Speaker 1: 0:04

We are never alone. How do you get the care that you need? Creativity and caretaking is messy. Does art make us better people? Is empathy, creative. We pretend creativity isn't all that we've got.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Hello, this is Sophie Herxheimer and I'm Dan Sheffrin. We are the people behind art and other people.

Speaker 1: 0:22

Our guest today is the inimitable Jai Chakrabarty. Jai is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World, which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction, and the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, which was among the New Yorker's best books of 2023. His short fiction has been published in Best American Short Stories, plowshares, the Public Space and many other journals, and he is the winner of both an O Henry and Pushcart Prize. Jai is also a trained computer scientist. He currently lives in New York with his family and is a faculty member at Bennington Writing Seminars. Jai, welcome to our podcast. Art and Other People.

Speaker 3: 1:03

Great to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:06

One of the ideas that we have on the podcast is that art, the creation of art and the reception and sharing of art can actually save people's lives. There is an element of caring that's embedded in it, and one of the things that we loved about your book, a Play for the End of the World, is the story of this play that was put on by Janusz Korczak in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. That allowed these orphans to approach death with a certain kind of dignity. It was very moving to kind of read that book and read about the afterlife of some of those characters fictional orphans, but people who came alive for us in the reading of it. I wonder if you could share a little bit about the origins of this book but to say something about how you came across this play and what it meant to you and why you thought this would be a good topic for a book.

Speaker 3: 1:59

So I was born in Kolkata, india, and I went to school in India and the work of Rabindranath Tagore was really a necessary part of education if you're growing up in Kolkata, as I did, and as a child I got to read that play. I even had a small part in performing the play the Post Office, known in Bengali as Datkar and it was a play that I remembered mostly for the excitement of getting to perform it with others. That's the cardinal memory that I have of that play from my childhood. And many years later, when I was in Israel with my now wife, the poet Alana Bell, we went to Yad Vashem. So it was a particularly meaningful visit for Alana, who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

Speaker 3: 3:00

And it was at Yad Vashem that I learned the story of how Janusz Korczak had decided to stage Dakkor, or the post office, in his orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto of cultures, of thinking, of art, and how it can really travel across time and space to have influence and to bring people together. And that was really for me. It was a life-changing moment in learning that story, because I felt so moved by the fact that in these very difficult times that Janusz Korczak, who initially I knew very little about, had chosen to resort to art to bring his children solace and comfort and a sense of dignity in those times, and so that set off for me years of research, which ultimately led to a novel, because this idea of how art can be valuable to us, of great value to us, in these difficult times, was something that I really wanted to sit with and dive deeper into.

Speaker 1: 4:16

I wonder if you could read a little bit for us before we proceed any further along these lines.

Speaker 3: 4:21

Yeah, happy to. So I will just read from the beginning of the novel here. This is from the prologue, so just a little bit of context. The play was performed in july 18th of 1942. This was literally weeks before deportations, and so I'll just read from the beginning. Here the set has been assembled a piece of codwood, that is to mean window. A watercolor Hannah has painted of the sun, that is to mean sun. A bed they've borrowed from the boys' dorm. No easy feet dragging it up and down the stairs for each rehearsal. That is to mean child's bed. Wooden blocks Misha carved to mean child's toys. A nine-year-old Yarek is dressed like a boy from India, at least what they'd imagined. A boy from India would look like A pillowcase fashioned into a turban, a prayer marking on his forehead. From the dressing area, jarek spies much of Jewish Warsaw gathered in the great room of the orphanage. Slengel opens with a poem of which he'll remember the lines. What does it mean afar? How to explain the word to a child? Maybe I'll pause there.

Speaker 2: 5:46

It's really fantastic atmospheric scene-setting, piece by piece. It's very beautiful, you can really picture it. It's very poetic and dense with suggestion, which is lovely to hear. I guess one of the things that strikes me me because I listened to you and Dan in conversation on the video I could hear a couple of things you said that were striking was referring to fiction as an empathy machine and the idea of crossing over cultures and inhabiting other people's experiences being so central to why it's moving, why we need to hear this sort of story and to stand in each other's shoes.

Speaker 2: 6:30

And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the stories that have shaped you in that way, that make you want to tell that sort of story. Maybe we mentioned reading Tagore at school and growing up and his huge influence, what a giant he was and is. But I wonder if there are other examples of novels that have really made you think about this or made you think, no, I don't want to write that kind of novel. I want to write this kind of novel, I want to bring this up.

