Reading Mumbai

New Zealand author and literature award winner Pip Adam recently travelled to Mumbai for the Tata Literature Live! festival, the city's largest international literature festival. From book launches to panel discussions and poetry readings, Mumbai became a buzz of literary activity in late October with the festival. Here, Pip Adam reflects on her time in the city and the stories told.

Tata Literature Live! is a fitting title for a literature festival which takes place in Mumbai, a city where story is everywhere and evolving. 

Two weeks ago, I was sitting in my office, thinking something wasn’t right. I felt out of sorts. I’d returned from Mumbai about 48 hours before. Sometimes we expect to feel ‘home’ when we get back but I felt a gap like something was missing. Then I realised - it was the noise. Ghuznee Street felt so quiet. I spend a lot of my work and writing life listening, to the point I think it has become my primary sense and I missed the noise of Nairman Point so much. It had been my company for ten days while I was in Mumbai at the Tata Literature Live!. Now two weeks later I’m still missing it. 

Tata Literature Live! ran from October 25 to 29 in Mumbai. Image: Supplied/Pip Adam

I think what I’m missing is that the birds, the car horns, the people, the music are part of the literature of India. Throughout my life I have found my greatest comfort in story. The first stories I heard were the gossip my grandmother would spin in my family home. I learnt so much from those stories that were told in the gaps - the things that shouldn’t be said, telling the things that she so badly wanted to say in a way that didn’t make her a bad person. I learnt to listen for sound as a part of the story - the change in tone, the tutt-tutt, the lowering of the voice. I think this is part of what has given me such a broad definition of literature and text. Driving around Mumbai I started distinguishing the different honks of the car horns. It was a shared language that seemed to keep everyone moving and everyone safe. 

Image: Supplied/Pip Adam

Mumbai is an incredible place to experience through this lens of ‘story’. Even the layering of the name Bombay under Mumbai. For most of my life I knew the city as Bombay yet it wasn’t until I walked around the ocean walkway that I understood the ‘bay’ in that name. So much of my trip was like that - the experience of being in the city as it explained itself to me through the stories that are so resonant in the land and water and air. I was lucky enough to be programmed in an event with Ranjit Hoskote, a poet I have read and loved for a long time.*

I sat outside one day preparing for our session by reading Ranjit’s poem ‘Passage’ when I got to some lines I had read many times before: 

You must be alert

to coffee stain and mosquito bite

red cloud of panic on the inner arm

the river’s pulse beating in the brain

its gilded fish bursting the weir of sleep

source forgotten mouth unknown 

The mosquito bite hit differently outside on the grass, under a tree in Mumbai than it ever had in Aotearoa. It was like Mumbai’s voice was reading me the poem - through the horns on the street and the crows in the air. 

An archway of books in Mumbai. Image: Supplied/Pip Adam

Obviously, as a Western traveller there is so much I will miss, my ear, my heart are visitors here. But Mumbai and the people who live there are incredibly generous. The city is alive with literature that is there to be read. The city has many narratives. The drive from Mukesh Ambani’s mansion to the baroque and gothic buildings of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus left by the British. Ambani’s mansion a reminder of the India of universal wifi and cell phones for everyone which recontextualises the imperial buildings. Changing their meaning in a way that makes the past shimmer with the present and future. 

But there are even older texts to be read. We travelled to Elephanta Island on a ferry and experienced the incredible temple which literally held the stories of Shiva in stone. 

This is how Mumbai prepares me for Tata Literature Live! When it starts I am wide-open to story in all the ways it manifests. One of the best things about this festival is the way it celebrates India’s writers. There is a trend in some festivals toward the international, and although the programme includes writers from all over the world, there’s a real sense that the audience have come to see writers from India. I am incredibly grateful to be programmed with three of them: Ranjit Hoskote, Smriti Ravindra - whose book The Woman Who Climbed Trees wins the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Fiction on the last night of the festival and Jerry Pinto one of India’s most popular translators and authors - at question time in our session it becomes clear so many people are here to see Jerry. Including me. 

Pip Adam (centre) at the Staring into the Abyss event with Ranjit Hoskote and Smriti Ravindra. Image: Supplied/Pip Adam

These incredible writers whose work I can’t recommend enough, illustrate another exciting aspect of India’s literature. Backstage at our event Smriti and Ranjit are tallying up the number of languages spoken in their homes. They both agree between seven and ten. There are around 780 languages spoken in India. Work from a great number of these, translated and not, is included and each year Tata Literature Live! highlights one language in its programming. This year the language is Kannada and it’s celebrated in an event called Kannada Classics where writers Mithra Venkatraj, Uma Rama Rao and Srinath Perur talk about the canonical works created in Kannada. 

The festival has an incredibly broad and contemporary approach to literature. There’s a book swap, open-air poetry readings, a stand where people can create their own erasure poetry. One of the most affecting pieces in the festival is the work Lives of Clay a performance which blends dance and pottery. Conceived and performed by Vidya Thirunarayan, Bharatanatyam dancer and potter this outdoor work is incredibly powerful and genius of programming. 

My last drive in Mumbai, to the airport, happens early in the day. People are exercising on the ocean walkway, there isn’t as much traffic on the road and I get to see this story of Mumbai, the waking up of one of the best cities I’ve ever visited.

* Pip Adam and Ranjit Hoskote's conversation explored what it is to arrive at an inflection point, when the world’s affairs take you to a point of almost no return - and solutions can be found, through poetry and through works of fiction.

Adam travelled to Mumbai with sponsorship from ANZ.

- Asia Media Centre