It’s 1 pm on the front lawns at the Diggi Palace, and we’re waiting for Mr Coetzee. The crowds spiralled out of control this year, as the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) became part carnival, part another roadside attraction.
The day before, with the poets/singers/lyricists Gulzar, Javed Akhtar and Prasoon Joshi packed into an absurdly small space, a tent meant to seat 250 almost folded as over a thousand people tried to get in. The session was repeated on the front lawns at lunch, the audience reciting favourite couplets along with Prasoon Joshi, to meet popular demand.
The weekend at the JLF is notoriously peak time, and this year it’s stressing everyone out — writers, publishers, readers, hordes of gawkers, the festival organisers. The organisers throw cordons around authors to get them into their baithaks and Mughal tents on time. If you get into one of the forums, you can’t get out. So, we’re waiting for Mr Coetzee, holding on to our seats, an hour-and-a-half before the quiet writer with the keenly observant eyes is due to speak.
“This,” says Ian Jack, one of my fellow judges on the jury of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, “is a tamasha. It’s a carnival.” Later in the evening, going up to announce H M Naqvi’s Home Boy as the winner of the prize, the jury is scattered by the crowds, and we make our separate ways to the stage. Chaos is this year’s presiding deity.
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JLF veterans are easy to separate from JLF newbies. In its fifth year, the festival is brashly Indian, not one of the usual, well-ordered literature festivals where readers queue politely to listen to writers talk, and queue politely to have a Junot Diaz or a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or a Mahesh Elkunchwar sign their books.
The newbies are wild-eyed, bewildered at not just the crowds, but at the variety of what’s on offer — Northeastern writing in the baithak, Afghanistan/Pakistan on the front lawns, American (that would be US American, not Latin American) fiction led by Ford and Diaz performing a pincer movement from the sides. The veterans have planned their Jaipur campaign like battle-worn soldiers, marking down the best times to visit the café, the least-used bathrooms, the easiest sessions to get into. The run-up to this year’s edition of the JLF has been marred by vicious gossip, a bitter battle about “ownership” of this cultural space conducted on the website of a magazine known for its deliberately contrarian stances, and some tension in the organising committee. There is the intrigue of a late Mughal court about the JLF this year, and it leaves an unpleasant residue — until the sessions start.
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Reporting a successful festival is not a news story; reporting a spectacular failure is. But the truth is that once the sessions start, all of this changes. Waiting in my row for Mr Coetzee are tourists from Australia; two rows behind is a bunch of college students from Muzaffarpur, who’re sleeping nights at the railway station and attending sessions during the day. Their favourite readings were the ones by Junot Diaz, Rana Dasgupta, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Temsula Ao. Earlier in the day, the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish has spoken of the three daughters he lost, “collateral damage” in the conflict; and his audience, 300-strong, first listened in silence and then wept, many openly.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor and chronicler of cancer, and Katherine Russell Rich, writer and cancer survivor, listen as other cancer survivors speak of their experiences, of the complex emotions — denial, hope, fear, resistance, determination, a renewed appreciation of life — that cancer might bring in its wake. Orhan Pamuk takes centre stage at all his sessions. Martin Amis speaks about the experience of writing about a cousin who disappeared when she was a child, and was discovered later to have been murdered, one of the many victims of the serial killer Fred West in the 1970s.
Comparing notes, with friends and strangers, we realise that we have all attended different festivals, scripting our own. The politics and the gossip that occupy the Delhi Durbar set are irrelevant for most attendees, who want a bigger snack bar and perhaps a system of passes for sessions.
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It’s 2:30 pm and J M Coetzee is on stage. He will not be answering questions or discussing the state of South African literature; the man who wrote The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace will not be discussing his novels or the process of writing them. Instead, he says, he will read a short story for the next 45 minutes, one of his famous “Lessons”. The story is about a son, called John, visiting his mother to discover that she has given shelter to the local village exhibitionist, who now has a place in her home along with the clowder of cats who also have claim on her. There is no sound from the crowds, no restless whispers, no stirring, just the sound of Coetzee’s measured, story-teller’s voice, and the parrots in the trees. And this is what will stay with me and hundreds of others through the rest of the festival. Just the memory of one writer, on stage, reading his story, holding us silent with the magic of his words.