THE WATCH by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya Format: Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781742752754 Imprint: Vintage Australia Released in May, 2012

Author Q&A

1. What drew you to Afghanistan? Ill paraphrase something by the poet Iqbal by way of an answer: Afghanistan is the heart of Asia, and when Afghanistan suffers, Asia bleeds. Its a wildly beautiful country, with a wildly beautiful people, and one of the last places in the world that appears to have successfully held its own against misguided outside influences. Whats not to love? Look, I live in the countryside because my soul needs it. And I wrote about Afghanistan because I needed to dwell, if only for a while, in one of the worlds last truly remote places. 2. Even now? Even after thirty years of war? Especially now. These wars will pass. The people will live just as they have for centuries. Weve tried to help them: weve failed. Our failure says as much about our societys civilising influences as it does about our own personal limitations. 3. Western readers are going to be especially interested in your relationship with the US Army officers who helped you write the book. They didnt help me write the book. I wrote the entire draft without recourse to experts, and I believe that anyone whos followed the wars of the last three decades will have gained a relative degree of expertise about these things. But the officers fine-tuned the manuscript and corrected my many bloopers, without a doubt. 4. Youre fulsome in your praise of their efforts in your Acknowledgments. Im an anchorite. I keep to myself. And I keep people away. But my friends in the US Army and they are friends, in the true sense surprised me. Theyre part of my life now. I feel an intense loyalty to them. Id rather give them pride of place in my book tours than stand behind a lectern, because its their rightful place, Ive only borrowed it. 5. Why were you surprised? Their openness astonished me; their modesty humbled me. Any corporate institution the size of the US Army is, by nature, impersonal, but these were some of the finest individuals Ive ever met. Theyre not the reason the Americans are losing the war.

6. Why are they losing, then? A lack of cultural understanding combined with terrible political leadership and disastrous policies. It takes a special brand of political genius to announce beforehand how long you intend your campaign to last and precisely when you plan to pack up your troops and leave: you undermine the efforts of the boots on the ground from the get-go. But thats the cesspool of long-distance politicking. And then theres the Karzai administration, which, after the 2009 election debacle, was the worst possible partner with whom to establish and maintain a functioning democratic regime. The all-round corruption would be farcical if it werent tragic. 7. Is that what made you decide to buttress your novel with an ancient Greek tragedy? Not just any Greek tragedy, but Antigone, who, for me, transcends time and place, quite literally. 8. Why a Pashtun Antigone? Why Afghanistan? I needed a protagonist who could serve as a moral yardstick of the degree of injury done to the Afghans by outside powers. A woman who simply has no interest in compromising with the folks whove slaughtered her family and devastated her country. She rejects their overtures in their entirety, and, in that, becomes a microcosm of the rejection by the Pashtuns, especially, of all the material temptations offered by Western civilisation in her specific case, both physiological and therapeutic rehabilitation; and, in the case of her people, all the material detritus that will be left behind by the Americans following their inevitable (and increasingly precipitate) withdrawal. 9. Those are strong words. It would imply a taking of sides. And yet, in the novel, you are remarkably even-handed in your depiction of the viewpoints of both the Afghan and the American characters. Im a novelist and I dont believe in taking sides as I write: thats the task of the propagandist. My personal beliefs and private opinions do not matter within the covers of the book. Ive no interest in either betraying my characters or holding the readers hand and telling her how to think, even as I realise the latter will not make me popular with a readership increasingly accustomed to being thereby directed. What can I say? Im old-fashioned. 10. You havent been to Afghanistan, youve never served in a military capacity, and, by your own admission, youve never held a gun. And yet, we have this book which is steeped in all those things. I write fiction, remember? My primary tool is my imagination. 11. What made you decide to write through the first person viewpoints of seven different characters? First of all, I needed to get myself out of the picture altogether and I realised that a good way to do this would be to let each character speak in order to enable the reader to see through their eyes, as it were. It gave the characters their necessary autonomy and made my own work easier. Thats the terrific thing about writing fiction, it allows me the freedom to do this. Its entirely subjective, it engages the heart of the reader as much as the head, and for my own intents and purposes its more effective than journalisms ostensible objectivity. 12. You dont think journalism can be objective? The moment anyone puts a pen to paper it becomes a subjective exercise.

Thats why I like the phrase creative non-fiction: its accurate. 13. Can you tell us about your research how long did it take? How many soldiers did you speak to in the course of your research? It would be difficult to give you an exact time span, given that Ive been following these wars ever since they began years ago. I suppose Ive always been fascinated by military culture. But I wrote the first draft in ten weeks, sending each completed chapter to my friend and agent, Nicole Aragi, who is also my first reader. As for my conversations with the army officers, that commenced after the book was complete, and it helped that I knew exactly what I wanted from them so as not to waste their time. 14. Are any of the characters based on real people? Nick Frobenius is a composite of a Marine Captain and an Army Captain, both of whom are fabulous writers and intensely intellectual. The rest are invented out of whole cloth. 15. What was the most memorable experience you had as part of your research? Innumerable heart-to-heart sessions with my army mates. More specifically, there was the time I went to see how a halal animal had its throat slit and came away repulsed and physically drained, though the episode did find its way into my book. 16. Did anything in your research overturn your expectations or force you to reassess what you thought you knew? Did anything you discovered shock you? Id had an idea about the degradation of women in Pashtun culture, but the magnitude and degree shocked me. I must say that this, more than anything else, influenced my decision to have a strong Pashtun woman as the protagonist both as a standing rebuke and as an aspirational ideal. 17. Why do you think novelists in the West have kept away from the Iraq and Afghan wars? One reason I can venture is class. The so-called volunteer army in the US, at least, doesnt overlap with the class that reads and writes literary fiction. The army offers the average soldier a way out of a dead-end economy. And as for the officer class, its a small, elite, often hereditary caste. Most of the men I know whore officers come from army families. Its a tradition with them, and they dont want to talk about it. 18. Perhaps its easier to write about war from the distance of hindsight? Yes, Ive heard that argument being made and I think its nonsense, quite frankly. Thats the task of historians. As a novelist, Id rather try to make people empathise and understand present reality in an attempt to influence it. Its easy and fashionable to write the Great War, but how many people are left who lived through it? Im not arguing against historical fiction, but the need of hour begs for something different. Art was supposed to be ambitious. Writing was supposed to aim higher than book tours and sinecures in writing programmes with office hours and regular salaries. Let me misquote Saint Catherine of Siena here: these wars are in our souls and our souls are in these wars as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. I simply dont understand how creative writers can turn their backs to it, especially when poets, playwrights, and film-makers have done so much

better. When did fiction become the most conservative of the creative arts? 19. Youre bitter. Do you blame me? On the one hand, think of the soldier who returns home in the dead of night to a country thats left no space for him. And, on the other hand, think of the hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan whore no more than statistics. Whos writing about them? Whos commemorating in the classical sense their deeds and memories? I mean, how crazy is it that after more than a decade of the longest American war, St. Louis becomes the first city this January! to hold a parade for returning vets? Ive wept for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but thats passive. If I didnt have these books to write, Id have gone mad a long time ago. Theyre my link to sanity. 20. Finally, what do you hope readers will take from the book? Greater empathy and comprehension for both those who fight these endless wars and for their victims than when they began the book.

Author Q&A from Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Author of The Watch Available in bookshops and eBook retailers May 2012 Print ISBN: 9781742752754 eBook ISBN: 9781742752761 Imprint: Vintage Australia | Publisher: Random House Australia
Copyright Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.