You Are Vijay Seshadri

An Interview with Vijay Seshradi

Vijay Seshadri is well aware of the many masks he wears. He has several ways to talk about them and he likes to talk about them. He’s good at it. Poet, nonfiction writer, professor, husband, father, son, Indian, immigrant, hitchhiker, and Elizabeth Bennett are some of the identities Seshadri has made room for in his consciousness. On April 14, he added Pulitzer Prize winner to that list—winning for his latest book of poetry, 3 Sections.

It was announced two weeks after he and I spoke, and a friend asked me if I’d heard. “You talked to him right before his life changed forever,” she said in a daydreamer’s tone. Inside, I resisted her assertion because I had a sense that no matter how decorated a writer he becomes, he will not exaggerate or downplay any effect an award has on his life. In fact, he told me that the prize put him in touch with people he hadn’t spoken to in forty years and that Indian news outlets had asked him to comment on the elections there (he told them he reveres the Indian Constitution)—both grounded, sensible responses to what surprises came as a result of the Pulitzer.

But I had mistaken what my friend meant when she said his life had changed forever. “I can’t believe he just got an iPhone…” she said, shaking her head.

The day before I interviewed Seshadri in his Carroll Gardens home, he FaceTimed me by mistake. No one has ever pocket-FaceTimed me, so I voice-called the number back, and Seshadri, in a tone that signaled a sense of humor without self-degradation, said he was in a hotel room messing around with his new Apple product and had called me by mistake after clicking on my email address. He said the contraption was not just his first smart phone, it was his first mobile device. Ever. He’d never even had an MP3 player.

When we met the next day, I showed him how to voice text—which he promptly did in a message to his wife in the next room, who opened the door to tell him it had gone through. Then, he made me tea, which he transferred from his kettle to a porcelain pot, and insisted I try the biscotti he’d purchased for the occasion. It seemed exactly right that this man, who I’m sure is a quantifiable genius, knew that we’d need provisions for the rabbit hole I wanted him to take me down. By the end of our nearly two-hour conversation, I had everything I came for: a deep understanding of the cross-genre “I,” an ability to apply the word...