting thing about A Passage to India is Forster's using India to represent material that according to the canons of the novel form cannot in fact be represented – vastness, incomprehensible creeds, secret motions, histories and social forms... (Said 1993: 241)

also says that Forster's treatment of the political reality is evasive and somewhat patronizing; while APTI is an imaginative triumph:

it is also true that Forster's India is so affectionately personal and so remorselessly metaphysical that his view of Indians as a nation contending for sovereignty with Britain is not politically very serious, or even respectful. (Said 1993: 246)

Aziz is the young Indian doctor whom Adele accuses. He is politicised, as we would say now, by his arrest. He comes into the novel already bitter about the English and after the trial goes to live in an Indian-ruled state and proclaims the 'Quit India' movement. (Independence would not necessarily have seemed imminent then.) The struggle for Indian Independence has become one of the twentieth century's most resonant stories; at its centre is the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the century's outstanding personages.

Forster chose not to mention Gandhi and the many events of his Satyagraha movement in APTI, an omission that places the novel curiously not quite in its time. Quite likely the thought of bringing in Gandhi and the Gandhians would have threatened to turn Forster's novel into something else, something that could not be contained in the novel. Forster was not an unpolitical writer; his sympathies are very clear in APTI, as they are in his other novels. Although he made a few false starts between his first trip to India in 1912 and beginning to write APTI in 1922, Forster was looking for the sculpture in the stone, not for the stone. Gandhi might have been part of the stone that must be chipped away.

In Neem Dreams Jade gazes at a statue of Gandhi, for her a landmark for finding an air-conditioned coffee shop:

The traffic circles a high pedestal set in the centre of a large intersection. On it rest the feet of the statue of a man. Wearing his simple loincloth, leaning on his staff, barefoot and penniless, commanding the hearts of millions of Indians and millions of others, shaming into retreat the imperial battalions that rule his country in their supremacist dreams. Look him up in the book.

Jade stops a moment, shades her eyes and squints up through the cacophony of blaring horns and blasts of petrol-laden exhaust fumes. She knows who that is, he's really famous, the famous great soul, she once saw the movie, and the statue is the landmark and right over there, thank heaven, is the Indian Coffee House.

They mocked him as a half-naked fakir; his body is now a sacred text. He ensures the world's headlines can not resist these brilliantly succinct gestures – a handful of salt gathered from the sea at the end of a long march, the spinning wheel that makes the simple cloth which is all he wears to Buckingham Palace. Indian salt belongs to Indians. Indians won't be made to buy foreign cloth. The spinning wheel is the icon of Indian pride and resilience and self-sufficiency, of swadeshi. He is the icon of a universal philosopher saint. He is the icon of unassailable defiance and ahimsa, the way of non-violence. He looks down the length of the road, its saviour, its guardian angel, its compassion and tenacity, presiding at the intersection.

They still argue about him. It was a Hindu extremist who shot him dead, and he is still not Hindu enough for some. For others his so-called simplicity is a display of antique quaintness that creates an image of India that is never going to help the project of an internationally respected modern state. His non-violence is naïve in a world where nothing is won without armed struggle. His schemes were never going to solve the nation's problems. His voluntary poverty makes a mockery of real poverty – remember how they said it costs a lot of money to (Neem Dreams)

Gandhi's legacy will resonate in Neem Dreams' last chapters, with the mid-1990s demonstrations against the transnationals explicitly having a historical connection with Gandhian politics of swadeshi and swaraj (self-sufficiency, self-rule) of the Independence movement.

Even today you cannot spend any time in India without discussing Gandhi. I've listened to writers on post-coloniality discuss the need for a Gandhian leader in other post-colonial countries (Aboriginal Australia included). The qualifications, demurrals and even opposition to Gandhi's politics have their exemplar in the famous dispute between the Mahatma and one of India's greatest literary figures, Rabindranath Tagore:

Tagore versus Gandhi was the cherisher of beauty versus the ascetic; the artist versus the utilitarian; the thinker versus the man of action; the individualist versus the politician; the elitist versus the populist; the widely-read versus the narrowly-read; the modernist versus the reactionary; the believer in science versus the anti-scientist; the synthesizer of East and West versus the Indian chauvinist; the internationalist versus the nationalist; the traveller versus the stay-at-home; the Bengali versus the Gujerati; the scholarly Brahmin versus the merchant Vaishya; and most prominently of all, the fine flowing robes and beard versus the coarse loincloth and bald pate....Theirs was one of the great debates of the twentieth century. Gandhi has dominated it in the history books, in the universities and on the movie screen. But India has espoused Tagore's ideas far more than it has Gandhi's. (Dutta and Robinson 237)

Tagore, like Gandhi, was inevitably involved in the struggle of India for self-rule. Since I read the 1976 best-seller Freedom at Midnight, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, I have been fascinated by the story of Indian Independence.

There might be a comparison with the Holocaust, that other massive twentieth-century event of extremes and atrocity. And a day after first writing this thought, I hear a publisher say, in a discussion of Indian literature on the radio, 'Indian novels are full of Partition; it's like the Holocaust'.

I have European parents and was born in Italy officially a displaced person. Any child brought up in Australia in the 1950s, as I was, could remain somewhat clueless as to the enormity and recentness of Europe's devastation, but when I finally travelled to Europe in my late 20s I realised something of the extent and the immediacy of its effects, even on those born post-World War 2. There might be some clues to my passionate interest in Indian Independence in the step removed from a historical relationship with India.

There would be a different affect to your interest in India if you had a British Raj ancestor. In Neem Dreams Jade assumes the only reason a guy like Andy has turned up in this remote southern hamlet is a search for an ancestor's story.

'I love your accent,' said Jade, understandingly. Things were looking up: how about this, a dishy Englishman? Looked like Ralph Fiennes. Here, of all places. Andy had come to trace an ancestor from The Raj, of course, she realised, a long-time ambition that had become an obsession; he was engrossed in the life of a stiff-lipped pukkha sahib in a solar topee and military boots, driven by long-irrelevant notions of born to rule and propriety and decency, with a pale English wife who wilted in the heat, no, thrived... (Neem Dreams)

While the memory of the precise time and circumstances of my first reading is lost, I can smell the pink roses in the houseboat in Kashmir where I first re-read APTI (and, incidentally, first read Hindoo Holiday, which I quote as epigraph for my story 'Snow-capped Peaks', written there, (Baranay 1989b: 53-64) not knowing of Forster's connection with its author Ackerley).

My next re-reading was twelve years later, in 1998. Neem Dreams was well advanced. I had begun this project by reading and re-reading fiction set in India and it became clear that APTI was the ur-novel of the English – or the European, or the Westerner – in India. (Perhaps Siddharta is another, but let's leave that aside). A non-Indian, certainly an English-speaking non-Indian, cannot write a novel set in India without knowledge of A Passage to India. Decades of scholarship continue to address it; it is interesting how often the book is cited in the most recent bibliographies of post-colonial studies. A Passage to India fits Italo Calvino's definition of a classic as a book that is always being re-read rather than read (Calvino 1982: 125).

APTI is continually re-read not only passively, but is constantly re-evaluated, its concerns re-posited in terms contemporary with new readings:

From A Passage to India on,

'books about India' have been more accurately books about the representation of India, with each offering variants of the peculiar logic through which a failure of representation becomes transformed into a characteristically Indian failure....[T]he narrative is not brought to rest with the melodramatic rape trial and Adela's recantation, but is impelled into a description of the Indian's ugly failure to apprehend a European sensibility and the seductive qualities of his continuing ignorance. (Suleri 245, 249)

On my own re-reading I noticed that neem trees are mentioned on the very first page. That's the kind of thing a writer is happy to take as a sign.

The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and in their turn hide the bazaars. (Forster 1954: 9)

What becomes visible, what becomes hidden: this might be seen as a theme of both A Passage to India and Neem Dreams.

4 The narrative imperative: aspects of two novels

How do I begin to write a novel? There's an idea that begins to obsess. Themes and images begin to weave into each other: characters, phrases, words, sounds: a collection of fragments that desire union in a single entity. What will bring it all together? What is it I am looking for, mentally shuffling these fragments, re-arranging them, building on them, combining or discarding them?

My method in Neem Dreams was similar to the one Graham Greene describes: travelling, gathering fragments, and puzzling at how they fit together until one day a story becomes apparent (Greene 1981: passim).

My novels rarely start with a story. Incidents and events, yes, people and places too, and the insistent need to be at work, writing, writing something to be read. But these are not sufficient to make a novel.

'Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story,' admits Forster in Aspects of the Novel (Forster 1955: 26). The tone is mournful, it is a regretful voice, the admission is reluctant.

Question: What does a novel do? Answer: It tells a story, of course! The reply may be made, surely is most often made, with vague indifference or with brisk insistence. Or, indeed, with a refusal of a simple answer.

But we regret the fact, Forster and I.

Why the regret? When I began to call myself a writer I referred to 'short prose fiction' and 'long prose fiction' rather than 'short stories' and 'novels'. It was the seventies, and everything we did and were was being re-defined. It was modernism being new again.

Forster was writing in the era of early modernism. Modernism means experimentation in content and form, it means stream-of-consciousness and fractured chronology. It means using not the language of the past, not the language of formal address but the language you hear. It means that you can decide the novel does not need narrative.

Lionel Trilling identified modernism as 'the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself' (Cahoone 391). Forster, while not as formally experimental as his contemporary Virginia Woolfe, was a modernist; he questioned the apparently obvious cultural imperatives.

Neem Dreams is written in the present era, widely called post-modern, and no one who lives in it cannot know how extensively this term has been interrogated. My own tendency is to favour the idea of post-modernism as the modernism of the late twentieth-century. This is in spite of also entertaining a tendency to think, as Ihab Hassan says:

Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments. Certainly it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that concerns us now; it's rather the Denaturalization of the Planet and the End of Man. We are, I believe, inhabitants of another Time and another Space, and we no longer know what response is adequate to our reality. (Cahoone 395)

These days we contemplate the real possibility of post-human existence (a possibility explored by contemporary novels such as Michel Houllebecq's sensational Atomised). Hassan's comments resonate. Still, not knowing what, if any, response to our new reality is adequate, a novelist begins a response by writing a novel. And comes up with that strangely unyielding fact: the novel needs a story.

It is characters and settings (Forster calls them people and places) and their interaction that engender a novel; it is particular themes, issues, contentions; it is the language you want to use, and, also, it is your sense of your place within the culture you inhabit, a need to find and express this.

But you must find the story.

That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it were not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form. (Forster 1954: 26)

I wish it were not so, too. But the stories we tell tell us how much we need stories: it's a matter of life and death:

Neanderthal man listened to stories...the primitive audience...gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense... The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him. We can estimate the dangers incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later times. (Forster 1954: 26)

In the Introduction to his 2000 anthology on narrative (which includes, from Aspects, Forster's passages on story and plot), Martin McQuillan points out that it is a logical absurdity to imagine the disappearance of stories, for that would be a story in itself (McQuillan: 1-2). And the fact that we dream – make stories out of fragments – indicates how essential our need is.

A Passage to India is about the British in India, about relationships between the British and the Indians in the early twentieth century, about prejudice and justice and friendship and how myths are made. Or it's about 'an unimaginable space which cannot be inhabited by the present tense, resisting even the European attempt to coax it into metaphoricity' (Suleri 250).

But that is not its story, those are some of its themes, or interpretations, and if someone asks of a novel What's it about? they are usually asking about the story.

A Passage to India is the story of a young woman, Adele, who comes on a visit to India to meet her fiancé. She is accompanied by his mother Mrs Moore; she wants to see the real India and to make friends with Indians; she is invited to an expedition to some nearby caves and there suddenly accuses the nice Indian doctor of molesting her and a court case ensues where finally...

No need to go on. Summing up the story tells you something, but it does not give you a sense of the novel.

Sharing Forster's regret about story, I tend to gape and swallow and hesitate when asked what Neem Dreams is 'about'.

About India. About globalisation. About 300 pages. About mainly these four characters...

Neem Dreams is about Westerners in India, it's about cultural exchange, it's about how politics and myths, as well as personal products, are made, it's about how globalisation works to perpetuate the powerlessness of the powerless... It will be about what its future readers and critics say it's about.

But what is the story?

Oh dear, of course there is a story.

And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence... Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. (Forster 1955: 27)

Still, the story is not what a novel is 'about'.

Nor is the story what makes you want to read a novel, not always. I will choose a novel for its writer, sometimes one who could write about anything they please and please me; I will choose a novel for its subject matter (experiencing India) if it is one I am currently pursuing; I will choose a novel that has been recommended; one that I have enjoyed before; one that promises a new experience of language. It is what Forster calls value that matters to us more: 'something which is not measured by minutes or hours, but by intensity (Forster 1955: 28).

But a novel must have a story. Which is not the same as its plot, as Forster also insists.

The plot is narrative's joy. Plot is where character is drawn, plot is effect and cause, plot has room for themes and issues and digressions and set pieces and re-building of structure into original shape; it is in the plot that the writer struggles and experiments and is surprised, as if ambushed, by elements that the novel's origins had still concealed.

The plot then is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect: it requires mystery, but the mysteries are solved later on: the reader may be moving about in worlds unrealized, but the novelist has no misgivings... He plans his book beforehand: or anyhow he stands above it, his interest in cause and effect give him an air of predetermination. (Forster 1954: 96)

Aspects of the Novel is E.M. Forster's other classic, a book-length essay on the novel. It remains – in spite of some out-dated examples from novels that have been long-forgotten in our day – an incisive examination of the form, informative and wise about the novelist's art, and piquant with dry wit. I keep recommending this book to new writers and students, and it has equal place with Kundera and Calvino on my shelf of favourite fiction writers on fiction writing.

Just when you think Aspects is quaint and dated, Forster says something of uncanny particular relevance. Time is our enemy, suggests Forster, chronology is a demon (1955: 9-23). He conjures up an image of all novelists writing their novels in a circular room, simultaneously, outside of time. Look, he says, at these pairs of passages of writing. We see at first how alike they are. But they are from very different writers, very different times.

Compare two passages from Samuel Richardson and Henry James, and find, says Forster that:

Surface differences are indeed no differences at all, but additional points of contact. (Forster 1954: 16)

Compare passages from Wells and from Dickens:

...they do not register any change in the novelist's art. (18)

Compare Sterne and Woolf:

...their medium is similar, the same odd effects are obtained by it. (16-20)

Realise then, that:

The novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject-matter. (20)

Admittedly, there are some problems here. One, all his examples are British (if you count James). Two, you could argue that it would be as possible to choose passages that show the novelist's art has changed, that effects have changed, and that subject matter is of supreme importance. But the point, finally, is that all exist in a comparable form, that of the novel.

The novel is not its story, the story is not the reason we embark on writing our novels in the circular room outside of time. Yet – oh dear – a novel contains time, chronology, therefore story.

Humankind apparently needs stories; why this might be so has to do with what makes us human: that we create meaning. As Umberto Eco says:

[W]e are continually tempted to give shape to life through narrative schemes...

Fiction makes us feel more metaphysically comfortable than reality. There is a golden rule that cryptanalysts and code breakers rely on – namely, that every secret message can be deciphered, provided one knows that it is a message. The problem with the actual world is that, since the dawn of time, humans have been wondering whether there is a message, and if so, whether this message makes sense. With fictional universes, we know without a doubt that they do have a message and that an authorial entity stands behind them as creator, as well as within them as a set of reading instructions. (Eco 1994: 99, 116)

Since Forster, the question of narrative has been extensively re-posited; we have often been told the novel is dead while more novels than ever are being published; we have examined narrative through structuralism, deconstruction, l'écriture feminine, psychoanalysis, identity politics, and, of course, post-modernism; our understanding of basic questions (setting, character, structure) has been refined; we usefully employ terms that post-date Forster: focalisation, narrative agent, implied author; and we have paid a lot more attention to the context and culture in which writing takes place (see McQuillan inter alia). Yet Aspects of the Novel remains pertinent to consideration of the novelist's craft, and is frequently cited in later works on the developing theorising of narratology; while more sophisticated ideas on narrative have burgeoned (see, for example, Prince, Bal, Rimmon-Kenan), Forster provided a foundation for them.

In the identification of the need for story, in the refusal to take story for granted as the basis of the novel, in the fresh consideration of aspects of story, Forster became for me an exemplar of a novelist who embraces the considerations of craft while being at the service of art.

And whatever we say about the novel, one thing above all remains true: let Forster have the last word:

The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. (Forster 1954: 23)

5 Travels with E.M. Forster

Conjecturing that the novel A Passage to India formed, at least in part, my awareness of India, desire for India and exploration of ideas about India, and finally led to the writing of neem dreams, I began to find Forster freshly fascinating.

E.M. Forster is not the kind of writer I'd have imagined I'd choose to spend a lot of time with. So English. Repressed. Timid. He hid his homosexuality most of his life. He never wrote overtly gay characters and gay relationships in his novels. I couldn't help wishing that he had. I couldn't help wanting to turn instead to a life that rebels against conformity and hypocrisy. Someone exotic or in pursuit of exoticism.

I probably shouldn't say gay by the way. It's anachronistic. Once a composer who had written an opera about Oscar Wilde was telling me about an interview with a gay journalist who typically attacked him for refusing to call Wilde gay. Wilde wasn't gay, said the composer, I am but he was not; there was no gay to be, there was no gay culture then. In Forster's world it was homosexual or, more exactly, homoerotic.

Forster was about 19 years old at the time of Wilde's infamous trial and Wilde's cruel disgrace might well have put him right off any notion of being, as we now say, out.

For the young Forster and other 'men under that star', the orchestrated demolition of Wilde...devastated hope and destroyed affiliation for homosexual men generally, and permanently affected Forster both as a private person and as an evolving writer. (Haralson 60)

And the point is, gay is not quite synonymous with homosexual, gay is a construct of culture and implies gay culture.

Forster used the word queer liberally, including in A Passage to India, to mean peculiar. In a new collection of essays, Queer Forster, edited by Robert Martin and George Pigghard, the writers focus on Forster's place in the emerging field of queer studies and his place in the re-evaluation of modernist invention of sexual identity. Counting up the uses of the word queer in A Passage to India, Yonatan Touval remarks

...it's as though queerness is the stuff Indians (or, like Fielding, Adela, and Mrs. Moore, things gone Indian) are made of, the very essence of Indianicity. Or if not India's essence, at least its identity....[Q]ueerness...becomes constituted by its difference from the English. (Touval 242-3)

And it is not only 'Indianicity' that marks this difference of course, but something far less visible, something unacknowledged: a sexuality that cannot be revealed or discussed, something that could only be defined in terms that set it aside from the ruling English idea of itself.

[W]hile queerness is never more explicitly defined than in the assertion that it lies somewhere in the difference between things Indian and English (but on the side of the Indian) McBryde's [the District Superintendent of Police in APTI] know-it-when-you-see-it brand of epistemology...is indicatively shared by the entire Anglo-Indian community....[Q]ueerness is that difference in the Indian which the quality of being English enables (entitles?) one to know. (Touval 243)

Similarly, sexual 'deviance' has usually been discussed as a 'difference' which the quality or identity of being 'normal' enables and entitles one to 'know'.

You do not need to know anything about Forster, his life and times, to read A Passage to India, to enjoy and appreciate it. These days it's a common assertion that you ought not need to know about a writer's life, that perhaps you should not, that the author is dead and the reader lives. Text, only text. New Critic W.K. Wimsatt in 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946) influenced the turning away from biography and authorial intention as ways to understand and evaluate works of fiction. Later theorists such as Roland Barthes posit the absence or even the death of the author-god. In his famous essay 'The Death of the Author', without which no contemporary discussion of writing can take place, Barthes sees a given text as either indeterminate in meaning, or as capable of multiple readings:

[T]he space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. (Barthes 147)

And Foucault also undermines the idea of an author as an autonomous, creative individual:

The coming into being of the notion of 'author' constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences...

The author-function is...characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society. (Foucault 1980: 141, 148)

It's as if we always thought so. But then, as Kevin Brophy says:

At a moment when the author as creative origin of a literary text has seemingly been undermined in favour of the text's existence as a cultural, political and historical artefact, as a production of language itself, or as inevitably subversive to its own assertions, [the] recent annexing of the creative function to a widening range of discourses seems to breathe a paradoxical life back into the author as creative origin. (Brophy 32)

Many of us do like to know about the life and times of writers who fascinate us. Booksellers confirm that writers' biographies are more popular than ever. Like many readers, I am curious about the life of writers whose work interests me. But what might biographical knowledge add to the reading?

Can it take the place of reading? I wonder, for example, if more people haven't read about the Bloomsbury group, Woolf especially, than have read the works.

I read the books of writer-friends with a special interest, aware of the person behind the text. When a new friend seeks to read my books I know their idea of me has something to do with why. Critical writing, of course, can choose to engage with the text alone, and recent fashion usually insists that it does, but a reader can choose their own degree of interest in the writer.

I don't need to know about Forster to appreciate his books, but I like to. I now read Passage after reading Forster's other novels, his Indian journals, his Aspects of the Novel, some of his other non-fiction. I read biographies and critical works about him. This would have to make a difference to my reading of Passage, but what kind of difference does it make?

Repressed or not, Forster is the writer who produced the work I am giving a lot of attention. Though he led a life that initially and superficially I have little sympathy for, I begin to find the life has other dimensions than the closeted one, and that what we might think of as regrettable 'closeted-ness' might have been a strength for the writer, and that Forster had admirable qualities.

And what if he had no such qualities? I don't desire to listen to Wagner's music so I don't have to think about whether his proto-Nazism would interfere with my pleasure. No artist whose work I do admire has, so far as I know, a world view as repulsive as Wagner's; still they are not necessarily someone I'd want to be friends with. You don't judge a work by the life. But knowing about the life gives your interest in or knowledge of the work another dimension: it places the work in a context that reveals something more of its origins and its worldliness.

Still, Forster was secretive about his homosexuality for most of his life, and certainly up to the time Passage was published. Where his homosexuality was concerned, says biographer Francis King, Forster

...was not one to stand up and be counted but to sit down and be counted out. When Ackerley once took Forster to task about his timidity, saying 'After all, Gide has come clean,' Forster snapped back 'But Gide hasn't got a mother.' He seemed to have forgotten that Gide had both a wife and daughter. In addition to scruples about his mother, Forster also felt that to publish the book [Maurice] would somehow damage his image as 'the Sacred Maiden Aunt of English Letters, Keeper of the Bloomsbury Conscience' (as Cyril Connolly characterized him). (King, F. 57)

Ackerley, now there's a chap to want to spend some time with: handsome, flamboyant, out. 'Arse-holes to you!' he'd say on the rare occasions his frankness about his sexual proclivities met with open derision or hostility. Very different, remarks Forster biographer Francis King, from the man whom Virginia Woolf described as timid as a mouse (King, F. 79). Ackerley's entertaining, vivid book Hindoo Holiday (1932) (A new edition, restoring earlier cuts, was issued in 2000) is an account of his time as a secretary to the homosexual Maharajah of Chhatarpur, an engagement that Forster engineered. The two men corresponded during this time and became good friends.

Forster, however, declined to write a preface for Hindoo Holiday.

He gave as his reasons that he thought the book too good to need a preface and that he did not wish to compromise himself over the Maharaja. But Ackerley realized that the true reason was that Forster shrank from being associated with what, by the standards of those times, might be regarded as improprieties and, in consequence, provoking his mother's disapproval. (King, F. 90)

Oh dear, Forster is no hero! Shrinking from being associated with improprieties! Not daring to provoke mother's disapproval! Can one admire the work of such a man? His work was so successful that even before Passage was published he was considered to rate up there with Lawrence and Joyce. What did he have to lose?

Forster's life was dominated by his close attachment to his mother who lived to the age of ninety (as did Forster).

Though he was never prepared to 'come out', his attitude to homosexuality became increasingly frank over the years. The process is illustrated by three incidents, one in the thirties, one in the forties and one in the fifties. The first is the successful prosecution of James Hanley's partly homosexual novel Boy. Forster did not offer to appear as witness, along with such writers as A.P Herbert, H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestly, but privately he expressed admiration of that book and his anger that legal proceedings should have been instituted. The second is the publication of a letter by J.R. Ackerley in The Spectator of November 1942, after a 'witch-hunt' in Abergavenny that had ended in one successful suicide and two attempts at it. Forster was not prepared to sign this letter but he gave Ackerely considerable help with its drafting. The third was an article, 'Society and the Homosexual', which he wrote for the New Statesman and Nation in 1953.

(King, F. 89)

Forster did not write another novel after Passage, so there is no telling what effect this 'increasing frankness' might have had on aspects of subsequent novels. But he wrote many articles, essays, and a classic guide to the city of Alexandria, admired – and put to good use – by Lawrence Durrell (author of the Alexandria Quartet) among others. He wrote an affectionate biography Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. He wrote letters and petitions, joined societies, appeared on platforms, attended congresses, sat on committees. Twice (in 1934 and 1942) he became President of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and he served as president of the Humanist Society. (Can one not admire the work of such a man?) And in The Spectator in 1936 he said what every schoolchild like me (decades later) would have wanted to hear:

'...If the impossible ever happens and I am asked to help break up a school what I shall say is this: 'Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies [sic]. School was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: There's a better time coming.'' (quoted in Furbank 48)

Could a greater frankness have helped him attain a greater artistic achievement? There is the repression-is-good-for-the-art-if-bad-for-the-artist school of thought; that kind of thing is often heard. A friend emailed to me:

Forster, the patron saint of the outsider's dilemma, writing like mad while he was closeted, drying up the minute he accepted his homosexuality.

Me, I wish Forster could've gone on writing incisive social canveses *with* ???? gay characters - but his gay side produced Maurice, a nice little coming out story - and that's understandable, according to my channel theory. (The theory that goes: art forms are a channel, the individual artist is water flowing. If you want to flow down an established channel, that's nice and easy. But if you want to flow down a channel that doesn't exist yet, you have to flow a bit, jump out and dig a bit, flow a bit further and then jump out and dig the next metre of the channel - and in consequence, you're unlikely to flow as far as a writer who accepts the status quo ... and you certainly won't be as able to concentrate on making pretty ripples as you flow.) (Pausacker 2000)

The novel Maurice, written before Passage and not published in Forster's lifetime, is generally found disappointing. It is curiously passionless, in spite of the homoerotic affairs it depicts. His other novels seem wiser about human passion, more worldly.

There is a lot to admire about Forster – his championing of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy and of his own compatriot Ackerley, and many personal kindnesses and unobtrusive generosity recorded in his biographies. And he was the one who famously said: 'If I had the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friends I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' (Forster 1951) That I have always admired, long before I knew who its author was.

Francis King calls this statement 'silly', pointing out

Most of a man's friends are also his fellow countrymen and Forster's preference...is therefore to betray the many rather than the one. An absurdity... (King, F. 116)

But I find this objection the far greater absurdity; Forster of all people would not suppose that friendship is prescribed by nationality, nor that national pride should blind one to superior accomplishments elsewhere:

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy... No novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust....English fiction...does not contain the best stuff yet written, and if we deny this we become guilty of provincialism. (Forster 1955: 7)

Forster's reminder that a great deal of viciousness arises out of the supposed virtue of patriotism, and that friendship is a supreme value, is demonstration, I believe, of a superior ethical sense.

