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Tower of Silence by James Killough
December 24, 2017
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES, THE INDIA FILES

‘Just Don’t Die in India’

During my early years in India, back in the late 80s, when I was writing the first feature film of mine that would go into production, I was invited to dinner at the home of a charming socialite in the Juhu area of what was then called Bombay. Some people say Juhu is the Malibu of Mumbai, but that isn’t being fair to either California or India. The only things that make the comparison viable are the location on the beach, the presence of film folk, and the insane real-estate prices. To be honest, the strongest shared quality is that the two names rhyme.

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By James Killough
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Satya Bhabha in Midnight's Children
May 3, 2013
FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES, THE INDIA FILES

REVIEW: ‘Midnight’s Children’ Haunts the Land of My Past

One of my stock phrases when I’m asked which writers I admire is, “Salman Rushdie taught me how to write.” Not that I attended some master class he gave—I’m an autodidact, so this was a correspondence course by reading his entire oeuvre. Oddly, I’ve never met him directly, although we have a few friends in common and it would be reasonable to expect that an ‘old India hand’ like me, especially one with such deep ties to Kashmir through marriage and personal history (Rushdie is of Kashmiri descent), would have had some contact with him, however brief. Nope.

A less dramatic statement would be that Midnight’s Children is the text that transformed my writing the most. Rushdie introduced me to how plasticine the English language can be,

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By James Killough
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May 22, 2012
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES, THE INDIA FILES

The Elusive Eunuch—Part One

At some point during Shoot Your Heroes Week here at PFC, I had an exchange with Eric Baker in our incestuous comments section that led me to remember the time I crossed the Rann of Kutch in a rickety van in search of the secret temple sacred to the hijras, the notorious eunuchs of India.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton became the one and only hero I’d ever had around page one hundred of Edward Rice’s superlative best-selling biography of him, which I read when it first came out in the early 90s.  This is the kind of man I would have tried to become had I been a Victorian with the sort of linguistic and scholarly brilliance with which he was blessed.  Burton was a character far more extraordinary than his contemporary Rudyard Kipling in many respects; he didn’t just dream of the Indian subcontinent and the British Raj in poems and novels, he lived it, playing the Great Game to the very edge of brinksmanship with a level of chutzpah I aspire to.

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By James Killough
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July 13, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES, THE INDIA FILES

Love The Unknown

 

According to Indian Railways I shouldn’t be writing this.  It’s not like I’ve ever misbehaved on an Indian train, unless you count the time my mother and I were taking an overnight local from Jaipur to Bikaner—which would be a three-hour drive on American roads—and I was hoisting her up to the top bunk of the sleeper, and she kept falling off, and we were laughing so hard she said, “Oh, no, I think I’ve wet myself,” which meant she had to get down and the whole process was repeated again.

No.  The reason Indian Railways doesn’t think I should be writing this is because, according to them, I have been dead for twenty years.

This is, of course, entirely the Raja of Kotwara’s fault.  Creepy bastard.  I’m not talking about the New Raja, but the old one, the New Raja’s father.  I never knew his name because I just called him Raja-sahib like everyone else.  But he certainly knew mine.

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By James Killough
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