Speaker 3: 6:59

Well, I'll talk about novels, but for me the first entry into stories were really the family stories that I heard from. My great uncle was an incredible storyteller and he would gather us around and he would regale us with incredible adventure tales as well as just sort of family histories, and that was a common thing. Growing up as a child, there were many power outages that we experienced at that time in Kolkata, and whenever there would be a power outage you would light a candle and you would go on the balcony or something and start telling stories. So I guess the first connection to storytelling really came from the oral tradition and hearing about family stories and just kind of experiencing.

Speaker 3: 7:51

What does it mean for a story to be engaging? I think a lot of it is frankly quite intuitive and we know what it means for a story to be engaging and we don't necessarily need to be taught that. And then, in terms of the novels that I fell in love with, I would say that it was really the work of Charles Dickens that made me fall in love with the English language, with the English novel, the Western novel, and I think I was maybe about 12 or 13 when I started reading him and I just proceeded to read as much Dickens as I could, and so I think there was something about the way in which Dickens he was serializing most of his novels, of course and there was something about the way in which there was this always perennial tension, this let's bring the reader along for the next moment that, I think, also had a great deal of influence on me.

Speaker 2: 8:50

I mean, I love what you just told us about growing up in Kolkata and the power outages, because the privileges of those of us who grew up before widespread internet use, where it was a matter of whether you had a light on or not, whether you'd get to hear something or not, that is so deep, it's so fundamental and deep and it shapes us as imaginative people and it's a way of being in the dark together with other people. Gosh, that creates storytellers, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 9:25

There's a line of thinking anthropologically in that some say that civilization began around a campfire when people told stories there was something about the oral tradition and about the way in which taking care of a tribe of people, a group of people, meant, in part, to help give them a story that connected all the dots. And by giving them a collective story, everybody had a voice in it and there was an act of co-creation. Even if there was a master storyteller, everybody was listening and even in these subtle ways of responding, or with an amen or whatever the version might have been, there is a sense that by participating in that story, you feel part of something, and by feeling part of something, you feel cared for.

Speaker 3: 10:08

Yeah, oh, that's so beautiful. I love that and I'm going to remember that for a long time.

Speaker 2: 10:28

All cultures have these founding myths and they have an incredible amount in common. Well, I've seen the Mahabharata being told a couple of times, and I mean I'm sure you've seen it being told a couple, you've probably heard it a million times, but I found that absolutely fantastic. And one time when I saw it being told by a bunch of storytellers a family bunch of Indian storytellers they had a little chorus of yes, people who'd go, yeah, really no. So the main narrator would be telling extraordinary things and then other people on the stage as well would be going. It wasn't really like that. And then another one would go yes, it was.

Speaker 3: 11:05

That's fascinating, Jai is that part of a kind of a storytelling tradition or culture? It is very participatory, I think that that's the word used as a really good one. So the Mahabharata was primarily relayed through oral tradition. It was a while before it was actually written down and so, as a result, we actually have like roughly four different versions of that book. I mean, as you're describing, you know, there are perhaps differences of how people remember certain parts of certain stories, and I think this is such a common aspect of storytelling and the participatory nature of it. I think about Ted Chiang's story, the Truth of Fact, truth of Feeling. Do you all know that?

Speaker 2: 11:55

I love that story. I don't know if I'm going to read it at once.

Speaker 3: 11:58

Yeah, it's incredible, and so, Dan, I mean like. The premise of it is that it's about this new device that has been created which allows you to record your memories and go back and scan your memories, and, at the same time, there's this sub story that is running through about an indigenous culture who is discovering writing for the first time, who is discovering writing for the first time, and there's a thread in there where Chang talks about the fact that, oh well, after hearing someone tell a story and actually writing it down for the first time, they realized that the version that they heard was different from the version that they'd heard years before or, you know, whatever time before. And that was the huge realization, which is stories are mutable, that stories don't stay the same, that they evolve as we change, as the context around us changes.

Speaker 2: 12:57

And that's certainly the case in your novel, bringing it back to that from a story where a little boy in the Warsaw ghetto is using very limited resources to dress up as what he imagines as an Indian boy, and how they're transferring their images in their imagination, which is why an imagination is an image-nation. But I love that idea of the evolving story and it does remind me a bit of Dickens too, because of the epic nature of something that reflects society back to itself in a kind of tumbling, tumultuous, multi-voiced way where there's somebody for everybody, there's somebody like everybody, there's somebody a bit more like everybody than everybody, and it's just a big world and you're inviting a reader into a really big world that has a sort of warmth to it, which has got a feeling of family about it. That's also. You're back in the family, aren't you when you're back in a book.