His hypothetical choice still incites debate and commentary, attack and defence from several angles:

E.M. Forster has been routinely ridiculed by conservatives... Why would such a man advocate treason? The simple answer is that he did not. In fact, he has been misunderstood and, in a way, even misquoted....He concluded not with a ringing declaration of the duty to aid the class struggle but with an appeal to ancient and mediaeval notions of loyalty and friendship:

Such a choice may scandalise the modern reader... It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chose to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome. (Fleming, T. 2001)

The author of the classic text on the outsider's (that is, non-Indian's) experience of India places himself outside the identification with the British in India that might superficially be expected of him. It is reasonable to suppose that it is his repressed homosexuality that gives him this extra edge, this ability to observe with something that passes for detachment. But it is not exactly detachment, it is a lack of attachment to and identification with the group he is with and supposedly in. Early pages of APTI show Indian characters in intimate conversation: scenes like this have no less conviction than those showing the English venting their racism among themselves.

Forster's engagement with India was one of 'aesthetic kinship and intellectual sympathy' in the words of a contemporary Indian author and publisher, who also says approvingly:

Forster was a subtle thinker who caught the 'clash of civilisations' at an early moment... He was an oddball Englishman of immense learning and hellishly independent opinions... He was outspokenly anti-imperialist, anti-Fascist, anti-fundamentalist. (Advani 2001)

While Forster never enacted the obvious flamboyance, outspokenness and outrageousness that once was more to my taste, he is read today as a queer writer. As Christopher Reed says in this context

I have to reply in the negative to the question, 'was Forster queer?'... The more interesting question, however, is 'Is Forster queer?' (Reed 86)

Forster's discretion, even his timidity, need not be seen as not meaning a lack or failure of nerve in the artist, but a source of strength, a way to cultivate qualities of detachment, perception, perspective and the invaluable certainty that one's work is to expose and explore what generally is hidden, unacknowledged, unspeakable. This was his great achievement in A Passage to India.

If Forster was my first guide to India, then, there could have been far worse ones.

Forster brought to India an understanding of the paradoxes in man's situation matured through contemplating other societies; from India he learned of aspects to the existential condition atrophied or stultified by modern civilization, and in Indian thought and the symbolism of her myths, art and architecture, he discovered other dimensions; to man's perpetual search for self-understanding.

It is as if India redrew the contours of reality for Forster. (Parry 272, 265)

To 're-draw the contours of reality': yes, reality will never do for some of us; and that's always been the reason for reading, for travel, for India.

6 Discovering neem: Far North Queensland

It is the best tree in the world. They call it the miracle tree and the tree of blessings and the free tree. (Neem Dreams)

I am teaching a class in creative writing at the TAFE in Cairns. It must be 1993. It must have been the introductory class. I have not met this woman before. She tells me she lives with a man who runs a neem nursery and promotes neem trees. This is of great interest to me, I tell her, as I have been planning to write fiction set in India and think of the neem as a perfect kind of symbol. I already know, then, about neem. I have no memory of the first time I hear about neem, or when I know of its properties, or when I first think of it as a theme, a symbol, a synecdoche, a trope.

There is an air of magical coincidence, the kind of thing that happens when a writer has an idea and life confirms that it is the idea.

Jude's boyfriend is called Joe Friend and his business is called Neem Peace. I often see them together at the kinds of social functions in Cairns where you see everyone you know – a benefit at the Regional Gallery, say, or a performance of the Bangarra Dance company at the Civic Theatre. Small town. And I visit Joe to find out about neem, Neem Peace and him.

Joe is a gentle, dedicated man, and a kind I will call a neem warrior. Neem Peace promotes the Australian use of neem in agriculture and for domestic use. For Joe, it seems, neem is a cause and a religion. I immediately know that one of my main characters is a neem warrior too.

He is not a man habitually willing, let alone eager, to talk a great deal about himself. He strikes me as somewhat introverted, wary, not particularly expressive, and genuinely committed to neem as a cause. I've always admired idealistic activism (at least, when the ideals are benign). He tells me about his life as I take eager notes, and he is never so open again. He has not prepared a defense against my kind of intense curiosity about his background, the story whose outcome is Neem Peace. Instantly I know I will have a character who, like Joe, has gone to agricultural college, had a father who suffered from working with toxic pesticides, had been to Darwin in school holidays and would become some kind of neem warrior.

It is large, spreading, old, it gives a generous shade and grows in places shade is needed. It grows in places too dry and too hot for most things to grow, thriving in hard seasons. Its roots spread deep into the most arid of soils, deep-mining for the earth's nutrients. The tree's fallen leaves and twigs turn into a rich humus and thus the arid soil is regenerated. This is only one of the tree's multifarious boons. (Neem Dreams)

This tree, anciently known in India for its 'multifarious boons' now being taken up all over the world...the analogy to yoga was already evident, too. By what rights and means is it commodified and marketed? Who can tell us how to use it? Does the West destroy what it embraces?

[T]he research and experiments of the farmers and housewives are not widely acknowledged. They took place before the change that brought the need for protocols, claims and attributions, the legalities of copyrights and patents, ownership of knowledge. They took place before the active ingredient of neem, azadarachtin, was isolated, identified, named, made the basis for acceptable proofs. (Neem Dreams)

For the West – this is one way of looking at it – India is a vast bazaar, full of things to buy and obtain, from incense and carpets to experience and spirituality to material for theorists and novelists.

If the West's predominant action in the world is exploitation, the East's is to provide material to be exploited.

Louis: I've got great little glass frames, I've got original folk-art drawings, from some, like, beyond beyondness-type region. I've got rugs. There'll be scarves, music, perfume, boxes, paintings, ceramics. Incense, I guess. And exclusive important items. This is where you get your $500 carvings, your $500 silk saris, your $5,000 carpet. But you can wander in off the street and look around and get your $20 tablecloth and your $2 incense. You know what? I love that Indian folk art, that shiny pop Disney Japanese comic brightly-coloured poster art! Everyone who comes in here will find something to buy. The antique and fine art department going on at the back here, and the bins of bargain items here. Oh, did I tell you about our mehendi booth? Not only hair, the Indian ladies paint these gorgeous patterns on their hands and the feet. I know, very tribal. Not everyone wants tattoos. This could be a major look for the summer. You're over powder-blue toenails, you get henna feet. And a little department right here with all the skincare and cosmetic things. Neem Care. (Neem Dreams)

Even yoga in the embrace of the West becomes a commodity. B.K.S. Iyengar jokes, as he teaches intensive classes of Western yoga teachers, that they will go home to advertise that they have got all the 'newest points' from him and charge $2,000 for a workshop. Some do.

In Neem Dreams the three yogis from the West (appearing just once and called, as in the following passage, LA, Norway and Toronto) argue about the rightness or not of one of them – a teacher from Los Angeles – patenting and marketing yoga props that originated with an Indian guru (unnamed, but clearly modeled on B.K.S. Iyengar):

And LA developed them further. His props are a new product, supposed to be better than the everyday benches and ropes, as they will be available in calculated sizes, and packaged with instructions. He goes too far, insists Norway; markets himself as a master, publishes his own book, presenting the method of teaching as his very own, with barely the slightest of references to Guruji to whom he clearly owes everything.

Yoga is not static, it develops, argues Toronto. Guruji doesn't own yoga. (Neem Dreams)

These arguments reflect the arguments aired far more extensively – and in the real world, not only in my novel – about the patents on neem-based products.

As this story takes place there are appeals against these patents in progress.

They're trying to patent a tree! cry voices crazed with outrage. You believe in ecology, you are on the side of spirituality, you are a champion of tradition (most especially the tradition of others, perhaps; perhaps with good reason). Your credentials – your credence – demand this rottenness is widely realised. Face it, 'they' will commit any atrocity for the sake of profit and glory; 'they' scorn the integrity and authenticity of age-old practices. Leave the people's tree alone, let the people show us its correct deployment. (Neem Dreams)

I bought my first neem tree from Joe Friend, and kept it in its pot in Cairns. A couple of years later, I planted it in the soil of an island in the Torres Strait, where with much pleasure I watched it grow rapidly in the conditions that it thrived in. I chewed a few of its fresh new leaves some mornings. I planted another couple of neems there and gave one to my neighbours. I later heard of a neem nursery on another island in the Torres Strait.

My copy of the book Neem: A Tree for Solving Global Problems is marked with my pencilled 1994. In 1994 my life in the Torres Strait is still part of an unknown future. A year earlier I seize the book at a stall at the markets at Atherton, a town on the tablelands inland from Cairns.

This is a snapshot of my life: wandering around these markets with Hans. This is the day we meet the Dutch family who sell organic vegetables and promote permaculture. In the following years Hans will arrange for his support staff, on a job not yet envisaged – a job to promote and assist growing fresh food in the islands – to go from the Torres Strait to the Dutch family's place on the Tablelands and do courses in permaculture.

I seize the book because I am already looking for it, or maybe only because of its title. Back at home I read it carefully and peruse its appendices.

I mark a few of the names in the appendix called 'research contacts': a few in the USA and one in India. The one in India has a Pune address, that's what I notice first, and then I notice that after the name C.M. Ketkar is the name Neem Mission.

Pune! 'Neem Mission'!

I receive a reply from C.M. Ketkar. One does not count on receiving replies to letters sent off to strangers anywhere, and least of all from India. Postal services there – usually pretty good – can be unreliable with international mail; in India one notoriously learns to count on nothing.

Mr Ketkar's reply is handwritten on flimsy paper, along with photocopies of articles that tell me who he is. He is an Indian scientist who has been involved in promoting the uses of neem since the 1960s. India is a vast and populous land and this Mr Ketkar resides in the one city I have long been scheduled to stay in for two months.

It may be a minor coincidence, but to a writer receiving a message that she is on the right track, it seems like a miracle.

7 Mr Ketkar 1995

Mr Ketkar is away in China when I arrive in Pune. I leave phone and mail messages for him and count on nothing. Pune has changed in nine years, become larger and noisier and more crowded. More time is spent stuck in traffic, sitting in an open auto-rickshaw level with a foul exhaust from a decrepit bus. The classes at the Institute, though, are – as they had been my first time there in 1986 – awesome. I stay at the same hotel as nine years earlier: much the same, though now I notice that the big tree alongside it is a neem. The seven weeks I am scheduled to stay here represents the longest period of time I will spend in any one place this year.

Feet running to her door, hands pounding on the door. 'Telephone!'

She leaps out of bed and throws a big shirt over her pyjamas. This hour of the morning, the call was going to be someone from a different time-zone...

The phone's at the end of the corridor. A man comes out of his room and stands at his door watching her as she picks up the receiver. She glares at him and he looks back, unflinching, unperturbed, plonked on his feet there behind his huge belly and curled moustache, and stays right there, listening, staring.

'Ketkar here.'

'Oh,' she says, adjusting fast. 'Oh, Mr Ketkar. Thank you for calling. You're back home? Did you get my letter?'

Only now. He has been in China, teaching organic farming. A deep, rich vigorous voice, heavily accented in English. 'You have my address? You sent your letter, that is correct address.'

'What time shall I come?'

'We are not like foreigners, we use whatever time there is.'

'Oh, right,' she says. 'Well, I'll come at 12.30, 1 pm then?'

'Better you come at eleven. Take an auto. Do not pay more than ten rupees.'

A tall thin elderly man, dressed in white, hurries towards her as she gets out of the auto-rickshaw, and offers a firm, friendly hand.

'How much did he ask from you?'

'We used the meter,' she answers diplomatically. They'd had to stop and ask directions a few times, in this, an even older part of town, the traffic on its narrow winding streets more likely to be buffalo-carts than autos.

'You must not pay more than ten rupees.' It was welcome, a concern for her honest passage through his city, where thrift was a virtue and virtue was natural. (notes for Neem Dreams)

He is a lively man in his 60s, who lives in the family home in an old part of Pune. Its narrow winding streets are unsuitable for modern traffic and have an air of, it must be admitted, the picturesque to the desiring foreigner who feels strange longings in places such as these, almost as if they were longings for the very experience she is having; longings to enter into that round-shaped hotel where the rickshaw stops, enter and be with, be one of, those young people eating idli and drinking coffee and discussing, surely, politics and ontology in terms she longs to employ.

Mr Ketkar serves tea in the narrow room which gives onto a storage space where he has filed every piece of paper he has dealt with for thirty years, each numbered, with carbon copies of replies attached. He can find any of them in a moment.

'And we think we need computers,' admiringly remarks Pandora who begins her life as a character called Marina who meets Mr Ketkar in exactly this way. In the first version of my novel, Pandora is still Marina, more of a dropout than a successful eco-scientist. She works in a neem nursery in Far North Queensland, comes to India to go to a yoga school; her boss, the neem nursery guy, asks her to look up this man in India...

'And we think we need computers,' she says. He hands her a list of all his correspondents from Australia. He hands her a list of the publications he could provide copies of. He hands her a list of articles that have been written about his work.

'Since 1962 I have been telling, but no one has been listening to me. Now I am asked to come, to speak. Nobody asked me then.'

'At Neem Aura,' she says, 'we promote and distribute neem trees and neem products and my employer, he's been following your work. He wanted me to ask you a few things.'

'First we take tea. Can do nothing without tea.' (Neem Dreams early draft)

Every time I visit Mr Ketkar he calls for tea at once, a sweet milky chai. I visit often, order many copies from his treasure of papers, which are sent out to a Xerox machine. I am so enchanted by him that for a long time I think Mr Ketkar must be a character in the novel. For many drafts of the novel the character who becomes Pandora is guided by a fictive Mr Ketkar to the rural development project for women. The only trace of him in the final version of Neem Dreams comes as Meenakshi assesses the project she has been co-ordinating:

Simple trainings can be provided; there are good people who will come to your community. Meenakshi finds them, invites them to the village, where they are made welcome, and conduct their good-natured training... (Neem Dreams)

Not for the first time the novelist learns that 'It happened' is no reason literary art recognises.

'You can't exactly patent a plant, can you?' Marina says. But the article, cut out of the Times of India, says that W.R. Kind, an MNC – multi-national company... 'It says they have applied to international patent courts to take a patent on certain neem products...'

'To the consternation of Indian farmers.'

'Exact words.'

'Indian farmers have used neem since time immemorial.' says Mr Ketkar. 'Both men and women, in the fields, in the garden, in the home. Are you knowing of such things? How do you suppose, dear madam, the Indian peasant family cleans the teeth?'

'Oh, they use a twig off the neem tree, don't they? Apparently with all the benefits of toothbrush and toothpaste too.'

'There is not shop for plastic toothbrush. Perhaps no shop at all. Can you imagine this? They use whatever they have.' (Neem Dreams early draft)

And so on. I found these conversations enthralling, but they were not translating into effective narrative.

Why not? It turned out that the novel did not need a Mr Ketkar. As it evolved, the characters entered the narrative already possessing their neem knowledge and their neem quests. Pandora became a different kind of character (see later chapter on Pandora) and there was no longer a questing, naïve Marina.

During this time, mid to late 1995, the controversy around the patents is at its liveliest. I read many Indian newspapers and newsmagazines, one of the pleasures of being in India. Good timing. I find stories on the intellectual property issue and the neem patents. The Times of India runs reports on the petitions filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office to immediately revoke the patents issued to W.R. Grace, patents that granted the company

a worldwide monopoly over the sale of a highly effective pesticide extracted from the famed neem tree of India.

The petition charges that W.R. Grace company knowingly expropriated an invention that had been developed by Indian villages and scientists and used freely throughout India for generations. ('Neem petition against controversial patent filed' [no byline] 18)

The article goes on to say:

Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha chief, Nanjundaswamy, who is also among those who filed the unprecedented legal challenge, says that if the neem patent and other similar patents were allowed to stand, it would mean that indigenous populations around the world would be excluded from freely using many of the local biological resources that had been carefully developed and nurtured over hundreds of years.

Mr Nanjundaswamy said Indians have been using neem for several centuries and patenting of neem amounted to piracy of this indigenous knowledge.

Professor Nanjundaswamy, chief of the KRRS, the farmers' union of Karnataka state, was also prominent in news stories about recent demonstrations in Bangalore and the resultant court cases. The fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken had installed an outlet and farmers, students and others were outraged by the incursion of these food chains, and succeeded in closing KFC down, if only temporarily. In its issue of September 24 1995, The Guardian Weekly reported:

...although Kentucky Fried Chicken has won a temporary reprieve from the wrath of Indian economic nationalists, the fast-food chain is emerging as a key hate symbol in grass-roots opposition to economic liberalisation. (Goldenberg 5)

It is irresistible fodder for local columnists and commentators. I am amused by an article headed 'KFC is only chicken pakora' in which the journalist argues disingenuously that Indians had been eating pakora for centuries and KFC was only a version of that so why the fuss? This set off another ultimately fruitless attempt to create a character who would be pleased to offer these perverse, provocative opinions, but he was aborted early. Still, a trace of this argument remains in the passage in Neem Dreams where the three travellers discuss food in India:

They all liked masala dosa, Andy hadn't tried idlis, Jade adored mango lassi. Northern food and southern food, the many kinds of dal, rice in the south and wheat in the north, the way tourists sought out western food, the Indian versions of pizza and burgers, whether it was all right for Kentucky Fried Chicken to set up in India, whether KFC was the same as chicken pakora, did that make it okay, who copies who. The meat-eating westernised Hindus, the reason for food tabus. Whether breakfast was where people most needed familiar food. How hot you could take it, spices that were used for preservatives, the spice trade on which Empires were founded, whether chili originated in Mexico. Food they missed and food they remembered, the food they discovered and the food they craved. Food like music and sex was more than physical.

'If anything is spiritual,' said Jade, 'it's good food.' (Neem Dreams)

Mr Ketkar has Professor Nanjundaswamy's address, and I write to him, and he agrees to meet me when I come to Bangalore.

I rent a video player and Mr Ketkar comes to the hotel with documentary films about neem, and charms my yoga buddies Carole and Frances, who become indignant at the story of the neem patents. The four of us take a day trip out of the city and picnic on grassy slopes. Watched by a cow with blue painted horns, we discuss how age changes us and whether women are different from men and in what ways the Australian countryside looks different from this.

There are reports, too, at the time, of the Ganesh miracle and I read them with interest but do not keep any of the articles on the Ganesh miracle, I do not think the Ganesh miracle will find its way into my novel, cannot see it in there, not until almost the last draft, and then of course the Ganesh miracle becomes a central motif, first mentioned when Pandora buys a poster of the elephant-headed god:

As if this, this shiny picture on shiny paper, were not only a depiction of Ganesh, but in some way Ganesh himself.

The image or the icon was often the thing itself in this land where statues are said to talk, move and eat prasad and are fed and dressed and garlanded as if they were themselves the gods they depict. Wasn't it Ganesh in the newspaper story she'd read at the hotel in Bangalore, Ganesh who in several places all over India had been witnessed drinking offerings of milk? There were pictures of statues of Ganesh accepting milk from the devout and even the skeptical had not been able to explain what they had seen. (Neem Dreams)

The Ganesh miracle later manifests in the locality of the novel's setting – in the novel's diegesis in narratology terms – giving rise to the riot where Jade disappears forever, and so becomes one of the novel's existents, an important part of the plot. Researching one aspect of the novel overlaps with research into other aspects, and the writer cannot always know what parts of her experience will become fiction's material.

8 Professor Nemesis (Bangalore 1995)

Professor Nanjundaswamy made a profound impression on me. 'Blown away,' I told myself in my journal. He had departed, with neither show of haste nor reference to other bids for his attention, in the large shiny car that started up in the shadows and glided back down the driveway as we came out of the dining hall; the signals had been invisible to me. The driver and another man had been waiting for him as I interviewed him at my hotel. I would meet men who would make a display of their impatience, their importance, when I wanted to interview them as research for a novel. Professor Nanjundaswamy was gracious and patient. He was dressed in a green khadi silk kurta, crisp and neat, with an emerald green knitted cap and an emerald green shawl over one shoulder. I tried to make some notes of description in my journal:

Glasses. Neatness, calmness, modesty, strength. A beautiful smile of sweetness. A hero, a warrior. A man who need make no display of his deep conviction. 'Passion' seems too untidy a word. (Neem Dreams early draft)

It was mid-October 1995, and the weekly newsmagazine India Today published a three-page 'Special Report' headed, 'Giving the MNCs the Jitters' (David 88). If I had seen the article before meeting him I would have seen his photograph, in the same green outfit, arm raised by another man, addressing a rally of farmers protesting the recent GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; precursor to the World Trade Organisation that was formed that year); the photograph was part of a boxed insert taking three-quarters of the page and headed in small letters: 'M.D. Nandjundaswamy'; in large letters: 'Nemesis at Large'. The main body of the article examined the recent enforced closure of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the context of intense contention over the role of MNCs (multinational corporations) in India.

I interviewed him in the dining hall of my Bangalore hotel. I stayed at a mid-price hotel I'd picked out of a hastily borrowed guidebook; it turned out to be quite the perfect establishment with its proximity to a buzzy kind of downtown area that Meenakshi would know. The hotel had a spacious garden restaurant and that quaint decaying Victorian air you still find in some Indian cities. It seemed what I had hoped for: perfectly fitting: neither too cheap and therefore inevitably sleazy nor in the pricey and therefore, in the circumstances, inevitably vulgar range.

And Professor Nemesis came to see someone he knew nothing about, only what I'd told him, that I was a writer from Australia, planning to write a novel based on the current neem patents issue, wanted to talk with him, would meet him where he asked me to. I offered him the menu, he had only a cup of tea, no milk, plenty of sugar. It was early evening, but dinner is eaten late by the middle classes in India and there were not many people in the vast dining hall. It had a high pointed ceiling and a tiled mosaic floor, a kind of terrazzo.

The article, 'Giving MNCs the Jitters', says:

The latest bogeyman of multinationals, the 59-year-old president of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS), M. Nanjundaswamy, has taken on the mantle of George Fernandes, who in 1977 turfed out Coca-Cola when the Janata Party was in power....Nandjundaswamy has started an institute on sustainable agriculture, and a seed bank to collect, multiply and sell indigenous varieties of seeds under the brand name 'Swadeshi' – apparently to protect biodiversity and defy the IPR regime of the WTO. 'For the KRRS, the seed is the symbol of the second freedom movement as salt was the symbol of Gandhiji's movement,' he says. (David 89)

In the same feature, another boxed insert, 'Problems of Property', summarises the contention over patents, illustrated by pictures of a neem tree and prominent ecology and intellectual property rights activist Vandana Shiva. Vandana Shiva, I already knew, was a hero to my novel's character Pandora, still called Marina, and her writings were already becoming an important source for the novel. I could already read this through the eyes of Pandora, and appreciated the apparent web of connection.

He had been working to organise farmers for thirty years, the Professor told me, and had formed a state-level organization in 1980, organised through village-level units. I asked about political affiliations. He said: 'We have come to the conclusion that all political parties act as middleman for the multinational corporations.' Similarly all media. His was a movement based on Gandhian ideology, and he called it the seed satyagraha, after the salt satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi.

He spoke about the organisation of the recent rally against the GATT agreements and its implications. We discussed the patents and the multinational company's plans to try to set up neem processing plants in association with a local company. He was adamant that the age-old and continuing uses of neem were

Perfectly sufficient! Perfectly sufficient!... For many centuries all the possibilities have been explored by the basic scientists – farmers. Farmers are the original scientists. It's an old civilization and has experimented with everything connected with not only neem but many medicinal plants. (Neem Dreams early draft)

He spoke of the appeals against the patents, the uses of neem in small local industries, the horrific beginnings of the fast-food chains' demands on the livestock wealth. A lot of food grains will be diverted to cattle to raise meat. In that way it damages the food sector of India and Indian agriculture.

As for international support: 'We are not dependent on foreign aid, it's not important, we can do it ourselves'.

That was the only time I saw a flicker of something – indignation, perhaps, or distaste – over his serene features; the arrogant Westerner was put in her place for even suggesting that international support has to be in the picture.

Many other industries – trade unions, banks, insurance officers – were set to join the farmers in the forthcoming rally. With the same unflinching grace he answered my questions about his own life, his beginnings as a farmer, his move into a career in law, and the discriminatory laws that remained as a legacy of the British.

'Anything I can do for you?' I asked as he left.

'Only send me some of your books,' he said.

A couple of nights later, brought inside by rain, I sat in the dining hall again and scribbled this in my notebook:

I'm at the round table (glass-top over check cloth in yellows) I sat at with the amazing Nandjundaswamy. Two high stained-glass windows. The large room – hall, really – is full. A quiet murmur; here there is no loud – or any – music. Some Westerners, some Indians. Beer poetry and India, I want more more more more. See, I look like this straight old auntie now.

The characters in a novel I had begun to imagine were already sharing my travels. I sat there, ordering another beer, and continued making odd notes, including, I think for the first time, a note on two travellers only I could see:

Marina and Jade thrown uneasily together and someone takes them for lifelong companions...

My 2nd beer is not cold!

...Did I say this dining room is bedecked with ads for a breath-freshening product? Samples on the table: 'For fresh breath, eat and exhale' with 2 mints in a little shiny cardboard folder.

In spite of its quaint charm the hotel was no escape from the usual Indian discomforts, not only warm beer.

My room stinks of lavatory which comes from outside and below. I was woken before 6 by spitting hawking and washing sounds. There's a tank down there, and I think the workers' lavatory....There's nothing I really wanted to do in Bangalore but meet Professor Nemesis. (I wanted to follow him to the end of the earth)...

I kept thinking about the charisma and righteousness of the Professor. I kept thinking of a new symbol as powerful as Gandhi's spinning wheel.

I also, less intentionally, kept remembering those packaged samples on the tables. They seemed like an atrocity (as well as a perhaps too obvious irony) but they did not appear in the novel until the final draft. Andy is staying in this hotel, and finds his glossy plastic samples on a table outside, underneath the giant neem.

By the time Andy sits here, looking down at this commodity (isn't there a word for products that are made not because a need exists but because one can be created?) and then looking up at the tree (remember those highly effective natural toothbrushes that, now, even Andy knows about) – by this time, he has taken a huge turn, one that will have him leaving here to join Pandora in an act of complete commitment.

Incidentally, as I begin writing this piece, I have just re-read Graham Greene's 1962 novel The Comedians. The narrator, Brown, has liked to think of himself as an uncommitted man, outside of politics, outside of moral choices. In the end of course he makes an enormous commitment, takes huge risks for hopeless causes and dubious people, lays his life on the line. It now occurs to me something of Andy's story reflects something of this.

And maybe it took me as long as it took Andy – or Brown – to make a commitment. I was 'blown away' by the Professor. And I kept telling myself to get some balance, to notice also that, in some places, he was considered extremist, unrealistic, unreasonable. Wanting India to remain in the bullock-cart days. Not understanding the modern world. (The same kinds of criticism made of Gandhi.) I responded to his ideas but I didn't know whether I had any commitment to them. I wanted him to be right, but I wanted to be open. I didn't know whether the novel would come down so surely on the side of his politics.

