Guest of the ilb 2007
Altaf Tyrewala was born in Bombay in 1977, his family belonging to the Indian Muslim minority. Following his graduation in 1995 he studied marketing at New York's Baruch College, and »suffering from homesickness« became an avid reader and minored in creative writing. In 1999 he returned to his native city, since renamed Mumbai following pressure from the nationalistic Hindu party Shiv Sena. Tyrewala started working as a software specialist and designed learning programmes for various corporations. Meanwhile, he published short stories in magazines such as »Gentleman« and »Little Magazine«. He has made a living by writing since 2002. His first novel, »No God in Sight« (2005), appeared simultaneously in Germany, the USA, France and Spain and was effusively praised by critics.
Through a series of snapshots over a mere 200 pages the author presents a kaleidoscope of the mega-city Bombay. Above all, the prose pieces are monologues which evoke individual fates across classes, strata and religions. As in a film, the focus constantly shifts towards new characters whose stories get woven into the narrative thread: from the former poet and currently bored housewife to her husband, whose function is that of a mere breadwinner. A snapshot of the son, who flees into the virtual world of the Internet, is followed by the story of the daughter, who aborts her child. From there the focus passes on to the doctor, to a slum on the roof of a high rise and a few of its residents, to the shooting of an innocent man claimed to be a »terrorist« and to his different namesakes, to a poultry butcher, to an impotent nationalist and to a half-dead beggar, until the plot finally ends with the father of the aborted child. Interconnected stories of guilt are portrayed in a concise and often allegorical manner – with perpetrator and victim at times encountering one another within the same person. The heated atmosphere between the religions is played out in the episodes as is the precarious balance between Bombay’s heterogeneity and multiculturalism. Behind all this, the universal conflicts within human co-existence are made clear; economic, social and ideological differences grow, leading to struggles and suffering.
The novel has often been compared to Salman Rushdie’s »Midnight's Children«. The German »Jüdische Zeitung« wrote that: »›No God in Sight‹ is a concentrated and modern version of what Salman Rushdie attempted in his 1981 masterpiece: namely, to lend a voice to the manifold cultural and ideological currents of modern India«. Tyrewala was a guest at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, whose focus that year was India. He lives in Mumbai with his wife and is working on his second novel.
© international literature festival berlin
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