Q&A: Jai Chakrabarti, Author of ‘A Play For The End of The World’

In his debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, Jai Chakrabarti weaves a captivating tale from the threads of history. Jaryk Smith, nearly 40 years old, managed as a young child to escape the grasp of the Nazis. Decades later, he finds himself still guarded, guilty to have survived when so many did not. A Play for the End of the World follows Jaryk as he falls in love in early 1970s New York City, then unexpectedly travels across the world to eastern India, where children amidst a local political upheaval are set to perform the very same play he did as a child in a Warsaw orphanage. Jumping back and forth in time from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, Chakrabarti unravels what it means to survive, how art influences life, and how the past has an uncanny way of echoing into the future.

Sounds amazing, right?! It is! Read on to learn more about how history inspired Chakrabarti to write this novel, how writing a novel differs from writing short stories, and the classic Dickens novel that sparked his love for reading!

Hi Jai! Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily! To start with, tell our readers a little bit about yourself.

Hi Beth—thanks for these great questions. A little about me: I was born in the bustle of Kolkata, India to two philosopher parents who instilled in me a love of stories and ideas. Nowadays I live in New York with my five-year-old and partner – I spent most of my adult life in Brooklyn, NY but earlier this year we relocated to the Hudson Valley.

Your debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, comes out on September 7, 2021. Can you give our readers a little summary of what the book is about?

A Play for the End of the World is about Jaryk, a survivor of Janusz Korcak’s Warsaw Ghetto orphanage, who travels to India to help direct a play from his youth. This play, Dak Ghar, was written by Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore and comes to have great meaning for Jaryk and his fellow orphans. Later Jaryk emigrates to America, and when we meet him in 1970s NYC, Jaryk begins to fall in love with love with Lucy, an American Southerner. Their relationship struggles against the weight of Jaryk’s past and his burgeoning sense of duty to a village in India.

I was taken aback learning the true story of Janusz Korczak and his staging of the Rabindranath Tagore play Dak Ghar. This is a piece of history I never learned about before reading your book! Could you share with our readers a bit about this history, which is centered in your novel?

This is indeed an extraordinary moment of history and what drew me to writing the novel. Janusz Korczak was a Polish-Jewish educator who ran an orphanage in Warsaw with nearly 200 children. Korczak had been drawn to Indian thought and literature and, weeks before deportations to Treblinka, chose to stage a play by Rabindranath Tagore in his orphanage in July 1942. I was compelled by the fact that art became both a refuge and a kind of protest.  In Warsaw, the play served to bring the children and the community together, and I believe its themes—Dak Ghar centers on a dying child who’s been quarantined in his home—would have been deeply resonant for the orphans.

When did you first learn about Janusz Korczak and how did that knowledge inspire the development of your novel?

I first learned about Janusz Korczak when my partner and I were living in Israel. We’d visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and there was an exhibit called “Art in the Ghettos,” which included the story of Janusz Korczak and the staging of Tagore’s play in Warsaw. I was moved and intrigued by the confluence of cultures that had connected a play written in a village in India to wartime Poland. This began a long period of research that would take me to Warsaw and to Shantiniketan, where Tagore composed the play. I had questions about the role of art in wartime—and why do we make art in these moments and how does it matter—and as I read Holocaust literature and began to dive into the political history of Bengal, I explored these questions through the characters in this novel. As I became more acquainted with Jaryk and Lucy, I also felt closer to this inquiry around art and survival.

Although A Play for the End of the World is set in the past (both the early 1940s and the early 1970s), so much of the story you tell is still relevant today. I’m curious — how do you see your book in conversation with current world events?

A central part of the novel is the story of refugees who fled Bangladesh for India, in search of jobs and a place to live. We’re in a period of so many humanitarian crises, most recently in Afghanistan, and as citizens of an incredibly wealthy nation we decide how we treat and welcome those fleeing persecution. Do we turn a blind eye—how do we engage as global citizens in this moment?

The pandemic has brought quarantines and a generalized sense of anxiety about how we connect with each other, whether it’s safe to do so in person and in proximity. During this time, I’ve thought a lot about Amal, the protagonist of Tagore’s Dak Ghar, who must remain in his home on doctor’s orders, and I’ve thought about Korczak’s children, who in 1942 were largely confined to their orphanage and the shrinking walls of the ghetto. I think of both stories as speaking to how we’ve had to isolate but also what it means to draw solace from community.

I’ve always been a fan of books that jump back and forth in time and place. Could you talk a bit about how you made the decision to write from the third-person point of view with the narrative flashing back and forth between the early 1940s and the early 1970s?

I love that fiction as a format allows a reader to move fluidly across time, and many of my favorite novels do this seamlessly. I also think that our minds largely operate nonlinearly – speaking of my own monkey mind, at least, I’m often thinking of one long ago part of my life and then flashing back to the present only to return to the past. So, it felt natural to me to structure a novel in this same way.

Regarding the third person, I see it as the most versatile perspective to tell a story. You can be super close to your characters, but you can also create moments of distance, a kind of so-called omniscience; this ability to pan in and out felt essential when writing about characters who’ve lived through trauma and for whom the emotional truths could be buried several layers deep.

One of the beautiful things about reading fiction is how each reader can view a story through their own lens. I’m also always interested, however, in the specific intentions of the author. What “lessons learned” are you most hoping readers will take away from their time with your book?

I’m hoping readers will empathize and feel close with the characters in this novel, and I’m hoping that some of the central questions that I struggled with—for instance, the role of art in wartime and how we love despite our traumas—will be ones that feel relevant for readers to also explore themselves.

Your short fiction has been published in many places with great recognition; however A Play for the End of the World is your first full-length novel to be published. How was writing this book different for you? Could you share a bit about what your writing process looked like?

In general, I think short stories are about a few specific moments in a character’s life whereas novels have more space to explore many moments over many decades. I find this increased scope to be a wonderful feature of novels, but as someone who identified primarily as a short story writer it was a huge learning curve to think about structure differently. For me, it was important to get to a first draft quickly, no matter how messy; it was only then that I could start to see how some of my base assumptions were creating issues much later in the story, and the first draft also allowed me to see where my interests were, the emotional center of gravity as it were. I enjoy revising—maybe too much—and once that first draft was in place, I developed systems to introspect characters and different movements in the novel, trying all the while to keep track of that emotional center.

The past year and a half has been a particularly difficult time. What has this time been like for you, as I understand you live in Brooklyn? How have these experiences impacted your writing, or how do you think they will impact it going forward?

While it’s been incredibly challenging at times, the pandemic has also brought me closer to my partner and my child, as we’ve been fortunate to be mostly healthy while spending so much time together. I’ve also been keenly grateful for my writing communities, which shifted to online and expanded to include writers outside of the New York area.

I do wonder how my writing has changed during this period; if anything, I feel more like I should write things as they are now, the dramatic if not the literal truth, because who knows when or how our lives will be upended again.

Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions

• First book that made you fall in love with reading: “David Copperfield”
• 3 books you would take on a desert island: “To the Lighthouse,” “The English Patient,” and The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz
• Movie that you know by heart: “The Karate Kid”
• Song that makes you want to get up and dance: Anything by Fela Kuti.
• Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
• Introvert or extrovert: Introvert
• Coffee, tea, or neither: Decaf Green Tea with lion’s mane mushrooms
• First job: Fixing computers
• Person you admire most and why: In the context of this novel, Janusz Korczak – for bringing art and joy to his children and for staying with them through the darkest of times.

Will you be picking up A Play For The End of The World? Tell us in the comments below!