‘The author can only build half a bridge’: Kiran Nagarkar

Most authors wouldn’t stop talking about their work if it had turned 40 and was still up there considered as a milestone in literature. But then novelist, playwright, film and drama critic and screenwriter Kiran Nagarkar has always been different.

Despite being celebrated as one of the most significant writers of post-colonial India, he resorts to self-effacing sarcasm when asked to react to his first book Saat Sakkam Trechalis (SST) turning 40. “The Guinness Book record-worthy success of Saat Saakam Trechalis (Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three), which sold a record 1,000 copies is what comes to mind,” laughs the septuagenarian Mumbai resident whose books are a target of ideological critique due to the hybrid nature of his version of postcolonialism, involving irreverence alongside seriousness.