Skip to main content

Paris Diary

Colours, colours. The Sennelier on the Left Bank, an art shop where anything seems possible
At a little square near St Sulpice a white-bearded man in a printed shirt in dappled autumn colours strolled over. He had a genial twinkle in his eyes and all the time in the world on that sunny morning. He paused to chat about the colour of the light, the quality of the breeze, how wonderful Paris felt on such a day -- a day of a kind when it might even appear a pleasant city were it not for the fact that there were so many French people in it....and why was I wearing black? You must never wear black, he said as he waved au revoir, black sucks the life out.

Another day, another stranger: she paused to give me directions -- I was walking away, quite definitely away from where I needed to be, she told me, then walked with me half the way in the dark evening despite her heavy bags, to set me straight. Two days later she turned up at the launch of the French edition of The Folded Earth, Les Plis de la Terre with a bag full of gifts -- including a tiny compass...

Add caption
Every corner I turned in Paris on this visit seemed to hold a magical encounter. Most magical of all was the first evening when Myriam and I walked the wooden stairs up to her flat on the fourth floor and her building's concierge stopped her en route to hand her a package: copies of the book I had written and she had translated. We toasted it with many glasses of wine and marvelled at the timing of the package's appearance: how was it that came not a moment before or after but the very hour she and I happened to enter her building? Because celebrating her translations of my books together in Paris was something we had long planned but never managed to do before.

Myriam Bellehigue and I originally met on a staircase -- years ago when we were students. Now, by many strange sets of coincidences and chances, she is my translator. She teaches English at the Sorbonne and is also a translator for Actes Sud. Her translations, everyone says, are fluid and perfect, and a reader read out from them to wonderful dramatic effect when the book was released at the Indian Embassy in Paris by the Ambassador Arun Singh. There was a Q&A conducted by my French publisher Rajesh Sharma and afterwards there was what there always is afterwards -- copies signed, drinks drunk, notes exchanged.
The book was released in Paris on 9 October 2013.

Popular posts from this blog

Painting a Residency

I spent most of May and a part of June at the De Pure Fiction residency in a tiny, isolated hamlet in the Occitanie in France. To write about the place and what it did to my work and to me will take time -- to reflect, to let things settle. Meanwhile, Isabelle Desesquelles, the French novelist who runs the residency, asked me a set of questions before I left, and has posted it on the blog with watercolours I painted while I was there. La Lettre #36 _______________ Anuradha Roy a publié cinq romans. Elle a résidé à la maison De Pure Fiction en ce printemps pour son prochain livre et depuis, les chevreuils, les oiseaux - rouge-gorge familier, huppe fasciée, pivert, coucou - les lézards verts, les libellules bleues, les papillons semblent s’être mis eux aussi à la lecture, la cherchant sous les pétales d’un coquelicot ou au travers du feuillage des oliviers. Peut-être même, tous, envisagent-ils de faire le voyage jusqu’en Inde et l'Himalaya où Anuradha Roy vit, ...
Read more

Begum Anees Khan

  Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.  Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...
Read more

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter.  (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...
Read more