Hari Kunzru: serpentinegallery.org
In the world of novelist Hari Kunzru, being homeless has a charm of its own.
"I don't write books where people go back to their own country and say *Aha! I am home! I want to write books where it's OK to be homeless," Kunzru said during a lecture at the University of Indonesia, Depok, earlier this month.
He was responding to a question by one of the students, seeking his opinion about authors whose characters return to their homeland to rediscover their identities and find the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle required to make them happy.
However, for the 40-year-old British national currently living in New York, the missing piece may be a sign that one is still alive.
"I wonder whether it's human nature . to feel that there's something you haven't quite understood," he said. "Maybe if migration wasn't part of your identity, then maybe you'll feel that way about religion, or politics."
Questions about cultural or racial identities are sure to arise in conversation with Kunzru, given his mixed background - son of a Kashmiri man and English woman, and raised in middle-class England.
Kunzru experienced racial slights while growing up, but "like *novelist* Zadie Smith, who shares his perceptive irony, Kunzru is of a generation that looks back from the 21st century not so much in anger as in cool mockery," wrote The Guardian.
As a result, his works are vibrant with witty gestures and fresh takes on discovering identity in the ever-evolving theme of multiculturalism.
His first novel was an epic one. The Impressionist, published in 2002, tells the story of Pran Nath's saga after the young man was ousted from his decadent life in a wealthy Kashmiri family because of his mixed racial origins.
Set in the early 20th century, the novel apparently takes a wide-eyed look at the Western world, as opposed to the work of Rudyard Kipling or E.M. Forster that made Eastern or Indian subjects exotic.
The whimsical journey of Pran Nath is a dangerous yet colorful one, and the character's flexible physical traits, which baffle those who try to categorize him into a certain race lineage, are reflective of Kunzru's own fluidity in viewing things.
"Nothing terrifies me more than a religious fundamentalist who really knows what right is and is prepared to do violence to what they consider is wrong," he said. "Claiming that degree of moral certainty is more or less a form of mental illness. I wanted to write in praise of the unformed and fluid."
In 2004, his second novel, Transmissions, was born. Unlike its predecessor, the novel is set in a modern world where the Internet and big corporations are woven deep into the characters' lives.
The novel tells the story of Arjun Metha, a computer programmer smitten with the American dream, only to have that dream crushed when he goes to work in the promised land.
Disenchanted with his Silicon Valley job - which he eventually loses - Arjun launches a powerful computer virus named after his favorite Bollywood star Leela Zahir, which earns him an infamous reputation as a crime suspect.
One of the comical scenes from the novel gives a nod to the identity phenomenon that affects Indonesian and other Southeast Asian migrant workers. In the story, Guy stays in a hotel in Dubai, where he is served by a Chinese waitress named Carey-Ann and an Indonesian waiter called Doug.
The scene was inspired by Kunzru's own "disturbing" Dubai hotel stay experience.
"I noticed that lots of the domestic staff in the hotel were Malaysians and Filipinos and Indonesians," he said. "The hotel I stayed in . really freaked me out because everybody had these name badges with American names on them and these people are obviously not American. . So there's this amazing colonialism where people lose their very name."
In 2005, his third novel, Noise, was published; his fourth, My Revolutions, was launched two years later.
"A lot of people say *my books are* very noisy, kind of busy books, crazy stuff happening. My Revolutions is obviously like that," Kunzru said.
Kunzru writes more than just fiction. He has worked as a travel writer since 1998, contributing to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. He also worked for Wired UK, where he got most of his inspiration to write Transmissions, from 1995 to 1997.
Music is one of his passions, once being a music editor of Wallpaper*_ magazine, and his recent move to New York prompted him to produce a work based on the new sounds he encountered in the city.
"I ended up keeping a diary for about six months about sounds in my new life. You know when you move to a new place and you hear new things, like I hear a fridge buzzing and people talking outside on the street," Kunzru said.
His other passion, of course, is one he frequently addresses through his works: multiculturalism and tolerance, both of which he fears are being threatened.
"I think one of the big changes in Britain happened after 9/11 and the 7/7 bomb attack, they were saying maybe there could be too much diversity," he said during his lecture.
So Kunzru tries to support tolerance through his work. "One of the jobs of writers is to make an imaginary world that allows us to tell stories that make change, that allows people to understand things in a more humane way."
But he's not just talk. Kunzru even turned down The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for writers under 35, the second oldest literary prize in the UK, because it was backed by the Mail on Sunday, whose "hostility towards black and Asian people" he deemed unacceptable.
Hari Kunzru is appearing at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Oct. 8-11. For more information and the full program, visit www.ubudwritersfestival.com.
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