1 Did Tibetan Gospel emerge from a fascination with belief and scepticism?
Though I was brought up to be a good Zoroastrian, I determined at an early age to abandon all belief in religions as wilful human delusions. I had a lifelong friend called Darius Cama, who did convert from Zoroastrianism to Catholicism and did indeed become a priest and go to Bolivia as a missionary. The idea of the novel came to me when I read that the “godman” Osho had claimed in writing that Jesus was buried in Kashmir. The plot then suggested itself. My late friend historian Charles Allen’s research into the origins of the Hindu and Zoroastrian idea that the plant they called Soma or Homa led to mystical experiences contributed to this plot.
2 One of the things I enjoyed about the book was the part about the monastery. Did you begin with a community and discover the characters inside it, or did the characters come first?
All of us interact with and are or have been part of institutions: families, schools, colleges, workplaces, etc. Yes, I imagined a monastery and its hierarchies of age, rank, function. Writing fiction is never a purely logical process. Action, motive, characters all emerge from the subconscious, which is, I suppose, a vast store of observations. These emerge into the conscious as one writes, resolving themselves in words and sentences, and then impels the fingers on the computer keyboard. OK, enough pretentiousness!
3 How much of the Pune that appears in the novel is the Poona you remember, and how much is the Poona you still carry in you?
All the descriptions of Poona are from my memories of growing up there, from my early years, through my teens. It was a quiet town till the mid or late 1950s, when the first large factories were built. I go to Pune now and it’s unrecognisable, except for the streets of the neighbourhood where I grew up.
Some of the buildings of our road, Sachapir Street, are still as they were then, though most have been replaced by taller apartment buildings. The Parsi fire-temple, the “komdey chi agyari”, so called because it’s crowned by a rotating weathercock, is still very much there and untouched.
Of course, when I think or dream of Poona, it’s not of the developed, crowded, heavily-traffic-ridden city; the adjunct of Mumbai that is the real Pune today.
4 How much of Farrukh founds its way into Darius?
As I said at the start, Darius or Dara and I grew up together and shared books, friends and stories through our teenage years and our 20s. Years after his death, of cancer of the tongue, I imagined, for this fiction, what he would think and do.
Inevitably, my own experiences, modified to take in his beliefs, became the substance of the novel’s character.
