PVLF 2025

Interview with Farrukh Dhondy, Author of “Deccan Queen: Take Two”

Interview with Farrukh Dhondy, author of "Deccan Queen: Take Two," discussing his inspirations, storytelling journey, and insights into his latest work.
on Sep 09, 2024

Frontlist: "Deccan Queen: Take Two" features a unique structure where descendants and relatives of the characters respond to the stories, sometimes with objections or requests. What inspired you to incorporate these reactions into the book, and how do they enhance the reader's experience?

Farrukh Dhondy: Yes, Deccan Queen: Take Two has a conceited structure which I don't think I've seen anywhere in English literature – I won't be so immodest as to say I invented it. I thought that while writing fiction, which relies on memory, one recreates the characters and incidents one remembers and invents others to construct interesting and coherent stories. While writing this particular series of stories, which do rely to an extent on memory – with the exception of course of the historical ones (I am old, but not that old!)—it occurred to me that it's our common experience of remembering things in a different way from others who may have observed or shared the experience. Hence, letters or responses were invented from those in the stories or those affected by them.

Frontlist: The Deccan Queen train serves as a central metaphor in your book. What significance does this iconic train hold for you personally, and how does it tie the stories together within the broader narrative?

Farrukh Dhondy: I was born and grew up in Pune (then Poona) on the Deccan Plateau. It was a quieter world than that of Mumbai (then Bombay), the metropolis on the west coast, which one reached by descending the Western Ghats by road or by train. The queen of all the trains that made this journey every day, carrying commuters to and from Bombay, was the Deccan Queen. It carried me and everyone I knew from one world with its characteristics to another with very different air and business and even indifference to it. The train, which I, my friends, cousins and relatives used several times a year, became a metaphor or analogy of travel from one dimension to another --- a sort of Doctor Who phone box before it was invented.

Frontlist: The book introduces a diverse range of personalities, from your grandfather's tragic downfall to the poignant tale of the young Scottish brothers. How did you approach developing these characters? Are there specific aspects of their stories that you found particularly challenging or rewarding to write?

Farrukh Dhondy: All the characters in my book, from my grandfather to the Scottish brothers, are, in a perhaps modestly fictionalised form, based on people I knew very well. Some are still alive, and I have changed their names and some of the incidental characteristics in the events to save their blushes – or me a libel suit. Their diversity is what anyone's life is filled with – these are characters I knew as family and others I knew as neighbours, friends, relatives, my parents' generation's characters and so on. The characters from Raj are obviously invented, but again, I hope they have the persuasive tones and demeanour of real, observed people.

Frontlist: Your book blurs the lines between fact and fiction. How do you navigate the balance between staying true to your memories and exercising creative license? Were there any particular instances where this balance was especially challenging?

Farrukh Dhondy: My chosen structure for Take Two can be, if a reader wishes to be cruel, labelled a 'conceit'. Mantha hoon Suleiman! When writing fiction one uses one's experience and memory as the raw material, the ore you have dug from the mountain of recollection. Since fiction is not a memoir, one then turns the ore by smelting it in the creative converter, however modest a furnace, into either iron, silver, gold or lead, which emerges as is in the mind of the reader. The most challenging incidents are those in which you are not delving into the given and compelling patterns of memory but inventing characters, events and drama from your wider experience of the world.

Frontlist: In the narrative, the idea of setting the record straight is central. What prompted you to readdress these stories through a "second telling"? How did you decide which aspects of the original tales needed revision or clarification?

Farrukh Dhondy: Ah! That's not how it happened. I determined while putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) right from the start that characters or others were going to challenge or further the narrative through replies. I'd called that first draft of the book "DECCAN QUEEN' SECOND EDITION," but it struck me that it sounded a bit technical, and potential readers might wonder why they weren't presented the first edition before they started reading.

Frontlist: Have any real-life individuals or their descendants reached out to you about the stories in "Deccan Queen: Take Two"? If so, how did their feedback influence your perspective on the book or the stories within it?

Farrukh Dhondy: None of the supposed characters in the book have responded or replied to me. However, I must admit that two of my earlier books, 'Come to Mecca' and 'Poona Company' – written and read in the 1980s – did elicit responses. Two came from characters who identified themselves rather gratefully in Come to Mecca, and one very accusatory letter arrived from the granddaughter of a nasty character whose identity and even nastiness I had transformed in fiction but whose portrayal was correctly (to me a compliment) identified as the real person. Obviously the fact of these responses must have lingered in my memory when beginning to recall the material of DQ' Take Two --- though I protest that they were not the trigger for my inventing the form.

Frontlist: The stories in "Deccan Queen: Take Two" delve deeply into themes of identity, memory, and the past. How do these themes resonate with your own life experiences, and what message do you hope readers take away from these explorations?

Farrukh Dhondy: As a writer of fiction, I have never thought about the 'themes' that my writing contains. That happens in the mind of the reader, reviewer, critic, and analyser. My feeling is that if you set out to write to a set of themes, the fiction may become preachy and stilted because the idea, the theme, forces itself on the creation, and the nuance of reality can, through the intervention, get distorted. That being said – methinks I protest too much? – one book called Bombay Duck certainly began with an idea or theme: that of cultural fraud or misunderstanding. Of course, in the course of writing, the nuance of reality, its description and characterisation had to be paramount, and I do hope it took over (which it probably did, as the book was one of the top two on the shortlist for the Whitbread literary prize. Unfortunately, (only for me) Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia won that prize, and I, like Napoleon at Waterloo, came second!)

Frontlist: How did the concept for "Deccan Queen: Take Two" evolve from its inception to its final form? Were there any major changes in the storyline or structure during the writing process?

Farrukh Dhondy: 'Deccan Queen: Take Two' was written in one continuous flow. The second draft was dedicated only to getting rid of typos and some clumsy sentences. My conviction is that the evolution of fiction is never a conscious, logical process. It relies on feeding notions into the subconscious by perhaps thinking of a story, a person and/or a particular recollection in one's conscious mind and then leaving it to vegetate or flower in the subconscious. Then, the full form and direction, if not content, begin to flow by coming to the conscious as a compelling direction, if not a fully beginning-middle-end construct. As the stories were constructed, I had in mind what the 'response' in the Take Two section could be.