Left of Centre? Gordimer at a city hotel. Pictures by Bishwarup Dutta and Amit Datta “Gardiner” with Pranab Mukherjee and (right) the author on the dais with Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Nadine Gordimer, 85, hurries into the waiting space of the business centre at Oberoi Grand, as much as is possible for her to. She is a frail, petite woman, with sharp eyes and the bearing of an elder statesman. It is quite evident that she was very beautiful once. She is the grand old lady of South African literature.

She lowers herself into a sofa and indicates with raised eyebrows that the interview should begin right away. She has no time to lose.

Or is she just plain tired?

The novelist, short story writer and critic, who won the Nobel for literature in 1991, is recognised as one of the most powerful voices that spoke against apartheid. Her fiction drew on the bruised landscape of her country and spoke about the complex human predicament in such a society, of both black and white lives.

Her eyes miss nothing. They have the kind of gaze that can strip the minds of her subjects of all vanities, deceptions, illusions and make-up, with a sharpness that is frightening as well as delectable. In one of her early novels, A World of Strangers (1958), a character says of a woman he has recently met: “...the woman hung round that retriever’s neck the first day I saw her the way a child communes in silent love with an animal when humans fail him….it was not that she could not love anything other than animals, but that animals were all she had to love.”

“Gardiner” with Pranab Mukherjee and (below) the author on the dais with Gopalkrishna Gandhi

In Calcutta, Gordimer was being honoured as a “state guest” of Bengal. She had arrived the day before, on November 10, in the city and delivered a lecture at Town Hall.

She was visiting the country on invitation from the external affairs ministry to deliver a talk in the annual Nobel Laureate Lecture series instituted by the ministry. Last year, mathematician John Nash, on whose life the film A Beautiful Mind was made, was the guest. This year, it was Gordimer.

Last year, Calcutta was not on the Nobel laureate’s itinerary. But this year, it was, and also for the lecture, while New Delhi and Mumbai were venues for mere readings, as an external affairs official of Bengali stock had said glowingly. For Calcutta is still considered the seat of culture.

But when Gordimer looked at the city, from the Town Hall podium — after walking in at 6pm, on the dot, about 10 minutes earlier than some of the Indian dignitaries — what did she see?

Rows and rows of red plastic chairs, perhaps meant to be the seats of culture. Red tasselled crescent-shaped velvet hangings along the two sides of the hall, perhaps to “match” with the red chairs. She was in the “Red” city.

She couldn’t complain about the strength of her audience, though. Just below the dais were sofas draped in government-white, meant for special guests. These were quite full. Then followed the red chairs, stretching down the length of the hall. The first floor gallery had been opened too. Still, the 700-plus audience spilled into the corridors of the hall, their mobile phones ringing in a sort of futuristic symphony, which would keep on ringing while she spoke, the way probably it happens only in Calcutta.

The city of culture was geared up to hear the author, one of the first persons Nelson Mandela wanted to meet after being freed from 27 years’ imprisonment. Gordimer, who had vociferously supported the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Committee, had put her life on the line. She refused to leave South Africa despite severe political pressure — three of her books were banned. Though many of her peers chose exile.

No homework

But she wouldn’t have it easy in Calcutta. First Manab Mukherjee, Bengal’s tourism minister, took over. He was the state government’s chosen one to represent culture for the evening.

He was part of a delegation to South Africa 14 years ago. If it was 1994, it was the same year that Mandela had been elected the first black president of the country.

Manab Mukherjee, too, had much history to contend with. He travelled 14 years down memory lane to land in a restaurant in Johannesburg, where Gordimer lives.

There was only an elderly couple there, who left soon after the delegation members entered. Someone told him that the lady was Nadine Gordimer. So he only saw the “backlight of your car, Madam”, said Mukherjee.

In original English, he spoke about her books, including July’s People. It’s a 1981 novel by Gordimer, set in a future when black South Africans have put an end to apartheid through a violent uprising. A liberal white South African family is forced to flee Johannesburg to the native village of their black servant, July.

Only, Manab Mukherjee referred to July’s People as “The July’s People”. He added that Gordimer had come to the “right city”.

Next, it was the turn of the Union minister of external affairs. Pranab Mukherjee, who must have tried hard to make time, expressed satisfaction that his ministry was bringing “mighty minds” to India and made several references to Tagore. But he had begun his speech addressing a certain “Nadine Gardiner”.

He ended with a flourish, addressing the author again, saying that he did not wish to stand between “you and them”! Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who perhaps knew Gordimer best, having been High Commissioner of India in South Africa, sat a mute witness.

I witness

So it was appropriate, in a way, that Gordimer’s talk was titled “Witness: An Inward Testimony”. She spoke, as she always has, of artistic integrity. She believed that keeping “my integrity to the word” was the writer’s “sacred charge”. She has practised that always.