That was in October 1995, and when I began writing the novel back in Australia, later that year, I thought there would be some kind of farmers' union organiser as a character who would play a large part: a local organiser, a disciple of the charismatic union head. I thought Jade might flirt with him. I was sorry to lose him but I never got very far with him.

A version of someone like Professor Nanjundaswamy remains in the novel. On her first morning in the village, Pandora sees:

Out in the field, the village common, the sun rises above the trees and the men's gathering swells to a crowd. More men appear, coming in bands from all directions, farmers from this village and from beyond.

And those are branches of neem they carry aloft.

A man has stepped out of the car, a man in emerald green khadi, in a green cap and shawl, and he stands before the crowd and makes a speech, listened to in attentive silence under the blazing sky. Then the crowd cheers. The men call slogans and wave branches...

The WTO is our brutal enemy.

The WTO will kill us unless we kill it.

The WTO is a new form of colonialism.

And so now we are all members of the second freedom movement. Once more we say: 'Quit India'. This time not to the British but to the multinational or transnational corporations. Quit India.

Direct action is the only way... (Neem Dreams)

The procession is seen by Andy in the distance as he has himself driven in a day-long journey from Bangalore to the village.

Andy dozed off and opening his eyes, saw, over on the horizon, a distant procession, thousands upon thousands of men marching steadily, a few bullock carts among them, some branches held aloft. But he might have been dreaming.

I write this in December 1999, nearing the completion of the novel's final draft. And that very week, Seattle happens. That is, suddenly the headline news reports huge demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the WTO.

Coincidence happens with every book one writes and while the writer might appreciate the sense of Right Work, it turns out to mean nothing to the book's fortunes.

For the first time I was getting my news off the Web. I was told that local media coverage of Seattle was superficial, and derisory towards the demonstrators, but on the Web they were taken seriously and the issues explored in length and depth. A coalition no one had known existed had the world's attention, and the World Wide Web had made it possible. The Seattle news was linked with a website for the KRRS.

As depressed as I had been by a world apparently driven by 'economic rationalism', I was, for a week at least, elatedly convinced that the tide had turned. Revolution might have been in the air, perhaps phantasmagoric, but perhaps not, for the world had after all seen revolutions. You don't have to be cynical. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, even if it didn't last.

The tide, of course, had not turned. The tide is globalization.

Thomas Friedman says about all alternatives to the free market:

They didn't work....When it comes to the question of which system today is the most effective at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over....[I]n the end , if you want higher standards of living in a world without walls, the free market is the only ideological alternative left. One road. Different speeds. But one road. (Friedman 104)

Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a triumphant charting of the beginnings and the direction of globalization, and he even dedicates a section to its detractors and opponents. His optimistic and popular argument is partly convincing – one can't argue too much about the fact and the desirability of the increasing democratisation of finance, technology and information, for instance. But he is both too sunny and too breezy about the fact that globalization is largely Americanization, and gives too little attention to the stacked deck that the USA plays with. Let alone the plight of those who are harmed by globalization or the integrity of those opposed to it.

'Globalization' is a word I see or hear every single day as I write this, revise it.

When I first became familiar with the concept of the 'global village', around 1970 when Marshall McLuhan was a portal into a world of new ideas, it was a promise of planetary unity. In the mid-80s I was struck by the idea of Coke as not only a soft drink but an agent of globalization. I was disinclined to deplore the apparently infinite reach of Coca-Cola. Even I like a Coke once in a while. Okay, a Coke doesn't cost me a day's pay, and that's what it costs where coconuts grow with their sweet healthy water. But the answer is not to ban Coke.

Maybe there are good things about globalization, as Friedman and his ilk claim. For instance, there's nothing like having everything you do watched and reported on to make you lift your game, and if multinationals are creating decent working conditions for their workers in the poorest places, does it matter to the workers whether that's altruism or public relations? Free market capitalism is good for everyone, that's Friedman's energetic position.

Except, of course, those it isn't good for. Some people miss out. It's not their fault. The gap between rich and poor widens, and widens and widens. Environmental disasters escalate. (e.g. see Sen; Elliott; and Shiva and Holla-Bhar). (I will return to this theme.) The global economy destroys local cultures, dialects and communities; it destroys local economies.

[W]hen it comes to [genetically modified] foods, and biotechnology more generally, there is a sense that science has been captured by the profit motive and has lost is moral compass. As David Korten put it in his book, The Post-Corporate World, the yoking together of objective science and corporate money has resulted in a system 'in which power and expertise are delinked from moral accountability, instrumental and financial values override life values, and what is expedient and profitable takes precedence over what is nurturing and responsible'. (Elliott 17)

The Indian farmers are right to oppose the WTO. It must be questioned, examined, wondered about. Not everyone wants to surf the internet sipping a coke and wear American shoes. Not everyone can. Some people will never have the choice. For some people, traditional uses of traditional resources is and will always be perfectly sufficient.

This was the position convincingly expressed by Professor Nanjundaswamy, these were the thoughts that energised me as I formed my ideas in the early drafts of the novel that would become Neem Dreams. A political passion fuelled the writing, as did the desire that the novel would ignite the same convictions in its readers.

9 Neem travels: Tamil Nadu

At the centre of Madurai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, stands the temple of Meenakshi 'the fish-eyed goddess'. The Meenakshi temple is vast, almost a little city in itself, with its alleys and walkways, the large pool, bordered by steps; at its centre, its many intricate carvings, the elephant walk, the arcades where merchants sell cards of bindi, coloured powders, glass bangles. You can spend many hours in this temple, even as an ignorant stranger, and observe ritual, commerce, worship, processions, music-making, socialising, pilgrimage, tourism.

The temple at Madurai is contemporary with those of ancient Greece and Egypt, yet while the gods of Thebes and the Parthenon have been dead and forgotten for millennia, the gods and temples of Hindu India are now more revered than ever.

Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world. (Dalrymple 183)

I take a room near the temple; from my window there are glimpses of its gopuras, the colourful, richly-decorated tower-like structures at its gateways. Back in the familiar warmth of a hot land, I begin to feel lightness again, and Madurai is one of the most charming towns on earth.

It is March, 1997. It has been a tough few weeks. Rewarding, though. I have been researching conscientiously. This is a novel based on the kind of research you'd do for a lengthy piece of investigative journalism, but I am also on a fiction-finding mission. Fiction doesn't always tell you when you've found it. Nor does fact, for that matter. Sometimes it's clear, those moments when you go I'm going to use this, I must include this while 'this' is happening. For example, I knew when I took the boat at sunrise on the Ganges at Varanasi that a character called Andy was doing this.

But more often it is in the later reflection, the discoveries made only when writing begins, that the writer finds out which experiences will be needed, utilised or transformed by the narrative.

By the time of this trip in early 1997, I know that the novel will include a neem factory somewhere in the south, a place I have begun to imagine, a place in a fictional region that combines elements of the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But I have not yet been to Tamil Nadu, the state where, they say, eighteen million neem trees grow.

I had arrived in Bombay, where I spent most of my time running between my sleazy hotel and a fax and phone service kiosk, then took a train to Pune, to Mr Ketkar. Staying at the same hotel as previous times in Pune, I saw some of the foreign students going to the Iyengar Yoga Institute, but this time I was not one of them. Once more I hired a video player to watch a new tape about neem, had pleasurable conversations with Mr Ketkar, and one morning left at 5 a.m. to take a long bus trip to a village where, at a small factory, oil was extracted from neem seeds.

The factory owner was not due back until the end of the day, and when he did come, my interview with him was brief, for I had little to ask him. I had only needed to see what such a place looked like, look at the extracting of oil, smell the air, better know my fictional factory, which would be larger than this one, as it would also manufacture products made from the oils. Here the processing took place in a modest row of sheds. In one of them an old metal mill was grinding the seeds to make oil. Crushed seeds and neem cake sat in piles. In another shed the seed was extracted from the neem fruit by being shaken about in a large container; this was powered by the steam from wood-burning furnaces.

New oil-extracting machines were becoming available, Mr Ketkar had told me, but here they were doing things the way they had done them for a long time.

The people here were kind and hospitable. It was the factory I had gone to see, and I worried at what I had seen and what I would need to describe, took notes, took a couple of snaps with a rarely-used, inadequate disposable camera. But the fictive germ turned out to be an invitation to take a rest at a nearby house. In a cool shaded room three little girls rubbed oils and perfumes into my skin and hair and adorned me with trinkets they had collected in a precious box. This would become the scene near the end of Neem Dreams where Pandora is similarly treated. In those days I dressed rather as Pandora would, a uniform of khaki pants and white shirt. (These days I look forward to putting on salwaar kameez in many hues.)

The rings were cheap trinkets, bits of glass glued onto an arc of flimsy metal that would close into a loop only on their dainty fingers but could easily be stretched open to fit onto Pandora's finger, one on every finger, suddenly the movements of her hand dictated by its regal ornamentation. The sweet little chattering as the girls decide whose turn and declare a verdict on some new effect... Chains and strings of beads and of little plastic daisies and bows hung around Pandora's neck. Silver toe-rings and anklets were found for her...

Joila had ground the leaves into a pungent brown paste. A new leaf was fashioned into a cone, with a small opening at its apex and the cone, filled with paste, became an instrument to trace swirls of lines on Pandora's hands and her feet, her skin marked with a mud that would be left to set, and then, rinsed off, would leave a tattoo in a precise design of pleasing arcs and spangles.

A little stick was dipped into a little pot and this was for her eyes, inside her eyes, it will make black lines around her eyes, make her eyes sparkle, the whites become whiter, kohl, I think we call it kohl, isn't that your word? A handful of hair pins, gleaming with enamel and plastic and with rare, rare jewels, these, with delicious little probings and pricklings and tugs, are fastened into her now lustrous greasy hair. (Neem Dreams)

It was an enchantment, that little house and the attentions of the charming little girls, both solemn and playful in their ministrations. I had been invited to this domestic, intimate space, this female space, and offered, it seemed, ancient rituals of feminine activity and bonding, transcending time, culture, language, age. There was something mysterious, other-worldly, about it, and something very familiar.

It was the factory that occupied my reflections that day, and the people I had spoken with on the trip and at the factory, and the bus ride – it was after midnight before I returned to my hotel in Pune; but when it came time to write the novel, that scene in the little house in the hamlet remained. When Pandora is transformed by the girl-children's grooming, she rises to find, dream-like, that Andy has unexpectedly arrived in the remote village she has gone to, driven to find her with his news that he knows all about the deals that had been made, deals that will mean the neem seeds from the women's project here will eventually go to the transnational company, and Pandora and Andy decide on the action that ends the novel.

##

In Delhi I had spent two weeks doggedly looking up a range of people I had acquired some kind of introduction to: feminist publishers, members of a women's collective researching traditional remedies, newspaper and magazine editors, a distinguished scientific researcher into medical uses of neem, a cosmetic company with a new neem line, a high official in the BJP (the Baratha Janata Party, the Hindu fundamentalist political party that was gaining prominence and influence).

I found a room at the house of a married couple of Bengali Brahmin doctors and we had long conversations over the late dinner. I had breakfast in a backpackers' café, I had tea at the Imperial Hotel and I took my hostess to lunch at Delhi's Taj Mahal Hotel, not as legendary as Bombay's but another glimpse of five-star life. I went to various concerts in various venues: classical Indian music mainly; jazz also. I went out with an Indian man in expectation of authentic local food and a Bombay movie; we went to a Hollywood movie and ate pizza.

'Delhi's pollution is so bad,' I'd been warned, 'that you carve your body space through it when you walk in the street.' I spent a lot of time in traffic in auto-rickshaws choking on exhaust fumes and I didn't feel healthy when I left. Maybe not the best preparation for the holy city of Varanasi, where I spent my troubled time with Andy. (See chapter on Andy.)

I longed to lie on the ground under a tree, to fall asleep on earth under a tree, but it seemed a ridiculous longing in Varanasi's labyrinth of narrow alleys, where I became sicker and could not get a train-booking for days on end and felt increasingly strange to myself. But finally I visited Sarnath, ten kilometres away, a Buddhist site where the Buddha is said to have given his first sermon, and there, among monuments and museums, managed to lie under a tree and fall asleep, and was left alone to do it too, amazing in India, but I did suspect I had become a ghost. I rose from that sleep improved. The train trip to Madras took 40 hours and the curtains were kept drawn over the largely opaque windows of my compartment, which proved the air-con class is not always the one to choose.

Meanwhile I had already imagined the neem project that the novel includes. A women's project, non-government, locally operated, involved in cultivating neem.

In Madras, the state capital, I visited Doctor Vijayalakshmi, who ran an NGO (non-government organisation) that had, among other activities, co-produced a handbook, Neem: A User's Manual (Vijayalakshmi 1995). It was she who told me how to find the project, further south, where women worked with neem. Something I had imagined in fact existed. When I left her clinic to find a bus back to town, I stopped to eat from a huge fragrant jackfruit that had just been cut open at a roadside stall; its taste and scent tinge the memory of that day and the realisation that a feeling of ease had replaced one of strife.

##

In Madurai, in my room near the Meenakshi Temple, at last once more I was blessed with that warm and fluid feeling of flowing with a sun-dappled river of life.

In the outskirts of Madurai, in a pleasant residential area of flat-roofed houses, dotted about with coconut groves, I found P. Vivekanadam. Vivek had begun his own NGO, known as SEVA (Sustainable-agriculture and Environmental Voluntary Action). He was courteous, modest, generous, hard working, knowledgeable, idealistic and practical. Why can't people like this rule the world? At a factory he sent me to, where they manufactured agricultural products from neem, the owners said Vivek was 'like Gandhi – living so simply, and he is a landowner's son, with a graduate degree, and could make a lot of money.'

I spent the rest of my days in Madurai with Vivek and his family. His two little daughters painted my hands with mehendi, and no manicure had ever so pleasingly improved my hands. I think I have conflated this hand-decoration into the scene with the little girls in Maharasthra.

Each day women drew intricate mandala patterns, kolam, in chalk outside their houses, as they did all over Tamil Nadu. This everyday yet richly-suggestive image must be included in fiction set in such parts and be allowed to speak for itself.

##

We took a day to travel to Vivek's village, stopping to visit a small village school that a friend of his had started. The friendly, eager children asked me about Australia – is it hot or cold, what do you eat, are the schools like this? To another village; in the nearby fields men were cutting down some neem trees for timber, which, in the short term, provided a better income than the seeds. How do you ask people, who have so little, to sacrifice a short-term gain for a bigger, better long-term gain? Neem leaves were used for fodder for goats. The men were digging out the young red roots of the trees; every part was used. The issue of patents, they told me, translated by Vivek, was 'only for intellectuals and city people'. Here, as in the village we were going to, SEVA was involved in a four-part agreement with landowners, the landless and women's groups to plant neems and allow them to grow. I carefully noted down pages of data: trees per hectare; payments to watchmen; percentage of cut tree for the village; and pages of uses for neem: medicine, toothbrushes, ceremonial pastes made with turmeric, cleaning material. But these days people wanted a plastic toothbrush and medicine from a doctor. 'She wants to plant neems in Australia,' Vivek explained when asked why I was there. People gathered around us under a huge shade tree and discussed the loan schemes in which many of their hopes for development lay.

Further along in our journey we inspected a SEVA nursery, where among other saplings, mainly fruit trees, little neem trees were being raised for planting in lines in fields that had been waste land but now would be made suitable for crops.

We reached Vivek's village. He would return home that day in the hired car and I would stay a few days then take a bus.

Here were the fields, the project, the houses, the villagers, the young woman who was a recent graduate from agricultural college and worked for the women's sangams (co-operative organisations), the house I stayed in with her, the many children, that were the basis for their counterparts in Neem Dreams. Though now it is as if the writing of Neem Dreams has rewritten my memories.

Anasuya's little house led off one of the laneways in a maze. At the centre of the house was an open-air courtyard, very small, with a tap in one corner and two little cubicles, one where you took your bucket to wash, and one with the hole-in-the-ground lavatory. Pandora slept, or lay awake, under the roof on a mat on a raised floor running along the length of the courtyard and tiny entrance area. There was a kitchen next to the front door, and Anasuya slept in the room at the other end of the house, with a couple of little girls from the neighborhood for company, maybe for chaperonage.

Sacks of grain were stored in this little house, piled to the ceiling at either end of Pandora's open-sided platform room and in an enclosed little room or closet at the entrance, and the rest of it in Anasuya's room.

But not only grain. There were sacks full of neem seeds, the newly improved yield of seeds, the seeds the women had gathered and sorted and stored in improved ways. The sacks were ready to be taken to the seed merchant in the industrial area. They were to have left this day but maybe they will be taken tomorrow. (Neem Dreams)

Her name was not Anasuya; I gave her that name in the novel after a hospitable minor character in the Ramayana. There were sacks of grain stored in her little house, but the sacks of neem...I must have made that up.

The President of the women's sangams gave us dinner in her house. I was curious about the fact that a picture of Indira Gandhi hung next to one of Nehru and one of the god Ganesh, and risked an inquiry. Indira's despotic prime ministership had been depicted in chilling terms in Salman Rushdie's novels and in Rohintan Mistry's A Delicate Balance, which I had just been reading. In fiction you understand the experience; non-fiction gives the facts more coldly:

[Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's] fatal weakness was her passion for power and her unbridled ambition for herself and her sons.

[During the 'Emergency' of the mid-1970s] more than 100,000 Indians were jailed without trial, held without due process for more than a year, kept behind bars in their own independent nation, by their own government. Every opposition party was banned. All newspapers and radio broadcasts were totally censored. (Wolpert 1991: 210, 214)

'The Emergency was necessary,' was all the village President said, giving no clue why she said so.

Now, the way I remember it, I am Pandora walking at dawn to the edge of the village, hand in hand with the children, to observe the gathering in the common area, seeing all the farmers gathering to march on the big demonstration, a figure like Professor Nandjundaswamy addressing them.

But that never happened. Scenes like that must have taken place, but I was not at them. I remember, as if from life, occasions I have invented. Real events seem like dreams, or stories written by another. Memory and invention have bled into each other. I can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.

10 Creator and narrator: four

[W]e can know more about [a fictional character] than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one... [W]e might exclaim at this point: 'If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.' For this is the principle involved. (Forster 1955: 56)

A writer has a peculiar relationship to her characters. There is the famous experience of the 'life of their own'. There is the perennial question: 'Is this character you?'.

Yes, characters have a life of their own. They take off in directions you had never planned, mutate into new beings you had never imagined. No, of course characters do not have a life of their own, you'd be delusional to think that; they have the life the writer and the reader gives them, the illusion of life the writer and the reader create:

...[S]aying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him...[t]hat kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. (Eco 1984: 28)

No, a character is not the writer, a character I write cannot be me, I am its first creator, its manipulator. And yes, the character is me, I use my own experience – including observation, imagination and fantasy – and, while the reader identifies, the reader too is the character.

In an essay in The New Republic in July 2000, widely reprinted, James Wood, speaking of contemporary fiction, calls recent popular novels 'hysterical realism':

What are these stories evading? One of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibility of novelistic storytelling. This, in turn, has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character. Stories, after all, are generated by human beings and it might be said that these recent novels are full of inhuman stories...they are stories that defy the laws of persuasion. (Wood 2000)

In Wood's view, many contemporary novels ignore character for the sake of effect: bizarre coincidence, outrageous images, tricks and flourishes of language and plot twists.

Others point to the decline of character in fiction because of the influence of new theories:

Character, then, is pronounced 'dead' by many modern writers. Nails are added to its coffin by various contemporary theorists. Structuralists can hardly accommodate character within their theories, because of their commitment to an ideology which 'decentres' man and runs counter to the notions of individuality and psychological depth. (Rimmon-Kenan 30)

Forster refers to characters both as 'people' and as 'actors'. A writer writing a character, too, feels partly person, partly actor. Part of the method is empathy, part of it is masquerade.

In the writing of Neem Dreams, the novelist centred her concerns on character. It was the discovery and development of the characters – the people – that drove the novel, the characters who revealed what would happen, the characters who created a story, the characters who provided the way for all the novel's issues to be addressed, the characters who channeled the novel's language.

In an essay on the writing of his novel A Hymn for the Drowning, Christopher Cyrill speaks of discovering he has four main characters, and other patterns of fours:

The book revealed the number four to me... Four is the number of cardinal points...Vishnu has four arms...I remembered the 'fours' of jazz where a chorus is broken into four parts, one for each soloist. As in music, four is the number of stability and harmony. Buddhism has Four Noble Truths. The shastras are divided into four classes. Four is the mystical number of the Cabbala, four humours were thought to control the body. Four forms, the tetrakis, represent the solstices and the equinoxes, the phases of the moon. And there were four destroying angels in four corners of the world. (Cyrill 651)

Me too. I do not set out to write a novel with four main characters but once each of them asserts their existence, none of them agrees to be eliminated. Often I feel it is one of the most difficult givens of this novel: this four, this fourness.

Three is an eternal triangle; two is classical, a simple attraction and opposition; one is a unifying and integrating consciousness; twelve means they can each play their little part and get off.

Four suggests a square, that least pleasing of shapes, but there are four, do what I will, and so I think of earth air water and fire, and, from the yoga tradition, Patanjali's fourfold remedy for the obstacles to practice (Maaitri, Karuna, Mudita, and Upeksa: friendliness, compassion, delight and disregard). There are four cyclic epochs in Hindu belief; we are in the age of Kali; the age of Kali is a well-known trope of our times (and incidentally the title of a recent book on travels in India [Dalrymple 1998] and the age of Kali must be mentioned in my novel).

I accept fourness, am open to new discoveries about four, begin to form or formulate analogies of these fours to my characters, and allow myself to be quartered rather than, as is more usual, dichotomised.

I am used to considering my self to be a divided self. My natal horoscope shows sun square moon. Think of the sun as the outward self, the moon as the hidden self. The ninety-degree angle between them suggests tension or conflict. That's my self, always wanting also the opposite of what I want. But I like to think this tendency has its benefit: an ability to see things in more than one way, an ability that helps in the writing of character. It would be more balanced to be divided among the four elements and the four cardinal points. I try and think of my four characters as each exemplifying one of these fours, not entirely successfully.

There are four points to the compass, four corners of the earth, four canonical gospels, four Winds, four Beasts at the Revelation. Four is supposed to be the number of practicality, application, loyalty, rigidity, repression, according to any simple numerology guide.

I have heard people say you should not live in a house number four. Apparently the Chinese word for death sounds like the Chinese word for four and that's where this superstition began. But it's embraced in the West among those who think of superstition as a superior spiritual practice, or those who think rationality is Western, imperialist and an insult to foreign superstitions. One day a woman looks at the return address on a letter to me and says vehemently, 'Your friend lives in a number four! Tell her she has to move out! You must never live in a number four!' A clairvoyant tells me the number four is good for me and a year or so later I am ridiculously pleased to stay for several months in an apartment number four in 22nd Street in a building whose numbers add to four. I had always liked living in places that added up to 6 or 3 or 9 and I realise how silly it is that I have to feel okay that this was going to be a 'four' experience.

I do not think, now, that my experience there, or anywhere, was in the least influenced by what number happened to be assigned to the place. Now I find myself unburdened by superstitions about numbers.

What is a useful way to think about character? EM Forster's famous distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters (Forster 1955: 67ff.) is so invariably trotted out that it begins to seem hackneyed and insufficient; yet his system remains the inspiration for developments in contemporary narratology's theorising of character:

The various characters abstracted from a given text are seldom grasped as having the same degree of 'fullness'. Already in 1927 Forster recognized this, distinguishing between 'flat' and 'round' characters...

Forster's distinction is of pioneering importance, but it also suffers from a few weaknesses: 1) The term 'flat' suggests something two-dimensional, devoid of depth and 'life', while in fact many flat characters, like those of Dickens, are not only felt as very much 'alive', but also create the impression of depth. 2) The dichotomy is highly reductive, obliterating the degrees and nuances found in actual works of narrative fiction. 3) Forster seems to confuse two criteria which do not always overlap. According to him, a flat character is both simple and undeveloping, whereas a round character is both complex and developing. Although these criteria often co-exist, there are fictional characters which are complex but undeveloping (e.g. Joyce's Bloom) and others which are simple but developing (e.g. the allegorical Everyman). Moreover, the lack of development can be presented as arrested development resulting from some psychic trauma, as in the case of Miss Havisham in Dickens's Great Expectations (1860/61), thus endowing a static character with complexity.

In order to avoid reductiveness, Ewen...suggests a classification of characters along a continuum rather than according to exhaustive categories. And...he advocates a distinction among three continua or axes: complexity, development, penetration into the 'inner life'. (Rimmon-Kenan 40-41)

This is rather more incisive and useful for thinking about the writing of character. Perhaps one can add to this another axis: extent of focalisation.

Prashant, Dinesh and Jolly are minor characters in Neem Dreams. Although they would be 'flat' in Forster's terms, they are not two-dimensional. You get a sense of dimensions that aren't explored because these are not the characters who are focalised. Though they cannot tilt the narrative to their focus, and there is no penetration into their inner life, Prashant, Dinesh and Jolly are complex. Prashant does develop, although off-stage as it were: he is Meenakshi's husband and in their last scene shows he has been thinking about their marriage, and demonstrates he is willing to do his part to revitalise it. Dinesh and Jolly do not develop, but in each case complexities of character are suggested: both are identified with, in very different ways, the circumstances of their remote rural area. Dinesh is a devious political opportunist; Jolly is a bright, agreeable young man longing for opportunities not available to him.

The four main characters demand penetration, complexity and development. While I am writing Neem Dreams I plunder my self and my life for these characters, and my self and my life are changed, are shaped, by their needs. The illusory 'self' is defined by Martin Amis as 'that holding operation between the mind's various factions' (Amis 2002: 282). As he says, a novelist cannot work with the equivalent of a street directory or text book to know what the self is; the self 'is what novelists feel they are obliged to grope their way around: they don't want to see the A to Z' (Amis 2002: 282). Maybe it is characteristic of novelists to seek a knowable self through the creation of character.

As this work develops, where I go, what I read and think about, the conversations I seek, the memories I dwell on and re-figure are dedicated to, guided by, impelled by, Pandora, Andy, Jade, Meenakshi.

11 Pandora

When I meet Joe Friend of Neem Peace in Cairns, Pandora sits there beside him, a younger, female version of him, sharing many of the same experiences and a similar background: agricultural college, father who worked with toxic pesticides, Darwin, neem. She is a neem warrior. She is an initium for this novel.

From the start I know she has a Greek background, that she falls in love with her first lover, another girl, at college, and doesn't get quite over it (or doesn't let herself), I know her younger brother dies before he is 21, of AIDS.

