Homecoming: A writer’s return to India

Northern Rivers author Helen Burns waited out a global pandemic to launch her novel, Andal’s Garland, in India where the book is set. And once she was able to visit the subcontinent for two key literary events, the importance of writerly connections and cultural synergy was made abundantly clear.

One bright day when the world began turning again, and after two years of cancellations, Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) confirmed their gathering for 2022 in Bengaluru, once coined India’s City of Bookworms. Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) was the tie-in three days later. All up, it was a feast of writers from around the globe, and in particular South Asia’s incredibly diverse and multilingual literary community. I could not have imagined a better confluence to launch my debut novel Andal’s Garland, a story steeped in the landscapes and traditions of a South Indian temple town. It was in 2009 that I first encountered the songs of the eighth-century poet-goddess Andal. My fascination with the mythic story of her life eventually turned into words on the page. I had been visiting her birthplace most years, and many drafts later held the miracle of a completed manuscript and contract to publish. Returning to India for the book’s first official engagement felt like a homecoming. Zipping out from Bengaluru’s airport into peak-hour traffic my Keralan taxi driver told me he is fluent in Malayalam, English, Hindi, Kannada and Tamil. Learning that I’m a writer, he shared the name of his favourite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I asked if it was translated into Malayalam and he nodded, but said he preferred the English version. It was my first conversation after touching down and boded well for the bookish days ahead. We slowed to a crawl and lapsed into silence. Smatterings of trees broke the monotony of concrete and as we inched toward the city, occasional banyans spread blessings of shade – remnants of old Bangalore’s famed gardens. The next day I discovered a kind of forest at its heart, through a hole in a rusty corrugated gate. A secret garden –any moment a blue-skinned Krishna would appear with a bamboo flute at his lips; a visitation from the pages of my novel. But before he had the chance an Indian army officer stepped across my line of sight with a Lee-Enfield rifle over his shoulder. Our eyes locked and I backed away.

Bengaluru: on any street corner you are likely to find a collision of ancient and modern – the politics of colonial history, of gender and caste, language, displacement, religion. It was the perfect backdrop for five days of conversations between writers and readers. APWT and BLF’s programs delved into many of India’s, and the world’s, complexities through the lenses of publishing and translation, short stories and speculative fiction, writing through trauma and across cultures. There would be lockdown dissections, laying bare the taboo of single parenting, film-talk, crickettalk, transgender folk artistry, poetry performances, and a question: who invented the samosa? Then, over lunches showcasing the marvels of diversity, through buffets of biryanis and chana chaats, palak paneer and beans poriyal, carrot halva and payasam puddings, lively discussions ensued.

Geetanjali Shree, the 2022 International Booker winner, was a guest at both events. She spoke of the essential solitude of a writer in her cave, a place where she can empty herself of life’s nitty-gritty, allowing space for the subconscious to surface. Music to a writer’s ears. I especially loved her equation of writing with a quote from the artist, Ali Akbar. ‘At first it is me who plays the sarod, then it is the sarod who plays me.’ Geetanjali then read from her novel, Tomb of Sand. She made the deliberate choice to read in Hindustani first. It was a tit-for-tat conversation between two characters, and whether you understood Hindustani or not, the rhythm and musicality of her dialogue was delightful. Then she said, ‘Now I’ll read it in English and maybe you will better understand because it isn’t the language that’s been shoved down your throat.’ It was an aside that roused applause from the crowd. Hindi, as opposed to Hindustani, the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan, is being pressed upon all Indian states as a guise for unification. Many call it imperialist, claiming it will crush cultural identity. To push the point, Geetanjali and her interviewer then chose to converse at length in Hindustani. It’s a tangled issue. But imagine if you were there and suddenly shut out. She makes her point. Points and counterpoints. There were many over the five days of conference and festival. There were celebrations too. At Alliance University, APWT’s host, we were welcomed to campus and each assigned an angel from faculty. Mine was the effervescent Dr Uma. When she guided me to the stage where I’d be launching Andal’s Garland, I had my first ever panic attack. The Grove was not the intimate room I’d visualised. Nicknamed ‘airport hangar’, it had seating for a thousand. But the kind and capable Shelley Kenigsberg, a favorite moderator at past Byron

Writers Festivals, held my hand as we walked to our chairs. We chatted and I shared a reading before the metaphorical ribbon cutting. My appreciation for the support and hospitality in Tamil Nadu, over the years it had taken to bring Andal’s story to life, was met with not just applause, but wolf-whistles and cheers. It was an overwhelming moment.

