The Folded Earth had its first outing in Landour, Mussoorie, at the Winterline Writer's Festival. Landour is a lovely little town just of Dehradun and has some famous old residential schools, including Woodstock, where the festival was held. What do you get when you stir in a pan several hundred school-children demented with the joy of half term and sugary chocolate icebars along with a few poets, novelists, climbers, artists, wildlifers, nature writers, guitarists in a tiny hill town? There were shrieks and squeals when Paro Anand read her stories to the kindergarten population; some stiffening backs when Arvind Mehrotra read from his translations of 4 BCE erotic poetry (well after school hours); George Schaller's talked of his astonishing travels across the Tibetan plateau in search its wildlife, the Swiss photographer Coni Horler, whose brilliant landscapes were on display, gave out the secret behind his waist-length hair (coconut oil) and determined efforts revealed that Mussoorie's one-street bazaar did have a nightlife.
The book may well pitch its tent somewhere on the slopes of Kilimanjaro next, or the Alps. According to one reviewer The Folded Earth can be a handy stand-in for a hill holiday. The reviewer comments: "If you, like me, expect to be cheated out of the Himalayas again this summer, I recommend Anuradha Roy’s second novel instead. Its pages are crowded with the small intense pleasures of a long trek, to be recalled years later with unbearable yearning by a veined stone, a fossil, a dry leaf. The pain of that intimacy acknowledges the imponderable: we rush to embrace the wilderness and dread the terror of being embraced by it. The Folded Earth embodies this paradox: it is a joyous novel about grief."
