Chapati, chutney — and literature!

For several years now, Indian writers in English have enjoyed flavour-of-the-season status at literary festivals around the world.

At the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, currently under way in Hong Kong, that’s again been validated, and quite literally at that.

Tuesday was billed as a ‘Chapati and Chutney evening’: publisher and writer David Davidar, whose second novel, The Solitude of Emperors, explores the communalisation of Indian politics, teamed up with two ‘Spice Girls’ of Indian literature — Priya Basil and Manreet Sodhi Someshwar — for an evening of book talk, and some delectable Indian snacks. 

Basil, author of Ishq and Mushq, grew up in Uganda and Kenya: her parents were banished from Idi Amin’s Uganda while she was at boarding school. After a brief stint in advertising, she put pen to paper, and finds her novel shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book.

Someshwar, an IIM-Calcutta graduate, worked at Hindustan Lever’s — she was the first woman in 20-plus years to be recruited by HLL to the sales function  — before taking to writing. Her novel, Earning the Laundry Stripes, is inspired from her days spent travelling atop detergent bags and selling soap in central India in 45-degree heat.

On Wednesday, the three will again interact with book-lovers (and food-lovers!) over a buffet lunch at an Indian cuisine restaurant named, appropriately, Bombay Dreams! I’ll keep you posted on the bill of fare… 

Food was again on the conversational menu when I met journalist and poet Fatima Bhutto ahead of a talk she gave at the stately Foreign Correspondent’s Club.

Twenty-five-year-old Fatima, who is Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s grand-daughter (and the niece of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto), is a columnist for the Jang group of newspapers, and is a trenchant critic of the “Diet Pepsi dictatorship” of Perves Musharraf, the dynastic politics of the Pakistan People’s Party and of Nawaz Sharif.

I asked Fatima if she had savoured Hong Kong’s street food. She confessed to being a vegetarian, but said she had tried some street food the previous night: “It was the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten — and I’m from Karachi!” 

Fatima graciously promised me an interview after the talk, but given the rush of things — and the fact that she was late for another event — I was at risk of being crowded out.

But yet more graciously, she agreed to talk to me in the cab on the way to her hotel. And so, as we raced through Hong Kong’s skyscraper-lined roads in a taxi, we spoke of cabbages and kings…