Ithaca (14 page)

They work late into the evening after which she drives him to his hotel. Once there, Apoorva reviews the next day’s schedule with him – they will go to meet a celebrated indie bookseller whom he has been meaning to meet on one of his trips to Delhi (especially since he has very good memories of occasionally patronizing one of the bookseller’s shops as an impecunious student), wrap up things at the office, then
attend a rival company’s book launch. She thinks the company puts on a good show – something Litmus should be thinking about emulating at its own launch in the autumn. He wonders whether he should be telling her about the uncertainty over the company’s future in London and then decides not to; Gabrijela would have briefed him differently if she’d had any doubts about Litmus India’s future.

After she leaves he goes up to his room and checks his BlackBerry – of the seventy-six new messages, sixty-nine are of no consequence; there is one from Rachel in which she says she has lost an auction for a novel that A.P. Watt was conducting; one from Yanara telling him to expect a nasty e-mail soon from Sir Reginald Zogoiby’s agent who is apparently appalled by their treatment of one of the UK’s greatest writers; one from Julia, which he finds frustrating because of its blandness; three from Mandy, which excoriate him in the vilest way (they had fought bitterly the day he left); and one from Gabrijela giving him the name of a lawyer in Toronto whom she would like him to use if he needs to deal with any legal matters that might come up in his conversations with Seppi’s translator. He doesn’t usually keep scorecards but as he reviews the recent past he realizes that his score reads zero. He has not found anything that will keep Litmus safe; he is no closer to Julia than he was; and he is not as far from Mandy as he would like to be. All that the previous weeks have succeeded in doing is to make the situation more vexed than it was before. His mood darkens.

He pours himself a Scotch from the minibar (company policy will not cover the expense but he doesn’t care),
drinks it quickly, has another a little bit slower this time, then takes a long shower, alternating between hot and icy cold, a technique to refresh himself that he has picked up from a James Bond novel. It works, and by the time he is ready to go out again he is feeling much better, not least because of the prospect of meeting the man he is going to have dinner with.

Ramesh Wadhwani is a legend in Indian publishing circles. He has worked for or advised most of the major firms and is a living encyclopedia on everything worth knowing about the Indian publishing scene. Although he is now in his eighties, and long retired from active duty so to speak, he has not lost his love of the game, and his friends pass on information and gossip about the business constantly. When they decided to open their office in the city, Ramesh was the first person Zach went to see. He declined a formal appointment to be an adviser to the fledgling firm but was only too happy to help them get started.

As always it has taken the taxi driver a fair amount of time to find the apartment building Ramesh lives in, because of the puzzling way in which buildings are numbered in the neighbourhood. As he climbs the chipped concrete stairs to his host’s third-floor flat he checks his watch to find that he is already half an hour late. This does not seem to bother Ramesh, a small untidy man with a great hooked nose and bushy eyebrows, dressed in kurta-pyjamas, who greets him warmly at the door and ushers him into his living room.

Ramesh’s apartment is a temple to books. Although the complex he lives in is no different from any of the other shoddy construction projects executed by a government
authority in the seventies and eighties, with sloping floors, uneven walls, and leaky ceilings, he has transformed it with expensive floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made of teak and well-lit glass-fronted cabinets that hold his greatest treasures, signed first editions of practically every book of consequence published in India, and memorabilia presented to him by the numerous authors and publishers he counts among his friends. Besides those that have been shelved, books litter every surface in the apartment – piles totter on the large colourful dhurrie on the living room floor, there is a stack on the telephone table, another one on the coffee table, and Zach has no doubt there will be more in the apartment’s loos, bedrooms, kitchen, and balconies. A bachelor with no real interest beyond books (that much abused description, book lover, might have been invented for Ramesh), he has poured all his savings (and a sizeable bequest from an aunt, Zach learned on his first visit to the apartment) into his collection. Best of all, he has a story about practically every book in the place, and an evening at Ramesh’s is usually spent flitting from one shelf to another with the host plucking out books and spinning yarns about them.

