Celebrated writer and festival director Namita Gokhale is back with her latest novel, Jaipur Journals. This time, she offers us a diverse cast of characters whose worlds collide in the Jaipur Literature Festival: an author who receives a threatening anonymous letter, a burglar with a passion for poetry, a twelve-year-old prodigy, an American woman looking for the vanished India of her youth, a lonely writer who carries her unsubmitted manuscript everywhere with her, and a historian who reunites with a past lover.
As rich as the Festival itself, Jaipur Journals is a metafictional ode to literature. A nod to the millions of aspiring authors carrying unsubmitted manuscripts in their bags, the book is an intimate look into the pretensions and pathos of the loneliest tribe of all: the writers.
In the excerpt below, we give you a glimpse of one of these stories.
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A volunteer with a round smooth face and dark shining eyes stepped forward to address the group. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘please excuse me, but which of you is Ms Zoya Mankotia?’
Zoya swished her mane of grey flecked hair and lifted one grey black eyebrow in interrogation. ‘You mean me?’ she asked, almost girlishly, almost coquettishly.
‘One of your fans was waiting for you—he left this card which he wanted delivered to you,’ the smooth-faced volunteer said. ‘And I must tell you, Ms Mankotia, that I too am a great fan of yours … I would love you to sign a copy of The Quilt for me.’
Jaipur Journals || Namita Gokhale
She handed over a pale purple envelope, which had Zoya Mankotia’s name written with a purple marker, in a neat italic hand. Inside was a card with a photograph of a kitten wearing a purple ribbon around its neck.
The message was written in capital letters, in purple ink. It was brief and brutal. ‘Miaow Ms Mankotia!’ it said. ‘I can see through you. You faithless bich, I know what you have been up to, how many women you have betrayed. And your pathetic intellectual pretenshuns leave me speechless! And your novel, The Quilt, is a copycat version of Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaf. You plagiarizer, you pornographer . . . Your time is up.’
Zoya’s expression did not change when she read this, although the set of her jaw tightened visibly. She put the card back into the purple envelope and passed it wordlessly to Geetha Gopalan.
‘So who is this mysterious fan?’ Geetha asked in her jolly booming voice. ‘May I read it?’
Zoya nodded. Geetha Gopalan opened the envelope. ‘What on earth is this?’ she asked in surprise.
‘It is an anonymous letter,’ Zoya replied, lifting first one eyebrow, and then the other. ‘Or an anonymous card, to be accurate, a deeply critical pretty kitty card.’
‘An antediluvian troll,’ Geetha Gopalan responded. ‘What a nasty man he must be!’
‘He could be a woman,’ Shonali Sen ventured. The card had been circulated to her and Leila Nafeesi as well.
‘I can never make out if men hate women more, or women themselves,’ Zoya Mankotia said.
‘Purple is a woman’s colour, somehow,’ Geetha Gopalan observed thoughtfully.
‘Oh, don’t please get into these tired gender stereotypes,’ Zoya snapped, her voice combining weariness and anger.
Leila Nafeesi had been quiet all this while. She spread out her fingers to display her long nails, which were painted purple. She had beautiful, pale ivory hands with rings set in silver on all her fingers lapis lazuli, turquoise, jade, topaz. ‘The colour purple,’ she said. ‘By the way, I don’t believe someone with such an elegant italic handwriting doesn’t know how to spell—it’s a pose.’
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To find out more about the letter, and to meet all the other attendees, step into Namita Gokhale’s literary world today!
