Alberto Ruy Sanchez at the Book Fair. (Aranya Sen)

It might have been poetry. “It was the hour in Mogador when lovers rouse, their dreams still entangled between their legs, behind their eyes, in their mouths, lingering over their empty hands….” The writer of this poetic, sensuous prose does not believe in classification of genres.

“There is no difference between poetry and prose. The idea that prose is a reflection of reality is rubbish. The difference is cultural,” says Mexican author Alberto Ruy Sanchez, who was in Calcutta recently to deliver the Ashoke Kumar Sarkar Memorial Lecture at the Book Fair.

The tall, mild-mannered Sanchez, decorated by both the Mexican and the French governments, has an example to back his conviction. “My book Nine Times Wonder is classified as essay in the US, poem in Spain and novel in France,” he shrugs. “When you move in the middle they don’t know what to do with you!”

By “they”, Sanchez’s fingers point towards publishers, especially in Mexico’s northern neighbours, the US. “The Spanish publishing industry gives us more freedom unlike the US. We are lucky not to receive money from books. We earn from lectures and tours.” That leaves authors free to follow their impulse without having to shape their writings according to preconceived generic distinctions.

That leaves the 58-year-old, who with his wife also runs an award-winning arts magazine, free to follow the senses and gather impressions. In Calcutta, he woke up at dawn and arranged with the chef of the hotel he was staying in to accompany him to the fish market from where the hotel’s supplies came. “I love to see a city wake up.” He has been to fish markets in Japan and Indonesia as well but nowhere has he seen incense being burnt so the smell of fish is not offensive. “So delicate,” he murmurs.

If it is smells in Calcutta, he remembers his Japan trip by a visual impression. “The Japanese have this culture of not touching or looking at others unlike us. I was at a crossing, and as soon as the light turned green it was as if two opposing armies came forward and melted into each other without clashing.”

But the impressions that have given him his idiom are gathered from Morocco, especially the city of Mogador on the Atlantic coast, a walled labyrinth of winding streets, marketplaces, bathhouses, and hidden gardens. This is where most of his fiction, like The Secret Gardens of Mogador, is based. “Mogador holds up a mirror to Mexico because of the Arabic heritage in our veins, introduced by the Spaniards. We must not forget that for eight centuries two-thirds of what is now Spain and Portugal was Arabic,” says the man who did his doctoral thesis from the University of Paris under the directorship of Roland Barthes.

This is where Sanchez forwards his argument of a “horizontal Orientalism”. “India may be the Orient for the Europeans and the Americans who are to its north, but I come from the south. Morroco too is to the south. So that works out a different south-south relation.”

But Mogador on the symbolic level is also a call to pay attention to life around. En route to Mogador on his first journey, it is with this attentive eye that he had noticed small trees full of black spots which he imagined at first to be vultures. “When we moved closer, our surprise grew larger than the trees when we realised that they were goats calmly chewing leaves of the branches. I pointed this out to a Moroccan next to me who asked me, aghast, where else goats were supposed to be. The goats gave me my poetics of wonder,” says the “Tagore fan” who was taught the Bard’s poems in school.