GD: Well, it’s a romance in part one.  Then there’s this whole thing about destiny. And there’s this thing about identity going through the book—the most important part of the guy’s name in Venice isn’t the Jeff part, but the Atman part.  Yeah.  Yeah. There are some big issues, but goodness me, serious issues need not be addressed seriously.

MC: Here’s a seriously ironic question: in Death in Varanasi, you write, “I sat on the bed and did not know what to do, and then I decided that not knowing what to do was a form of knowing what to do, which was to do nothing, so that is what I did.”  So much of the end is like that: peeling things away, eating bananas.  Did you go bananas writing this book?

GD: By the end of a book, I’m in a groove and it’s all coming quite easily. I love that crazy monologue delivered to the guy—is he Swiss? The narrator says, ‘I’d like to drop my spoon into that chick’s pudding.’  I laughed my nuts off when I wrote that line.  An old girlfriend used that expression twenty-five years ago.

MC: You had a girlfriend who asked you to drop your spoon in her pudding?

GD: Ha! No. But regarding the brass tacks of romance, I never tire of doing the whole choreography of glances and gestures. You see someone across a room and you feel something big.  You get talking to her and you think she likes you and then you think you’re just deluding yourself. First conversations are infinitely possible. Those are the great moments in one’s life. These peak experiences—when you come to these places or experience these films or works of art or when you meet certain people and there is some kind of transcendence—peak experiences are what I’m most interested in from life. What is so special about those things? How do you articulate and respond to things that move you deeply?  For me, typically with tears. Of gratitude, I guess. 

MC: I think the great thing about them is that we can’t force them to happen.