Category: Specials

A richly atmospheric, deeply claustrophobic story with a stunning denouement, of two women confronting the everyday realities of their city and country, So All is Peace by Vandana Singhal provides an unflinching insight into love, lust, fear, grief, and the decisions we make, through a cast of sharply drawn characters brought together by an unspoken wrong.

Here are some powerful but heartbreaking lines that stayed with us long after we had turned the last page:

‘…it made me have an epiphany that that is how my life was going to be; its beauty forever marred by ache, its moments of ecstasy shadowed by agony. I was wrong of course. My moments of happiness reached a point and snapped off. Just like that. Never presaged and never returned.’

*

‘That’s Tanya. She was always beautiful, always a better person, always by my side to make me stronger… But when I begin speaking again, the words stumble and lose direction and fall out as droplets of water. Ok. Perhaps I am not ready to speak yet. In time, but not quite just yet. Or perhaps never.’

*

‘All I feel is pain. Unmitigated, unending pain. Like a loud horrible keeeeeeeee of a faulty microphone inside my head. And cold. I am always so cold that I seem to be discovering new parts of my body that are developing little icicles inside them.’

*

‘His restlessness despite his otherwise structured life as a successful award-winning journalist probably comes from the complete lack of emotional support that he received from his parents throughout his life and although it feels a little juvenile and unfair as a thirty-seven year old man to still attribute his lack of emotional depth to his parents, what is undeniable is that they could be from another planet for how much he understood them or how much they have ever understood him.’

*

‘It is difficult to feel unique when there is another person who looks exactly like you, mirroring your every expression, replicating your every action, even if the replicator is as good looking as Layla often is.’

*

‘The spaces for women have been systematically, methodically truncated. Not by any dictate. That would be too obvious…No, there no boards saying ‘Women not Allowed’. But open a map of Delhi and there they are. The many, many places where no woman can go and the many, many more places where no woman can go after sundown. A temporal and areal-shrinking of their boundaries.’

Full of memorable characters and poignant scenes So All is Peace is a crucial commentary on the emotional realities and heartbreaks faced by women in today’s cities.

Jaipur Journals is a unique, metafictional novel by Namita Gokhale, one of the founder-directors of Jaipur Literature Festival. Set against the backdrop of the festival itself, the book brings together a rich cast of characters and their even richer stories.

We introduce you to some of the characters whose lives intersect and collide within these pages.

Zoya Mankotia

A writer who identifies herself as pan-sexual and non-binary, Zoya Mankotia is an icon of queer literature and representation. Her most recent novel, The Quilt, created waves, occasioning both outrage and intense appreciation. Her voice holds a mélange of accents.

In the world of Jaipur Journals, we meet her in a panel, where she introduces herself:

‘I am by discipline a novelist […] as passionate about crossover genres as I am about gender fluidity. I am nonbinary and pan-sexual, and I am committed equally to my writing, my raison d’être, and my wife, my monogamous partner. We can be who we are, write as we like. Sexuality, as a narrative, is a freeflowing river.’

Raju Srivastava

Born in Bijnor, Raju Srivastava is a burglar who is passionate about poetry. He is the son of an unsuccessful tailor-master. He arrives in Jaipur to fulfil two purposes: meeting India’s greatest poet, Janab Javed Akhtar, and covering the cost of the trip through some well-executed burglaries.

Raju nurses a deep-seated desire to become a poet, and is an avid reader of poets like Nirala and Dushyant Kumar, Muktibodh and Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He writes prolifically, and his preferred form of poetry is the ghazal. His hero and idol in the poetry world, however, is Javed Akhtar.

Anura

Anura is short for Anuradha, a twelve-year-old student en route to Jaipur on a school trip. She is a prodigy, having been selected for a Young Adult panel in the Jaipur Literature Festival. She has self-published a dystopian novel.

As is evident from her preference for the shortened form of her name, she is quite taciturn, and likes to save her words for important things.

Anna Wilde

Anna Wilde is a writer from America, who primarily publishes books on meditation and reflection. Anna is quite renowned for her association with the Beat Poets, especially Allen Ginsberg. She is attending the Jaipur Literature Festival to talk about her books The Inner Eye, which was very successful, and The Third Way, which has recently been reissued.

Anna teaches theology at the University of Colorado. She calls herself a Hindu, by ‘dharma and karma’, and has spent many years in India before returning to America.

