Veda goes to Jaipur

After the first half hour, I knew something was wrong. I could feel it, but couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t a guilt-ridden feeling, the kind that makes your tongue slightly dry so that you have to swallow every so often to convince yourself and your body that you’re not to blame. All that I knew was that something wasn’t quite right, and it was bothering me, but only a little.

The session was titled ‘1857’, moderated by William Dalrymple (There were three others equally interesting to choose from but “You can’t go wrong with Dalrymple and 1857,” I told myself, and anyone else who asked.). I had reached a few minutes late but assumed I was on time. I wasn’t.

It was only later while talking about it to a friend that I realized what it was. No cell phones went off. No one talked, whispered or mouthed silently.

And once I realized, I started finding other things almost normal but not quite.

Everyone was on their best behavior – as though on a trip abroad for the first time and desperate to not to reveal their less-privileged origins. Yes, there was a crowd and yes, I did get jostled a bit, but now that a hypothesis was taking shape, I assumed it was by those to whom the names Coetze and Pamuk meant nothing and Kiran Desai sounded vaguely familiar. And of course it was alright that they didn’t know who Coetze and Pamuk were. But that weekend they’d find out and maybe buy themselves a personally inscribed book. Or so I thought.

There were no reserved seats and conversations (even lunches) with heroes were possible – sometimes without the pressure of saying something clever.

Conversations seemed to break out everywhere. They began with smiles and were propelled with the conviction that everyone present was part of the same club. I caught someone’s eye in the middle of a crowded session. We were both standing with several people between us, but we knew we were friends. We had both chuckled to ourselves, one of few to who found humour in that particular discussion.

Each day I’d read accounts of the festival full of with quotes and mugshots of people, important enough to be quoted, with whom I’d shared a coffee with and (hopefully) a witty punchline.

And at the end I thought about how, if not for Jaipur Literature Festival, Chimamanda Adichie’s Nigerian riot victims and Irvine Welsh’s Skag Boys would continue to sound exactly the same in my head.