Sunil MS was listed in the ‘Top 10 Short Fiction Writers’ by DNA-Out of Print in 2017. His work has been previously published in DNA India newspaper, Out of Print, and Bangalore Review. Sunil MS was born in Dharwad, Karnataka, and grew up on a steady diet of books. His journey as a writer began with narrative poems which evolved into flash fiction, short stories, and now a novel – Song of the Whale.
A street photographer since 2010, Sunil mostly spends his time walking around the streets of Bangalore and making pictures. When not on the street with his camera, one can find him in bookshops or cafes. He currently lives in Bangalore.
TBE: Could you please tell us about your most recent book, Song of the Whale, its overall plot, and the main characters in it?
Sunil MS: Song of the Whale is about a whale haunting the city of Bangalore. There are these people called The Listeners who hear a whale song every night and they step out of their homes in search of its source. Amongst these, is our protagonist, who cannot hear the song himself but comes across The Listeners by happenstance. He joins them. Over a period of a week, he meets many Listeners – the young boy who is responsible for the death of his maid, the abandoned old woman at the temple, a blind man seeking Death, and a woman who is in love with her father. The protagonist collects their stories, their memories, and suffers the whale’s silence.
TBE: Your work brings together the genres of allegory and mystery. What attracted you to writing in those areas?
Sunil MS: A lot that happens in life can be interpreted in more than one way. There’s always this degree of right and wrong, good and bad, happiness and sadness. Nothing is absolute. When you look at life through this lens, everything holds a certain degree of mystery. Your life shapes up based on your interpretation of situations (which again is a product of a lot of your past experiences). Life itself has no inherent meaning. It’s what you make, if you have the privilege of time to stop and try to assign meaning to your life. I have that privilege to a certain degree. I love exploring ideas in that space and time.
TBE: How this story first came to be. Did it start with an image, a voice, a concept, a dilemma or something else?
Sunil MS: I remember being obsessed with whales back in 2016. Even though they terrified me, I would listen to Humpback whale songs for hours. Then I came across the story of the 52-Hz Whale, popularly referred to as The World’s Loneliest Whale. I was deeply moved by his story. I was up late one night (I suffer from insomnia) when I heard this really absurd, abstract, wailing noise. It resembled a whale song.
I stepped out onto the balcony and looked at the Bangalore cityscape. The following night (I was severely drunk), the idea of a whale in Bangalore came to me. The next morning, hungover, I was traveling to a friend’s place. On my way, as I looked out of the cab I was traveling in, I pursued the idea. By the end of this one-hour journey, the characters had found their places in this story of a whale in Bangalore.
TBE: Song of the Whale illustrates your deep understanding of life and hardship that comes with it. How did you manage this feat?
Sunil MS: We all have stories. We all suffer from abstraction, in some shape or form. Nothing comes to us in absolute black and white. We try to make the right choices (at least those with some degree of conscience) and try to find peace and joy. Most often life isn’t kind. Especially for those who suffer mental health issues. Their language changes. It’s that grey space where we want to be seen and be invisible at the same time. Those outside this space, often find it hard to understand us. Some don’t even listen. The world would be a lot better place if one only cared enough to stop and listen and try to understand. Empathy is the thing that we need the most.
TBE: There exists in the protagonist of ‘Song of the Whale’ a longing for the convergence of science and myth in the making of his identity. How do you see the stark division of the arts and sciences, storytelling and experimentation, in our current culture? Does it hinder us as humans more than help, especially in dealings of the language of psychology and mental illness?
Sunil MS: Humans are meaning-making beings. We want to make sense of all that happens to us. But, living in a capitalist world, life is often a blend of both arts and sciences. On one hand you have all these practical concerns one needs to deal with, while on the other, you have something as abstract as life itself, and our inherent programming to make it.
One’s life is often a struggle balancing the two and creating your identity. Our politicians, for example, draw a sense of identity from power. The billionaires, by making more money. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you have the underprivileged, who struggle just to survive. The question – what is this life all about? – is outside their circle of concern. People suffering from mental illness are often, unconsciously, burdened by a product of a society with these deep-rooted problems. Although the world of psychology has advanced enough to treat these issues, it is not enough. There is a need for a more fundamental change in the way we perceive the world, the “others”.
It is beyond science. We need to look at the larger picture, at ourselves as a species, and, unfortunately, it all starts at an individual level by looking at this “other” as a human being. In today’s world, which is controlled by politicians and billionaires, there’s a deliberate attempt to create this “other”, and it’s mostly a play of language. It’s hard to escape this language when one is struggling from their own identity crisis.
We reconcile with something that’s easy to acquire. We get swayed and embrace this language and speak in the same tongue, furthering the vested interests of those in power. It’s a well-oiled machine. Only way one can escape this is if one has an agency of reasoning and empathy, science and arts respectively. I don’t know about a lot of things. One of them being – how do we trigger this collective consciousness which counters this creation of the “other”?
TBE: Which mystery and suspense writers do you draw inspiration from? What are your favorite books from the same genre?
Sunil MS: I went through various phases of genres. As a teenager I read a lot of Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. As I grew older, I read Camus, Sartre, and Dostoevsky. Horror and Existentialism, two genres I love reading. The books I keep going back to are The Outsider by Albert Camus, and Invitation to a Beheading by Nabokov.
TBE: You must have done a lot of research on Whales and their behavior and learned a great deal about them. Did you learn anything that surprised you?
Sunil MS: I LOVE how closely a whale song resembles how we live our own lives. As a new-born, a whale first borrows its mother’s song. As it grows older, and listens to other whale songs, it begins to borrow pieces from other whales. After a point, a whale ends up creating a unique song of its own, which is a blend of all the songs it hears in its life. Much like how we live!
8TBE: How was your publishing experience with Leadstart?
Sunil MS: Leadstart as a publisher is a very process-driven organization, which is great. All through the book publishing cycle, there was constant support and communication.
TBE: Is there anything you are currently working on that may intrigue the interest of your readers?
Sunil MS: I am currently just focusing on getting back to the basics – reading and writing short stories. I am toying with the idea of publishing a collection of short stories, and I also have a couple of ideas for a novel. But nothing is fully formed yet. Hopefully by the end of 2022, I will have something that I feel brave enough to publish.
