Bibliofile

Jaipur is not exactly a literary hub but organisers of the three-day literary festival there last weekend are determined to make it so. "A meeting point for writers and readers across India and abroad" is how Pramod Kumar of the Virasat Heritage Foundation describes their plans for the litfest they now plan to hold there every year around this time. An ambition not entirely unfounded, considering the response they got from both the authors they invited (Hari Kunzru, William Dalrymple, Shobhaa De, Tarun Tejpal, Namita Gokhale etc) and book lovers, even if they were mostly from Jaipur. "None of the authors we invited turned us down," says Pramod. And no wonder. The festival provided the kind of readers any author would kill for: ready not only to listen in silence to hour-long readings, but actually beg for more. Even a little-known poet from Arunachal Pradesh, Mamang Dai, received surprising response for her poetry-reading session.

For at least one author, there is something more memorable than Amitav Ghosh's prose: his cooking. Recalling her life in an NY apartment she shared with four others, living on "a potato and carrot", Kiran Desai says she was grateful to have Amitav as a neighbour in the next block. He may have sliced his chicken with scissors but the meals he dished out kept her going in those seven years. Not even a US advance can outlast a slow muse apparently.