Sanjay Sanghoee’s Scandalous New Wall Street Thriller
By Priya Bhayana

In writing Merger, investment banker-turned-author Sanjay Sanghoee has taken a large step outside the realms of typical South Asian diasporic literature. Merger, a suspense novel that takes place in New York, surrounds the villainous but extremely charming money-mongerer, Vikram Suri. Interestingly, Suri is the only South Asian character in the book, yet is clearly the most magnetic and central person in it. The novel discusses the corruption involved with working in the financial world, and the moral qualms one goes through when trying to succeed in such a world.

Merger breaks South Asian stereotypes two-fold. Not only is the novel’s content an anomaly from most writing by the diaspora- which usually concerns the struggle one endures to gain a sense of belonging in a world with which one has many cultural or racial differences - it also represents the author’s transition from the successful, stable profession of investment banking to the risky one that is writing. The combination of the two has made Merger a thrilling read: author Sanghoee maneuvers himself with ease in the labyrinth of the banking world, yet writes with a cinematic flair that makes seeing a film made out of Merger not a far flung assumption. Here, Sanjay Sanghoee talks to EGO about his new book, his new life as an author, and the world of intrigue in corporate america.

	Merger Press Release

So, Sanjay, tell us a little bit about what made you think of writing a book about Wall Street. It’s very unusual to find a South Asian writer doesn't talk about American born confused ideologies, or monsoons in Bombay. This is completely different from anything we’ve read by South Asian writers.
I guess couldn’t find enough to be confused about! I knew Wall Street and that the Wall Street world I could make would be convincing. I wrote this before the Enron and the WorldCom scandals had hit the news, but having worked in banking, it wasn’t hard to see where all of this was going. Authors like Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, Paul Erdman, these are the authors I read, so I said this is what I want to write.

Well, it isn’t really something you would call a South Asian novel; you only have one South Asian character in it.
That’s right, it’s a mainstream thriller. Having a South Asian character in there was not even what was really heavily premeditated. I just thought, I need a villain, I need a good villain. I think most books and movies today have very weak villains, which is why they aren't so engaging.

Describe the villain, Vikram Suri, for us.
Vikram Suri is a megalomaniac and very flamboyant. He’s good looking, charming, exceptionally intelligent; he’s also a deeply complexed man. He is both driven to aspire to heights that most people would not even feel the need to touch, and burned by darkness that drives him. He is unlike a lot of Indian characters, which tend to be very mellow, very Gandhiesque. In the Western world, that’s what people associate with Indian culture. But Suri is just over the top; he doesn’t identify with being Indian in his professional life. In his personal life, he would probably not want to identify with being Indian, but he identifies with it a lot more than he admits.

Your whole novel reads like a movie: setup, investigation, execution, end game. If you could actually make this novel into a movie, who would you love to see play Vikram Suri?
That’s a very good question. I haven’t thought that deeply about who I would love to play in that role. As an actor, and in terms of power, personality, I would love to cast someone like Ben Kingsley, who would be fantastic for the role. The problem is, he doesn’t look the part. What you want is someone that looks the part and someone who has the power and personality of Ben Kingsley. Vikram Suri is not just another criminal, he’s a master criminal.

Apart from Vikram Suri, all of the other characters are not South Asian. What is your process of developing your characters?
It’s a mix of observation and of imagination. A lot of it is sitting down and trying to put myself into the skin of that character, which is why it’s really disturbing that I could write Amanda Fleming so well. For example, there’s a scene with Amanda Fleming and she's smoking. She’s really upset, because she can’t smoke inside a restaurant or a bar anymore, and that’s a very New York phenomenon. Women tend to smoke more than men do nowadays, did you know that? I tried to think, if I was a woman and a smoker, how would I feel about that? I realized it's about her personality, it’s not just about the smoking: she’s defiant. She rebels against the social norms; she’s a reporter for the NY Times, her job is to be aggressive, she wants to find that next story, and she wants to break through whatever smoke screen is in front of her.

How would you describe Merger in your own words.
Well I think the best quote we’ve got for the book, which I think describes it in one sentence perfectly, is “the firm meets wall street”. The central theme of the book is greed versus honesty and corruption versus stability and security.

How has that transition of being a banker and then being an author been with regards to your personal life?
It was very tough. People from my family and the banking world, they couldn’t understand why I was doing it. From childhood, I was always rebelling against everything, that was a pretty good sign for my family from the beginning. At the end of the day, I think it was just desperation, wanting to get out. I had a serious problem with observing how this whole corporate cycle functioned, and being a part of it, and being a willing and happy part of it.

Images Courtesy Sanjay Sanghoee