He is in fine form this evening; he has just finished reading a well-received new novel, Neel Mukherjee’s
Past Continuous
, and he can’t seem to stop talking about it, its poignancy and bold exploration of homosexuality. “Just when you thought there was nothing new and exciting on the Indian literary scene along comes a novel like this that revs up the engine again. Every year, every season almost, there’s something new. Last year we had Aravind Adiga, this year it’s this fellow,
who knows what lies in store for us in 2010?” he says, pouring Zach a large whisky. “So what do you have for me today?”

The passkey to Ramesh’s world is a book and it is understood that every visitor arrives with some new offering for the host. On previous visits Zach has been able to produce a new Seppi for Ramesh’s immense library but this time he can do no better than Carruthers’ Cotswold novel. Ramesh takes it from him greedily, scans the first page of the opening chapter, riffles the pages until he gets to the very end, reads the last paragraph, and pronounces himself satisfied, says he is looking forward to reading the novel. “These days, when it seems anything goes, most writers forget the importance of the opening and closing chapters,” he pronounces and drains his drink, indicating to Zach that he should follow suit. He shouts to his cook, who is almost as ancient as Ramesh himself, to fix them refills. Zach has been feeling a little buzzed from the two Scotches he has had before coming, and has been taking it easy with his drink, but he decides to abjure restraint and empties his glass in two swallows. He might as well make the most of this evening, especially as this is the first time he has been at Ramesh’s place where he is the only guest, and the phone hasn’t been ringing constantly.

An excellent dinner of kebabs, roomali rotis, rice, and a finely spiced dal that wouldn’t have been out of place in a maharaja’s kitchen scarcely interrupts the flow of conversation about books and publishers and authors and booksellers. Zach has heard some of the stories before but he does not interrupt his host’s recollections, finding this fleshing out of a world he has only witnessed from afar utterly absorbing.
Ramesh shows him some of the rarest books he possesses – first editions of Mulk Raj Anand’s
Coolie
, almost all of R.K. Narayan’s novels, Ahmed Ali’s
Twilight in Delhi
, Khushwant Singh’s
Train to Pakistan
, Raja Rao’s
Kanthapura
. Without exception, all the novels are inscribed by their authors.

His host picks up a first edition of
Midnight’s Children
and tells Zach about his only encounter with Salman Rushdie. In the 1980s when Indian novelists in English were still a curiosity, Ramesh was living in Bombay, where he worked for one of the big educational publishers and witnessed the triumphant return to Indian soil of Rushdie, the first true rock star of the Indian writing and publishing scene. “The purists quibbled about Rushdie’s nationality and said that he hadn’t lived in the country for decades,” Ramesh says with a touch of asperity, “but such criticism paled into insignificance when you considered his indelible accomplishment – he was the first writer to sing the contemporary Indian novel into its fullest being, unapologetically using Indian English and rhythms to make his masterpiece,
Midnight’s Children
. Oh, the battles Salman fought and won on behalf of everyone who followed! His was the first major novel to do away with a glossary, to reject the italicization of Indian words – all the irritating colonial conventions that hobbled novelists in this country – and his fans couldn’t get enough of him. Front-page headlines in all the country’s major newspapers when he won the Booker, receptions and parties that lasted till dawn, my goodness it was something!

“I remember going to a reading he gave in Bombay, it was at the Taj or the President, one of the big five-star hotels,
they had given the organizers their biggest event space but it wasn’t enough: they had to rig loudspeakers in the hallways so those who couldn’t get in could at least listen to him speak. That was some night, I tell you! Rushdie cigarette in hand, eyebrows raised sardonically, being mobbed by the cream of Bombay society – elegant women in heels and shimmering saris, distinguished old Parsi gentlemen, rotund financiers who had probably never read a book in their lives but had decided to show up for an historic occasion – I’ll never forget that event.”