Rudrani Rana

Rudrani Rana is a woman in her seventies, who sees herself as a ‘failed novelist’. She always carries around a handbag that contains her unpublished magnum opus; which she refers to as UNSUBMITTED.  The novel is actually titled The Face by the Window and is a dedicated to Alice Walker and her book, The Colour Purple.

Rudrani is an alumna of Waverly Girls School in Dehradun. Alongside her unpublished semi-fictional novel, she also writes anonymous letters as a means to express herself.

She is a huge fan of Oprah Winfrey, which is what had drawn her to the Jaipur Literature Festival for the first time, back in 2012. She is often fatigued and lonely, and feels like an outsider within the literature circuit at the festival.

Gayatri Smyth Gandhy

Gayatri Smyth Gandhy is fifty-two, single, divorced and is a self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the world’. She is a  historian and cultural anthropologist with an American green card.  She is also an aspiring novelist.

She is stuck in her novel, struggling to understand herself what it is about. She lived in Jaipur as an adolescent when her father Brig. Gandhy was stationed there. She considers herself a Jaipurite in many respects, and makes annual trips to the city during the festival. She often feels divided between her Indian and Western selves.

Namita Gokhale’s Jaipur Journals  brings together these characters within the setting of the Jaipur Literature Festival, and their stories are as vibrant and diverse as the largest free literary festival in the world!

The decade spanning 1978 to 1988 saw the terrifying rule of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. In a Lahor under Martial Law, we meet Ikhlaq and his family, who are struggling to build a home in the city.

Set in a troubled time and leadership, The Chronicle by the celebrated Pakistani author Intizar Husain – translated by Matt Reeck – tells the epic story of a family and its illustrious homes. The reader is introduced to a dramatic and darkly comedic chain of events through Ikhlaq’s voice.

We are here to introduce you to our main character! Read on to meet Ikhlaq:

A Storyteller

When he finds the manuscript of the tazkirah, his family chronicle, he decides to continue writing the story as the last chapter has become illegible. Ikhlaq is both a reader and storyteller, and we are introduced to his world entirely through his voice.

‘I thought that, in the end, I was of the same blood as my ancestors, so why wouldn’t I want to continue writing the chronicle? Why hadn’t I seen any such desire in my father? All he had done was to make sure that the chronicle had not been destroyed.’

*

A Family Man

His desire to continue the chronicle in an effort to safeguard and maintain his family’s history also presents Ikhlaq as a family man. His excitement and engagement with the family chronicle also reaffirms this point.

‘…I began to find some pleasure in deciphering [the chronicle]. I began to feel that I should see what the pages contained so as to figure out what it was about my family that in every generation someone took it upon himself to sit down with an inkpot and start writing. With such concentration they had written down the histories of the family—as though they were leaving for their children a valuable piece of property.’

*

Nostalgic for What his City Used to be

With Haq’s rule, Ikhlaq’s life and environment have become very dynamic, and we often find him reminiscing about his home and how much the world around him has changed.

‘I got the feeling that the world had really changed, and the city was something altogether new. I thought about how the city used to be. I remembered a fall afternoon. There was a carpet of yellow leaves on the street […]How many city streets from the Red House to Mall Road did I imagine in this way, each one covered with fall leaves?’

*

Restless for Home

His search for a house, struggles with the rising rent, and eventual attempts to build a house for him and his family tell us of his inherent desire to find a home, stability and peace in his ever-changing life.

‘Maybe I felt restless because I didn’t have a house.

Maybe if I had a place to lay my head and rest my feet, I would find some peace of mind. So building a house, which would soon drive me crazy, became something to think about. I started to share the worries of my co-workers. These men had been going back and forth to their housing development’s offices.’

*

Desire for Freedom

Ikhlaq’s life and feelings act as microcosms for the larger desire of freedom in Haq’s Pakistan. His act of building a new house and neighbourhood give Ikhlaq a powerful insight into both the desire and the fear of freedom.

‘Finally I understood why people were fleeing the alleys for the new neighbourhoods. I had thought they were doing so just to show off their new wealth. But I realized that they were tired of alleys. after hiding from the land and the sky, they grew weary of the tight alleyways and the tall houses. It’s so difficult. The one doesn’t let you breathe, but neither does the other. People are scared of the open land and the endless sky. But they also grow tired of the claustrophobia of alley after alley and house after house. So after having left behind the fear of the open land, we grew of tight quarters.’

Step into the lanes of Lahore and Ikhlaq’s ever-changing life in The Chronicle!