How Philip Roth got me to write AS Dulat's memoir

Writing a book with ex-spy chief AS Dulat was at times so frustrating that at one point the only way to continue was to plot a secret second book based on the same material. This book, a friend suggested, would be inspired by American writer Philip Roth's meta-fiction.

This idea popped up in the summer of 2014, while I was in the middle of transcribing conversations with the former Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief which eventually took form as the recently-published Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years. While most have focussed their opinion of the book on its content - whether secrets are exposed (well, not official secrets), whether the author is honest on key events (he is), and whether the book has anything new to say (another formulation of "sour grapes") - a few were kind enough to appreciate that the book did not read like the drab musings of a bureaucrat. "I couldn't put it down," said an espiocrat giving feedback on the book's reception in intelligence circles (not too happy). A lady from the Times of India who did stories when the book first hit shops remarked on its clarity (thank you).

Left to Dulat it would have been, like most post-retirement memoirs, a Chinese water torture of dead words slowly dripping on one's forehead. Such vanity projects have been unquestioningly published in India for years for no convincing reason; it certainly wasn't for money, and that's why someone like former Penguin editor Chiki Sarkar is so brave: She is determined to stop blindly publishing memoirs (though that's not why our deal didn't happen). To be fair, Dulat's purpose was not a vanity project, but securing a legacy.

So a few months into the book, my biggest worry was control of the meta-narrative during the interviews/conversations, which was also when I was planning the chapterisation. Dulat kept holding back details. He wouldn't reveal who said what at which secret meeting. There were unexplained gaps. It wasn't that I wanted operational details, which would have been both illegal and wrong. But Dulat didn't seem to understand that detail was the life force of any book, and that no one would read a dry, bureaucratic note.

This tug-of-war was tiring and for a second time I verged on giving up (in the beginning I had quit and told Dulat to hire a retired IB stenographer) when my friend MT made his suggestion. MT was a journalist-colleague and is now in Bollywood. He is an eccentric man who has flashes of practicality; so naturally I tell him everything. "Let a bland book be published if that's what Dulat wants," MT argued. "But keep the maal for your own project."

I had been thinking of getting Dulat to supply me with incidents that I could dress up as spy fiction, like John le Carré's. MT however meant something else: "All the stuff that comes from this memoir you put into a Philip Roth type novel."

It is pointless trying to summarise Roth's meta-fiction; it is better to give the example of his 1993 novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, in which two Philip Roths show up and one eventually becomes a spy for Israel. MT thus proposed that I write a novel about a journalist who ghostwrites a memoir with a spy chief. "You can and must name the journalist Aditya Sinha," he said.

Ah, brilliant, I thought. Dulat told me many stories to help me contextualise the details, but he forbade their entry to the book; nothing stopped me from putting into a novel such stories. Plus there were many funny aspects to this day-to-day interrogation of an ex-spychief. The icing: I would finally publish a novel, my dream since university days, the elusive ambition that has driven me all these years.

It has not happened, however. Instead, I wrote a short story on the drinking binges that bind spy chiefs, for an anthology on Indian drinking, to be published towards year-end.

And when I thought about Roth's alternative-reality novel The Plot Against America - in which aviation-pioneer (and Nazi sympathiser) Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 US presidential election and sets his country on a radically different course during World War II - then I thought why not go the whole hog and write an alternative-reality book about Kashmir, but one that was more Philip K Dick. I grew up duly impressed with his The Man in the High Castle, in which WW II lasted till 1947 and was won by the Axis powers who carve up America. That isn't the weirdest thing in the novel: the novel-within-a-novel, in which the man in the high castle writes a book about an alternative-reality where the Allies win WW II by 1947 leading to a US-UK arms race, blew my mind.

This rumination paid off when I suggested to Dulat that we include four "what-if" scenarios in the book's final chapter, and after some persuasion he agreed. The four counterfactuals may not be as trippy as that of the two Philips, but they provide interesting insights into the flow of history as well as clarity about key moments in Indian political history.

In the end, the book turned out pretty satisfactorily. That's not to say, however, that I won't do the Philip Roth type novel, given some of the stuff that's sitting in my head. If it does happen, I can promise that it will be trippy.