How do I know? I just do. Those initial and unchanging elements of this character arise from impenetrable depths of the unconscious, and just as interpretation is the enemy of dreams, so it is the enemy of such givens. As it happens, I find both 'Greek' and 'gay' have positive associations that seem to be genetic, so essential to my sense of self; 'feminist scientist' sounds good to me too, doubtless a more recently learnt response. However, while I want a character I'd be very interested in, I could not be interested in one who I knew or loved too easily, and from these early givens much has to be discovered, or invented – and writing fiction makes discovery and invention feel like the same thing.

I begin to explore her background, find out something about how things work at agricultural college: what she might have learnt there, how many women might have been 'doing agriculture' at the time. Pandora is around 33 years of age and the novel is set in 1995, so she was born in about 1962; she didn't go to college straight after school, she's there from around 1985. Her brother Paul is dying when he is 20 so she is 27 so it must be about 1989. Right, I think every time I do these sums; 1989 was 'a big year', a year of change, for a lot of people I know. My nephew tells me it was the year he turned from football to hip-hop. My oldest friend had a baby. I published my first book. Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The Berlin Wall fell.

Then there's science. What is a scientist? Here is Pandora at age 11:

Some leaves have smooth edges, others have jagged edges, called serrated. Some are long, like spears, some shaped like ovals, some circles. Some sit on the stem on either side in pairs, some are staggered along the stem, some bunched in clusters.

She has at least three of each type of leaf and sorts them into three sets three different ways: colour, shape, and whether they come in pairs. Uncle Theo sees her doing this. What she is doing is classification, he tells her.

Theo, she's a girl, she hears aunt say, her tone telling him to eschew some notion about her, certain to be about her future, for to grown-ups you seemed to have value only as a future adult. What do you want to be? Practice being mature and reliable.

She thinks like a scientist, Theo says. Pandora thinks she likes this. He is her father's brother and so he is Greek too and he is also a scientist, but a science teacher, so he will not die young. (Neem Dreams)

I entertain a fascination with classification. I have a friend who obsessively, thoroughly, indexes and cross-references every piece of music in her extensive CD and tape collection, the usual way, alphabetically. She knows someone who classifies his collection by order of purchase, and if he buys three CDs insists that sales clerks itemise them in the order he chose them. Susan Sontag, I once read, places her books on her shelves not alphabetically but in order of publication.

I have long talks with a scientist friend – a marine biologist – about the meaning of science and the scientific method. I become fascinated with the fact that a hypothesis cannot be proven, only disproved (and quote this in the novel). I ponder the accusation I keep hearing that science is based on 'male logic' and 'patriarchal' notions of proof. I am convinced that this thinking is absurd – science is a method; these objections are voiced by few scientists; but I also have some sympathy with it – patriarchy constructs these methods, maybe, and shapes the contexts in which science is carried out, certainly. No, it's a vast and tricky arena, this one. (A clearly-written and painstakingly rational overview is Chalmers' What Is Science? [1999])

I begin to read books on ecology and feminism – eco-feminism – and it's as if this label were invented for my Pandora.

An ecofeminist perspective propounds the need for a new cosmology and a new anthropology. (Mies & Shiva 6)

I allow Pandora to develop the kind of radical politics expressed by her model or idol Vandana Shiva. Pandora has lived and worked in the Pacific: the novel merely mentions this, but I imagine her somewhere in Melanesia – the Solomons, say – reading Shiva's book Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development in India (1988) while writing her PhD on women and 'the development project'. This PhD becomes Pandora's book, the book she offers to Meenakshi as her 'credentials' with a 'silly hope' that Meenakshi might already know it; the book which in a parallel world someone like me would find, and Pandora's book would sit on my shelf along with Mies and Shiva.

Vandana Shiva vigorously criticises development as a new project of western patriarchy (Shiva 1988: 1), declares that modern science is patriarchy's project:

Modern science is projected as a universal, value-free system of knowledge, which has displaced all other belief and knowledge systems by its universality and value neutrality, and by the logic of its methods to arrive at objective claims about nature.

The 'facts' of reductionist science are socially constructed categories which have the cultural markings of the western bourgeois, patriarchal system which is their context of discovery and justification. (Shiva 1988: 15, 27)

I enjoy my embracing of a radical politics of science while at the same time being persuaded to deplore the illogic and the intellectually flabby ultra-relativism of what is known as the far left, as described in books like Gross and Levitt's Higher Superstition (1994) and demonstrated by the Alan Sokal hoax that happens while I am writing early sections.

With an aim of exposing science critics' rather weak grasp of science and even weaker standards for peer review, Sokal intentionally strung together the most outrageous statements by well-known postmodern theorists and cultural critics...to pay exaggerated tribute to how postmodern social theory has shown that the reality physicists study is a social and linguistic construct. (Nanda 1997)

Sokal, a theoretical physicist, submitted an article to the journal Social Text. It was accepted and published and then Sokal revealed his article was a parody of postmodern science critique. (This kind of parody can now easily be constructed at a website called The Postmodern Generator.)

I was living on a remote island and only knew about this hoax thanks to the radio, humankind's best invention. The discussion alerted me to Meera Nanda's article 'Joining the Science Wars from the 'Other' Side: De-Westernization of Science and the Hindu Right' (1997). (In a time before I had internet access, the miracle of faxes brought this to me. A fax can arrive in minutes from an office in the USA to an office on Thursday Island, but takes longer to be transported from there in a tinnie – a dinghy – over to another island, to a house without electricity: a discrepancy that seems to resonate.)

This article became an important source for my illustration in Neem Dreams of the fashionable embrace of old superstitions which are manipulated to political ends by the Hindu Right. (Nanda argues that the Far Left – the 'post-alls' – helped make this possible.)

Before all this, after going to college, Pandora spends some time in Sydney – the job at the laboratory measuring pollution levels is an early given – and she studies yoga there, also an early given. I send her to a version of my old yoga school and see her through the struggle of the early days – the strange dread and the inexplicable commitment.

No one takes any notice of Pandora. No one speaks to her. Why is she in a crowded yoga room with stained ropes and wooden blocks and black rubber mats and strange people? She thinks of it with dread.

But if it is Monday Pandora does not go to her bus when she alights the train between her city job and her beach home. She walks past department stores, buses grinding to a halt, to a doorway next to a toyshop, climbs the stairs. Men and women are stripping off their day clothes, some struggling for modesty as they pull on tights and T-shirts.

Sometimes an odour remains from the previous class, a smell of endeavor and anxiety, wafted away in clouds of lavender oil. Barbara is a high priestess in here and the pictures lining the top of the wall above the ropes, they show, you can't say a god, something more than a teacher. A guru. Astounding in each of sixty-four asana.

One day in the downward facing dog stretch, Pandora feels her spine move, her spine lengthen, she feels herself grow long, she feels her chest open and move toward her thighs, she feels her buttocks extend upward, she feels part of her body move and extend where she hasn't known there was anything to feel. She feels her upper arms turn, locates strength within herself, understands the movement, understands a new way to understanding. (Neem Dreams)

Pandora is the character who unites yoga, India and neem.

A character changes through drafts. In The Island Draft (the first main draft of Neem Dreams) Pandora does not become a scholar, but a dropout. She moves from Sydney to Far North Queensland. There she works in a neem nursery. At this stage Pandora – still Marina – is a bit soft around the edges, her uncertain, drifting quality a reflection of the searching and experimenting I am doing to find her story, her character.

She gets a letter from her old yoga school in Sydney. It is time to go to yoga school in India (I am thinking of the Iyengar Institute in Pune, but not exactly). She has booked her place way back then, pretty much forgotten that, but it's a three-year wait to get in and she's kept in touch with her old teacher. She hasn't kept up her yoga too well and she isn't going to go but the guy who owns the nursery is neem-networking, and says something like, While you're in Pune look up this man.

I write long chapters about Pandora doing yoga at the Institute in India, the hotel she stays in (which I call the Chandra, then keep that name for the hotel at the junction in Neem Dreams), the kinds of conversations yoga students have (detailed reports on their bowel movements, gossip about other students and teachers).

Pandora/Marina meets Mr Ketkar or a fictional version of Mr Ketkar, reads his material. I chuck all this out. Once more the novelist learns that 'it happened' is no reason that art recognises. I was too enchanted with the real Mr Ketkar to make any of the adjustments – however slight – a novelist must make to a real-life model to create a new character. And I was spending far too many pages setting up the information on neem.

In the early drafts, it is because of Mr Ketkar that Marina/Pandora drops out of yoga again and decides to make her way to the women's neem/development project.

In early drafts, the characters in the course of the novel discover neem, discover the patents issue, discover cures, discover products, discover causes. Their discovery was going to drive the novel. But that wasn't going to work. It became obvious that they had to know, they had to walk into the frame of the novel with prior knowledge. This was not, after all, going to be a novel about the discovery of neem and the patents issue. That knowledge, gained in their back-story, was what gave them drive, motive, purpose.

So the novel now begins with the sentence It is the best tree in the world.

In The Brisbane Draft (second main draft) Marina arrives at Meenakshi's place already well-established as an ecofeminist author, already keen to further her career with a follow-up article on women and development, already knowledgeable about the patents issue. In this version of the story, the pompous schemer Dinesh has insisted that 'a qualified project evaluation' is a condition his unnamed backers require before further support will be granted for Meenakshi's precious village development project, and Meenakshi can't believe her luck when Marina, willing and eager, turns up with all the qualifications. But when she is first seen at Meenakshi's door she 'glances around her uncertainly' and this version has no real ending. No, Marina had to give birth to a Pandora, a fiery and determined woman who betrayed no uncertainty and was moving inexorably towards a fiery conclusion.

I remember seeing, in a New Yorker magazine of September 2000, an advertisement for a hotel chain that sought to entice you with the slogan 'Tourists come home with souvenirs. Explorers return with stories.' It is my contention that the distinction between traveller and tourist ceased to have substantial meaning around the time it was first formulated; it is a cliché usually employed as a shorthand for tourist: bad, traveler: good, a convention so absurd that it makes possible this advertisement, in an upmarket magazine, for an upmarket hotel chain. These days you can buy the right to be called a traveller, explorer, trail-blazer.

All that notwithstanding, we can say that Pandora has little interest in conventional tourist activities – seeing the sites/sights listed on travel guides, eating in recommended restaurants, shopping for souvenirs, taking photographs. She goes to India in part to experience the country, or perhaps more accurately to experience herself in that country, one of the conventions of travel.

Pandora wasn't in India for the shopping. She had not bought fabrics or clothes, bijoux or bibelots. She traveled in the same pants and shirts she wore at home. (Neem Dreams)

At the junction area where a lot of the novel is set, there is a famous ruin, and Pandora visits it with Andy, but they never get further than the fence around it, and see it only from behind a locked gate, with darkness 'flinging a shroud over the monument'. They make no remark about it except to murmur that it's 'ancient'. The disputed ruin is not the object of their walk together, it's just a landmark, a setting. They each have their quest in this place, and it is centred on neem, not on a disused temple.

Away from the bazaar, the air smelled of dung and decaying leaves, air that this ruin had for aeons inhaled, and into which it exhaled its own essence, steadiness, lastingness, or if not everlastingness a slow decay that watched your own generations pass unable to perceive its alteration.

The ruin, then, works metaphorically or perhaps I mean allegorically or symbolically or even anthropomorphically. It is disputed, it is seen, it is a tourist site though we never see any of the tourists who visit it on the daily bus trips that are mentioned. Its history and purpose are unclear, although it is laden with a reputation of dispute and scholarship.

First came the ruin: an image as if from a dream, from half-remembered images of temples and ruins seen travelling in India, from imagining the junction area where the novel is mostly set. Then came the ideas about it – its ambiguous provenance and meaning (in a country full of disputed sites); its re-positioning as a tourist destination (in a country where so much is positioned this way), its place in a novel as a place that the district is famous for but none of the characters is seen in (in a country that confounds expectations).

Though, just after I wrote that, I re-read a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, Quartet, which I had read many years ago, long before I had begun writing this novel. My image of the ruin could once have been formed by this story, I thought, as I read:

After walking six hours in the sun that day we reached a promontory jutting into the sea...

It seemed to me as if a slumbering earth had stretched a weary arm over the sea. In the hand at the end of that arm stood a blue-green hill. There were ancient rock carvings in a cave in the side of that hill. Whether these were Hindu or Buddhist, whether the figures were of Buddha or Krishna, whether their craftsmanship betrayed Greek influence, these were contentious issues among scholars. (Tagore 1993: 36)

So memory feeds imagination and is subsumed by imagination, and perhaps the opposite happens as well: my memory includes incidents from the lives of fictional characters.

When I return to the novel again, after many months of separation again, I find a character whose anger is constantly growing, and I find the world I'm in confirms that anger is needed.

I'm not alone in seeing the cause of this anger. Greed has won. Australia's Howard Government constantly astounds us by unceasingly sinking to ever-deeper iniquitous depths of racism, cruelty and philistinism. For a while it's as if Pandora had provided me with something to do with the unrelieved anger aroused by the daily news. Give it to her. Let Pandora do something.

I talk to my friend Helen one day about Greek names – Helen comes from a Greek background – and she suggests Paniota or Pandora. It's one of those moments – click: of course! And the fuzzy-edged pale brown watercolour of Marina is replaced with a blazing oil of black eyes, and a face and body that appears in my mind as clearly as the best-known aspects of my closest friends. I can smell Pandora and see the texture of her skin, and as I begin to write and wonder what she will do, it is simply obvious that she will commit an act of eco-terrorism. (E.M. Forster had changed the name of Adela from Violet, Janet and Edith; in this case the character was 'more aggressive' in earlier avatars [Stallybrass 1978: xvi].) Another fortuitous conversation, with John Ward who is finishing his PhD on ecology and economics, leads me to the old cult classic The Monkey Wrench Gang and the Web leads me to more information on its author Edward Abbey, his followers and successors, and contemporary acts of eco-terrorism. I write on, wondering exactly what act she will commit, and then the sacks of grain that always were in Anasuya's little house reveal themselves to have sacks of neem seeds among them – but of course!

Not because you can change the world this way and not because you can never change the world; for the sake of refusal, for the sake of demonstration, for the sake of a primeval force of wonder and terror, because you have to know when to cut a knot rather than untie it and similarly you have to know when to sacrifice what little you have to point out why it is so little, so that you are not a victim, so that you make sure there is alarm...you make a fire. (Neem Dreams)

That is Pandora's argument, in the final chapter, for setting alight the sacks of neem seed in the little village house where Andy comes to find her and tell her that these seeds, finally, will be used to further the interests of the transnational company. The fiery conclusion seems more inevitable than death. (It occurs to me there is quite a lot of death in this novel. And then it occurs to me that that is only natural.)

I am not in a village where I can burn the sacks of neem seeds in order to say the people get the seeds or no one gets the seeds, as Andy and Pandora are willing to do, or at least seriously to contemplate doing. They desperately imagine making a fire big enough to destroy not only the sacks but, and this is only suggested, the house, the village, the fields around them and all injustice with it. I share their frustration, their fury, the desperate desire to do something. They are sitting among sacks of seeds that ultimately will be, they have just found out, not (only) the product of an idealistic project, but the provision of resources for their brutal enemy, the transnational company, the unjust patents, the forces of corporate globalization. They have kerosene and matches, they are seriously thinking that what they can do is burn it all down.

That's not what I would do. What would I do?

I would brood, and ponder, and reflect, and eventually I would do the only thing I can do, write a novel.

12 Andy

Andy starts out as an American who used to work for the company at the centre of the neem patents protests, the company I have called WR Kind in the novel. I already know this when in New York in 1996 I meet an Australian friend of a friend who works for a multinational. (His name is Andy but this is a coincidence as my character is already named for a pleasant English man I met on the boat trip between Alleppey and Quilon on the previous year's journey in Kerala, where I also met one of the models for the character Jolly.) The Australian Andy passes me thick plain brown envelopes under the table as we have lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his mid-town office, while I find out from him the name of the job my Andy would have.

The envelopes contain documents, the contents of which I have trouble remembering now, and have to do with the company I would call Kind based on one called Grace. The company with the most neem patents.

And my Andy is going to be a 'product manager'. Andy will have managed some of the neem-based products patented by the company, and I need to know what his working day might look like.

I visit Australian Andy and his wife in their Upper East Side apartment and he generously answers my questions about agro-chemical and pharmaceutical companies. I am interested in the culture of these companies and how a gay man might fit in. Not easily, especially in the agro-chemical companies. Andy was always gay, was always going to travel to India with the ashes of his dead lover, was always going to arrive in the novel in a shattered state.

After The Island Draft I realise, reluctantly at first, that Andy had better become English. Reluctantly because I had his American voice, because I had a resistance to finding an English voice, because it is hard to change your mind sometimes. The realisation partly comes from the character, a being struggling to make itself recognised. Partly it is a decision that one of the characters has to be English – a reason from the cold-blooded author, who is aware of Empire history implicated in the story and so an English connection has to be carried by a character. One Australian, one Englishman and one American, is what I decide on, and one Indian. Schematic. Pandora is the Australian of course. But Jade has already appeared as an Australian too, and I try but cannot make her the American. I've written her 'past' scenes and there can be no American equivalent. And then that seems just fine. Jade's an Australian who is working for a USA-based business, an Australian repeatedly mistaken for an American: just as good, even better.

Andy, I'd also realised, had better be a lawyer. Once I'd moved down south (as the rest of Australia is known in its far north region) and begun watching television again, I became a devotee of the nifty English drama series This Life, about young lawyers; none of them is Andy but they'd have known each other.

Andy is an Englishman, and he'll have to be a lawyer. It was a common fantasy of mine that I had long ago made sensible decisions about my life and become a lawyer. (When writing wasn't going well I used to fantasise about other lives I should have had. I seem to have stopped that, apparently it's sunk in that I'm not going to do anything else.) This is Andy in the years before the big changes that would bring him to India:

[Andy] puts his mind to the successful practice of law. Andy is satisfied in its games of logic, argument and proof. Very satisfied. Here's the problem, here's your goal, here are the rules and the tools, here you have no room to move, here you need to be more creative, assess your opponent, prepare, act, get it right, win. (Neem Dreams)

I can just see him. Andy who? Andy Forster, of course.

Andy is someone who 'had never stayed in a hotel that had not been booked for him by a reliable travel agent aware of his standards and requirements' (Baranay 2002: 11). The first time he appears in Neem Dreams he is focalised looking around him, a new arrival who has found his own way to a strange remote area:

He had nothing to gain from the big-city bluff act like the street is yours and you're in an important hurry. Nothing to gain from the demeanor that had served him in India so far: Hey so I'm a tourist but under this blandly polite exterior I'm also well aware of all scams and pitfalls. He looked around with the frank scrutiny of the stranger who knew he was so unmistakably, glaringly foreign that he could let you see he wasn't sure which way to turn.

Pandora remembers her first sight of Andy the night before this in a posh hotel:

She sees a fair-haired man in an elegant loose linen shirt, also looking hesitantly into the dining room, its polished cold expanses, also deciding to eat outside. Alone, well-off, English.

Andy and Pandora eat dinner together, two strangers travelling alone.

Maybe he has an accustomed ease among the kind of men in suits that she'd like to kick with her hiking boots but they both like the same music video.

And when to their mutual surprise they meet again at the same place the next day, she sees:

A fair-haired man about her age, the kind of yuppie she normally wouldn't be pleased to see again.

But in spite of their apparent great differences they soon feel like old friends, and as they watch the shadows fall on the ruin Pandora's gaze on him is focalised:

You talk over dinner about rhododendrons and the types of rain and when you think you'll never see someone again come out with something intriguing as they're leaving. Came to India to bring the ashes. She would see more of him if he were going to stay. And it wasn't only that, there are familiar intonations as they speak to each other, the sound of speech that is based on references and premises that are familiar. My lover died. My brother was. Someone you can really talk to.

Jade, too, wants Andy to be free for dinner that night.

Things were looking up: how about this, a dishy Englishman? Looked like Ralph Fiennes. Here, of all places. Andy had come to trace an ancestor from The Raj, of course...

I'd say Jade has seen the movie Heat and Dust; might have read the book. If Andy had in fact had a Raj ancestor no doubt that ancestor would have been not unlike the detestable Ronny Heaslop in A Passage to India. Andy's background is the middle of the middle classes and his homosexuality has been only the slightest twist on a conservative way of life. I kept meaning to insert the fact that he had voted for Thatcher. At some point I wrote a short scene that didn't survive in the novel, Andy's memory of seeing an anti-Thatcher demonstration and feeling both repelled by and indifferent to the vehement opposition to her ultra-Right regime.

Andy, then, is not someone I easily create out of myself. It's not only how he votes, it's his personal politics. He is not 'out', as we expect our gay friends to be. But then, he is not exactly a standard closet case either.

This was Andy in the years before Patrick's death:

No one at work mentions his private life. Don't ask, don't tell, they all agree on that without asking or telling. Andy lets them understand he is 'involved'. They'd most likely think it was a woman but he never has to say and could not really say what was likely.

He knows he is not obvious, he keeps checking. He takes Patrick's sister as an escort on the rare occasion – the Christmas party, the grand reception after the merger – when he can't ignore the invitation to 'spouse or partner'. If he takes some pride in passing for straight it has to do with the fact he would feel a more honest unease being identified as anything else. He just happens to live with a man.

Then the events of the year before the main action of the novel (1995) radically change him:

His partner, his spouse, his lover, his Patrick, his love has to call on lawyers, lawyers who have to go to other lawyers, to claim his disability insurance and does not win his rights until he lies dying. By then Andy is angered beyond assuagement, radicalised beyond return, politicised beyond the faintest possibility of passivity. The most arresting fact of the whole affair, its devastation and its discovery of his fortitude, is the lesson that every step he goes through has already been taken and documented; and information, contacts, choices, support groups, interest groups and lobbyists are all available to him, and he needs them.

Andy, then, is politicised by his experience of Patrick's death: no longer able to say his sexuality has nothing to do with his profession, his professional relationships, his personal life, his sense of himself, his essential being. I think this is one of the reasons why he reveals to Pandora the reason he came to India – the ashes: to obey the last wishes of his beloved, ensure his memory. Perhaps part of him understands that she, too, has a problematic homosexuality, perhaps part of him understands his fate is bound with hers although it looks as if they will part soon after they meet and never share more than a cautious meal in a hotel garden.

'I'm understanding more about being gay, what it means socially and culturally not only sexually,' a young Indian film-maker is saying in a long radio interview as I begin to write this piece on Andy. Andy is a kind of gay man who hardly participates in gay culture – except for the 'bathhouse binges' mentioned that he and Patrick agree are 'over'. He compartmentalises his life, as many people do, and he makes sure that it remains compartmentalised.

I've met men who say, 'I am homosexual but not gay'. Patrick would have said that and Andy would have said nothing. 'I hate Mardi Gras,' a Brisbane hairdresser once told me vehemently, 'because then people think that's what being gay is'; this was a young man for whom the OTT drag and the floats and the exuberant lewd displays were, I took him to mean, not celebratory or affirmative but a denial of dignity, ammunition for the imposition of stereotypes, an image he did not want projected onto him. Andy would have agreed. He and the Brisbane hairdresser prefer to consider 'gay' as a personal condition rather than a social role.

Up to the time of Patrick's death, Andy simply refused to participate in identity politics. That is, although he would not have seen it as a political choice (and I of course do) he did not participate in gay community activities and causes. He enters the novel with this position entirely shook up.

The sympathy I have with him, and with Pandora's finding her own political engagement in feminist ecology politics rather than in lesbian identity politics, comes from a more radical position. My own experience, observation and reading keeps reinforcing the idea that sexuality and sexual, even gender, identity, are far from stable nor do they fit into a gay/straight binary. Andy's own thoughts are:

If he takes some pride in passing for straight it has something to do with the fact he would feel a more honest unease being identified as anything else. He just happens to live with a man. He just happens to think even man and woman are categories that conceal suspicions that identity is not contained in them. Let alone that sexuality is not a category that tells the truth about the selection of urges and actions that it, sexuality, is supposed to contain.

Look, if Andy can barely form these thoughts, it has something to do with the way he used to think this is not the area he should put his mind to.

The problem with the 'coming out of the closet' tactic

from Foucault's point of view, was simple; it assumed that one had a more or less fixed sexual identity that was worth avowing in public. This assumption he had long rejected. 'The relationships we have to have with ourselves' as he put it in a 1982 magazine with gay activists 'are not the ones of identity, rather they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation.' (Miller, J. 126)

Andy would probably not have read Foucault nor theorised much about his instinct to refrain from proclaiming sexual choice as identity. I don't have to make a judgement about this, because it's not me refraining, it's Andy. I also refrain from proclaiming sexual choice as identity, it occurs to me now, and yet I don't think my generally queer-positive and over-theorised concern with all this resembles Andy's skills at evading the issue. Perhaps an author can know her character no more completely than she can know herself.

In other areas, my memories are indistinguishable from Andy's.

A friend describes his journey to take his own dead lover's ashes to a requested place (in Mexico). In early drafts of Neem Dreams, Andy threw the ashes out of their 'baggie', my American friend's word, which is eventually changed to a plain British small plastic bag. It is a 'baggie' though that I carry in imagination when I make the journey in fact to the Ganges.

In India in 1997 I travel to Varanasi (Benares, Kashi) for Andy, with Andy, as Andy. I take the overnight train from Delhi, hastily purchasing a length of pink wool cloth on the way to the station to keep me warm in the train. After some hiatus – taken to the wrong place, classic ruse of touts at the railway station, who lure you to their own hotel, telling you it is the one you have asked for and you don't find out it isn't until after you have checked in and paid – after all this, I eventually stay in a riverside backpacker hotel, the one that Andy visits for a day. I spend many days there, more days than I had planned, sitting on the rooftop café, an outsider among its denizens, feeling old and mad among the brutal tribes of young foreigners on their way to and from Nepal.

They have seen a temple with erotic sculptures. They have seen the temple of the goddess of death. They have seen a large golden Buddha. They have done yoga, done Sanskrit, learnt the sitar, bought a sitar to look good on the wall. They have slept off last night's party. They give the waiter cassettes of acid house and say turn it up and an Israeli guy sits in a corner and plays a didgeridoo.

They stay in cells that aren't cleaned, place their own bedspreads on sheets that are rarely laundered, bathe out of buckets in bathrooms that have never been scrubbed out, eat off grimy tables, suck on saliva-sticky bongs passed along by strangers, and those lassis they drink are made of not only yogurt but water. The green lassis have bhang added and that is a powerful hashish. But not one of them would go in the river. (Neem Dreams)

But I do. First I take a boat at the end of the day:

...the sky streaked in pinks and oranges, the evening light falling on ancient-looking higgledy buildings, rising up crowded on the western bank, the buildings glowing golden. Like the palazzi of Venice, asymmetrical, intriguing, leaning into each other, ochre and brick. That one belonging to someone very rich (nice paint job), that one bought by a rich American (major renovations and plants in tubs in the windows), that one for pilgrims from far away, hidden behind shaded arches. Location, location. No one is on the rich American's balcony but Andy sees that you might like to sit and look at all this from over there: if you were someone attracted by the religious thing here or maybe an art-directed background for a place you can get anything with rupees, you could buy a heap of spirituality or an unhindered indulgence in depravity.

