If most delegates ignored the finger-wagging, the small team of Pakistani writers at the litfest was more perturbed at how closely we two neighbours resemble each other. "Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle—You turned out just like us," said Nadeem Aslam, quoting a line from Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz, who spent a few years in exile in Delhi in the 1980s before returning home, disillusioned. It's Aslam's first visit to India, but the incident reminds him of home in Pakistan. "There's always a twinge of disappointment when we discover how like us you really are," he says, throwing up his arms in a gesture of disgust and empathy. Mohammed Hanif, whose satirical roman à clef on General Zia, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, found many admirers at the litfest, echoed the sentiment: "People like that (those who object to a glass of wine being drunk in public places) should move to Pakistan. At least, it's illegal there."
There's much Indian writers can learn from their Pakistani counterparts. And it's not just their writing, which grabbed the audiences at the litfest by its diversity and originality, with that enviable edge to it. Born, as the Pakistanis explained, out of living in a troubled state.
More notable was their camaraderie. There were only three of them at the litfest—Aslam, Hanif, and new literary sensation Daniyal Mueenuddin (the fourth, Ahmed Rashid, having ditched at the last minute)—but, judging by the way they stuck by for each other, you'd think they knew each other all their lives. Instead, they were all meeting for the first time here, their first trip to India (if you don't count the brief visit Hanif made recently to Delhi to collect a book prize). Accustomed as we are to the fierce competitiveness and back-biting that goes on in literary circles, Aslam's unreserved praise for Mueenuddin's debut work, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was, to say the least, refreshing: "This is the most important book to come out of Pakistan, and anyone who wants to know Pakistan should read it." Mueenuddin tried to joke it away by saying he paid a heavy price for the compliment, but the friendship between the three Pakistani writers was clearly genuine. "Isn't it the same way here?" Aslam asks in surprise when I point it out to him. I didn't want to stir another twinge of disappointment in him.