Speaker 3: 13:56

Yes, I think that one of the fundamental desires for Yarrick, that little boy, is to find the sense of family again. I think that's what he struggles with as an adult, and even though his childhood is, of course, very difficult within the context of Janusz Korczak's orphanage, he does have that sense of family, and so I think part of what he's searching for in his relationship is fundamentally a love story in some ways is to recreate that sense of family from his childhood, which I think is not so uncommon for us.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Jai will you say just a little bit more about the book and where the book goes. I could try to summarize it, but maybe just say a little more about how does Yarek stay alive, who else stays alive, and a little bit more about where the love story goes.

Speaker 3: 14:46

So Jarek does stay alive. So after the performance of the play, after the deportations there, he is able to escape from a train bound for Treblinka. So this is a departure from a historical record. There were no children who were at Janusz Korczak's orphanage who did survive. So this is a fictional departation. And he then meets up with his longtime friend, his almost brother, misha, in a DP camp and together they head to New York. Together they start a life, and it's almost 20 years after they moved to New York that he meets Lucy, a Southerner, a woman from North Carolina, who will become the love of his life. And a few different things happen at that point. One is that Misha dies in India. He has gone to visit India and he dies there, and also he's very deeply in love with Lucy. And so those two things at that point Yarrick is almost 40 by this stage resulted in a series of questions that he has to navigate.

Speaker 1: 16:08

We heard a little bit about your great uncle being a great storyteller and that process of family storytelling. Can you say any more about elements of care and a kind of culture of care that emerged out of your family or your network growing up?

Speaker 3: 16:22

So my parents they grew up in extended families. So in my father's house there were maybe 15, 20-ish people living there and it was one of these grand houses in North Calcutta where on the lower floor, they had the house help and they also even had their own cows at some point on the lower level. And then they had the extended family living there. So my mom, on the other hand, her family they were refugees from what is now Bangladesh and they came to Kolkata with very little money. There were 15 people living in a three-bedroom apartment. It was a very crowded, exciting. Whenever I visited my father's family house, I always got that sense of okay, everybody knows everybody's business. People are caring for each other, looking out for each other at all times, and this is really like growing up in chaos.

Speaker 3: 17:33

My parents when we moved to the States, we really just kind of had each other.

Speaker 3: 17:39

So my older sister and I and the two of us, you know, we did not have the luxuries and complexities that come with an extended family.

Speaker 3: 17:55

And my parents they are now both retired professors, but once we had emigrated to America, they were both trying to get jobs in academia, which meant we were moving around every year. So we would go to a place, go to another place the next year, and all of this meant that, at least for my sister and I, we really didn't cultivate many friends. We had each other and we had our parents. So I think in that way we were a very tight nuclear family. And then in the summers, when we would go to India, we would be surrounded by this sort of gaggle of relatives. Surrounded by this sort of gaggle of relatives. So this is all to say that I think it was a little bit bifurcated upbringing in that way, in the sense that in America we had a very closed nuclear family, very devoted, I would say, set of parents who doted over us, and then in India there was this kind of swarm of relatives that we were met with.

Speaker 2: 18:54

I love to hear about the polarity of that and the pickle it must have put you in as kids. Because when you're getting lots of attention from two parents in a kind of nuclear family setup, it can be very precious. It can be a bit intense and sometimes a little bit over the top. Everyone's paying attention, maybe a bit too much, and you don't have a chance to wriggle free. Wriggle in your gaggle and then when you're able to go back to India and it's chaos and it's probably so different.

Speaker 2: 19:24

It must just cultivate those different sides of you which are very important in terms of your own attitude to creativity and to care. Because one thing I like to sort of think about in terms of care is, yes, we can care, but it's really nice also to be careless. And sometimes if you're in a gaggle of people you can be a bit careless and nobody really cares. You can be carefree and your parents can suddenly be carefree, knowing there's 10 uncles and two aunts and a cousin and a few cows and dogs sort of around the place, that nothing's going to happen because somebody's got an eye on somebody. And I think that's very nice for cultivating work because it saves one having to be precious about the work in process and progress and having to dot every I and cross every t as you go along.

Speaker 3: 20:17

Maybe I'm thinking now a little bit about the fact that. So so we have one child, we have an eight-year-old son and we've lived in New York City for many, many years and then, during the pandemic, we moved up to the Hudson Valley where we found this very tight-knit community, a very small community. So my son goes to a school that is from kindergarten to eighth grade. There's a total of 180 kids, so it's a very small school. Contrast this with the fact that I went to a school with 15,000 kids. You know, and you may get a sense of the difference between those two experiences. But even though he doesn't have siblings, we have found ourselves in a very tight community and there have been all of these moments over the last few years where I see him run around and know that there are all these other caretakers who can watch out for him, and that has been a real blessing and it's been kind of letting go and trusting the community, which I don't think we had quite in the same way when we were living in New York City.