Riverside buildings atop high sloping walls marked by the tides of the annual monsoon. Monkeys, those are monkeys filing along the edges of the flat roofs, a long monkey procession. A baby monkey struggling to jump to a higher ledge, almost making it, falling. Monkeys competing as scavengers with rats cats dogs goats cows.

I ask Andy's young boatman, Krishna, to take me out again for tomorrow's sunrise, because Andy is doing this, fulfilling his mission.

And Krishna persuades Andy to come in, the water's fine.

And he takes me over to the far bank, where the water seems, but cannot be, clear and clean, and I dive in, and there is no magical blessing as a consequence, only a secretive appalled regret.

I don't know if the revulsion is my own or Andy's – do I give it to him or does he give it to me? Many travellers are enchanted by Varanasi. I expected to be. But suddenly, sick and unable to get a train-booking, it's as if I were as heartbroken, shattered, bereft as Andy there realised himself to be, repelled by the rule of superstition rather than enraptured by the perseverance of tradition, as irrevocably severed from any life or identity I might return to or be welcomed by. My dip in the river was not an act of faith but a foolish meaningless whim.

I visit the expensive hotel where Andy stays and buy myself a lunch that costs about four nights at the backpackers'.

Andy's shattered state is going to be healed – through meeting Jolly, Pandora, and Jade, going to the healer, making a narrative out of his past, committing an act maybe of existentialist freedom, maybe of new allegiance, certainly of commitment:

He suddenly let go of all images and measures of his former self, allowing himself to be nothing but what he had become.

##

Can one write as the 'opposite sex'? The answer is Madame Bovary c'est moi; the answer is Anna Karenina. No example of an unforgettably vivid male character written by a female author springs as swiftly to mind but then few characters in fiction are as famously vivid as Emma and Anna. Let alone the politics of the canon. Apparently Jane Austen deliberately never wrote a scene where men talked amongst themselves without a woman present. Austen doubtless had a more severe view of the separation of male and female experience than a Western writer entering the twenty-first century needs to have. Austen doubtless was more severely separated from male experience. We, on the other hand, have extensive experience of the extensive investigations of sex, sexuality and gender. Art has let us peep and eavesdrop. We believe gender is performance. We nurture the queerness in our hearts. I embrace the idea of bisexuality that Hélène Cixous offers:

...the one with which every subject, who is not shut up inside the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theater, sets up his or her erotic universe. Bisexuality – that is to say the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes...the non-exclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this 'permission' one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire's inscription on every part of the body and the other body. (Sellers 41)

E.M. Forster, a century after Austen, writes scenes in which Adela and Mrs Moore speak alone together and he enters their minds and describes the world through their eyes.

Forster is generally considered good on women characters. His Margaret Schlegel (in Howard's End) is one of the most believable, sympathetic characters in modern English fiction. He was brought up by women and remained close to his mother all her long life. He must have had much opportunity to closely observe the world of women. And perhaps his homosexuality gave him opportunity to develop both an idea of the androgynous soul and an awareness of his outsider-ness. Outsider-ness motivates very close attention to people.

I had first written a male narrator in my earlier novel Pagan. That's when I had decided I could. Why not? There is the androgynous soul, there is human understanding and imagination, there is prolific documentation of the experience of being a man. I've been Pagan's Patrick as fully as I've been any of my characters, and I don't know whether creating a male or a born-Australian country boy was the greater challenge.

How could I believe in writing if I could not believe it showed me what it was like to be someone other than myself? How could I believe in writing if I could not believe I could do the same: show what it was like to be someone other than myself? To believe in writing is to believe I can, sometimes must, write as someone else, write from various parts of myself, write from a self that is large, contains multitudes, contains the man I might have been, the men I might yet become.

Andy's sex or gender was no more a challenge than his being English, a lawyer, a long-term live-in lover and a Thatcher voter. Once he was fully imagined, his inner life became known to me.

Understanding of how this process works, and why it cannot be fully understood, is expanded by a book called The User Illusion (Norretranders 1998) which demonstrates that humans make very few choices consciously. Norretranders calls the consciously-choosing mind the 'I' and the far greater part of a person the 'Me':

It is not a person's conscious I that really initiates an action. But it is quite clearly the person himself.

There is a difference between the I and the person as a whole. 'I realize that I am more than my I.' [Findings discussed in this work] show quite clearly that the conscious I does not initiate our actions...

The term Me embraces the subject of all the bodily actions and mental processes that are not initiated or carried out by the I, the conscious I. The term I embraces all the bodily actions and mental process that are conscious. (Norretranders 257, 258)

Using this model, I can say it was 'Me' who wrote a great deal of Andy, rather than the 'I' that pauses while typing and makes a conscious choice between one word and another.

Performances live by this contradiction, this swinging back and forth between the I's clear, disciplined awareness of technique, expression, and coherence on the one hand and the way the Me brings all these intentions to life in an unconscious, vetoless flow of empathy on the other. (Norretranders 265)

Writers work like this too. 'I' the writer make some of the decisions that bring Andy into focus, or focal range, but it is 'Me' who discovers, through writing, decisions I did not at first know (or consciously decide) that Andy would make: to go to the healer Jolly leads him to, to go to Bangalore to put it all together, to go find Pandora at the village, to find himself so much changed that he is last seen seriously arguing about whether any cause might be served, any point clearly made, by setting fire to a little house in a poor village.

13 Meenakshi

A writer creates a character in ways similar to the ways an actor works. An actor prepares by doing research, and by finding the techniques that will allow a character to manifest. I learnt in long-ago (1970s) acting classes that some of these techniques rely on one's own personality and history: sense memory, emotional memory, identification; and some rely on learning the appropriate gestures and accents and on a technique called 'psychological gesture': putting on the clothing and using the props that help you inhabit that character. Or perhaps I mean that help that character inhabit you.

E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, refers to characters as 'actors':

[W]e may say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings. Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity between himself and his subject-matter which is absent from many other forms of art. (Forster 1955: 44)

A glimpse of a location, a way of life, a person, is enough in the mix of imagination and desire to create a character. In some ways I had been a young woman like Meenakshi – longing for more of life, more experience, other places. In some ways my life much later became like hers much earlier – going to live in an isolated place with someone idealistic, having to find out what this consequential choice means.

The India novel was always going to include an Indian character, a Hindu, a woman, an English-speaking, educated, perhaps 'westernised' Indian. I don't know if I ever asked myself why; I'm pretty sure the answer would have been something like: Because I can just see her, I know she's there, she wants me to write her.

In 1986 I took a 26-hour train trip from Delhi to Pune, where I first read The Serpent and the Rope, a novel by Raja Rao, 'picked at random in an Agra bookshop ' (Baranay 1989: 44-52) (the quotation is from a story which includes an account of this train trip and this reading) though I would find out it is one of the most famous Indian novels in English. Arguably this is a novel that any English-language Indian writer – Indo-English writer – cannot ignore. (However, the editors of Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian writing 1947-1997, Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, did ignore it: no part of this novel appears in their controversial anthology – controversial for such omissions. It was also controversial for its inclusions; I will return to this below.)

There is a line in the novel I never forgot (though did not quite accurately remember, I find). The Indian Brahmin first-person narrator and Madeleine, his French wife, are discussing an Indian woman called Savrithri. Not only is she very beautiful:

[w]ith Savrithi truth and tact were but one instinctive experience...

'It's three thousand years of civilisation that produce a thing like her,' [Madeleine] said, as though paying a compliment to me.

'And five for me,' I said, claiming my Upanishadic ancestor... (Rao, R. 1968: 142)

I went looking for Meenakshi, a bit like an actor looks for their character, a bit like a director looks for the actor. Meenakshi has many models: women in India and in the USA; some I had only seen, some spoken with briefly, and some I had spent more time with, visited at home and at work, met for meals, observed interacting with others: journalists, publishers, business women, development workers. Women, then, in India or of Indian origin, well-educated and with that particular air of unassailable self-assurance, that ability to speak with an air of utter confidence, eloquence and grace. This quality many of them attributed to the degree of support that is yours when you come from a large family in a culture of centuries of precious tradition that honours family. It is also, of course, attributable to origins in a class of privilege and wealth in a society of extensive inequalities, a fact which problematises those three thousand years of civilisation that produce such a being.

This realm of experience is a long way from my own; I grew up with a decimated family of displaced people; people and places I could not know made up their entire world of reference, to the extent they talked of that laden past at all. I grew up in the 60s and eagerly latched onto all that generation gap stuff and R.D. Laing and David Cooper with their devastating critiques of the double-binds and oppressions at work in the typical family of a wounded, un-spiritual, repressive culture... No, Meenakshi's background did not seem like my own.

The characters we write are based not only on actual people but on other characters, including those in biographies and autobiographies.

I imagine Meenakshi's family to be similar to the family described by Nayantara Sahgal in her engaging memoir Prison and Chocolate Cake (n.d.). Sahgal's beloved uncle was Jawaharlal Nehru and she grew up in a household devoted to the struggle for Independence. Nehru became the country's first freely-elected Prime Minister when Sahgal was a young woman. Of course this family is from the North and Meenakshi's family is from the South, but they too are well-educated, worldly, refined people, Congress Party people. The politics of privilege includes the privilege of working for social justice and national independence, and consequently being sent to gaol for the cause. Meenakshi – whose uncle's father had been a freedom fighter – is a couple of generations younger than Saghal, but in her own way she too takes for granted a world where nationality is not a necessary bar to what Forster called intimacy.

[T]he Chinese, European, English and American visitors who came to Anand Bhawan [the family home] did not seem in the least foreign or different from ourselves in any way that mattered, joined as they were to us by a common view and vision of the world. (Sahgal, Introduction [no pagination])

This 'common view and vision', of course, is shared, in instances like these, by people whose entrée into the household was a sign of class affiliation.

It occurs to me that I have often written to reclaim the middle classes. 'Middle-class' is a term of faint, or even vituperative, abuse in most circles I've moved in; it's a shorthand for conservative or conformist, materialistic attitudes; it's shorthand for its near equivalent 'bourgeois'. I am reminded that Raymond Williams has said:

Bourgeois is a very difficult word to use in English: first because...it is still evidently a French word...; secondly, because it is especially associated with Marxist argument, which can attract hostility or dismissal (and it is relevant here that in this context bourgeois cannot properly be translated by the more familiar English adjective middle-class); thirdly, because it has been extended...to a general and often vague term of social contempt. (Williams 45-6)

Just as Pandora says that women have a culture, meaning there are – there can be – understandings between women that do not depend on shared language or background, so, I wonder, the middle classes, also, have a culture that overlaps several other categories of cultural identity such as nationality and ethnicity. This gives me an entrée into a sense of familiarity with some of the dynamics of Meenakshi's family.

I might remark here that to be part of the middle class in Australia was not something I could take for granted, arriving in this country displaced and de-classed. It has been achieved.

Money plays a singular role in class these days and that was a new, curious, and troublesome fact as I grew up among people who had been dispossessed not only of property and nationality but of reputation and recognition. Beginning this discussion on class opens a door to a plethora of issues and problems; I turn my back on that door. I want only to make the point that I believe I could find a more profound identification or familiarity with some aspects of Meenakshi's life than I might with a superficially more-akin Australian. Her family, like mine, has a long history of valuing education, and valuing the nexus of attitudes, accomplishments and behaviours understood as those of 'cultured', 'civilised', and, indeed, bourgeois people: professionalism, worldliness, conversation.

We all exist in several cultures simultaneously. In the most common useages of the term 'culture' its association with nationality tends to dominate. But we also participate in various other cultures, including those of gender and sex and class.

Bangalore is already emerging as the main centre of India's technology boom when Meenakshi goes to her English-medium school there and dreams of her travels to the West.

The west is freedom, the west is slavery. It is a commonplace that the west stands for both limitless personal freedom and inescapable bondage. She's heard it all her life... Meenakshi has always known she wants to study abroad. (Neem Dreams)

As a college student in Bangalore, Meenakshi

rehearses her new vocabularies in [its] bars, rubbing shoulders with airline staff, computer programmers and European tourists. She gazes upon a blonde foreign woman who sits alone drinking beer, as relaxed as she might be in her own neighbourhood, leafing through a magazine and sometimes looking around her with a frank, disinterested curiosity, who meets her eye, comfortably, seeing not seeking, and Meenakshi thinks, I will know you some day, I will be you.

I should say that many educated Indians who speak English and move in international circles would not necessarily, these days, be happy with the descriptive term 'westernised', although, writing in 1952 of events a decade earlier, Sahgal uses the term to describe her milieu. She points out that 'there are varying degrees not only of education, but of 'westernisation'' (Saghal 17).

What 'westernised' means has changed over the decades; there is an argument that the better term, and what people really mean, is 'modernised', an argument put to use by Hindu fundamentalist parties that proclaim 'modernisation without westernisation'. ( For more on the return to the question of modernisation and westernisation see my essay Globalisation, Multiculturalism and Worldliness: the origin and destination of the text.)

I choose the name Meenakshi for, firstly, a chic, assertive young woman I met in Pune, and for the splendiferous Meenakshi temple in Madurai, the temple of the 'fish-eyed goddess', with large old neem trees growing around its prodigious borders. I feel affirmed in the choice talking with a pleasant man in Madurai who shows me around his neem business (agricultural products) and tells me his little daughter's name is Meenakshi, and they call her Meena, Meenu, Meeksha. Later, I am amused to find a wicked, soap-opera-bitch character called Meenakshi Iyengar in a Shoba Dé novel (Sultry Days, 1994) (Shoba Dé is the Jackie Collins of India.)

In Neem Dreams we first see Meenakshi through Pandora's eyes:

This Meenakshi...was expecting someone. Probably a movie producer come to beg her to play the heroic warrior princess in a cinematic action romance...

Meenakshi offered her hand...her handshake firm, the skin silken. Her jeans signified, what, she'd worn jeans before, they were as natural to her as the drapes of a sari, as natural as her elegant youth, the fall of licorice-black hair, her radiant confidence. She lived in a hybrid space, was familiar with the foreign, empathised with the existentially alien. (Neem Dreams)

That is near the start of the novel, and tells the reader, as well as Pandora, that she is not about to meet a version of the 'typical' Indian wife. There is no typical Indian wife, it hardly needs to be said – to quote Sahgal again:

[T]here is no 'average' in India as there is in the West, because there is not the same degree of uniformity in the way Indians live. There are many different levels of living, not just the simple horizontal divisions of the upper, lower and middle classes. (Saghal 17)

This must be even more true half a century later. Still, you need only ask the next few people you talk to, 'What is a typical Indian wife?' to find this mythical creature is illiterate and bullied. I'm not saying many Indian wives are not. It is also common to point out that many Indian goddess-figures – Kali, Durga – are fierce and strong and warrior-like, and so create images of powerful womankind.

Meena has cousins in Bombay (father's side) and in the unnamed fictional district where she lives (mother's side), where the junction and the industrial area and the ruins are, an area her friends and cousins call a 'rural outpost' or 'mefussil beyondness'.

She takes on the coordinating role in a women's project in a nearby village to which her family has ties; it is her baby. She takes seriously her decision to be guided in her values and way of life by her husband, Prashant – not least, although this might seem paradoxical, because his consciousness and values have been informed by feminism. That might not occur to any other reader of Neem Dreams, but I know that Prashant is, like most smart, thoughtful, fair-minded men of his age (I think around 28 or 30 in 1995, though the novel doesn't say) partly formed by the visibility of feminism as he was growing up, and Meenakshi wouldn't marry a man who wasn't, even if she was marrying just whom her family would approve. As one of her friends in New York says:

So it's like no, it's not an arranged marriage and yes, this is who you'd marry if it was? Cool.

Meenakshi also believes her privilege entails obligations. But she is still young, and the marriage is not as passionate as she had dreamed of – she who has known the giddy bliss of a torrid affair (a professor in New York; at the end of that affair she turned to the familiarity of Prashant). This could be an Emma Bovary in the making, and for a while I do not know where this potentially disastrous situation is leading Meenakshi.

The character of the Uncle – who is never seen in the novel – and his son Dinesh are elements very early in the writing. The predominant fact in recent Indian politics is the phenomenal rise of the Hindu Right. The idea of 'fundamentalist Hinduism' might once have seemed as absurd as the idea of Buddhist terrorists but this is today's world we live in and we don't forget it was a Hindu extremist who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi who is still not Hindu enough for some.

These days, the issues had become more complex. Or maybe the issues had only been hidden, back then, in the overriding struggle for Independence. In any case, these days, where you thought there could be nothing but dead ashes of old grievances, sparks were fanned into flames. (Neem Dreams)

Even in A Passage to India we are made aware of the Hindu-Moslem tensions that can flare at times, but that was no preparation for the bloodiness of Partition. (Or present atrocities.)

Early in Neem Dreams we follow Meenakshi's thoughts on this:

A secular, tolerant, democratic India, that is the vision we have been born to inherit. Our pious Hindu ancestors would be appalled at the suggestion that any one Indian tradition was more indigenous that any other.

Yet it is in their name that the so-called Hindu nationalists exhort the domination, the elimination, of others. Hinduize politics and militarize Hinduism: the old slogan is revived. The context now is an increasingly apparent organisational complex embracing the phenomenon of mass communalism.

Meenakshi at first does not inquire too closely into the source of the funds passed on to her to help her village project, and after a while realises Dinesh has avoided telling her. Although the Hindu Right claim they are also free-traders, they promote popular nationalism:

I love India, is the top of the pop songs, Made in India, a joyful pop carol, East west, India is best, that's yet another mass-market ditty.

Ads for jeans and for telephones say: be a true Indian and buy the Indian-made product, drink chai not Coke. Film stars and filmmakers, business moguls and media personalities, and paid opinionators, they're all affirming a new age of India-centred Indian culture: Indian economics and Indian pride. Dinesh's dad's speechwriters are steering that old bandwagon onto the local line.

Who's going to try and work Dinesh out? He's not the one thinking about categories and what's mutually exclusive. It's not him that's puzzled by his adoption of fundamentalist slogans combined with a taste for western suits, the car, the display of provincial sophistication.

In the novel, it is Andy who reveals that the source of the project funds is the multi-national company at the centre of the neem patents controversy. Meenakshi will find this out after the novel ends. Had she inquired too closely any earlier, she would have been faced with conundrums of ethics and local politics that might have prevented the project from going ahead, and perhaps for no good purpose.

Neem has always been naturally and unremarkably a part of Meenakshi's life. Quite likely she would never have used neem twigs for a toothbrush, as usually only the rural poor do that, but she's always known she could have, perhaps like we've always known we could have made our tea in a billy on the campfire, or known that there was bush tucker in places where a whitefella would die of starvation.

I have never actually heard someone say, 'You cannot and must not attempt to write as if you were of a gender or ethnicity not your own', but I have heard a great deal of discussion about this prohibition, and usually the term 'political correctness' is not far away. Criticism of my Rascal Rain: a year in Papua New Guinea (1994) included the accusation that I should not have written 'unauthorised' descriptions of Papua New Guineans. In Australia, the scandals about non-Aboriginal artists passing off their written or painted works as Aboriginal were scandals not only of deception or fraud but of 'appropriation'. There is an understandable position here – historically some people have taken it upon themselves to speak and decide on others' behalf and these others now insist on speaking for themselves. The corollary is: don't even think about saying anything that could be taken to show you don't know this.

I don't suppose any such considerations troubled E.M. Forster as he set out to write A Passage to India. He writes scenes where women talk among themselves (Western women) and he writes scenes where Indians talk among themselves (Indian men). They are quite convincing to me and apparently have been to a good many Indians:

To speak of Forster is, in a way, to speak of a saint...

The Hill of Devi is certainly one of the most Indian books in this century...

Sanskrit poetry then seemed to me not an alien element in Cambridge; it was more as if Forster had spoken in it and I had replied in his tongue. (Rao, R. 1996: 102, 114, 115)

Nirad Chaudhuri, no fan of A Passage To India, attacks Forster's depiction of both the British and Indians; but he does also say that APTI has possibly been an even greater influence in British imperial politics than in English literature (Rutherford 68). And even Chaudhuri does not say Aziz is not believable: 'Men of his type are a pest even in free India' (Rutherford 71).

I am pretty certain that Forster would have imagined his novel read by Indians as well as by the English and the Anglo-Indians. (In his day Anglo-Indian was the term for the English in India and only later meant people of mixed parentage.) Still, the implied reader in his novel is often someone who, along with the author, stands outside of India and is expected to nod agreeably to his generalisations and assertions.

Neem Dreams focalises only the four main characters; the implied reader is one who can both look into and out from India. And that could be an Indian or a non-Indian.

Who or what is 'Indian' anyway? Is there anything Indian? Language, religion, history, custom and geography give us many Indias. One of the features found disquieting in Mirrorwork, the Rushdie/West anthology mentioned above, was its high percentage of writers who were expatriates from the Indian subcontinent. People of Indian heritage are identified as Indian even if they have never lived in India – an example is USA writer Jhumpa Lahiri whose short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Writers who have left India to live and publish abroad are still identified as Indian – Rushdie, Mistry and heir-apparent Manil Suri whose novel The Death of Vishnu was an international bestseller in 2001. (The success of new novels like Suri's, claims Friese (2001), lies in the exoticising of India for a foreign readership.)

Is Meenakshi 'real?' Meenakshi, although she speaks English as one of her first languages, has a Tamil background, was brought up in Bangalore, and speaks Kannada as well as Tamil fluently. I do not, therefore, speak all the languages she speaks. Can I then know her completely? Can I claim that I have made her 'real'? (Or made 'it' real, as Forster would say.)

And now we can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is real when the novelist knows everything about it. (Forster 1927: 63)

Everything, that is, that, finally, the novel knows. I have been warned off by Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, 1994) from the notion that the use of different language implies the construction of different ways of perception and thinking, and am convinced that human universals are rather more the point. But it is still true that languages do not exactly translate, and each achieves its distinctive nuances.

And then, Pinker is roundly and convincingly challenged in the website magazine devoted to language issues, The Vocabula Review (Halpern 2000). It is only reasonable, after all, that Eskimos would have more words for snow than, say, Trobriand Islanders. And only reasonable that one's language to some extent forms one's character. Those distinctive nuances really do make a difference to what you can express. A rendezvous is not quite the same as a meeting. And the French Academy's attempts to rid French speech of le weekend, le blue-jeans, le computer, etc. are futile. And so on.

Indian writers in English often if not always have their characters season their English dialogue with Hindi, Hindustani and other Indian languages. Meenakshi would use a hybrid language with Prashant and her Indian cousins and even Dinesh. I read enviously Salman Rushdie's insider reference to ''Hug-me,' our polyglot trash talk':

'Chinese khana ka big mood hai,' she learned to say, when she wanted a plate of noodles, or – for she was a great hobbit fancier – 'Apun J.R.R. Tolkien's Angootiyan-ka-Seth ko too-much admire karta chhé.' (Rushdie 124)

I love listening to that kind of Indian polyglot demotic but never heard enough of it to be able naturally to reproduce it. Except for a couple of common Hindi expressions used in Indian English – yaar, mefussil – Meena's dialogue with Indian characters is rendered as entirely in English.

In fiction, people from other cultures, other historical periods and other planets speak in our own language and mostly this is a convention we accept. It does not necessarily compromise the verisimilitude of what we are reading or seeing performed. The truth of fiction does not lie in strict realism or logic, it lies in fiction's ability to reveal a world to us:

[The novelist] will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life. (Forster 1955: 63)

Asked about the choice of a female point of view in his novel Grand Days, male author Frank Moorhouse says:

Perhaps there is a separatist tendency at present which says that only men can write about men and only women about women and only gays about gays and only the working class about the working class or Greeks about Greeks. This separatist position is in direct contradiction to the postmodernist tradition which would say appropriate whatever you want. There is a third position, which is the cosmopolitan or traditional position about the capacity of the imagination that can go across centuries, genders, ages and cultures with the only limitation being the self-recognised limitations of the writer. Empathy and intimacy are obviously two tools of a type of inquiry into the other...having intimacy...having empathy and having the distance that comes from not being a member of whatever groups can be a powerful tool for observing. (McDonnell 721)

This identifies the position from which I took on the writing of Meenakshi. It wasn't so much the 'appropriate anything' aesthetic of postmodernism. It was from a sense of wanting to extend the way imagination can reveal the necessary knowledge. It is to what Moorhouse calls 'cosmopolitanism' – being a citizen of the world – finally, that Meenakshi and I give highest value. It was what made her feel at home in the mongrel city of New York; and it was what made me able to imagine her there, and follow her home to India.

14 Jade

There are aspects of culture raised to new standards in the city of New York and one of them is shopping. Checking out the shops is unmissable and instructive. One of my friends had a little department store, the now defunct Little Rickie on East 3rd Street, a treasure trove of cards and gifts, things you had not known existed for needs that these things themselves created. [In 2011 Little Rickie is remembered on its own Facebook page.] What does the invention of a commodity called the gift, found at a gift shop, tell us?

[G]ifts can become bargains, bribes, and weapons... Among human cultures, giving gifts is common; visitors bring gifts, special occasions are celebrated with gifts, marriages and birthdays are marked with gifts. In Britain, about seven to eight per cent of the economy is devoted to producing articles that will be given away as gifts, and in Japan the figure may be higher still. (Blackmore 159)

Magazines, advertising and self-help philosophies encourage us to give gifts not only to others but to ourselves: Pamper yourself, you deserve this, be good to yourself. It is in this context that a fictional skin-care product called Neem Care will be sold in a New York gift store.

It must have been hanging out at Little Rickie – plastic post-kitsch next to Mexican folk-art – that I realised what Jade would be doing in India. She leaps at the chance of a new career as a buyer for the fictional Louis Segal's new venture in SoHo.

Louis:...Everyone who comes in here will find something to buy....And a little department right here with all the skincare and cosmetic things. Neem Care. Well, that was the idea. It has to be an exclusive line and that's what Lucas found, this one place where they have a family-owned factory and make all this great stuff, made from some amazing ancient, like, tree, 'the miracle tree', we have this whole promotion. We're going to...

Jade: The thing people might not realise is that being an actress is actually training for an incredible number of other things. It is a business too.

Louis: Ancient knowledge meets high-tech. Postmodern meets retro flower child meets gourmet traveler. That was the dream. Should I change my name to Marcus and call the store Neem and Marcus? Neem Dreams? What's in a neem? Neemesis?

Jade: What is neem? (Neem Dreams)

Louis' store will be called orientalisme. 'Oriental is me'? Punning business names are common (elsewhere Jade refers to New York's [fictional] Bar Oak and Bar Sinister).

Nothing new about going to India for the commerce.

Jade was the character who seemed to spring into being fully-formed from the start. It was as if she had always existed. I wrote most of her sections early, and they changed the least. My life in Sydney, one of my lives, the one connected to actors and acting and the vicissitudes of showbiz, made her background familiar to me: childhood tap-dancing, acting school, the move to the city, the period of the 'big break' when she thought she had it made and could go nowhere but to increasing success, the return to the dismal round of cattle-call auditions.

