Tales from Near and Far

The authors got 10 minutes to read and 10 for interaction before the session ended with a recording of guitar music by Spanish maestro Paco De Lucia. Asha Miro squeezed her personal history, Daughter of the Ganges — about an Indian girl, adopted by a Catalan family, who returns to trace her roots — into the designated 10 minutes. Josef Haslinger from Austria did the same with his report on being caught in the Tsunami with his family while on a holiday to Phi Phi Island in Thailand. “There are some books you want to write but you don’t, and there are books you don’t want to write but you do,” he said about Phi Phi Island. French journalist Constantin Simon recreates his experiences in India in the book, India Express, whose cover carries a Bollywood-style poster of him in a Ajay Devgn pose. The experiences of the Nano launch and Kumbh Mela teach Simon that “in India, you have to be tough and never let go,” he read.

“There’s an amazing lot of people,” said crime fiction writer Katarzyna Bonda, the biggest-selling female author of Poland. The guests had been formed into groups of 15-20 and each visited an author by turn. A few visitors spoke a foreign language but rarely two. Bonda read in Polish (a translator in English followed up) about a female profiler named Sasza Zaluska, and she noticed that “the audience watched my expressions and laughed with me”.

In one of the most layered sessions, Andrea Bianchetti from Switzerland, who writes in Italian, read while theatre artiste Ledwina Costantini mimed the words. He spoke of meeting a mime artiste with a wooden leg on the banks of Hudson and Costantini, black lines radiating like sunrays from her eyes, danced softly to the lines. “These rays around my eyes are tears,” she said later as a packed room watched in concentrated silence. Gabor Lanczkor from Hungary played the harmonica between reading poems based on the black painting of Goya that came up on the screen behind him, allowing the audience to relate his words to the images. When the guitar burst, it shattered a meditative spell.

“I think this event is more important for the audience because they go to different worlds and can get many inputs. For me, as an author, it is a new thing as it is fairly short; I get to read one story and there is no time to express myself. I am used to reading five-six stories for one hour, and playing a few songs,” said Danko Rabrenovic after a deeply personal account of what home means to an immigrant from Yugoslavia to Germany.