The old cook has cleared away the plates, brought them coffee, and retired for the night, but it seems as though Ramesh could go on for hours, not that Zach is complaining. His host reaches up into one of his display cabinets, pulls out a title reverentially and hands it to Zach. “Another great milestone, Vikram Seth’s
A Suitable Boy,”
he says, as Zach carefully turns the pages of a beautiful red and gold hardcover book. “Open it,” he says, “feel the paper, it’s what they use in Bibles. That’s how they managed to compress over a thousand pages into a manageable size. Quite an achievement.”

Ramesh extracts a brochure from a stack next to his coffee table and hands it to Zach. “That’s from the Morgan in New York City, featuring some of the highlights from their book and manuscript collection, which I finally managed to visit last year. It was a place of pilgrimage for me, Pierpont Morgan was addicted to books, and he had the means to indulge his passion. By the time he was done he had managed to amass one of the finest collections of rare books in the world, and anyone who loves books should get there at least once in
their lifetime. They have three Gutenberg Bibles, the Lindau Gospels, collections from all over the world; you could spend months examining its treasures, some of the finest books ever produced by man.”

“I’ll try and make it, I manage to get to New York at least once a year.”

“You should. Say, you’ve lived in the South, haven’t you?”

“Yes, why?”

“Have you ever watched a farmer plowing his fields with bullocks and an old-fashioned wooden plow?”

“Can’t say I have observed farmers very closely, but I have seen them, of course.”

“Well, next time you come across a farmer at work look closely, because that’s what the first alphabetic scripts looked like, the sort of writing you’ll find on Egyptian papyrus scrolls; they ran from right to left, left to right, so alternate lines ran in opposite directions, just the way a farmer ploughs his fields. Interesting, huh!”

“I’d say.”

“Pass me Vikram’s book.”

Zach hands the novel to Ramesh, who absently turns the pages, and says, “When Vikram decided to have his masterpiece,
A Suitable Boy
, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and published in India, everyone thought he was crazy. Don’t forget the Indian consumer publishing industry was only a few years old at the time. You had some excellent educational publishing, OUP and Sage and people like that, but trade publishing was more or less non-existent until Penguin India, a company created by a visionary American and a
visionary Bengali, appeared on the scene. They began modestly, I remember they operated out of a small three-bedroom flat in Gulmohar Park, and were later located in a dismal office in Nehru Place, where power outages were common and the entire office park was surrounded by a giant shantytown, not the most prepossessing of sights. One editor said the office was so decrepit that for a time pigeons flew in and out of the women’s toilet through a crack in the wall, until the landlord was eventually persuaded to repair it.

“So, when Vikram, in a giant leap of faith, decided to entrust the fledgling company with the responsibility of publishing his manuscript, which had sold all over the world, it seemed to be more than they could manage. And if you are to believe the stories that sprang up around the making of the novel – Vikram moving into his publisher’s house to keep him honest, visiting bankers pressed into reading proofs, arguments raging across the dining table, all-nighters fuelled by whisky and masala chai at primitive typesetting establishments – it all sounds quite harrowing. It obviously wasn’t easy to achieve the sort of standard that had never been achieved in the country before, but to the credit of the author and the publishing company they managed to pull it off and the result is this gorgeous book.”

Ramesh shows him more of his treasures – the striking Indian hardback of Kiran Desai’s
The Inheritance of Loss
, a rare edition of Arun Kolatkar’s
Jejuri
, a framed cover of
The God of Small Things
that was designed in Delhi and used around the world, an almost impossible to find first edition of Rohinton Mistry’s
Tales from Firozsha Baag
, beautiful
folios of poetry, stunning picture books, and all the while the stories pour out of him, about the new royalty of the Indian writing scene – gifted literary novelists and world-class non-fiction writers, commercial writers who sell in the millions, and historians and biographers of distinction. Future generations of writers and readers will look to them with gratitude and awe, he says, for they are paving the way for everything that will follow.