Jade's sections entertained me; she amused me and appalled me. My early readers were divided, one 'adoring' her and wanting more, another saying she didn't like her at first, and more of her past should be revealed earlier. Jade reminded me of several people I know – or did they remind me of her? – and is not quite like anyone I know. I don't think I'm in the least like her. I'm not big and redheaded and flamboyant. I might understand, even envy, her narrow convictions but do not share them. But I wrote her as if I were taking dictation from her.

Jade's journey from a plain Jane in the outer suburbs of Sydney taking a train into the city to acting classes, then changing her name along with her location, is related in the flashback chapters centred on her:

She rents a cheap dingy bed-sit in a wonderful building and hangs it about with lace curtains, bright sequined scarves and overly ornate, improbably coloured old flower vases. She throws away her girdles, plain little suit, nice little frock, toned down make-up. She becomes herself. Fleshy and screechy, she totters around on high platforms, stumbling over the ends of her scarves and the hems of the vintage dressing-gowns and pyjamas she refashions into the vesture for her new true self. She buys costume jewelry at op shops and toy shops. She wears purple eyeshadow and orange lipstick. She rinses her red hair with copper, gold, pink. I dress, check the mirror and look for one more thing I can put on. If elegance is refusal, style is inclusion.

Jade's giddy new life is full of auditions and running up a frock, mainly for men. Although she doesn't like drugs or staying up late enough for discotheques, she has met Seamus Gardiner. (Neem Dreams)

Seamus Gardiner's new play with Jade playing the leading role is the 'big break' in her acting career that takes her in a hit Australian show to New York. But it turns out to lead to nothing but bit parts and 'Don't call us'. Jade, back in Sydney, attempts to re-start the dressmaking business that had previously earned her a living, but...

She tries again to make clothes for a living but it's not working out. Her heart isn't in it and these days you have to do perfect tailoring. The time is over when you sequin over your mistakes and make the frills bigger and everyone is happy. No one is happy any more anyway.

And as the sense of the-end-of-this-line and looming disaster intensifies...

When it comes down to thrilled at a small appearance in an episode of Outback Law she has a good long look at the whole thing. Her fee will either keep her going to auditions in Sydney for a few months or take her on a trip to New York. Louis and she have kept up their Letters, always starting with, It's so good to write to you, no one writes letters any more.

Come to think of it Dear Louis is her dearest friend in New York, the world. Then she will come back reinvigorated with some deadly new shoes and slay them at the next audition. She buys the ticket then panics. Nothing is as good as it used to be.

Louis' new venture provides her with a new direction. Jade convincingly takes on the role of businesswoman and takes to India with enthusiasm: she acquires new outfits in bright hues as she goes about researching and ordering the products for the store, and planning new one-woman theatrical shows based on this trip. Jade conscientiously takes notes as she goes, aware of her experience as potential 'material' – perhaps in a similar manner to her author. Maybe we note-takers are continuing a tradition of plundering the subcontinent for treasure.

Everything goes smoothly enough, until the neem-based cosmetics available from a large company in a city are found to be not suitable. And so...

There is nothing for it. She might have to, not yet but she might, go to that place way down in the south, by herself, it's hardly on the map. She'll have to think about it. She wants a range of neem skin-care, Louis wants neem skin-care, he could live without it, she couldn't.

In the cities it's just a matter of seeing the middlemen, the brokers, the suppliers. The trade routes have long been carved out. So far most of the stuff is found at trade fairs and wholesalers and agents. Someone, almost anyone, could be sent like she has been and just pick it up, all that other stuff.

No, it's Neem Care, that's her achievement, her great story, the thing no one else has. Got to go there.

Thus Jade makes her way, too, to Meenakshi's house and the family's factory, arriving at around the same time as Pandora and Andy. She and Pandora have shared a disastrous dinner before this, and at first do not get along – they are, obviously, very different women – but become united in their affection for Andy, his revelation of his HIV status, the fact that they have each a quest that leads them to the same place and, by implication, in a sparking of respect for each other. At their last meeting, Jade gives Pandora what's left of her jar of Vegemite: no better symbol, for travelling Australians, of kind wishes. All of this came to me easily, as if it were a story I already knew.

That is, all except her ending. For the longest time I did not know what would happen to her. It was only after I'd written the Brisbane Draft (1998-9) that I knew Jade was moving towards something dire and dramatic. The violence heaves around the area and I see her caught up in it like an empty plastic bag in a wind. She is in a crowd, trapped in a crowd, oh my god, trampled...oh no...oh yes, great.

Sorry, yes. Sorry, Jade. How was I going to face this?

I put it off and then the time comes. Summer, the Gold Coast Draft (1999-2000). It's time to write endings. If this is going to happen to her, I have to imagine it. I have to go to the crowd, realise it's out of control, realise I cannot escape, realise the life is being crushed out of me.

I have no conscious memory of being in a rioting crowd but I have been in vast crowds, crowds in India. And I have a memory of people being crushed, some to death, at the fences of a football game – television images, from years ago.

The author does not take the reader into Jade's experience for more than a moment. I imagine the scene, quickly escape, and write it in a distanced, reflective way:

The horror of this demise is not easily entertained. Even indomitable Jade suffered pain and terror at the end, the moment of realising that her life was being crushed out of her, this was it, like this, unprepared, incomplete, unredeemed, it can end like this.

But she had this fate, and, no matter where she went, her fate kept its appointment with her and she could do nothing but go to meet it. (Neem Dreams)

It is a horrible ending but this is not, should not be, the high point of horror. The real horror is the process of global economics, undemocratic rules of trade, the inexorable power of the transnational corporations.

There is perhaps a perverse justice: the idiot Western urbanite plundering the subcontinent for gifts. The trampling of Jade, then, might be seen symbolically: she represents the free trade ethos and she is trampled by the poor.

I am reminded of another huge, aroused and potentially frightening crowd in India, that outside the courtroom where Aziz is being tried. In the crowd, a rumour has gone around about a Mrs Moore – she who Aziz believes was always his friend, and would have saved him had she not been sent away by Aziz's enemies. Both plaintiff and defendant, Aziz and Adela, think of Mrs Moore, Adela as she looks around the courtroom and we glimpse the beginnings of her doubts:

In virtue of what has she collected this roomful of people together? Her particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctioned them – by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilisation? Mrs Moore – she looked round, but Mrs Moore was far away on the sea; it was the kind of question they might have discussed on the voyage out, before the old lady had turned disagreeable and queer. (Forster 1954: 212)

As the case proceeds and the vicious prejudice of the English side remains apparent, 'suddenly a new name, Mrs Moore, burst on the court like a whirlwind.' Aziz's lawyer, Mahmoud Ali, 'had been enraged, his nerves snapped; he shrieked like a maniac' and when the English side say they do not propose to call Mrs Moore to the witness stand (the reader knows she is sailing back to England and later finds out she died around this time), he bursts out:

'You don't because you can't, you have smuggled her out of the country; she is Mrs Moore, she would have proved his innocence, she was on our side, she was poor Indians' friend.' (Forster 1954: 218)

And as the contention over Mrs Moore gains in wild surmise and hysteria...

[t]he tumult increased, the invocation of Mrs Moore continued, and people who did not know what the syllables meant repeated them like a charm. They became Indianised into Esmiss Esmoor, they were taken up in the street outside. (Forster 1954: 219)

And we switch to focus on Ronnie Heaslop who finds it

revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess.

'Esmiss Esmoor

Esmiss Esmoor

Esmiss Esmoor

Esmiss Esmoor...' (Forster 1954: 219)

Now it is of course nudging the far-fetched to draw a parallel with Jade. But there she is, glaringly different from the entirely Indian crowd she has joined, one where those desperate to attend the Ganesh miracle are joined by those still fuming over recent political disturbances:

There was such passion and neediness in this crowd, the halt and the blind and the destitute and the infertile, so desperate to be healed of their affliction, so terrified that the magic would be all used up before their turn at the presence of its grace, and now they were being pushed this way and shoved that way and blocked here and blocked there.

If Jade, white-skinned and red-haired and glaringly foreign, had any advantage here or expected any it was long gone. Maybe she never did. She was possibly at a disadvantage. She didn't belong here. It wasn't her miracle. People close around her stared at her for a while but she wasn't as interesting as getting close to the miraculous Ganesh was interesting, as keeping your place in the crowd was interesting.

Jade was not the kind to retreat, and she might have tried to insist that she could pass through, still seeking, perhaps glimpsing, the seller of clay figurines. Probably refusing to acknowledge the growing frenzy around her. Until even she could not deny that this was very serious trouble, felt alarm and then terror. And once there is terror you must fight until you are free or until you are extinguished.

And in the meantime, some of the still-inflamed mob from yesterday's demonstration at the factory had regrouped and found their way here, violently furious at the violent police interference that had lead to the death of two or three or seven, furious that the strike had not been honoured, beginning to break it up. Others defended the crowd's purpose. Some demented, poisonous idea of Hindu righteousness, its rallying cries and slogans, spread, a bloodlust to match the rapid contagion of panic. (Neem Dreams)

Riots are frequently reported in Indian newspapers, not surprising when one considers that the sheer magnitude of the population is likely to make what might be a street-corner or pub brawl in Australia spread into a major fracas, exacerbated by the perennial tensions of poverty, over-crowding and the social and religious differences that can be inflamed and manipulated.

Jade disappears into this hysterical melange. And as a result...

...a crimson apparition, determined upon her own Ganesh, has given rise to a local legend.

And versions of this legend, their meaning, and the advisability or otherwise of creating myths in fiction then occupy some pages of Neem Dreams.

Another interesting, if also unconsciously-created, link between Jade and Mrs Moore is their apartness from the prevailing dichotomy set up in the question of how a foreigner relates to India. In A Passage to India Adela wants to see 'the real India' and makes attempts to meet Indians socially; she does not consider that in the context of imposed British rule there cannot be a free intercourse of equals nor does she consider that the social rules are still those imposed by the colonialist. Her fiancé Ronnie, quite on the other hand, is the very type of the born-to-rule British colonialist, bigoted and inhumane. Mrs Moore is clearly distanced from her son's imperious swagger but she doesn't do much more than go along with Adela's attempted excursions. Mrs Moore's character is established when she first appears, in the mosque at night where she meets Aziz, where she behaves with courtesy and consideration out of a natural instinct and an innate sensitivity, not because of any theories. She invites Aziz back to The Club with her without realising – or acknowledging? – that Indians are barred as guests.

Jade in the mid-1990s cannot be unaware of theories – Theories – that flavour post-colonial relationships, or the ideas about them.

Orientalising, orientalism, Jade had heard that; there was a point at which she recognised that the store's name evoked words out of heavy books of theory and out of weekend fashion and style pages (not always poles apart, are they, these days, these cultural studies days?). She was aware it was a cheeky name - oriental is me? - irreverent, but to what was reverence due? You weren't meant to do it, to orientalise, and Jade wasn't sure exactly what you weren't meant to do. (How swiftly a brilliant cultural analysis becomes a tool for pedestrian scolding and forbidding.) Was it to have the attitude that 'the orient is what we say it is, we defined it'? Or was it in getting images confused with what the orient actually is? Or would you by definition as a westerner therefore an Otheriser be orientalising no matter what you said? Or was it the fact that you would even use a word like orient without being ironic, which in SoHo they would be. (Neem Dreams)

The authorial phrase 'brilliant cultural analysis' refers of course to Edward Said's Orientalism (first published in 1978), on which the ascendant fashion in academic/intellectual thinking about the role of the West has been based. Estimations of its 'brilliance' have been revised in the context of an increasingly obvious simplistic demonising of Western liberal values and sentimentalising of all that is non-Western. Bernard Lewis in Islam and the West (1993) attempts to systematically demolish Said's popular assertions:

The success of this book [Orientalism] and the ideas or, to be more precise, the attitudes that it expresses in spite of its science fiction history and its lexical Humpty-Dumptyism, requires some explanation. One reason is certainly its anti-Westernism – the profound hostility to the West... This responds well to the sentiments of those in the West and especially in the United States who condemn their country as the source of all evil in the world as arrogantly and absurdly as their forbears acclaimed it as the source of all good... [T]he book appeals by its use of the ideas and still more of the language of currently fashionable literary, philosophical, and political theories. It meets the world's growing need for simplification... (Lewis, B. 114)

As I work on this chapter in December 2001, reviews on that indispensable website Arts & Letters Daily cover contention over a new study, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, by Martin Kramer (see Romano, Kurtz, Tuller). Much of Ivory Towers apparently

...details Kramer's view of the consequences of Said's influence... In Said's lexicon ['Orientalism'] became a word that expressed 'a supremacist ideology...articulated in the West to justify its domination over the East' and projected 'racism of a deceptively subtle kind'. According to Said, for most of the period from the Enlightenment to the present, 'every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric'. (Romano 2001)

Discussing the work and influence of Edward Said in the Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz says:

At a stroke, Said's 1978 book Orientalism created post-colonial theory... [T]he cleverest twist in Said's theory is his claim that even the most sophisticated and respectful Western accounts of foreign cultures are actually tools of imperialist oppression... The insinuation hiding behind even the most respectful study of cultural difference, Said claims, is that the people who practice exotic customs, however intriguing or complex they may be, are sufficiently irrational as to be unfit to rule themselves.

So the Western scholar gets it coming and going. Say something nice about other cultures, and you're an evil imperialist; say something nasty, and you're worse. (Kurtz 2001)

My own experience of critical reception to writing about non-Western people shows that some critics respond exactly like that: there is nothing acceptable to say or by implication even think or experience about other cultures.

No one has refuted such response to Orientalism more systematically and persuasively than Said himself, in an essay in which he re-asserts what his book was really about:

[E]ven so relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly supposed to gain some of its identity from its historical moment interacting with the attentions, judgments, scholarship, and performances of its readers but this privilege was rarely allowed the Orient, the Arabs or Islam, which separately or together were supposed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of western percipients.

Far from being a defense either of the Arabs or of Islam...my argument was that neither existed except as 'communities of interpretation' and that, like the Orient itself, each designation represented interests, claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only in violent disagreement, but also in a situation of open warfare. (Said 2001a: 201)

Of course this all post-dates my invention of Jade and Louis and the new New York store called orientalisme. But it points to the influence of Said's work beyond its immediate readers, and the creation of a predominant fashion in critical thinking that has reached outside of academic circles. Jade, being a smart urbanite, inevitably has an inkling about all this, and she suspects that this fashion is based on the premise that by definition as a westerner, therefore an Otheriser, you would be orientalising no matter what you said. Uncertain as I was of fixing my own position, unready as I was to systematically evaluate not only Said's arguments but his vast following, inappropriate as that would be to a novel anyway, I realised that Jade would have some awareness of all this, for indeed the influence of Said and Orientalism is vast. I allowed Jade to express a naïve bafflement, one I suspect is not unique to her, about correct positions and the reasons for them. Perhaps, in Jade's case, not naïve bafflement but a performance of it.

Perhaps once again the value of 'cosmopolitanism' has been asserted. In any case, as Mrs Moore trusts common humanity, Jade, similarly, trusts mutual benefit. She thinks people can get along if only they want to and that their common interests are more important than the restrictions or differences of history and culture. Her disastrous exit might represent the failure of these ideas but then again it might not. Let each reader decide. A reader of Neem Dreams can discover, or invent, many possibilities of interpretation. The somewhat uncertain quality of Jade's end – 'You get a different story depending on who you ask,' says the novel, which only reports rumours about her disappearance and the growth of a new local legend – points to the open-ended quality of the inquiry into the meaning of Jade's place and purpose in the Orient, and the resonances this provides.

15 Three Main Drafts: issues in writing and rewriting

i The problem of method in writing a meta text like this

The chapters on Neem Dreams' four main characters provide a demonstration that all the elements of narrative are implied, or implicated, in the development of character.

But it remains to elucidate the process of creating a novel: to investigate how writing takes place; how a novel is created through a process not only of writing but more significantly re-writing.

A collection of notebooks and boxes of discarded pages provided the research material for this exegesis or meta-text. What would I do with them? I embarked on a transcription of all the notebooks written during the years in which Neem Dreams was composed. After a few weeks, in which only a small part of this task was accomplished, I paused to ask: And then what? I could not provide all of that material as part of this work: it would amount to far too many pages, and I could not reasonably expect anyone to read them. My task became to select. On what basis would selection be made? Do notebook entries specifically addressing the composition of the novel provide more illumination than those that do not, especially in a work in which I see emerging a thesis that life and text create each other? In fact would any of this material provide reliable clues, evidence, proof? Or wouldn't that depend very much on what was selected?

And perhaps more useful documentary material could be provided by my personal letters to writer friends. It is one of the creepy benefits of writing letters on a computer that one retains copies. (I adore a handwritten letter but my handwriting is unreadable, even to myself, when it is needed for more than a postcard-sized note.) But there were too many qualms. A couple of writer friends have sold their collections of personal letters, including ones from me, to libraries, and I experience an unease I have not fully come to terms with. A personal letter is written for a single reader, surely that is understood. Still, it is not impossible that I will sell my own collection one day; it is not impossible that I will destroy it before I die. I'll leave letters out of it for now.

But then, I occasionally do quote from some correspondence in this work, as these important written conversations – email, as it happens, which becomes a significant new factor in daily life in the period of writing Neem Dreams – provide the very means and words to explore a then-current train of thought.

As for a study of the development of the novel through a study of changes and corrections in various manuscript versions: to provide this kind of documentation, it becomes clear, is the work of a (long) book-length piece in itself – see for example Stallybrass's examination of the manuscripts of A Passage to India (Stallybrass, 1978). It would be a task of such magnitude that the rest of this research would not have been possible. And there is no call for it. If it begins to bore me it will hardly excite anyone else. It has less chance of speaking to a wider readership of those interested in the writing process in general. It is more to the point to indicate the kinds of decisions that are made, the writer's modus operandi.

And what is a 'draft' anyway? Some sections of the novel have been re-written dozens of times. Some sentences have been rewritten dozens of times; some have never changed. The experiments with structure were often expressed in diagrams and sketches that were not kept: even a hoarder like me keeps filling the paper bin; I don't realise at the time what will later seem more interesting.

I still do some of the work of a first draft of a particular section or passage in handwriting, and compose sentences and passages this way; but also, my markings are often word-sketches or skeletons only, employing an idiosyncratic abbreviation. And these days a great deal of change takes place on computer. The computer factor is often noted in discussion on the studies of writers' processes (sometimes in the form of lament) and I therefore kept a great deal of hard copy: there were innumerable deletions, additions and substitutions made at the keyboard.

As Kevin Brophy says about creative writing:

It is about those sometimes vivid moments of confusion, uncertainty, dilemma, or confrontation. And it works best when the writer, it seems, does not yet know how to find a way out of the dilemma so foolishly entered into – and is willing to let the writing go where it will. This is the secret joy of writing; one that few writers will talk about, perhaps because it is so different every time. (Brophy 198)

The word 'secret' has a connection to the word sacred; the joy remains, in some part, secret/sacred: something that no amount of examination can encompass.

What remains hidden, too, is the kind and extent of the influences on my writing. In Beginnings, Edward Said quotes Paul Valéry on literary influence:

No word comes easier or oftener to the critic's pen than the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another...leading to active consequences that are impossible to foresee and in many cases will never be possible to ascertain. (Said 1975: 14-15)

I usually keep a list of books I read, at least those I finish, but how can I tell now, when I did not write about it then, how each of them affected me? And then there are magazines and documents and letters: I suspect if one could know what works really did modify one's thinking they would be counted significant. And then, it is not only other minds and texts that modify the writer's mind. As I write this paragraph, I am affected, however subliminally, by the natural sounds around me (the sea, turbulent on a stormy day) and the music I am playing (John Scofield), the climate (sultry), what I'm wearing (sarong and singlet, and then there's underwear and trinkets). There are the colours around me, the taste in my mouth, the lunar and menstrual cycle, what else is on my mind: all are part of what creates the writer at any given moment, and so in turn what creates the text. There are more factors the more you think of it, each of them re-configured the next time the writer re-reads her own work and begins to make changes, using pen or keyboard or going off to think about it all some more. These all become invisible, unknowable influences.

The kinds of influence on my writing, although impossible to document fully or evaluate in any quantitative or qualitative terms, are suggested in my notes.

If life and work are intertwined, it will be useful to provide a sense of the life being lived while Neem Dreams was written, the life in which the conversations with oneself about current work takes place. I have tried to present a sense of the typical, but, finally, whatever I can offer towards an understanding of a writer's method inevitably conceals as much as it reveals.

What follows is an amplification of the issues of drafts and the writer's practice. Notes, letters and markings of manuscript pages make up a kind of hidden subtext, or parallel text to the novel. A selection of the transcriptions of notebooks from which I quote, and which demonstrates the kinds of processes in operation as the story went through its versions, are provided as appendices.

How to select?

A selection already had been made: what I chose to write, when I was in the conditions that provide for writing: time and solitude, usually; or the urgency sometimes created by a disturbance to thought and mood. Not all processes, thoughts, decisions relevant to writing the novel were recorded; those that were not might have been the most significant ones. One cannot always know at the time.

Some further selection had already taken place, even before I gathered the material I would examine. For not everything I might call 'process notes' survived. Some were written on backs of envelopes, unfastened papers, margins of manuscript pages.

To select what would be included for this section I decided on these principles:

One: I would use only notes from my notebooks, leaving out marginal notes on manuscripts and other material such as letters.

Two: I would eliminate musings on places, people and events in my life: that is anything not completely and obviously pertinent to Neem Dreams and writing. As this proved a rule impossible to keep, I did leave in the odd note of this kind, to provide an indication of the writer's environment, for it has its effects.

And, three: I would leave out the writings done in India and the USA and use only those made in the three principal places of the novel's composition.

ii Hidden processes

Josephine Hart wrote her first novel, Damage, in six weeks. (Boylan 20)

The author must not interpret. But he may tell why and how he wrote his book... The writer always knows what he is doing and how much it costs him... [T]he problem is solved at the writer's desk as he interrogates the material on which he is working – material that reveals natural laws of its own, but at the same time contains the recollection of the culture with which it is loaded. (Eco 1984: 8, 11)

'The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.' (Michel Foucault quoted in Miller, J. 328)

What is a draft?

When Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville planned Making Stories (1993), their study of how particular works of fiction came about, they intended to show how novels evolved from one draft into another. But as they began to approach writers to provide some insight into 'the invisible work that goes on behind the creation of a piece of writing' they found:

We had to rethink our model of how a novel is revised. For example, one writer explained that she didn't work in anything as coherent as 'drafts'.

...We realised that we were investigating what happens inside the entire making of a story, as far as its creator can apprehend the process. It wasn't possible to distinguish between 'revising' and 'writing the book'. When we next wrote to potential contributors, we talked about 'versions' of a story rather than 'drafts'... (Woolfe and Grenville xii)

And still the study of how ten novels came about was fraught with difficulty:

it was not always possible to deduce the order in which the work had proceeded. Occasionally it was difficult even to read the words. (Woolfe and Grenville xiii)

And so the study includes conjecture about the order of writing, and thus which section shapes another. The process of selection, too, prevents any claim to a comprehensive demonstration of the process: 'We had intended to demystify the process but in the end this did not seem possible' (xiv).

We are left with a mystery, but also with a book that is probably on the reading list of every Creative Writing program in the country. Making Stories demonstrates:

That writers work in a variety of ways;

That writing is work. (Writers cannot forget for long that to people outside the industry this is often not understood; my long-time favourite illustration of this is a New Yorker cartoon in which, in a crowd at a smart party, a man goes to shake another man's hand exclaiming 'A writer? Great, I wish I had time to write.')

That there are myriad decisions to make in the development of a novel, some of them revealed here; and

That the whole strange business of creative work remains strange (to those who practice it as well as those who would study it).

iii E.M. Forster's Drafts

Oliver Stallybrass made an exhaustive study of the manuscripts of A Passage to India and yet cannot claim to give a thorough account of the development of the novel. There were large untidy quantities of paper to sort through: complete drafts, pages torn from notebooks, odd sheets of paper, parts of rewritten chapters that cannot definitely be categoriSed as belonging to one manuscript rather than another (Stallybrass 1978: vii-xiv).

Even the latest manuscript differs from the published text, and

[t]he extent of the differences...fluctuates from chapter to chapter and even from page to page. At one extreme, the published version of chapter 32 differs from the final state of MS A [the manuscript closest to the published version] only by the insertion of 'yet' in the last sentence; at the other extreme, much of the latter part of chapter 24...had been completely rewritten... [O]ne might hazard a guess that, as Forster competed his first draft of the final page of the novel, other pages were in anything from their first to their tenth avatar; certainly much of it was already in typescript, some of it probably in a second, possibly even a third, typescript version. (Stallybrass 1978: x-xi)

Extant versions show changes in narrative method (converting many passages to dialogue), in characterisation (including the characters' names: Adele was Violet then Janet then Edith), in events and structure. There is evidence that Forster must have made extensive other alteration which he either forgot or denied.

The main impression conveyed by the manuscripts, and by the discrepancies between them and the final version, is of an author who – once he gets going – writes fast, and uses the physical act of writing as part of 'the process of creation', not as a mere technique for recording sentences already formulated in the mind. (Stallybrass 1978: xv)

The manuscripts of Neem Dreams, it turns out, provide the same confusion of chronology, and of extent and method of change – even though the writer knew she would be studying them later.

iv Three main drafts of Neem Dreams

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognised for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. (Welty 90)

It is not easy for me, either, to identify a 'draft' of a novel. I work on sections at a time, some of them written over and over again. The most problematic sections might have been rewritten dozens of times, with substantial changes made; a few sections might have seen little change. At times I am occupied with the sense of the whole; at times with minutiae: a particular word, a small detail.

As it happened, Neem Dreams was written in three main stages, each identified with a particular location. There was a gap in writing as the changes in location took place. Thus the versions sort themselves readily into three main 'drafts'. The Island Draft (1995-97) and The Brisbane Draft (1998-9) are the state of the manuscript as the island period and the city period ended; The Gold Coast Draft (1999-2000) is the version I called a completed novel and began to send out for consideration.

There were periods in each place of intense, dedicated work on the novel – longest of all on the island, when I was free to write full-time; and periods where life – the necessity of doing other work mainly – meant having to put it aside. But it was never entirely aside, even if temporarily crowded out by other things; as noted in 'Brisbane Draft: Process Notes' [below]:

16 June 1998 what is happening to Neem Dreams? Put aside for all the marking and research work I say, can it still keep breathing with so much neglect? Must not neglect it. Spend even if a moment but every day looking at it.

During the time of writing The Brisbane Draft, I embarked on this research project: to study the way this novel came into being. Thus, from then on I was engaged in two separate but intrinsically-related writing projects:

3 December 1998 keeping my novel and my notes from research papers separate in space and it's as if they have separate times – novel writing time is not note/research writing time. But then to invite library notes into novel time (evening, Ravel). [The new project] is 'ficto-criticism'? it is 2 separate 'projects': novel and PhD –...