In the leafy grounds of the Lalit Ashok hotel Pico Iyer kicked off BLF’s first session with Why We Travel. ‘We are not living in a small world,’ he said, ‘of two hundred cultures divided by common references of media and Beyoncé. The world is so much more interesting than that. When we travel we turn the despair of statistics into hope through the faces we meet.’ I flashbacked fifteen years to Iran. My partner and I were sitting in the garden shrine of mystic poet Hafez when a young man invited us to his home. He played the setar and sang a mournful song, poured tea, then took down a pirated copy of Osho’s From

Darkness To Light asking, ‘Can you send me his cassettes?’

Under showers of golden cassia petals that evening, our table of slightly raucous women were raising glasses in solidarity with Iranian women protesting the hijab. We made room for two more – they had had enough of the man-talk at the table next to us – Palanimuthu Sivakami, a social activist, feminist and the first Dalit woman to write a novel; and Gita Ramaswamy, former publisher of Telegu literature, feminist and champion of land rights and fair labour for Dalits. Women with chilli powder, women at the front line.

The next day at lunch, over a bowl of rose and pistachio ice-cream, I dropped into a conversation with a laid-back Vikram Chandra. His book Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code had blown William Dalrymple away and between beers he was earnestly scrolling his tablet for one particular verse by the Tantric philosopher and poet that Chandra had quoted in his book.

He didn’t find it and Chandra was not forthcoming. I was intrigued, but knew zilch about computer programming and wondered if Mirrored Mind was for me. But the poet. For some reason his name lingered: Abhinavagupta, born in tenth-century Kashmir.

Earlier that day I had an inconversation session with the poet Mani Rao about Andal’s Garland Rao’s recent book Wave of Beauty is her sublime translation into English of a Sanskrit poem, ‘Saundarya Lahari’. Its author, the Vedic philosopher Adi Shankara, lived in Kashmir around the same period as Abhinavagupta. Not surprising then, that Rao had chosen the one passage in my book referring to Adi Shankara’s work. She read, ‘All the knowledge in the world is useless tinsel if it is not integrated into life… Knowledge and devotion are two paths but they are not different. When wisdom comes alive in your heart and flows out as action, it becomes devotion.’ These chains of coincidental thoughts and encounters persisted through to the last night of the festival.

Satiated, exhausted and still curious, I Googled Chandra’s

Mirrored Mind searching for the quote Dalrymple couldn’t find. What I found was something else, from one of Abhinavagupta’s disciples. It stopped me in my tracks: ‘Through Her own Will, Awareness unfolds the universe on the canvas that is Herself.’

For the next weeks, as I meandered my way east then south, as the paddy fields grew greener and coconut palms taller, these lines from all those centuries ago played inside my head. I was a traveller again, musing this fleeting world from windows of cars, trains and buses until my arrival at Andal’s birthplace.

Revisiting the landscape of my novel felt different. Now my book was completed there was no project tapping me on the shoulder. Had my relationship with Andal changed? Of course, just as Awareness said, it’s a continual unfolding. As I stepped into scenes from Andal’s Garland – following the temple elephant down old Brahmin streets, resting in the shade of the garden where Andal was born, listening to women chanting her Tamil songs – I felt gratitude, sweet like the sugar crystals placed in our palms at the end of each morning’s garland offering. Stories, spoken, written and reenacted in countless languages, since the beginning of time. Sitting on the edge of the temple tank where Andal’s bath is ritualised I pondered her mythic tale to the rhythmic slap-slaps of women’s laundry echoing across the water. In a few weeks I’d be home, the draft of a new novel waiting on my desk. All those conversations had in Bengaluru. All the tinsel a writer accumulates through each of her five senses. They are fields waiting to be tilled whenever a blank page presents itself. Letting life’s nittygritty go, making way for the voices of characters. And when they arrive, a kind of devotion happens, for they become the storytellers, and the writer’s task is to pay attention.