Salman For Dinner

If Delhi betted on the Commonwealth Book Awards in the same manner as London betted on the Booker, the jackpot this year wouldn’t have been about the author who picked up either the Best Book or the Best First Book award. It would have been about whether Salman Rushdie, India’s most famous exile, would show up for the gala evening held last Friday.

The presence of Delhi’s finest khaki-clad defenders, fresh from their involvement in the Hansie Cronje match-fixing scandal, was a dead giveaway at the Oberoi Hotel. And yet, rumours persisted - justified by the fact that Rushdie sightings were commanding as much space as Elvis sightings in middle America. When it became clear that the world’s most famous author-in-hiding was actually on the premises, it set the tone for a feeding frenzy as camera crews used tripods to batter a way through to midnight’s messiah.

The presence of the man who won both the Booker and the Booker of Bookers for Midnight’s Children, and had an infamous fatwa pronounced against him qua the "blasphemous" Satanic Verses added the necessary dash of glamour to a prize better known for its rigour than its celebrity status. The author’s return to India after that 12-year enforced sabbatical is headline news in its own right. As for the natural worry over security considerations, the threat posed to the man by various Islamic militant groups paled in the face of the media stampede.

But it wasn’t Rushdie’s night all the way, though he was certainly the main attraction. The same week that saw Rushdie’s discreet arrival in the country - he spent several days travelling through some of his favourite places accompanied by his son Zafar - witnessed the crowning of India’s first-ever Pulitzer winner in Jhumpa Lahiri. Just a few days before she picked up the award, Lahiri’s friends had joked as she returned bearing the Pen/Hemingway prize for her debut short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies that the Pulitzer and the Nobel were next on her list.

MAny delighted Indians across the globe revelled in the fact that Lahiri was the first author of Indian origin to be the recipient of an award considered peculiarly American. Lahiri herself acknowledges her hybrid heritage. The talented author can lay claim to three nationalities - England, where she was born, the US, where she lives, and India, which she visits on a regular basis and where her second book and first novel, to be published by Flamingo, is set.

Closer home, the hectic week of seminars, readings and lectures by the contenders for the two Commonwealth prizes (Best Book and Best First Book) ended with little parochial cheer for the host country. Neither Rushdie nor Shauna Singh Baldwin, contenders in the Best Book category, nor Raj Kamal Jha (The Blue Bedspread), contender in the Best First Book category, walked off with the palm. The credentials of the eventual winners - J.M. Coetzee (South Africa) for Best Book and Jeffrey Moore (Canada) for Best First Book - were not questioned by a Delhi audience composed of the more intellectual of the page three set, who greeted their success with enthusiastic applause. Rushdie, who had earlier paid paternal homage to Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary skills, citing her success as a signal that Indian writing in English had come of age, took a long sip of water before joining in with the applause for Coetzee.

It would only have added to the lustre of the evening if Coetzee had been present - especially since V. S. Naipaul, also in Delhi at the moment, elected to stay away. But Coetzee, the famously reclusive South African writer (cited in literary circles as a potential Nobel nominee) sets his calendar a year in advance, and was detained by a prior engagement in France. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth Award sets the seal on his Booker triumph. Disgrace, the book that picked up both honours, is a novel of shocking intensity. It revolves around the travails of former professor David Lurie, indicted for sexual harassment and forced to retreat from his university calling to his daughter Lucy’s rural smallholding. A brutal assault on Lucy, David and the farm by a band of three black marauders serves as a metaphor for the ongoing politics of violence in South Africa. It is not pleasant, but like his first Booker winner, The Life and Times of Michael K., it is essential reading.

For Jeffrey Moore, the Canadian author who bookends his story of insufficiently requited love with allusions to Shakespeare and Shakuntala, the Commonwealth award came as justice delayed. Just a day before the author - resplendent in an unaccustomed suit and tie - stepped up to the podium to receive the Best First Book Award for 2000, he had regaled an audience at a reading with an account of how he responded to awards ceremonies in general. When nominated for an American award, the author of Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain recounted blandly that he was totally serene all through the deliberations. He was quite prepared not to win, he said. Except that when he didn’t, he was crushed - somewhere inside, he had expected to pull off a miracle. This time around, up against a field that included a wonderful book of short stories from Nigerian Funso Aiyejina, a plangent first novel by Bulgarian-New Zealander Kapka Kassabova and Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread, the man who’s lived most of his life as a translator of other’s works was granted his miracle.

In keeping with the spirit of the evening was Moore’s speech of acceptance. Confessing that the only previous award he’s won was a prize for perfect attendance, aged 8, he quipped: "I’d like to thank Salman Rushdie for making a special trip to see me win this award." One way or another, Rushdie hogged the show.