While the novel and this exegetical work were indeed two separate projects, requiring separate writing times and different modes of approach, they increasingly seemed to affect each other, each to play a part in the other's creation. (I will return to this relationship in Part Five.) An anthology of fictocriticism had recently appeared when I wrote the above note in my journal. The editors say:

Fictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridized writing that moves between the poles of fiction ('invention'/'speculation') and criticism ('deduction'/'explication'), of subjectivity ('interiority') and objectivity ('exteriority'). It is writing that brings the 'creative' and the 'critical' together – not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing a spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them 'say' something else. (Kerr and Nettelbeck 3-4)

To define this work as 'fictocriticism' provided a useful way of thinking about it, gave it a context in an emerging genre.

v Hunting, layering, braiding

Talking about a famous poem of his...Lamartine said that it had come to him in a single flash, on a stormy night, in a forest. When he died, the manuscripts were found, with revisions and variants; and the poem proved to be the most 'worked out' in all of French literature.

When the writer...says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realising he knew the rules. (Eco 1984: 11)

'I'm working on my novel... The truth is, I have no idea how I'm going to end it, and this is what I have to learn – the only way I know being intimacy with the novel, which for me comes with this endless rewriting.' (Mary McCarthy in Brightman 252)

Some writers write fast and the rest of us do not.

My natal chart shows Saturn conjunct with Mercury in Virgo. Thus I empathise with Susan Sontag's description of the character born under the sign of Saturn:

The mark of the Saturnine temperament is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which can never be taken for granted. The self is a text – it has to be deciphered... The self is a project, something to be built. (Sontag 1986: x)

It's the words that slow me down. Words I know perfectly well suddenly seem strange, send me to the dictionary and the thesaurus. Then I can lose myself in reading a page or two of the dictionary, or chasing words and meaning-strands through a thesaurus. I find words I'd like to have to use, and I might need to make note of some concomitant thoughts. Then most likely I will simply go back to the first word I thought of. Did I just waste my time? Some of us find our work becomes increasingly complicated as we search for a simple word, and a simple matter of looking up a thesaurus no end of a conundrum:

(I still find the deracinated adjacency of the thesaurus objectionable, and never use one, and feel guilty when I try to make a dictionary serve the same slatternly function, and I am only tempted to seek one out in the reference section if I strongly suspect that a reader may say 'Florilegia? right sure, he just looked up anthology, the fraud,' and I need to assure myself that the word I used is not sitting right there three words over from the word I think the reader will sneerily suppose I was wishing to avoid, and even then I resist the urge, because if I do find that the word I want to use is there and I avoid it I will be operating under the influence of Roget's too...) (Baker 78-79)

The process of writing I think of as 'layering'. There's an idea, an image, a phrase, a line, a scene. You scrutinise it and tease it and add to it, then chop at it, see if you can do without it. Sentences emerge. Sentences are expanded then whittled or eliminated. Then there is the relationship between parts; it's what Edmund White calls 'braiding':

But now I read a collection of short stories by new writers, and I saw they did something I can only call 'braiding', the interlacing of phrases, details, snatches of dialogue. Until now I'd written mindless confession in a desperate effort to keep my head above the rising waters of despair and confusion which could also be called the flood of circumstantiality. Nothing had ever seemed more important to me than who said what first, what she said back, and where it happened, but now I was toying with the idea, gleaned from my recent reading, that a design of sorts, not a stencil but a weave, could be teased out of all these balls of yarn. (White 1988: 87)

Josephine Hart claims that she wrote her best-selling novel Damage in six weeks. But she also says it had been completed in her head long before and that she then spent time

undertaking that exquisitely painful pursuit of perfection known as editing. This was physically exhausting – from early morning until late in the evening. (Boylan 210-11)

This editing is what most of us would call rewriting, and count it as time spent creating the novel.

Like a character in a Lorrie Moore story, I like to revisit a piece in various moods:

She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them – she didn't trust things written in the morning only – so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day, its moods, its light, was allowed to dominate. She hung onto a piece for over a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there. (Moore 69)

All of this points to the fact that no matter how extensive this inquiry is, there will always be elements of composition and creativity for which evidence cannot be displayed.

16 The writer's setting

'I believe that...someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books...but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books. The private life of an individual...and his work are interrelated...because the work includes the whole life as well as the text.' (Michel Foucault quoted in Miller, J. 19)

The writing of each text is closely associated in the writer's mind with the circumstances of its writing. To examine these circumstances takes one back again to a project of memoir, which, of course, must be prevented from taking over this entire project.

In setting out to make a selection from process notes made in the creation of each 'draft', I have been confronted with a great deal of material about the circumstances of life and it is near impossible to draw a line between what relates to the writing of Neem Dreams and what does not. The complete selection follows in the appendix; in this chapter I use that selection to reflect on the composition of the novel.

The Island

I began to live on Prince of Wales (Muralag) island in the Torres Strait in August 1995; I had visited the previous New Year when my then-partner had moved there. At the end of August I went to India for ten weeks. That was the official beginning of the neem novel. I returned to the USA for a few months in 1996 to work on the novel there, and to India again for seven weeks in early 1997; otherwise I lived on the island until the end of 1997.

Life there was a source of intense feeling. It was very beautiful and very isolated; its beauty and its peculiarity were fascinating; sometimes there was a kind of rapture of the deep; sometimes a kind of cabin fever; sometimes a simple contentment:

3 February 1996 Evenings like this. I light the oil lamps and candles. I don't need the generator on. Don't need electricity. It's long past sunset but it wont be really dark at all tonight. The full moon is almost obscured by clouds, and here is a wealth of shades of blue, blues of darkness, part charcoal and grey and black. (Notebooks)

I get a little thrill out of a cheesy pop song often played at the time – 'My Island Home', sung by Christine Anu who came from a Torres Strait family but had to live Down South to make a career.

'How was Down South?' the neighbourhood kids would ask me, whether I was returning from Cairns or New York or Bombay. My neighbourhood was a stretch of beach a dinghy ride from Thursday Island – no electricity, no shop, no traditional 'community' (Muralag traditionally had not been an inhabited island and therefore had no Island Council). The kids were a big part of my life there. They took me fishing and for bushwalks; I helped them with their homework. They hadn't much chance of a career if they didn't move south.

It was all about beginnings there: finding the story, the characters. The journal/process notes show the in-the-dark ignorance of this stage, and the obsessive persistence. Huge amounts of pages were discarded as I played endless games of 'what if?'

11 April 96... I suppose this is grist for J's character. Im not sure if that is her name. It was going to be Jade when she was a 28ish daughter of a rocker but now she's a 40 yo ex-actress but I think she changed her name from Jane (and wishes she hadnt but uncertainly) or from Jan if it was a numerologist....

I should be well on my way, need only application right? It's faith Ive got Marina with a background, in India for the yoga, her interest in neem established, meeting Mr Ketkar Ok but this has to be a fictional Mr K which means he doesnt have to be in this city but it's neat if he is otherwise, she has some other contact and goes off to find him Ok she discovers this patent thing and decides to act or Mr K asks her to act, go somewhere to do something but what, asks the novelist who can answer: anything, farfetched is good. (Notebooks)

Now, knowing the completed novel, looking over this time is like watching a disoriented, blindfolded person playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, staggering in several directions.

25 March 96 This stage where I hardly know anything. It's one step then another. But there are not sentences yet. I have not begun to write sentences. And writing is made up of sentences. (Notebooks)

I took up drawing, able there to give it attention and stillness; a different kind of drawing remains in some of the 'notes' towards the novel, drawings of the characters, with whom I had endless conversations. I occasionally taught yoga, and practised daily, struggling with the difficulties of a solitary practice. I'd been to Iyengar classes in several cities by now and learnt different things from all of them, but was mostly missing my long-time and continuing teacher from Sydney and my yoga family there. Still, I had to consolidate what I had learnt, and do it alone. I cooked painstaking meals in the afternoons, grinding spices for curries while I listened to the radio. I read In Search of Lost Time over the three years on the island and tried, without success, to write a good Proustian sentence. I watched my neem tree grow.

I went to Sydney and attended as many yoga classes as possible, and on one of these visits, in May 1996, I made this note in my journal:

May 96 Sydney [...] We [the conversation included two friends who were booksellers, quoted here] had an intense ravey conversation about Publishing. The 3 week window of opportunity: 'you need the good reviews, the book in the shops, and the marketing, and you need them simultaneously' and the decline of the mid-list author: 'we thought of you'.

This was an articulation of something I had not paid much attention to before: visible changes in the publishing culture. These changes would, and continue to, affect my idea of what kind of writing life is possible now. Along with most other 'mid-list' authors, my back list goes out of print, there is a rapid decline in the role of editors, publishers and booksellers increase the polarity between big-selling commercial fiction and the marginal, and discussions and experiments on the shaping of book culture by new technologies (e-books, print-on-demand, cyber bookstores etc) have not settled into a clear picture. (For more recent attention to these issues see, inter alia, McPhee, Epstein, Rose.)

Back in 1997 I was more concerned with simply writing my novel. The visit of a writer friend, Jenny Pausacker, with whom I have maintained a correspondence about writing since we met in 1991, meant that I could show the work in progress to a suitable reader for the first time, just when it seemed impossible to go on without this kind of input: an understanding response, critical suggestions.

It was she who made me know that the character Andy would have to be English and the novel would be called Neem Dreams. Details of our talks on this and our other works in progress were not recorded – partly because I was too engrossed in the experience of this exchange and partly because I imagined that as what we said to each other at this time seemed so vivid and important I would always recollect it clearly and exactly. It's to counter this delusion that we keep notebooks. What remains is the memory of the relief – peculiar, I think, to a writer living in such isolation – to find affirmation that Neem Dreams did have an existence, that its characters did live because I could gossip and speculate about them with someone else, that I might yet turn all this groping uncertainty into a novel.

12 May 96 SUPPOSE hotel chandra is magical you are brought your 'bed tea' but you dont drink it like in a dream you don't eat or drink or do you did you ever taste something in a dream, dream a smell

If Marina were actually fabulous had magic powers or a curse or a ghastly accident or a bad habit or she sings or in her dreams dances who does she make love to and why not she rebuts identity: that bit of Greek that matters, what she feels is the Greek in her.

'The country for which we long occupies a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we happen to be' Proust

I couldn't have known for sure, then, that I would work all this out – work out what whole would finally be made out of these fragments that emerged from the mire, these sharp, certain fragments.

The City

Eventually Brisbane was the best idea.

January 1998. I rented a flat in a good area – art deco, high ceilings, beautiful polished floors, dark though. A promising new start with dark passages.

January 1998 What are these years?

What do we call this time?

This is the time I come to live in another city a provincial little city in wh much is made of its current re-invention of itself

this is the time I slowly name this deadened thing as part of me dead or deadened

this is the time I hope to leave behind step upon to step up and away from

a secret the fear I have ended up

I assume the posture of optimism and confidence, over and over I adjust collapse and slouch into ascending & opening

it'd be worse if I didn't (Notebooks)

I found a part-time job teaching writing. If you're a writer who needs a job, this has a lot going for it. Teaching is learning.

I was given a small grant, but only for half of my proposal: not to finish the neem novel but to begin to write the novel set in the Torres Strait. I conscientiously worked on some ideas and while it was at that time too soon and too late for me to write a novel set in the Torres Strait, the folder exists, waiting until I finish this, sprouting who knows what growths neglected in the dark.

I felt sometimes that times were hard, there in Brisbane, and yet it was the start of a new period of the deep pleasures of work and friendship, which was what I had moved to the city for. I would think of ways to talk about writing for my writing students and ways to talk about yoga for my yoga students, who became mostly a small, regular, long-term group of friends. My yoga practice was revitalised by regular teaching; it became more focused and dedicated. (Whether writing practice is affected similarly by teaching writing is a more complicated question; the actual writing can only be done alone; the writer cannot so exactly demonstrate and describe how it is done.)

Finally, near the end of the year, I was unemployed at last. (Unemployment benefits have made possible a lot of Australian art.) I had two or three months for the novel, finally to produce a draft with an ending. Meanwhile I had decided to undertake this PhD study, and began more consciously to observe the process of developing the novel.

It is interesting to find that I had written at least as many 'process notes' before this decision.

During the Brisbane time there were many experiments with structure, with plot and narrative, and the problem of endings became clear. The work was to keep doing that shift in focus: up close on a passage, wide view of the whole. A chapter I'd always called 'the green café' became a focus of experiments in structure: at times it appeared early in the novel, at times much later. It seemed crucial, the chapter in which three of the four main characters come together. The dynamics were intricate. Earlier versions had Andy and Prashant meet as well (as it turned out, this never happens).

8 May 1988 the green café scene that has to work

Andy, Marina and Jade have dinner together. I think of this as pivotal, if that's the word for a novel with such a peculiar shape. But here they come together and they clarify what they are after. No, but we already know. We have seen each alone in India, see their past, know what theyre after (-ish; about as much as they know themselves) so what's really going on here? Ok, they meet, so it's like the three (by implication the fourth too) stories cross (like the crossroads [i.e. in the novel, near the green café] ok, but here something has to change, be illuminated. Theyre only telling each other what we already know?? This section comes well into the novel - two thirds. From here on, the movement is entirely forward, no more extended back-story. There has to be - this is what there has to be - a sense that something is changed here. (Notebooks)

But still the novel was not ready to be completed.

29 November 1998 even as I write I know certain decisions can not be made at this stage. A chapter has to 'sit' a while (on the desk, in the unconscious) - to re-arrange itself, shake out the - (image of shaking pans of lentils to separate the stones, remove them, leave only what's good to eat) (Notebooks)

It would be almost another year before I could give the novel my complete attention again.

The Coast

It took too long but then it was just what I'd planned: finally finding a rentable flat by the sea and another long break between teaching semesters, nothing I had to do but write, run across the road for a dip in the ocean, a walk on the beach, write.

11 November 99 Lighting and lightening it, loving it again... (Notebooks)

This time I wrote the entire novel, all of it, once more, with a new Pandora and knowledge that I was pushing each character to some kind of ending.

There had to be an ending to this version. And as I pushed towards it, there was a sense of all obstacles crumbling as events in the real world revealed that I had been on the right track all along.

December 99 There are these huge demonstrations in Seattle, against the WTO!... The opinion piece I read on the NYT site was like, oh how dumb these people are, don't understand the world doesn't have walls, but I so know that isn't it at all. There will have to be attention now. And it is SO RELEVANT to what happens when Pandora is in the village. The one million farmers....

Discovering these past few days that Pandora is getting angry and crazed and ready to commit an act of great terrorism tho I still dont know by what means.

And I begin to rewrite the old 'in the village' chapter and find it is all there.

If I can say 'it's set in India and it's the story behind an act of ecoterrorism' then Ive got that answer. The fact that the eco-t act is not til the end and even then probably not seen doesn't mean I don't have that good line. What makes someone burn down a village? There is kero and there is a lighter. Cement doesn't burn. Ok, she burns down the neem seeds. The bag of seeds that has been referred to a few times & you cd see it as a kind of symbol. (Notebooks)

5 December 99 I am thrilled about the anti WTO protests in Seattle. The synchronicity! It is exactly while I am writing the scene where the farmers' demonstration takes place. The arguments against WTO are right here. In 1995, the time of the novel, is when WTO was formed out of GATT. I spend hours on the web, find worldtradeobserver.com, and find plenty when I look up Nanjundaswamy. Who I hope would take this as tribute. (Notebooks)

The anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle were synchronistic with the related scene in Neem Dreams (Baranay 2002:219-221), and gave articulation and context to my sense of the novel. It was satisfying to discover patterns that gave relation to various elements, in a way maybe only the writer will ever see. I was still making changes to the green café scene, and pushing towards a sense of crescendo if not exactly closure.

I was also pushing myself to end the story of writing the novel.

And I was preparing for my next visit to India, including a month at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in Pune: this gave my study and practice of yoga renewed dedication.

The books I was reading, videos and music, dreams and memories and fantasies, the beach and the climate, discussions on the radio, the state of my yoga practice, the phone and email: these were some of the things I'd make brief notes about while the writing of the novel was the centre of my life.

10 January 2000 Thinking I'd just about finished though also thinking about the bits where I go oh YEAH and the bits I go, hmmm, it'll do. I'm up early making corrections. I go to the beach and take the radio. I listen to Salman Rushdie read his death of Veena passage [from his new novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet] and talk about how the death of Diana influenced this which he was already writing at the time: 'It was kind of spooky'. So I think of course and I have to rewrite the last 'the neem tree' chapter to where the farmers demo makes waves all around the world and (implied) actually leads to the demos in Seattle and every one talking about free trade and what it means. (Notebooks)

When does a novel end? I would say it was done and then make some changes again.

10 January 00 lack of lakhs or cent per cent: those words that signal: this is India

'fuck Ive finished'

and then I sort the pages

clear up the files and folders, write a title page

21 Jan 2000. it's finished, or this draft is finished. I don't feel great about it, just depleted and bit depressed. I don't know what to think. I love it but I don't expect anyone else to, not enough. (Notebooks)

There would be some reworking, some rewriting, but, essentially, it was done. This draft – the Gold Coast Draft – was it. It was the novel.

Appendices: Process Notes

Note to Appendices

The Appendices contain a selection I've judged as an indication of typical entries of my process notes, with consideration for variety and reducing repetition.

Square brackets [] indicate a word or phrase added here. An ellipsis within square brackets [...] indicates gaps in the transcription.

I have made very few minor corrections for clarity: the principle was selection not alteration. Although there was a temptation to alter, several considerations made it resistible. For one thing, there'd be no end to it and for another, the quality of process writing is that it is raw and unconsidered.

Appendix 1 Process notes: The Island Draft

3 February 1996 Evenings like this. I light the oil lamps and candles. I don't need the generator on. Don't need electricity. It's long past sunset but it wont be really dark at all tonight. The full moon is almost obscured by clouds, and here is a wealth of shades of blue, blues of darkness, part charcoal and grey and black.

20 February 96 According to what I'm reading ('Silent Sperm' in New Yorker January 15) the continuation of humankind might well be over. I feel that's right. I am not writing, then, for future generations. What difference does it make?

21 March 96 Marina [Marina is the name of the character who will be called Pandora in later versions of the novel] speaks to me. Leading nature treks. Working at a wilderness lodge. Before that, agricultural college 1980-82. What happens there. Youre doing your courses. Youre learning the subjects. Go to India. Be in India. Wait there. Before, youre asked by the neem network, youre the one to go to India. What is the conflict.

23 March 96 I'm working on [the novel] by not working this works when it's the right time to work by not working – otherwise all it is is not working.

Marina's story and what it's really about: injustice and lost causes and no reason to give up

25 March 96 Marina goes to agricultural college in this large town. She lives in student housing as she likes to be lonely. Probably she doesn't trust anyone. The town has schools a college army farmers and 2 shopping centers the mall and the street; the action's at the mall but the book-shop's on the street Marina getting to know this other woman: Nance? The Ag college is a world of its own. She goes to class does her project has a part-time job (lab? field?) swims laps has her lunch group went out with one guy for a while now it's over she's retelling the past yes the past changes what a different story the same factors now make she has to think ahead to a career: what's available to someone at ag college? she'd like to work outside research appeals but not the atmosphere of a big company (she might've done 'work experience') How she gets to know Nance say she moved into different housing and has to cook, she goes to the health food store she's aware of pesticides she's at the book shop the thing that throws them together an evening class, say 'Creativity' what it ends up, she's at a table at an Italian restaurant with a group of women to hear writers from Sydney and Melbourne hear them speak, read hear about something different, hear questions answered hears about 'women's' spirituality' this all must centre on a conflict /decision/event: the when... Some of these girls are lovers they say 'it's the 80s now' Perhaps she's pressured and resists coming out... what I see is the table of women at the reading maybe they go to the [visiting writers'] motel after? The question has to be asked by now. Like, who's she going to get together with. Is she gay. Is this her course. Love or revenge or a prize. What a novel does, what a plot is. Something from that quarrel when she was 7?

This stage where I hardly know anything. It's one step then another. But there are not sentences yet. I have not begun to write sentences. And writing is made up of sentences.

Years/unclenched

Marina asking: this is the happiest I have been this is the happiest time of my life. Puzzlement did not make it go away

25 March 96 this contentment that I call ridiculous. Too much pleasure in simply being. The sound of the sea, clean air, rainwater the long hours

should I disturb myself as if that would do it good as if that's all that would do it good

write happy. That's ok too

give it to Marina

29 March 96 Looking up a word in the dictionary. Reading the whole page, like a guilty pleasure. (youre allowed to if you really have to look up a word.)

I like the kind of novel where you have to go to the dictionary

chartreuse

furcated

furling

furlong (use in India)

furunculosis

trenchant

corolla

amaranth

morceau

oftenly

29 March 96 Marina Ive discovered does do yoga – think about that - and she's there for that. Then this neem business begins and she chooses that, runs away from yoga. Runs to help save the neem. The neem tree on the way to the Institute.

listening to radio program on Annie Sprinkle; drawing a picture of Jade Jade looks at herself in the mirror and contemplates the effect of her Annie Sprinkle Workshop. Was she a slut or a goddess? Maybe she could sell silk scarves from India in Neem Dreams [At this time Neem Dreams was the possible name of the shop Jade was buying for ].

Marina and Jade together in India forced together what they think of each other a temporary common ground

Jade at factory: the wrong packaging.

Jade and Marina having to swap their 'duty' and do each others'.

8 April 96 [[a drawing of Marina and Jade and waiter at the café where they meet]]

Marina in plain men's shirt. Her short hair could do with a trim where will she get it

The waiter is the 3rd person who brings another pot of tea but not a cup. Because this time the tea is for Marina

Jade in dark red silk with springy red curls a long scarf hung over one shoulder lopsided face cant resist an extra ornament – thinks she can push 'taste'

The teapot doesn't work too well. Next time have lime soda and M will have tea

Someone asks for chopsticks.

11 April 96... I suppose this is grist for J's character. Im not sure if that is her name. It was going to be Jade when she was a 28ish daughter of a rocker but now she's a 40 yo ex-actress but I think she changed her name from Jane (and wishes she hadnt but uncertainly) or from Jan if it was a numerologist....

I should be well on my way, need only application right? It's faith Ive got Marina with a background, in India for the yoga, her interest in neem established, meeting Mr Ketkar Ok but this has to be a fictional Mr K which means he doesnt have to be in this city but it's neat if he is otherwise, she has some other contact and goes off to find him Ok she discovers this patent thing and decides to act or Mr K asks her to act, go somewhere to do something but what, asks the novelist who can answer: anything, farfetched is good

far fetched fetched from afar Are they patenting neem trees asks Marina this is not possible is it say Mr K has to go to China again she goes to give her weight to some movement something intellectual scientific ecofeminist she must have that mission however slight something turns her admit it she's pretty lost her father's ghost yes she recalls how he was sick and what he tried

'ochre brilliance suffused the tattered fog, disclosed the bay, smothered it' [No source given for this quote.]

neem plantations would only be on rocky hilly ground or if good ground something going on World Bank type thing? They make a deal: take expertise to the farm for 'quality control' so to get material of the quality they need.

19 April 96 [...] Im feeling quite unwell. Just still tired from yesterday I thought (to Moa Island in the dinghy and back). I get up this morning and in the mirror I look so old and ugly [...] I'm feeling sour unloved flabby tired pained vulnerable

21 April 96 a bit of a resurrection in a frock & lippie, w a decent meal on the go and did a little good yoga first

23 April 96 this low-level misery drags on... I'm writing Marina in a Mysore-type place, sick, and that may have something to do with it.

25 April 96 'Ive always known a good writer is one who throws away what most people would keep... it occurred to me that a good writer is also one who keeps what most people throw out.'

David Mamet on the radio. And

'...to overcome the nausea and disgust attendant upon writing – 'this is garbage I'm a fraud what does this mean'...'

May 96 Sydney [...] We [The conversation included two friends who were booksellers, quoted here had an intense ravey conversation about Publishing. The 3 week window of opportunity: 'you need the good reviews, the book in the shops, and the marketing, and you need them simultaneously' and the decline of the mid-list author: 'we thought of you'.

12 May 96 Jade's HomePage. A character who does make a home page. A site for the neem dream boutique. How it'd be designed. Ask M.

her agent said: it's not enough to run around in five metre purple scarves

the director said: she's been trying to impress everyone in so many ways [...]

the arts admin[istrator] said: how it is for women they got one big chance and they blow it by trying too hard

-there are no roles for women over 40. I mean, so rare. And the same 2 women get them. Film, you have to be a producer. Theatre, it's better but not that much better. It wasn't Marge Lavender goes [through] menopause was it.

Speaking of menopause, be set up for it when it hits. That is no time to be trying to start something or look for work. – [This passage became a part of the novel, surviving into the final draft. ]

14? May 96 Jade has a partner for the shop. He has sold access/o to go into this with her. Seeing how his life changed and he keeps thinking of India (but I'm thinking of Andy) not only, but it keeps getting mentioned and see the day he asks for a sign he's with Jade who's obsessing about her career. 2 monologues side by side, as they come to the conclusion that she'd do buying for his new venture the guy or whoever who told them about neem (how it gets interpreted) The kind of place New York has become. The city that never sleeps now has 'quiet hours'

Jade's chapters: the old days in NY, & way back when her mum put her in amateur theatricals and at West Blackrockhill at an early age and she grew up a little star in her municipality... ambition set alight when... she was in a film about community TV

Marina: I feel she will blossom in friendship with Andy.

tree samplings seedlings planting a little tree take its leaves off let the roots take the nutrition give it plenty of water pack the soil tight round its roots say good luck tree (Marina repotting trees, muttering her spells, getting witchy. Marina quite a witch and ecofeminist) holy trees of India sacred trees plant a coconut near your house for luck mango the smell of rotting fruit, of mango lying all over the ground, everywhere, the season. Too many to pick up eat use leave them lie there rot and scent the air

Roots are for trees (Rushdie quote) deeply rooted or shallow roots

Before you plant dig deep. Loosen the soil make room for the roots to find their way something to retain water certain soil mulch on top plenty mulch for The Dry birds morning call like a gong striking a clear gamelan gong that one bird call

this neem tree has shot up so fast Hans said Ive never see a tree grow so fast. 3 or 4 times in 7 months! It likes being there so we say we speak for trees: they like this, they like that, they don't want

it's craziness how you talk to your trees and look to them for signs and messages that always you can find o yes always something. Roots, branches: blatant metaphors, resist.... think of it your own way mind in new gear

'The very next day the duchess purchased quantities of exotic plants and gave herself out as a great lover of botany.' [Stendhal] [I was reading Stendhal's The Chartreuse of Parma at the time.]

Marina perhaps at college she went to a women's spirituality thing yes something new about nature they need her it's a big country town (like Wagga, say, that writers visit in a reading tour) she goes to hear

I like this thought about 'home': I planted the trees here to put down roots yes, but not my roots. Human beings dont have roots. Trees have roots. These trees can have roots for me. I can go and know somewhere there are some roots I put down That's it.

