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Alessandro Baricco, Kapka Kassabova and Sarnath Banerjee in conversation at the Calcutta Literary Meet on Saturday. (Anindya Shankar Ray)
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Chandrima S. Bhattacharya walks through the Calcutta Literary Meet
Writing is a solitary act, if it’s not in a creative writing workshop. Reading is a solitary act too. In between is the Calcutta Literary Meet, held in association with The Telegraph.
The meet at the Book Fair is three days old, and is breaking out into a happy concatenation of events, arguments and the occasional “industrial” noise from the AC, as writers from India and abroad converge and settle issues, mostly amicably, at the small igloo surrounded by tall towers between Hall 3 (Dante) and Hall 4 (Neruda). Dante presumably took a long time to be born, his dates having been marked as “mid-May to mid-June 1265 to September 14, 1321”, but otherwise no controversy seems to be brewing at the Book Fair. The high points of the first three days:
Hot hot fire
Wolf tones, libretti and fire. And hot hot hot desire. Or should we say dizayaah?
Day One saw Vikram Seth in conversation with Ruchir Joshi about Seth’s latest book, The Rivered Earth. The event turned out to be a concert and Seth a performance poet.
What is a wolf tone, asked Joshi, exasperated at stumbling on many difficult words in the book. Seth didn’t have to try hard to demonstrate what it was. “If you play a good violin there can be a howling,” he said. At the Book Fair, it translated as the ambient noise. There was lots of it.
The Rivered Earth combines four libretti, books of poems that were set to music. Seth moves between continents in the book, from China to Europe to India, and his poems, which he read, came with the music — he played a recording in which one violin that sounded like many — and calligraphy, of which he is a student. Then a poem leapt from the pages of the book on to the stage.
Seth had written this poem called Fire in the section in which his lands coalesce, and in which Krishna badgers his mother for the moon and Oswald from Ibsen’s Ghosts cries out to his mother for the sun. It is a deeply moving poem, but it was not enough for the composer Alec Roth, with whom he was working for the book. He wanted fewer cultural references and Seth was advised to get drunk and write. He did that.
At the meet, Seth paused, drank some water, got up from his seat and planted his feet firmly on the ground to read out what he had written.
Fa-yaah
O fayah — fayah — fayaah
Dizayaah
Hot hot hot
I’m burning a lot with dizayaah
O fayah fayah fayah
Hot as a filament wa-yah
Hot as prawn jamba-la-yah
I’m burning so hot
I’m baking a pot —
O hot hot hot as dizayaah
Fa-yaah! Fa-yaah!
O Man! O Blake! O Tyger! O gentle poet of Golden Gate, how you surprise us!
Tagore too many
In the previous session, after inaugurating the meet with Sunil Gangopadhyay by writing the initials of the meet calligraphically in no less than two styles, Chinese and Arabic, Seth had plunged straight into battle.
He spoke of another literary meet in India that has just concluded in a wave of shame. Preventing a leading writer of the world from coming to India was a “disgraceful exhibition”, he said, of the suspension of the liberty of thought, expression and belief. “Where knowledge is free…” he quoted emphatically from Tagore, though, admiring as he was of Tagore, he had confessed earlier to being named Amit at birth by his mother after the “wimpish hero” of Tagore’s Shesher Kabita.
Would Seth have done better to quote Auden? Writer Amit Chaudhuri took issue with the Tagore of “Where the mind is without fear…” as was apparent from the inaugural session, which followed and was — you guessed it! — on Tagore and his relevance.
Chaudhuri was emphatic that he did not like some of the Tagores doing the rounds. He did not like the Tagore of the “national constellation”, featured in the same panel with Nehru and Gandhi, or the Tagore of “the mind without fear”. The poet, Chaudhuri felt, was to be found in his celebration of the superfluous, in “the attraction towards the lived life… the excitement in embracing life just for itself”. The best of Tagore is to be found in “non-events”, wisps of light, the poet again and again rebelling against the conscious mind as is apparent from an essay on Bengali children’s rhymes he wrote in 1885.
In the superfluous, as in the nursery rhyme, lies “the moment of freedom”.