Speaker 1: 21:37

One of the other guests in our podcast, Denise Saul. She was talking about this idea of space or the room between people, and we were talking about ways in which sometimes caretaking or caregiving requires you to create space and give other people space to grow and learn. And, on the opposite side, when are the times when you want to not leave that space which creates loneliness or isolation? And, as a parent all three of us here are parents I think it's something that we think about how much room to give somebody and how do we think about space physically room to give somebody and how do we think about space physically and emotionally in terms of caretaking? I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.

Speaker 3: 22:17

Yes, I'm a morning writer, so I wake up early to start my writing practice, but I also have a rule, which is that if my son, surya if he ever interrupts me wants to play, I will stop my writing and I will just engage with him, because that is of higher value to me than finishing my work.

Speaker 3: 22:39

So that's the kind of way I think about the space that I create, or the boundaries that I create, with him in that context. But as we were playing together this morning, we were building this contraption together, like a little device, a kind of complicated toy that he got from a set and he was struggling with certain parts of it and I was wrestling with this question of how much do I interject and how much do I step away. And so, even though it doesn't necessarily come naturally to me, I tried to like wash the dishes but be nearby, as he was kind of struggling and complaining about the difficulty and just providing words of encouragement rather than doing it. But it's definitely hard, because there are moments where I'm like I know exactly how to fix this problem.

Speaker 2: 23:33

but yeah, let me stay away the close relationships in the family and who's in charge, and having to be flexible enough that as a parent, you're not always going to control and as a child, you're not always going to try and control the parent. How do you ever get to that stage? Because it takes. Everybody feels that they know best or that they could be in control. I mean certainly my son, with his autism and learning difficulties, really craves control because he doesn't have control over his life. It's very hard for him and so he exhibits very controlling behaviour and won't let anybody open or shut the car door. He has to do it. We as the parents have to be very zen about it because we see that matters, and so we invent a name for him where he's the butler and he's called Perkins and he opens and shuts the car door and we like it. We go thank you, perkins, and that's a way of dealing with the fact that we're not allowed to open and shut our own car door.

Speaker 1: 24:31

What a great use of creativity and imagination to care for somebody in these small but ultimately actually really large ways.

Speaker 2: 24:38

Well, it's the same, with Jay washing up instead of fixing the toy. It's a way of being present to the other person's immediate need, without having to second guess, without having to take it away from them as their need.

Speaker 3: 24:55

Yeah, and I love this idea that I think you're bringing up, dan, which is, I think it's also a willingness to imagine themselves in their fullness many years later, right, that through the mistakes that they're making, the way in which they're struggling, they're emerging into full human beings in ways that have something to do with you as parents, but also a lot that you have no control over and you have no influence over parenting.

Speaker 3: 25:28

And this needing to let go of who our children actually become, right, like they are going to become who they become, and this idea of creating a character in fiction, which is also, I think, a kind of letting go, because we may come in with certain thematic ideas when we're writing a novel or graphic novel or story or whatever, and then, as we kind of follow that character, follow who they are and really see them in that space of their uniqueness, our intentions, our themes, our premise may entirely change, and I think that's one of the hardest things to do as a writer is okay.

Speaker 3: 26:12

Well, I had this idea, I had this premise, impulse for a story, but I spent some time with these characters in the way in which you might spend time with your children and you realize actually, no, they're very different people and you have to let the story unfold to accommodate who they are and not your version of who they are. Something that just came to mind as you were talking, sophie, is that when writers are encountering difficult material and then trying to connect it to their own art making as you are in your graphic novel, as I did in A Play for the End of the World how do we take care of ourselves as artists when we are working with difficult material? What sorts of support systems, rituals or other means do we turn to?

Speaker 1: 27:08

Do you have an answer to your own question or are you willing to share some things that you've?

Speaker 3: 27:13

Answer my question.

Speaker 2: 27:15

Oh we could answer your question. It's a really juicy question and a really important question as well, because it's hard to actually allow for it, allow for the fact that one needs to also be supported in handling really heavy stuff, and I think more and more people are aware of that. I don't know how I'm doing it. I'd love to know how you're doing it and, if you're doing it, if you did it with that book or other material you've handled. That's hard.

