Issue 44 / May 2012
Alice Albinia on the Indian Literary Scene
A decade ago, when I lived in Delhi, book launches were stately affairs. There were only three places to hold them and access was by invitation-only. The grand, red-brick India Habitat Centre was for poetry collections and policy reports. The dimly-lit, sixties-built India International Centre was for memoirs by retired diplomats and generals (whose talks were considerably sweetened by the in-house speciality, fig and honey icecream). Novels, meanwhile, were launched in the British Council auditorium, an unpredictably glamorous building in the heart of New Delhi, decorated by Howard Hodgkin to resemble a Friesian cow.
My memories of that time are of long drives across the city from the literary magazine where I worked; of ceremonial events (there was always a formal book-unwrapping); of boozy evenings filled with noisy, inimitable conversation.
In Bombay, people have long complained that Delhi-ites are 'uber-intellectual'. On a book tour in May with my novel, Leela's Book, I found that in Bollywood's hometown the genteel literary scene characteristic of Delhi is now being elbowed off-stage by free-for-all events. These are held in new chain bookstores, built around a coffee shop - crucially - for this draws in a heterogenous crowd of texting teenagers and tea-sipping aunties. The books are arranged to reflect this mix. Instead of the hierarchies deemed proper in Delhi or London, Orhan Pamuk shares a table with the bestselling diet book From XL to XS; lifestyle-guru Deepak Chopra is piled up next to Sanskritist Wendy Doniger. Literary order is torn down and rebuilt. The biggest democracy in the world has changed the rules: Jeffrey Archer is on equal terms with J.M. Coetzee.
Bangalore, the cyber-city of the south, has taken this egalitarianism one step further. Here, in the new concrete malls, books are displayed alongside stacks of foreign perfumes and Chinese toys. Florescent strip-lighting is the only truly unpleasant aspect of these new book-temples. Everything else is just mildly disconcerting.
Moments before my event in Bangalore's newest-such mall, a man rushed up to me, asked if I was Alice, and thrust a book towards me. It was fat, 600-pages long, with a flower on the cover, and the title was Rhyming English Couplets - by himself, M.R. Shetty. There was nothing whimsical, let alone flowery, about the couplets within, however. They were arranged in alphabetical order, clustered under one-word headings. I took an instant liking to the volume.
Guzzling
He had no peer
In guzzling beer
Gym
How to become slim
without going to the gym
One of the longest entries is 'love' which runs to over 50 pages. Most couplets on this theme are predictable but who could have anticipated, 'Love hormones / Can rid you of moans'? This is the fourth volume in the series. The first two made it into the Limca Book of Records.
I consumed quantities of sweet, fizzy Limca during the two summers I spent in Delhi. It was apt, therefore, to return this May and reacquaint myself with the mind-bending heat that spawned my books: not just the novel but also the travelogue that preceded it, Empires of the Indus. In those glory days with no internet to surf, no mobile phone to text on, no fridge to keep food distractingly fresh in, the perspiration fixed me, most clammy of limpets, to my desk. There was nothing to do but read. And write. Two books were conceived, simultaneously, in the mango season.
My novel, Leela's Book, is about the Delhi I lived in ten years ago. A decade on, certain aspects of the city - and the lives within it - seem immutable. In Nizamuddin West, the housing colony where I lived and about which I write, the cheerful barber is still dispensing head massages and mobile phone top-ups. The shoe-mender's shack has neither been torn down nor improved; the success of this low-caste craftsman is in continuing to trade, unmolested. Deepak, the vegetable-trolley man, is still making his rounds. Wazir Ali, Master Tailor, who made my bridesmaid dresses (as well as a splendid one-armed black silk dress), turns out sari blouses and embroidered shirts, unruffled by the passing years.
For other people, however, India has been transformed. Much of this change concerns the things to buy (and the prices to pay). Not just mangoes but dresses from Mango; not just chai but Starbucks latte. Ten years ago, the nearest pukka vegetarian restaurant to meat-dominated Nizamuddin, was Sagar: a short walk under the flyover and across the main road to the Lodhi Hotel. Sagar was a quaint place, full of large lunching families and cheerful waiters. Ten years on, hankering after the cool yoghurty refreshment of some dahi idli, I tried to go back there. But the place I remembered had vanished, and I found myself wandering through a shimmering space of sheer tower blocks, sandstone lattice, mammoth Hindu sculptures and ponds of petals. The transformation, I discovered, was the work of Aman Resorts, a luxury hotel chain. The maize soup I ordered in the restaurant was ten times the price of an equivalent dish from Sagar.
My editor took me back there for a swim, late one afternoon. The pool was almost empty, and as I swam silently up and down, I thought about the place Delhi has become, and considered whether, since M.R. Shetty doesn't have an entry for 'pilates', I should supply it (Delhi women love the gym / Pilates keeps their bottoms trim). I was roused from this reverie by the call to prayer.
The muezzin's cry has wound its way through both my books. It was in part this hauntingly beautiful Muslim chant that drew me over the border to Pakistan for Empires of the Indus; it was this that kept me coming back to Delhi for Leela's Book. As the lone male voice drifted incongruously over the water, carried on the wind from one of Nizamuddin's mosques, the sadness I had felt intermittently since returning to India, resurfaced. Probably every writer feels it: the self-indulgent melancholy that accompanies the completion of a literary project. But my sadness was also tempered by awe: at this bold, challenging world I had once been a part of - which made me a writer - and which was metamorphosising with such rapid, stunning incompleteness.
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Leela's Book by Alice Albinia is published by Harvill Secker.
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Sunday, 3 July, 2011
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