From our favourite haunt Pak Tea House to Victoria and Albert Museum in London was indeed a long jump. Soon after the jump I found myself in a city imaginatively known to our forefathers as vilayet. For long they remained under the awe and spell of this newly discovered magic city. However, much has changed since then. Now we have amid us too many London returned friends. But none of them care to write ‘London returned’ as a prefix to their names. However, I felt that I am still under the awe of this city, which was known to me in my early years as vilayet, situated far beyond the seven seas.
This was my second visit to this city. My first visit was courtesy the now-extinct Urdu Markaz, which in good old days flourished in this city under the patronage of Mr Abdi’s BBC One. Though that stay was long enough to allow me to see different corners of the city, this time I felt that the city was kind enough to reveal itself to me. I understand the reason for that. Cities with rich histories behind them are in general very secretive. They don’t care to reveal themselves to a stranger interested primarily in sight seeing.
But I should there. I feel duty bound to first disclose the purpose of my recent visit to this city. Frankly speaking, the favour extended to me was something out of the blue for me. Being an Urdu writer I could hardly expect any notice from the managers of the Booker Prize. The news of being among the ten nominees for the Man Booker International Prize came to me as a bolt from the sky. Then I found out that they have instituted an international Booker Prize for which non-English writers too would be considered provided their work, or some part of it, has been translated in English.
As for me, along with the my novel Basti, whose new edition has been brought out by New York Review Books with a preface by Asif Farrukhi, a number of collection of my short stories are also available in English translations published mainly by Oxford University Press, Delhi and Harper Collins, India. But on both readings I was asked to read from the present edition of Basti. At their book stalls too, only this edition of Basti was available. From this I concluded that the judges had relied on the present edition of Basti alone.
However, it was for me a pleasant experience to form a part of the ten chosen writers belonging to different nationalities and writing in different languages. I was among those few writers who chose to read from their original text. It was left for the artists nominated by the organisers to read those same pieces from the English translations.
The ten nominees gathered there did not know each other. In such a situation I was so happy to find a familiar face, that of Ananth Murthy from India, a South Indian novelist writing in Kannada. We embraced each other with enthusiasm, least conscious that we have provided a moment of surprise to some onlookers. When the Booker occasion was nearing its end, the assistant director of Booker Prize, Truda Spray, expressed her pleasant surprise on that embrace which perhaps meant to her a demonstration of love between India and Pakistan. She wanted a repeat of this moment for the sake of record. I conveyed her wish to Murthy who heartily laughed and embraced me again with the same enthusiasm. Booker’s cameras duly worked and conserved that pleasant moment. The ceremony came to an end with American writer Lydia Davis winning the award.
Next day we moved from London to the Hay Literary Festival where a big crowed of writers from every corner of the western world had gathered together. We seemed to be moving with a sense of surprise in a global village of literature. There I read from Basti again, this time in the company of Lydia Davis and Marie NDiave, a French writer with African roots.