She has, of late, faced some criticism at home. Some feel that once apartheid was over, her voice lost its power.

Her position on the cause she is working on currently, AIDS, has also attracted a bit of criticism. As in India, in South Africa, too, there is a feeling that the number of the afflicted is inflated for the benefit of western pharmaceutical giants. As a former radical, she was expected to side with this view.

But it took more than courage to write in the South Africa of 1963 of an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman, as she did in Occasion for Loving.

In the same novel, Gordimer had written: “All claims of natural feeling are over-ridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness…What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann, what Ann felt about Boaz, what she felt for Gideon — ...the delicacy and towering complexity of living (reduced) to a race theory...”

A member of the African National Congress (ANC), which is still the ruling party, she began with the party’s secret meetings, then became its member. In 1987 she helped found the Congress of South African Writers with black members mostly.

In Calcutta, her speech stressed the necessary dual presence of an inwardness and engagement with the outside world in a writer’s life. The author’s mind, as “witness”, transforms events into “enduring significance”, into “meaning”.

She drew on a long tradition of western writers and artists, quoting, from Kafka, from Picasso, from Flaubert: “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls,” from Sartre: “To go into exile is to lose your place in the world.”

Most emphatically, she remembered Camus: “The moment I am no more than a writer, I shall cease to be a writer.”

She has often spoken of these writers elsewhere. She believes in the ultimate intellectual freedom of the writer, in her alignment with nothing but what she sees.

Her speech was brief and maybe not as impassioned as her Nobel lecture. But it was moving, though some in the audience were a little surprised by the high praise she showered on a few Indian writers like Kunal Basu and Pavan K. Verma.

Questionable audience

Then the floor was opened for questions. A gentleman who wouldn’t be put down shook the mike vigorously. In wild English, he asked her, in a long, winding, bewildering question that amounted to a critique of the “apartheid” in Bengal, the unbroken domination of the Left.

The background threatened to take centrestage.

The same gentleman, who also wanted to know what she had won the Nobel for, had accosted a group of reporters before the lecture began and asked them who the speaker was – a writer? Someone who would speak in English?

Gordimer listened patiently and said that she had enough problems in her own country. “I wish you luck”, she said.

At the end, two persons fought a duel for a chance to ask her a question, one saying, repeatedly: “One question, Madam!”, the other pleading: “One prayer, one prayer...”

No wonder she looked so tired the next day when interviews were lined up... then the chief minister would drop in, there would be a dinner with writers and academicians and maybe a visit or two to Calcutta’s culture spots the next day…

FACE TO FACE

Excerpts from an interview

Metro: What are the most visible changes in daily life in post-apartheid South Africa ? Nadine Gordimer: Previously schools were only for whites, or Indians, or blacks. Now I walk past primary schools and see little boys, black and white, fighting. Little girls, black and white, giggling and running out together. In cinemas, restaurants, coffee shops, there are both black and white people. I walk into a park, I see a couple, one black and the other white, kissing and cuddling. Previously there was the Immorality Act (which prevented marriage or sexual relations between the races). But it's been only 14 years. There has been some trouble. Some students who have gone up from segregated schools to universities, if black, have resented it if they have been marked badly by a white teacher (thinking it was because of their colour). White students may have resented being marked badly by a black teacher. We have the best Constitution in the world. The Constitutional Court guarantees your rights against any interference. Anyone — male, female, gay, lesbian — can move the court if he or she feels discriminated against on any ground.

Metro: In what significant ways has your fiction changed in the post-apartheid era? N.G.: If life changes, the changes enter your book. You don't have to go out and find them. You finish one book and the next story needs to be told in a different voice.

Metro: Please tell us about your involvement with AIDS. There has been some criticism about your position on the issue.
N.G.: AIDS is a huge problem in South Africa. Musicians do these big shows (to raise awareness), but we writers are doing nothing. What's the good of grumbling? So I asked my colleagues to contribute a story each on AIDS. Everyone from (Gabriel Garcia) Marquez to Woody Allen did. There were 21 stories (brought out as the collection Telling Tales). They are wonderful stories. The book has been translated into 15 languages.

Metro: In India , some think the AIDS problem has been exaggerated. Malaria is a bigger problem. But it's not glamorous enough. No films are made about it. No celebs take it up.
N.G.: What is the percentage of the AIDSafflicted in your country? My view is that AIDS must be taken seriously. If you are HIV-positive, you are very likely to get T.B. It's easy to get malaria after that. There is no cure for AIDS. We must work towards finding an AIDS vaccine.

Metro: What is your impression of Calcutta?
N.G.: I have been only a day here. I wish I could watch the film festival. At home, I have watched many Indian films. I thought Deepa Mehta's Water was extraordinary.