(Apologies for the technological incompetence that resulted in this being empty when I first put it up).

I’ve never read Kiran Nagarkar, but after Monday evening when he spent an hour in conversation with Nilanjana Roy, I resolved to fix that lacuna in my life. Not so much because of the samples of his writing we heard or heard described, but because of the man. If that makes sense.

For one thing, his sense of humour. It was there in the first bit of reading he did. This wasn’t a passage from any of his books, but three short fictional biographical blurbs about himself that he wrote for what he said was a short-lived website he had once. “Take your pick”, he said of the three, and it was hard. In one, he claimed to be the most prolific writer in history, having written works now claimed by such luminaries as Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Shobhaa De and the various apostles who put together that book known as the Bible. In another, he claimed to be the inspiration behind the crimes of Idi Amin, Osama, Mugabe and others. It wasn’t just that these outlandish claims were funny by themselves; it was the way he made them, and the way he read them out to us, that had the audience chuckling.

And it was apparent in the rest of his conversation too. Something about the way this man spoke with and to his audience hinted at an alert, vibrant mind, always a good substrate for humour, and so always on the lookout for humour. Not the laugh-out-loud slap-you-on-the-back humour of a Bollywood-style Johnny Lever, yes, but a subtle, self-deprecating kind that grows and builds with that twinkle in his eye. It brought to mind Davy Barry, or Groucho Marx, or perhaps someone even subtler, like Art Buchwald or PL Deshpande.

But there were other things about Nagarkar.

One was his anguish at the state of his city and country. “This is such a beleaguered city”, he said. He meant in particular the recent Raj Thackeray attacks on so-called “outsiders”, but that phrase also reminded us of at least a generation worth of such assaults by another Thackeray and plenty of others. All of which have torn at and through this city.

Another struck close to my heart: his feelings about religion. He has no use for organized religion, for it’s a source of violence, he said. And yet, he is drawn back to religion all the time. The fascination with Mirabai that produced his “Cuckold”, the way Kabir “takes me to God despite not believing, despite my agnosticism.” This complex reaction to religion also, he says, made him realize that he is just as prone to stereotypes as those he looks down on for their stereotypes. “The only thing worse than intolerance,” he said quoting someone I cannot recall, “is the intolerance of intolerance.”

That last theme ran through much of the discussion of Nagarkar’s “God’s Little Soldier”. His portrait of a terrorist in this book has been questioned, for example when Nilanjana Roy asked “Are you asking us to feel sympathy for the terrorist? That’s such a taboo.” This goes to the core of what Nagarkar meant about intolerance. “It’s completely false that they are envious of the West,” he said of jihadi/terrorists. “After all, they feel as chosen as the West feels chosen!” We owe Zia, the terrorist character in GLS, the desire to understand where men like him come from. Not sympathy, but an understanding. Maybe we owe that to ourselves.

“George Bush said ‘I don’t do nuance’,” Nagarkar told us. “But nuance is what is demanded of us.”

In many ways, that summed up the discussion for me. From the humour to the anguish to the yearning to understand: this is a nuanced man, and for that reason a thoughtful, liberal, wide-canvased thinker.

Yes, I will fix that lacuna in my life.