Speaker 1: 27:46

I feel a responsibility to answer at least a little bit, just because it seems fair. Not that I have a really good answer, but I know that when I'm working with material that's difficult. I know that I have a tendency to go to the intellectual or to be academic or historical in some way and to move away essentially from the emotion of the scene and going to the idea of it. And so it's interesting that I may not know ways in which I'm affected by material until I read what I've written and say, boy, this is really on the surface in some way. It may be deep intellectually in some way or historically, but it's kind of skirting the issue. And so I feel like when I notice that, that's when I know that I need to take care of myself a little bit more to allow myself to go deeper.

Speaker 2: 28:32

And one of the things that I've noticed is that I don't feel myself to be myself unless I've gone into the real emotional content of something. And it is intense emotional content of something. And it is intense and because I've now got older, I'm better at toughing it out, and I like to tough it out and I like to cry and I think, oh yeah, look at you, you're a wreck because you're dealing with this stuff and it's shit. And I go around the house shouting at everybody in my book and really feeling all the feelings of my book and it makes me feel good and alive, and then I think, god, I'm some kind of vampire no-transcript.

Speaker 3: 29:43

Yeah, I wonder if you might read a little bit from that and we can talk about this process of creativity and storytelling and self-care mathematical text that was written in India and he told me about how there was a version of it that had a diagram that might be like an early flying machine, like an early airplane, and so I was so compelled by that I mean, he told this to me when I was a kid that I wanted to bring it into a story that I eventually wrote, which was called Lilavati's Fire, based on after the book Lilavati, which is this mathematical text, and in this story it's about a woman, aparna, who is married to an aeronautical engineer engineer. She is a stay-at-home mom, but she is herself quite an engineer and, unbeknownst to her husband, she has built an airplane, a small airplane in the garage, based on these ancient diagrams, and for her, I think it is really kind of a reclaiming of herself as an engineer, as a woman of science, rather than only as a mother or as a wife. So that for her, is really this core journey, and I'm just going to read the last couple of paragraphs in the story. It's after her husband, harish, has seen her contraption and unfortunately it does not fly, which is a little bit of a spoiler. He asked this question is it for Sanjay's birthday? He said so. Sanjay is their son. They would walk in the morning, son, he would lean on her for steadiness. Aporna, yes, harish, she said. That's all it is.

Speaker 3: 31:54

Later that night, when she'd retired to her bed and Harish had retired to his on the other side of the nightstand, she stayed awake for a while to hear the music of the cicadas, but Harisha's snoring was supreme. So she went outside in her nightdress and heard them. On the lawn she sat on the grass and smelled the honeysuckle planted next door.

Speaker 3: 32:18

As a girl in Kolkata, she had sucked the honey from the beaks of these flowers, living inside their smell. Drunk with life, she stared at her air chariot on the concrete. It seemed to stare back with derision. She had used the drawings of an ancient mathematician who had never known, of Newton, of his third law of action, equal reaction. And when the miracle of flight had not come and she was still on the ground, she did not think of Newton or Bernoulli's principle of how curves under pressure create the most important form lift. She thought instead of that first moment when Sanjay had come out from her body and the nurse had passed him into her arms as if he were the most precious gift and all she had thought then, as Harish looked on weak-kneed and teary-eyed, was how ugly her little boy seemed, how covered with blood on his sagging skin. But she held him anyway with his cave of a mouth, with his arms outstretched like a fledgling bird.

Speaker 2: 33:33

Oh, I love the turning around of everything the not working of the plane and the not working of the baby either. I mean there's a subversion and a paradox in it about love isn't there, which I really enjoy hearing.

Speaker 1: 33:50

One thing that struck me about the story in this context was this idea, perhaps, that her act of creativity was fundamental to her self-care Right. And her creating a story about herself that was not denying her role as a parent, as a mother, but was expanding it to include her being a scientist in some way, Whether or not it worked, whether or not you got paid for it. That seemed important. I don't know if that was what she had in mind, but that seemed present.

Speaker 3: 34:18

It is essential. I think it is essential for all of us in some way to find that creative connection beyond our roles as people who make a living or people who caretake, but also define. What is that creative spark within us? Whether it is to build an airplane or whether it is to write a book, it's an essential pursuit.

Speaker 1: 34:41

Jai Chakrabarty, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 34:45

Thank you so much, great to be with you.

Speaker 2: 34:47

Lovely to meet you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 34:53

Art and Other People dedicated to the support of healthy families and communities through the arts. Our theme music is composed by James Rolfe. Join our community at artandotherpeopleorg.