There is cacophony all around — drowning out Ben Okri’s soft voice. So we cut through the noise and find a secluded corner on the terrace of Jaipur’s Diggi Palace, the venue of a five-day long literary Kumbh Mela. Now I can hear his gentle voice, and am spellbound by his unhurried way of speaking.

My interview with the Booker Prize winner will be in two parts, I have been told by the festival organisers. There are too many people waiting to meet him. So the 52-year-old Nigerian writer-poet has to ration his time. I have to pack in as many questions as I can in our first meeting. But first, I want to ask the man whom Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe had once described as representative of a new generation of promising writers holding aloft the torch of Nigerian literature.

“I grew up in one culture and grew out in another,” he says. Born in west Nigeria, his family moved to London when he was just over a year old so that his father could study law on a scholarship. The family returned when he was seven and his father a barrister.

“At home in London, when mom told a story the image stood up in my mind. In school, it was told in a different manner. The English mode of storytelling is formalised, while the African mode is more intimate,” says Okri. “So I have a dual way of looking at everything.”

Like him, his books straddle two worlds — of magic and reality. Okri published his first novel Flowers and Shadows in 1980 when he was 21. In 1991, his novel The Famished Road, weaving the spiritual with reality, won him the Booker Prize. His latest book A Time for News Dreams is a collection of poetic essays and was published last year.

But Okri — dressed in a blue linen shirt and black corduroys, with a black beret complementing his French beard — would rather not talk about his books. Instead, he wants to discuss corruption. “Honestly, corruption bothers me more than anything else. It’s like a cancer. Corruption is death by 10,000 cuts,” says Okri, about the gnawing effects of graft in Africa. Okri almost chokes on his words while stressing his helplessness. “We don’t pay enough attention to the effect that corruption has on a country. Corruption will slowly drain a country away.”

We are just warming up when I see the organiser hovering around. It’s the signal that half my time with him is over. It’s well past noon and the man is yet to have his lunch. He should be exhausted by the incessant demands on his time. Okri, however, is not complaining about all that. He’s worried about the stranglehold of corruption on poor nations.

“Poverty in India and Africa is very painful. I always ask this question, does it really have to be that way?” A long pause follows: it almost appears that Okri is in a trance. Then he adds, “Have we tried hard enough as individuals, as politicians, as socially responsible persons? Have we cared enough?” He shakes his head, goes off into another deep thought and then weighs his words to explain the issue with England’s example.

“London was one big slum in the 17th and 18th centuries. They reduced the presence of poverty considerably. So it can be done. It’s not that it cannot be done,” he says passionately. “It just bothers me that here in India and in Africa, we live as if these things can’t be changed. I find it unacceptable. It breaks my heart.”

I move to another subject. His musings on India prompt me to ask him what he thinks of the country. “India has been part of my consciousness as far as I can remember. This is just one of those countries which you can’t escape,” he says with a smile about his second India sojourn. Okri, who hates flying, first visited India 15 years ago to break a long journey to Australia with a stopover in Delhi.

“In my first visit the sense of coming home was very strange and very strong. Just the air here makes you feel at home. If you believed in reincarnation, you would say that in some past life I have been here. It was like that, very familiar, very inexplicable,” he says. “India has an extraordinary contribution to the spiritual awakening of humankind,” he adds in the same breath.

And then there is the Bollywood connection. “Don’t forget, I am also of that generation, maybe the second generation, which grew up on Indian movies. People like Amitabh Bachchan were the big heroes at our time and we were big fans of Hindi cinema.”

But the times, despite the escapist flavours of Bollywood, were difficult. His childhood memories are of civil war in Nigeria and of being educated 400 miles away from his family in Lagos. At home, he read Chinese and Greek philosophy, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Isaac Newton. By the time he was 17, he’d finished his first novel. He sent it to a dozen African publishing houses — and the manuscript came back with a rejection slip each time. Then he moved to England to study literature at the University of Essex. He sent the book to English publishers — and met the same fate, till a publisher finally picked it up.

He laughs off those difficult days in England. “I was in London on a scholarship when suddenly my government stopped it midway. So I became homeless and had to drop out. I read on the roads and on the streets. It wasn’t a year or a lifetime of homelessness. But it was long enough to teach me for a lifetime.”

The lessons are still vivid. “I will tell you what I discovered during my homeless days. The doorways of a bank are always warmer than everybody else’s doorways. There is heat at night also. So if you sleep outside it you could be naturally warm.”

While in London, he started writing short stories, some of which were published. He made some money as a book reviewer too, and also worked as a BBC broadcaster and poetry editor of West Africa magazine before being shown the door. Then, in 1991, The Famished Road won the Booker. Till then, the book had only sold 2,000-odd copies. After the award was announced, it sold 2,00,000 copies.

Okri continues to live in London. He writes and travels, and for a brief period also taught at Cambridge University.

But it is poetry that captures Okri’s heart. “I have to explain to you quickly what I mean by poetry. Poetry for me is not an exotic language, romantic words or flowery language. Poetry for me is the mysterious lucidity of life and of existence. It’s the fact that everything we experience stands for something else at the same time.” Okri’s new book of poems would be out in April.

His works have been labelled magic realism, but Okri isn’t comfortable with that. “It’s a tag, I don’t like tags. You miss what I am doing when you give me a tag,” he says.

I want to pick up that thread when we meet later in the evening, on the second leg of the interview. But in these intervening hours, Salman Rushdie’s absence at the festival has taken over all other issues. So our conversation naturally veers towards New Delhi’s ban on Rushdie. “It’s very sad — a little question mark on India’s perception of itself. Tolerance is one of the greatest virtues of being human. Without tolerance we will kill one another. The implication of it is that things aren’t safe here anymore for free minds.”

A free mind possibly reminds him of Rabindranath Tagore. “My favourite Indian writer has to be Tagore. His poetry had a very direct way of being able to keep in the spirit of things. T.S. Eliot goes around the block, Keats needs a lot of structure, but Tagore just takes it from the air.”

The clock is ticking away. What about the publishing industry, I ask him. How has it changed in recent years? “The industry is in a state of crisis because of the Internet. Publishing has to transform and become more democratic. It has to be less elitist. They ask writers to write the same stuff that sells. It kills literature,” he stresses.

Change, he suggests, is what spurs movement. “We are living in a time of great political exhilaration. We are so afraid that if we change we will lose our identity. If it is so easy to lose identity then you don’t have an identity.”

How does he see literature, I ask as a parting shot. “It’s about finding myth in life and life in myth,” he replies.

And that is that. My time with Okri is over. In another time and another place, I would have asked him some more. Does he still watch Hindi movies? And why does he keep searching for duality? But this was not the time, nor the place — he had left me on a famished road.