Richard Morais treads a fine line between his profession as a journalist and his hobby as a novelist.
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Richard Morais loves to add a pinch of masala to his tea these days. He has even started stocking cinnamon, cloves and cardamom in his Philadelphia home. Morais (48), who recently launched The Hundred-Foot Journey (HarperCollins India) in New Delhi, doesn't talk like a hardcore financial journalist, which is his "day job" with Forbes.
"I don't have a beat, and that helps me look at issues from a macro view," says Morais of his way of working. Morais is a great fan of working from home. "I have a fantastic job, and I love my job," he says of his work-life balance. "Many years ago I told Forbes that I don't want to go to office. When I am in office I gossip too much and I am much more efficient when I am at home. When they generously agreed, I made a promise to myself. The time I would have spent in commuting, say about hour and a half everyday, I would devote to writing fiction every morning before I started on my day job," he says.
However, the idea of writing this book germinated from his culinary adventures along with film producer Ismail Merchant in Merchant's London home kitchen. "He was an opportunist in the kitchen too. Once we had some actor friends coming in and there was some leftover pasta and some chicken. He stuffed pasta inside the chicken and served it; it was delicious," recalls Morais. During one of their meetings, Morais happened to mention that Ismail should somehow bring together film making and their culinary skills. After a bit of thinking, Morais offered to even write the book to be made into a film. "It has the cross-over potential now," says Morais who hints at the prospect of the book being turned into a movie.
But what made him turn to fiction writing? "At Forbes, every story has to have a business angle. Business is very important but there is more to life than business. Fiction allowed me to write on things without those narrow confines," reasons Morais.
His first book, an unauthorised biography of fashion giant Pierre Cardin, The Man Who Became The Label (Bantam Press), was published in 1991. "I had done a cover story on Pierre Cardin and I didn't know much about fashion then," confesses Morais. "Pierre Cardin stopped talking once he found out I was working on the book," he reminisces. This forced him to dig deeper into Cardin's background and business that he ended up interviewing about 250 people and worked full time for two years for the book.
However, The Hundred-Foot Journey, which is a journey of an immigrant restaurateur who makes it big in Europe, is all of 180 pages. "I had written a non-fiction, and I wanted to write fiction," he says as a matter of fact. "Because I could write only for short amounts of time, it was very slow. The other thing I found difficult while getting into fiction was that Forbes has taught me to write short. In the sense, business people are very busy and they have to quickly know what the point is. Always better to say in 80 lines -- something that you are taking 200 lines to say," says Morais.
The book is called The Hundred-Foot Journey because that's the distance between Hassan Haji's father's Indian restaurant and Madam Mallory's French restaurant. And that's the distance Hassan covers to start working in the French restaurant and then he finally receives the three Michelin star. "And Hassan Haji is the first immigrant to receive a three Michelin star in all of Europe. And in getting this, he becomes like Madam Mallory. He doesn't get married, there is no time for family and his only aim is to get a three-star," Morais says of his book
Exploring India
Morais is not new to India. He has visited India several times for reporting. He is particularly overwhelmed about one of the stories he has worked on – the business of selling dying ships in ship breaking yards in Gujarat. In fact, the journalist in him is always alert; Morais keeps his eyes and ears open to jot down tiny, new details that come by during the conversation. Talking about his book he says, "This story is about an Indian chef. I had to make it credible." And this is where journalism skills came handy. "If one needs to know a country's economy, one should visit its markets. I get to know about a country through the pores and not just here (pointing to his head)," says Morais.
So, off he went walking around in the lanes of Mumbai's markets and bazaars. "Parameshwar Godrej introduced me to the chef in Khyber restaurant in Mumbai. I talked my way into the kitchen and watched the chefs work there," says Morais speaking of his research for his book.
Profession Vs Hobby
Like any other journalist, Morais prefers information to be accurate. And this tendency to be accurate also irked him in the process of writing, he quips. "The danger of being a journalist and accurate reporting is that one tends to become too rigid," he says. But again, his interview long ago with the 1960s actress Jeanne Moreau came handy. "She told me that her way of pretending to be someone else is 'through her costumes'. Fiction writing is like acting. One has to pretend to be someone else in fiction writing," he says.
One of the difficult parts of writing fiction is that fiction is about creating a world that has its own pace, explains Morais. "In fiction writing, you are writing from your heart. It's not like journalism which comes from the mind. In fiction, Gods have to be smiling. You have to sit down every day and write. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't," says Morais.
While writing his latest book, Morais bumped into two interesting things one of which he incorporated into the novel. "The first one was mentioned in a book by French chef Michelle Roux. To pick a tasty chicken, look for plump knees." The other thing he discovered was a delicacy in Iceland made during Christmas. "It's the sauce of grass found inside the throat of a fish," says Morais. The Portugal-born author who grew up in Switzerland is now working on another fiction based on his "annual pilgrimage" to World Economic Forum in Davos. His next destination: the Kovalam Literary Fest in Kerala. Besides meeting authors and talking about his book, Morais is also impatient to try out the coastal food out there.
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