SUPPOSE hotel chandra is magical you are brought your 'bed tea' but you dont drink it like in a dream you don't eat or drink or do you did you ever taste something in a dream, dream a smell

If Marina were actually fabulous had magic powers or a curse or a ghastly accident or a bad habit or she sings or in her dreams dances who does she make love to and why not she rebuts identity: that bit of Greek that matters, what she feels is the Greek in her. Ancient something that could be fanned into flame

'The country for which we long occupies a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we happen to be' Proust [I was reading In Search of Lost Time over the three years I lived on the island.]

'The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience....' P[roust].

for Jade: a relationship based on angst and misery that falls apart when(ever) one of them gets happy. Dont know if her name is Jade I should make her one of those 40 y.o. losers who's always got one more great idea that's going to make them a fortune yes!

Appendix 2 Process notes: The Brisbane Draft

January 1998 What are these years?

What do we call this time?

This is the time I come to live in another city a provincial little city in wh much is made of its current re-invention of itself

this is the time I slowly name this deadened thing as part of me dead or deadened

this is the time I hope to leave behind step upon to step up and away from

a secret the fear I have ended up

I assume the posture of optimism and confidence, over and over I adjust collapse and slouch into ascending & opening

it'd be worse if I didn't

the depression's not the worst thing

I cope, keep coping, lift myself and stretch upward and sooner or later get out and walk and breathe deep and lift and rise and strengthen

but days of huddling, Ive done that before

it's fine, these are that days I keep saying that

I might go to a shrink, might need to

this is the time in my life

I'm not writing

even though I'm told to remember you can write when youre not writing

8 May 1998 despair, i say, Ive been in despair. Seriously thinking about ditching [the novel].

can't. won't. like an abortion in the 8th month i say

ive been thinking, i say, that my story about my life used to be, everything works out; sooner or later you say, it was for the best, that hateful thing allowed eventually this wonderful thing to be the case. But actually, I say, Ive been thinking, people can fuck up. You can have a fucked up life. You can have made the mistake.

We of all people should know, F says, the power of words. The words to describe your life. How many people have had 6 books published and been where you've been, you've had a good life, are having one (The idea is, it's the way you tell it.)

that was yesterday. I wake today holding on the image of specks of blue velvet as if they were dear and important. (my blue velvet wrap is on my bed and in a dream there were as if crumbs bits of this shed and floating around like autumn leaves.) up later than planned but feel kindly towards myself for having had a good long sleep. Get up and go for a walk, along the cliffs of kangaroo point. Cool grey day, good for a brisk walk. Briskly back up the hill. Coffee and figs. An invitation to meet at noon (Tim's friend) and I say ok tho I was going to spend a longer time typing. But I'm also in the business of making contacts that could get me work and going to the café in west end very soon is not to neglect my duty.

'my duty': in India when I say thank you I would be answered it is my duty. I came home and it became a much used phrase between Hans and me. Thank you. It is my duty. Last night Hans called me from Thursday Island. i felt so nostalgic for the island, the sound, and the smell and when I woke you would say

on the island where also for so long I went through this (this, loving this unborn novel and wondering if maybe I would never make it work and would better off giving it up)

it's like, it's never been so hard (writing) but Ive said that before, every time, no, nearly every time

Sheila was not hard, it was a lot of work but it wasn't hard, I worked hard at it but it was pleasure.

Shall I get into that, thinking, I really am disappointed, even hurt, that it has been so resoundingly ignored, depriving people of the pleasure it offers and the pleasure I would get... [ Sheila Power published in September 1997 was never reviewed in any of the usual book pages or book reviews; and I felt anguish over its ghastly cover.]

but that is not really 'it'

what is really 'it'?: the truth, the 'real truth' of a period like this

it: the truth that sets you free

because the thing is, I find the mind's tricks are such that you are troubled but troubling yourself over this you don't find what it is really troubling you

clearing your mind

the late-night apres-bath mind-clearing where you find your life has been about dentistry

the late-night mood after a fragrant steamy bath and you write the way you fell in love with writing, a pen and a notebook, talking to yourself or not quite yourself, communing, a future self or a better self, a fascination that if you put it in words you discover what you are thinking, you find out what you mean [...]

a momentary dizzy looseness after a glass of wine and I'm saying, I'm in despair, there's no one to talk to, I'm worrying at my novel problems and I havent cleared my life problems

dentistry, and a difficult relationship, and the job I need - just to acknowledge all this, that it is what my life is about for a moment, then I can pass on

rather than ignore it all, pretend it's but an irritating distraction

things to say about life and art, getting one in order...

something to talk to the students about. Clearing your mind.

The usual thing that happens, when I 'realise' it's happening to one of my characters (it's not me, I'm a channel)

how are they then

Marina who has had to let go of Lauren and thinks she has

Jade who thinks poking bits of yourself into other people seems daft and distasteful though the enchantment is nice

Andy who is awakened to love and loving

there is a section that is currently number 22 out of 30. 'the green café' I call it

the green café scene that has to work

Andy, Marina and Jade have dinner together. I think of this as pivotal, if that's the word for a novel with such a peculiar shape. But here they come together and they clarify what they are after. No, but we already know. We have seen each alone in India, see their past, know what theyre after (-ish; about as much as they know themselves) so what's really going on here? Ok, they meet, so it's like the three (by implication the fourth too) stories cross (like the crossroads [i.e. in the novel, near the green café. ]) ok, but here something has to change, be illuminated. Theyre only telling each other what we already know?? This section comes well into the novel - two thirds. From here on, the movement is entirely forward, no more extended back-story. There has to be - this is what there has to be \- a sense that something is changed here. Andy here reveals what he is after - trying to find out if there really is an effective anti viral for hiv ( i.e. known here and not in England)

here's a thought: that becomes chapter 4 [...].

Later: that idea becomes the idea of the day, chapter 22 becomes chapter 4 and hey, everything changes, and I lighten up

15 May 98 now the LONGEST (by far) middle part of the novel is all back story and is framed by 5 + 7 chapters of the main i.e. forward movement narrative.

Which is it?: main story w flashbacks in the middle - OR -

main story with flashforwards framing/book-ending

India's nuclear tests and the reaction to them. Show an India where there is about to happen.

12 June 1998 about NOT writing, about the sick ugly feeling of not writing. Over and over again it's been this way with this my problem child... and it's like no one else no other writer has this sickness theyre all at it pouring it out flowing and streaming with words.

It's plot, it's story it's plot it's narrative

Andy Marina Jade Meenakshi

in a situation but what happens. More and more I want it to be a dramatic extreme violent and magical thing that happens.. and theyre all there inert, unmoving, dying, dying for the breath of life that will make them leap to their feet as if out of bed on a fresh and lovely morning full of promise

they have to want something enough

they have to feel something strongly and deeply enough

they have to be prepared to act boldly enough

what is at stake? What is threatened? It is something to do with the deal made - project funds in return for the promise

here's the situation we have:

the deal is, the project doesn't go ahead without MNC funds but use them and they end up controlling the resources. How to thwart this?

I keep thinking we're getting somewhere but we don't get there

how do you thwart the MNC? You can't you can only do something to its local rep - Dinesh

the sickness and dread

I keep thinking, if I were writing something ELSE - things I think of novels about witches or the underworld or the islands - I'd be flowing and streaming, words and deliciousness

X ['X' was a colleague who had offered to read my work in progress][X: there's too much dialogue but you know that

me: so you think there's too much dialogue?

X: but you know that.

(I don't know if I know that. she means the chapter where Marina and Meena meet. I think there has to be dialogue, theyre meeting, theyre explaining themselves)

X: read about trees, the myth of the tree

Me: (gratefully) ok thanks I will

yeah, sure, read about trees, is that going to reveal the plot?

Sit under the tree and pray

under the neem tree, pray

Andy is a lawyer, he can find out what went on, what the deal was

... X is not going to be that great an advisor [...] I need someone who understands, thinks creatively and can see it all with the fresh and objective eye I cant

sometimes I really think of giving it up then I feel so remorseful like I wanted to kill a baby - at this stage it's be more infanticide than abortion...

16 June 1998 [...] what is happening to Neem Dreams? Put aside for all the marking and research work I say, can it still keep breathing with so much neglect? Must not neglect it. Spend even if a moment but every day looking at it. All this time and it still needs that one strange (as in stranger) element that's missing

needs one more great idea, then one last concluding period of immersion to write a last draft. And meanwhile, what I can do - a daily attention to it

is it possible to write more than one thing at a time?

My time has to be so well organised now

and I have agreed to give a paper at the conference - so had better start thinking about that!

later - reading over parts, and loving it, thinking with relief, I love it. Read some other things Ive written, loving those.

05 November 1998 Interesting to see corrections/changes[i.e. on the manuscript.] made in a previous reading: good ones, correct ones, but today I would have skimmed over the clumsy inexact phase. Many many readings: essential. You notice different things on different days

06 November 1998 a burst of new action [writing] Neem Dreams very conscious that I'm finding out what this novel is about... which we always say is what writing a novel - writing - is about: finding out what you want to say. The sculptor chipping the stone to find the statue within finding the plot being revealed

13 November 1998 the weaving in of back-story and present happens more and more as I re-write; back-story is recollection and association

22 November 1998 p.o.v in 'green café' central scene idea: switch the pov - start w Andy. Each in turn, then combine (over food ) ( a single three-headed hunger). This is first time meet Jade. So: Andy observes J and M; we look at them through his eyes; [...] cutting out the argument about patents: 1. Makes chapter shorter and 2. Delays this argument (have to set it up). It's the first time J appears but she has already met Prashant, and, probably, Dinesh. So intimations of the political trouble. The Indian men in the café? [ I was experimenting with having other people in the café intrude into the narrative.]

23 November 1998 endless, it seems, the restructuring now putting Meena in a series of 4 'suddenly' chapters and her first scene with Prashant, before all the long flash-back episodes. Politics must begin early

24 November 1998 always this question: what happens when the pov changes. Looking at ch 1. It's all M's pov then there has to be a moment of cross-over

the scheme of the sections: the interlocking points fractal design? (must find out exactly what a fractal is)

Jade and Dinesh: establish D's character, add to dislike of him - if D mistakes her then J meets Marina knowing she has arrived - effect?

Reading the Gita

cultural references: Gandhi (simple saint / swadeshi) Passage to India

25 November 1998 English, August [A novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee (1988)] for description of hot tedium

fuck the computer is stuck cant even scroll up the doc to copy by hand in case it hasn't been saved cursor moves round but click nothing happens no pulse no commands work

now [there are] only 2 pink post-its on wall - for a while there was a whole lot [pink ones had things-must-do e.g. write lectures, do tax, prepare for etc, things that meant I couldn't work on novel til they were done]

26 November 1998 sorting through a big file drawer of notes - an old file 'India' with articles from 1987 - outdated e.g. Kashmir as fave holiday destinations for Australians; how frightful to use a phone A file of long forgotten notes & letters & books proposal - for a 1990 trip - didn't go til 1995 - never got anywhere discarded elaborate family tree showing P[rashant] and D[inesh] relationship

28 November 1998 looking at passage to india (1924) - these days Indian men molest western women all over the place and while Heaslop's ilk still exists there are so many other ilks [...] a heap of possible and permissible attitudes 70 years later. Must read about Forster and crits on this book pp234-5 Adela and Fielding after the trial - what 'really' happened remains unclear tho pretty clear Aziz is innocent and it was either a hallucination or an unknown other molester (or yet, tho not stated, a malicious or hysterical impulse).

How a novel begins: neem / Ketkar / Pune / Bangalore

29 November 1998 even as I write I know certain decisions can not be made at this stage. A chapter has to 'sit' a while (on the desk, in the unconscious) - to re-arrange itself, shake out the - (image of shaking pans of lentils to separate the stones, remove them, leave only what's good to eat)

Ganesh - the miracles of Ganesh. Maybe Andy brings back a feature about it [i.e. the idea that Andy finds a journal article about the Ganesh miracle to introduce this theme into the novel.]

29 November 1998 RULES!!: don't go see any more dumb crappy films. Waste of time plus, worse, fill your mind. That was the worst. How anything so unrelentingly stupid...

don't go see ANY in intensive writing period. Only if you are going to be inspired, nourished

Get up early. You've been lingering in bed and yes it's nice. Remember it's no easier, getting up, later than earlier. Habit!...

01 December 1998 the dream passage from my journal. Where the dream of broken blue glass follows. Which I give to Marina why not give her more of my dream: fitting the pieces together. Why not make it sapphire blue, as Jade sees Meena wear next

late afternoon - talk w F. - he says he's tired 'cant have relationship, have nothing left to give' me: we - writers - are damaged. We talk about what a writer is, what we always put first. He's reading Vera Britten.

02 December 1998 Texts within - what if each character has a text s/he reads/refers to: the Gita, the guidebook, Passage...?

The only book we should be writing is the one we don't have the courage or the strength to write - Cixous. So, I think, I'm writing the book I should be writing. Reading 3 steps [Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing] to keep me writing about the dead and dreams.

The most unknown and the best unknown, that is what we are looking for when we write... writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written p. 38

what do dreams teach us about written creation?... a woman who writes is a woman who dreams about children p. 74

yeah me too!

foreigness becomes a fantastic nationality

It is the feeling of secret we become acquainted with when we dream... you unknow; you posses the unknown secret p. 85

03 December 1998 keeping my novel and my notes from research papers separate in space and it's as if they have separate times - novel writing time is not note/research writing time. But then to invite library notes into novel time (evening, Ravel). [The new project] is 'ficto-criticism'? it is 2 separate 'projects': novel and PhD - the thought of including some of this [ie process notes]

08 December 1998 Andy in India - 2 adjectives for the liaison with Mike - so many to choose from! Thesaurus hunt! Musings on nuances. It all takes time. Decide on the Latin [ad hoc, pro tempore] because Andy is a lawyer.

09 December 1998 Lots of work on the Dinesh scenes. It's complicated - his part in it - and he need only be a 'flat' character. It's important that his encounter with Meena result in something. I have him also meeting Jade but apart from the airing of some opinions am not sure of the dramatic purpose, that scene. It has to be about the effect on Jade [of] the encounter: she probably would get it all wrong or even have some insight.

'what if' is what I say over and over

14 December 1998 chapter the village. Soodalai asks Marina why are you here? Reader might ask, author might ask.

Marina's search for an ending the henna painting. Andy staring at a pile of shit, but the tree is there. Jade turning it into a performance. Meena locked into her fate.

17 December 1998 at last a shape to Marina in village. I think that's fabulous and I'm not easily pleased.

India is Doing Identity, like Australia does.

06 January 1999 so slowly but it's true that a little every day - something anything is better than nothing - adds up. Putting last [chapter] into shape. All that remains is 'strike' (2d last chapter)

the search among other texts. Reading Imagining India at the library. 'Appropriating': taking a thought and twisting it, changing it, as one does in conversation.

Appendix 3 Process notes: The Gold Coast Draft

12 August 1999 my whole life has been about gold coast real estate for the last two months which is way way too much of a life to waste especially as there's some kind of malevolent equation that means every day that youre away from your work, unfocused, uncentred, unbalanced, weirded out, not living well, spiritually sick, for every additional day of that it takes an additional day to recover, get back on the path

when life is so short

it was getting ridiculous, the way I'd occasionally find the rare rare place that was both affordable and livable and at the last moment theyd sell it or the tenant wouldn't move out day after day the real estate pages the real estate agents the knocking on doors FUCK NO if it feels so wrong don't do it - right?

The waste the waste the waste of time

a home a home

anyway so I had to do something so I'm moving into a very expensive holiday flat at Broadbeach on Monday - ocean views, there to heal my sick sad soul and invoke a clear and coherent thought again as I worship the sea [With this move, the energy changed and I found a suitable flat for long-term rental.]

12 September 99 just don't drive anywhere today, youre in no condition. But go out to lunch and yes have a glass of wine. The 1st day of your period -it's good for writing, but only like this, pen + paper, don't concentrate, wander.

11 November 99 Lighting and lightening it; loving it again and was afraid I wouldn't for it was so uglified by its weight and mess; now it can be polished and stripped and shone. I could be wrong about this but you are never wrong or are you when you know it isn't right. When you love it its right.

Isn't it??

How a story is like a tree, a novel is like a tree, this novel is like a tree; a trunk, and branches, some of them brushing against each other as they bob in the wind, creating points of intersection.

The first chapter is still dreadful. It's not seductive. It's bad. It's dull. It isnt full of promise. I might start with poppyseed.?

24 November 99 selling the novel. Marketing. Thinking about agents, publishers, how to do it. Improve the website. Start sending out queries. Go and visit, take a trip, plan some meetings...

need money to go to India. A book advance'd do it. Get the advance, use the research funds to do it. A gamble. A big gamble. It was no from Asialink.... India in 2001, I could maybe live with that, I don't know.

25 November 99 Andy and Pandora: do not read this [That is, their bond, the friendship they immediately form]as a triumph of heterosexuality : could they say so? How you want to be with someone, talk to them, stick around, even if youre never going to, you know, I mean, you will kiss, might be even a deep kiss sometime when the moon is full, but it's not the kind of kiss that's starting something. You want one major person in your life

but it's so rare it's not always a lover.

There are intimacies, avowals of devotion, mutuality, being appreciated like in your dreams

especially sweet when the fact you are never in each other's territory of possible sex adds a dimension of peace. It's wonderful to love and be loved, ive tried to find ways that that isn't true, but there are no ways that that isn't true. It's always good when people love each other and indisputably when there's no-one to mind. Whether his friends will like her whether her friends will like him, we can barely begin to imagine.

I'm glad that it's turned out that Andy and Pandora find they love each other, and want to talk for a long time...

25 November 99 copying sections from the last draft. Each sentence as a separate paragraph, to be looked at alone

28 November 99 Yoga. Writing as a yoga. Looking at my 'press release' re yoga classes. At what I say about writing . And add 'yoga is a complementary practice and writing becomes my yoga. Think of this more.

typing the Pandora in Sydney chapter. It's so long. There are these really good bits about yoga but theyre starting not to fit in. And the meaning has to change. Now Pandora will not go back [to yoga] again, because she does not want its lessons. She wants strength but not detachment; she wants understanding, she wants vengeance. A father's ghost reminds you to take vengeance, you owe him that. I want to put that in. She rejects yoga. She does not understand [that] it is the way of the warrior.

I eliminated a passage about her life at college. It's good, but I'm worried about the balance.

Andy needs a long chapter more on his past. He has less past, it is less interesting. He might have gone to Ibiza. He might have had a spooky experience. It has to be about why he doesn't want to remember. He is the most unconnected to his past. He is an Arjuna, learning that he must do battle, must do what he must do.

Ask him, what does he remember, what ties you to your past. It's the battle, have a conversation with him.

Me: tell me what you remember

A: it doesn't matter, my past is disconnected from my present, not like your other characters

Me: that cant be so. What made you become a lawyer, do you know when you decided

A: it was always obvious, what I was good at: language, logic, hard work, security, winning

Me: I know a time when security was not in the picture

A: I'm not the only man who makes compartments for his life. It was fun

Me: I was always jealous.

Me: idv got bored, but youre that yuppie generation

Me: that thing about truth and justice.

A: I had to fight where I might not feel like it, I had to fight against my own ((a case anti homosexual e.g.??))

December 99 There are these huge demonstrations in Seattle, against the WTO... There is hope! People arent just taking it! It was really well organised and theyre saying it was effective. The opinion piece I read on the NYT site was like, oh how dumb these people are, don't understand the world doesn't have walls, but I so know that isn't it at all. There will have to be attention now. And it is SO RELEVANT to what happens when Pandora is in the village. The one million farmers....

Discovering these past few days that Pandora is getting angry and crazed and ready to commit an act of great terrorism tho I still dont know by what means.

And I begin to rewrite the old 'in the village' chapter and find it is all there.

If I can say 'it's set in India and it's the story behind an act of ecoterrorism' then Ive got that answer. The fact that the eco-t act is not til the end and even then probably not seen doesn't mean I don't have that good line. What makes someone burn down a village? There is kero and there is a lighter. Cement doesn't burn. Ok, she burns down the neem seeds. The bag of seeds that has been referred to a few times & you cd see it as a kind of symbol.

Certain words that arent the right words come to me, shall I think of them.

I'm thinking whether Andy's appearance might not be a better place to start i.e. current ch 4 & 5.

5 December 99 I am thrilled about the anti WTO protests in Seattle. The synchronicity! It is exactly while I am writing the scene where the farmers' demonstration takes place. The arguments against WTO are right here. In 1995, the time of the novel, is when WTO was formed out of GATT. I spend hours on the web, find worldtradeobserver.com, and find plenty when I look up Nanjundaswamy. Who I hope would take this as tribute.

I am thrilled with Pandora's name. Out of wimpy, weak, unsure Marina has arisen strong, angry Pandora, ready willing and able...

And me? Now I feel like this too. The correspondence with Jenny over 'getting a fright' . I had been weakened, frightened, by a tough time,... now it's different. Pandora gives me strength.

09 December 99 I'm in love with Pandora. I am wondering whether to describe [her face] on page one. (i.e. chapter. 2): black eyebrows, thick, black eyes, large and deep, a large mouth and a large nose on a broad face, a strong face, handsome, intelligent, her determination and fury apparent. Lauren said she looked like Michelangelo's David, the Italian version of a Greek god-like hero of the Israelites. Pandora, I went to sleep with my face against her back, her smooth olive skin. My Pandora.

12 December 99 hit a blind spot and had an evening or 2 drinking red wine (please buy yourself better wine) and watching videos. The rain, a rainstorm, while I was out to get wine and videos and my papers got soaked.

Skipped ahead to the final few chapters, which was a good idea.

And the green café is still the problem.

Like it always was.

Because not enough happens.

It is hard to set up consequence.

Pandora and Jade never like each other. ok.

What consequence does this have?

What could Jade have told P or vv and it'd'v made a difference?

The authorial voice solution: let the author muse on this.

Then there is the spiritual food passage, but it comes too late to give rise to the patents argument.

Or does it?

They talk about food, clothing and spirituality. Fine. And about the patents, they must.

It's an airing, it's not narrative.

17 December 99 there are three gardens [in the novel] – 3 dinners in gardens. Andy is at each: with Pandora in Mysore; with P[andora] and Jade at the green café; alone in Bangalore

the long long long time question of consequence at the green café

'thank you consequence'

things you leave out: 'KFC is just chicken pakora' the KFC story (though I mention it)

21 December 99 printing out 'Meenakshi story': the list of M's chapters. This structure, its strands, weaving and separating. Editing marks: Sasha's 'ww' very useful [Sasha Soldatow taught me ww as an editing mark for wrong word ]

24 December 99 sometimes I don't know how to say it was dark. The garden was dark now. Now it was dark in the garden.

31 December 1999 things you know that arent in there. That there is only 1 taxi in the district and it took Pandora and Jade to the same place on the same day

when I first wrote Pandora buying Ganesh poster + thought that [would be] the only mention of Ganesh [in the novel]

there was going to be a temple scholar

Louis' mehendi booth: this was written in 1996, before the fad

10 January 2000 Thinking I'd just about finished though also thinking about the bits where I go oh YEAH and the bits I go, hmmm, it'll do. I'm up early making corrections. I go to the beach and take the radio. I listen to Salman Rushdie read his death of Veena passage [From his new novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet ] and talk about how the death of Diana influenced this which he was already writing at the time: 'It was kind of spooky'. So I think of course and I have to rewrite the last 'the neem tree' chapter to where the farmers demo makes waves all around the world and (implied) actually leads to the demos in Seattle and every one talking about free trade and what it means. This is where Web research comes into it.

10 January 00 lack of lakhs, cent per cent: those words that signal: this is India

'fuck Ive finished'

and then I sort the pages

clear up the files and folders, write a title page

21 Jan 2000. it's finished, or this draft is finished. I don't feel great about it, just depleted and bit depressed. I don't know what to think. I love it but I don't expect anyone else to, not enough.

01 March 2000 reading Neem Dreams the pleasure of reading a near–final draft and doing more refined editing. – I don't START with sentences

it feels right – the long middle flash-back section/s even – and then you want to get back to now and to Andy and you do.

1 May 2000 the same fear Ive had like always: the green café is static, you get bogged .. too slow

10 august 2000 could not achieve the 'meet cute' for Andy and Jolly. No-one has a 'cute meet'

India [[things you leave out]]add somewhere 'they don't know any better' ['They don't know any better' was one of those remarks made by a western visitor to India to demonstrate that very much pity or compassion towards the very poor was not necessary; for a long time I wanted to include this in the novel.]

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Further reading

'Paralipsis: money drugs and sex' TEXT Vol 6 No 1 April 2002:

<http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/april02/baranay.htm>

'Multiculturalism, globalisation and worldliness: origin and destination of the text' JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature) Vol. 3 2004

 http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/39/69

Baranay, Inez 'Six texts prefigure a seventh' Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy G. Harper & J. Kroll (eds.) Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2007

<http://www.inezbaranay.com/downloads/6_texts_prefigure_7th.pdf>

'It's the other who makes my portrait: Writing self, character and the other' TEXT Vol 8 No 2 October 2004:

<http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/oct04/baranay.htm>

'Writing Lessons: Settings' Griffith Review Edition 26: Stories for Today' 2009

 http://www.griffithreview.com/component/content/article/233-essay/770.html

'Indian Specific'. Australian Author 33, 2 (August 2001): 34.

About the author

Born in Italy of Hungarian parents Inez Baranay is an Australian writer; she has published ten books, seven of them novels, as well as short stories and essays in a range of publications. She has travelled extensively in India since 1980 and her novel Neem Dreams (2003) was first published there, to widespread critical acclaim. Her following books With The Tiger and sun square moon: writings on yoga and writing were also first published in India. All of her back list is being re-issued as ebooks. More biography and details of her books as well as her Newsblog can be found on her website.

http://www.inezbaranay.com

Acknowledgments

Chapters from this book published in earlier forms include:

'sun square moon: Discovering neem; Mr Ketkar' LiNQ, Volume 29, No 2, 2002: p.74-82

'The meaning of India: Early travels' Southerly, Volume 62, Number 1, 2002: p.152-160

Other work written as part of the dissertation which is the basis for A Passage To Neem Dreams can be found in the Further Reading section above.

I thank Daniel Stephensen for the cover design and continued moral and practical support in the process of creating ebooks. Read Daniel's work at http://forgetlings.net/<http://forgetlings.net/>

Acknowledgments for the original dissertation:

I would like to thank my exemplary supervisor Associate Professor Nigel Krauth for unfailing support and invaluable advice at every stage from the initial idea to the final edit. Thanks to the School of Arts at Griffith University Gold Coast for its support.

I thank Jan McKemmish, Associate External Supervisor, for conversation and her close reading and valuable suggestions at an early draft.

My thanks too to friends who read and discussed early drafts and parts of this dissertation for their constructive responses: Jenny Pausacker, Kay Parry, Christine Stanton, Alison Bartlett, Jeff Buchanan, Hans Spier.

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