French poets, Vishnu Purana
A woman writer from Calcutta, one of the first Indians to write in English, who died at the age of 21, to leave behind a small but fascinating body of work, and be largely forgotten. It took a man from another part of the country, the dapper Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, with his grey beard, leather jacket and charming manners, to come and speak about her in the city.
Toru, who was born in 1856 to a Christian family, and her sister Aru, had travelled in Europe and gone to school in France, where Toru picked up the language. Though she is known in her country for her original poems, Mehrotra thinks that her translations of the French poets — Baudelaire, Hugo and Nerval — are her best work.
Toru had also translated two tales from Vishnu Purana. One of them, sections of which Mehrotra read out, was a brilliant rendition that dazzles the reader with a strange beauty.
Mehrotra said it was a pity that there is no respectable edition of her work.
The Pakistanis are here
“Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven,” Mark Twain had said. A hall at the book fair is named after him.
Things are not so bad in Pakistan, but humour has become a necessary tool to get by in the country, said Moni Mohsin, the creator of The Social Butterfly, a delightful creature who lives in Lahore*** wrapped in her world of privilege and party sharty, where people think shahtoosh is for maid servants, to peep out of the column*** written by Mohsin.
Not that she will be called dumb. Mohsin read out a passage where after the Indian cricket team has left Pakistan, there is a sudden void and the Butterfly has taken to following Gandhiji to hang on some Indianness. She is having only daal and practising peace in a furiously meat-eating household when her son rebels and asks the servants to bring to the table the aloo-gosht that they have cooked for themselves. Her ahimsa collapses.
Mohsin said satire was essential to survive life in her country and satire is thriving.
In the next session, called Humour in hard times, her countryman Mohammed Hanif”, writer of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’, a “novel” account of General Zia’s death in a plane crash in which his own theories feed those of others, was in conversation with Manu Joseph, journalist.
Hanif, a journalist too, whose second novel is Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, sat on stage, looking a little weary. He had to several literary fests, he said, and was going to take a break. He said he was never confronted by the ISI, but a senior army official once took him aside in a party and asked him who his sources were on Zia. He obviously didn’t believe in fiction.
Cricket calls
Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, an ad man and the young author of Chinaman, The Legend of Pradeep Matthew, would spend his afternoons in cheap bars looking for old men who were repositories of stories, cricket stories. They were amazing men, men who loved the game passionately, who wrote letters to Wisden and ICC with utter conviction, sending them nuggets of their wisdom. One of them believed he had invented the Third Umpire.
Karunatilaka got his material from these men, by the afternoon, as they would be too drunk by six, and his story, a dark, funny one***, is told by a drunk man and is about cricket.
His immediate inspiration was an incident at a wedding where two middle-aged men were fighting bitterly. What could two men of such an age fight over? Not a woman. It must be cricket, thought Karunatilaka and thus began his novel, which has gone on to win awards since 2008. He was in conversation with Indrajit (Indie) Hazra, journalist and novelist, who was also in conversation with Arunava Sinha, whose translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee into English has opened the floodgates for translation of books in Indian languages, especially Bengali. Sinha has also translated Moti Nandi’s Stopper and Striker.
Hazra wondered why novels on other sports are not written. He suggested a novel on carom. Last seen he and Sinha were fighting bitterly about Sinha’s support for East Bengal; they belonged to the opposite camps.
Blind date
An Italian author who has written a novel about Japan without visiting the country, a beautiful Bulgarian who goes to live in Buenos Aires because she is obsessed with Tango and writes a novel about it after ten years of the dance and an Indian writer who is quite familiar with Europe’s streets and the three haven’t read each other.
Alessandro Baricco, Kapka Kassabova and Sarnath Banerjee met for the first time and an interesting conversation followed.
Baricco, who had appeared a bit reticent in an earlier session, seemed to burst into life at the knowledge of Kassabova’s Tango and questioned her closely. ***
Baricco: Do you speak with the people you dance?
Kassabova: Yes, you can if you want to.
B: What do you ask them?
K: I ask them why they tango. That’s what I asked them for my novel.
B: Do you change partners?
K: Yes, every 12 minutes. My novel is called 12 Minutes of Dance.
Banerjee: That is about the time men take.
K: I somehow knew someone was going to say that. I was prepared.
Two days remain. Meanwhile, did someone mention a Jaipur Litfest?
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