BY JUDY STOFFMAN, October 21, 2001
Entertainment Reporter

THE TORONTO STAR

          T.S. Eliot worked at Lloyds Bank, and Anthony Trollope, who wrote 47 novels, was a postal inspector. But among those appearing at this year's International Festival of Authors, Indian-born writer Shashi Tharoor has the most unusual day job.

Tharoor,who reads tonight at 8 at the Premiere Dance Theatre from his fifth book Riot: A Love Story, is head of the United Nations Department of Public Information in New York. In the 23 years he's been at the UN, he has also worked for the High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore, was responsible at UN headquarters for peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia and from 1997 to '98 was executive assistant to Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

A role in world affairs and his writing are both equally important to Tharoor. Over skim-milk cappuccino at a Toronto cafe, dressed in the all-black international uniform of the intellectual, tossing his longish hair, he says: "If I neglected either side, my personality would wither on the vine."

The personality is charming, witty and patrician with tendency to show off his erudition.

When told that Riot is a page-turner of a murder mystery, yet so packed with information about India as to serve as a primer on its social history and politics, he quotes Moliere in perfect French to the effect that the writer's goal should be edification through entertainment. "You write because you have something to say. All my fiction is aimed at getting readers to think, you have to find a way of con-
veying the information they need to think."

Riot is based on a true event, the demolition in 1992 of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics who wished to erect a temple on the site. In the riots that followed throughout the country, thousands of lives, Muslim and Hindu, were lost, the worst outburst of sectarian violence since Partition.
On the night of the `mosque's destruction, a fictional American aid worker, the idealistic feminist Priscilla Hart, is murdered, apparently in the riot. But as the story unfolds, through an ingenious sequence of newspaper articles, notes, letters; conversations, diary entries by Priscilla and the different people who knew her, we discover her secret love affair with a local official and piece together another explanation for her death.

Riot is, riding at the' top of the bestseller lists in Iridia; outselling Salman Rushdie's new novel Fury, a fact Tharoor points out with satisfaction. Though he denies it, his rivalry with Rushdrie is obvious.

In each of his novels,' Tharoor has experimented with new forms - the epic in The Great Indian Novel, the film script in Show Business, the patchwork of different viewpoints and documents in the new book.

His virtuosity with language manifested itself in childhood; by age 10 he was a published author, with a story printed in an Indian children's magazine. He was educated in India but born in London, where his father, who died in 1993, worked on a newspaper on the business side. "He was not a writer, but he took my writing seriously and sent it around to get published," Tharoor recalls.

Writing, he says, is "an alternative life." He writes his novels on weekends and nights, a habit he developed when his twin sons were babies and kept him awake anyway. They are now 17 and living in New York with Tharoor's journalist wife Tillotama, from whom he is separated.

Tharoor is a secular Hindu, but one of his sons was screamed at in the street after Sept. 11. "It's not easy being brown in the U.S. now. You know they used to say it's dangerous to drive in America while black. Well, now it's dangerous to be brown and airborne.

"This is not a war against Islam but terrorism. It would be tragic if we started discriminating against, people on the grounds of race and religion.

People have to help others across cultures and races." He firmly believes the UN is the most credible instrument for doing so. "It's where international law is made. We just passed a convention requiring member nations to freeze bank accounts of terrorists, to monitor and port movements of suspected terrorists. The UN is vital for the battle that goes beyond the military war, the possible rehabilitation of Afghanistan." His novel's heroine works to empower women to take charge of their lives, which Tharoor sees as the developing world's most urgent need. "We (the UN) hired women to distribute our aid in Afghanistan, much to the wrath of the Taliban."

His cellphone rings, and he takes a call from New York.
"Sorry, my professional life keeps intruding."