It all began at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I repaired to the shamiana for lunch and at my table was a young man with a complexion like cheese from a seter. He introduced himself as Mathias Samuelsen, a Norwegian.
“I don’t know much about Norway,” I said, “But my father read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy to me. Sigrid Undset, you know?”
His face lit up.
“You’ve read Sigrid Undset?” he asked.
“The trilogy and Happy Times in Norway,” I said, which by the way, is where I first heard of a seter, a cottage in the mountains to which the Norwegians repaired in summer; they would make cheeses there all summer and the children would romp about and everyone would be happy. Happy Times in Norway deals with a family of three children and their mother; no father is ever mentioned. There’s a mentally challenged daughter and it doesn’t take a genius to realise that it is a portrait of Undset’s life itself.
“You must come and stay in her house and write at her desk,” said the young man enthusiastically.
“I should,” I said with an unwonted touch of sarcasm, “and I should go to Paris and live at Gertrude Stein’s and eat an Alice B. Toklas meal.”
“No,” said the young man. “I shall invite you there.”
I smiled sweetly upon him. One meets many Europeans addled by the Rajasthan sun. However, six months later, an invitation did arrive; did I want to live in an open-air museum of old Norwegian homes called Maihaugen and report every day to write at Bjerkebæk, Undset’s house?
Catholic tastes
I suppose the invitation was occasioned by the surprise that someone in India should be reading Undset to his children. But my parents were both avid readers who had been denied college by family circumstances. They made up for their lack of formal education by building up a library of Catholic tastes, and by reading omnivorously. If someone won the Nobel Prize—and Undset did in 1928—they were a shoo-in. And then these books would be read to their children. Which is how I got to hear of Undset in the first place.
Several months later, I stepped off a train from Oslo to Lillehammer, which is where Happy Times in Norway is set. It was May 15, and in two days, it would be Constitution Day. Samuelsen was at the station to meet me with Kari Elisabeth Svare, my local guide and the kind of free spirit who would tuck her skirt up and swing off on a ropeway designed for children of the Steiner school at which she was once a teacher. It was she who drove me to Follibu, to see the house of Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson, the other Norwegian Nobel laureate in literature, a man before his time who wanted social justice so much that he tried to make sure the landless labourers who tilled his soil could buy farms from him.
We did not have much of Bjørnson’s work at home but I had heard of him through a reader of Shanta Gokhale’s writing that I have been editing. When a theatre group in Maharashtra wanted to start with Henrik Ibsen—another Norwegian!—they were told by their angels that they could do their version of A Doll’s House as a second play; so for their first, they chose Bjørnson’s A Gauntlet. Later, at the Lillehammer literature festival (official name Norsk Litteraturfestival 2017), legendary Norwegian actor Kåre Conradi and Indian singer-theatre person Ila Arun performed a two-person, two-language scene from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt; Arun’s version is called Pir Ghani and is set in the Valley. Norwegian literature seems alive and well in Maharashtra, at any rate.
But before the festival came Undset’s birthday and writer-historian Kristin Brandtsegg Johansen invited me to an evening’s bacchanalia in her honour. We drove there with a woman who had written a book on the use of flowers in Undset’s work and Johansen asked me if I would like a tour of the garden.
I had no idea she had an ulterior motive. She wanted to fashion two laurel crowns, one for the head of the speaker and the other for the head of the head of the Undset Society, and so we foraged for wild flowers and devised quite a fetching pair of crowns. Through all this, I kept wondering if I could feel Undset’s piercing eyes on my back. And though Lillehammer is a refuge city and even a city of refuge for writers who have been exiled from their own countries, I could imagine some Norwegian seeing a Person of Colour savaging a garden and thinking, “Is that why we let them in?”
Cheese from a tube
Dianne Wilson, American by birth and Norwegian by choice, was my local host and I had some splendid meals at her home. She also decoded the supermarket for me and taught me how to eat cheese from a tube and make open-faced sandwiches. We drove into the mountains once, up above the treeline, into a lunar landscape of stone and river; I built a small cairn of hope from the shiny slate that was lying around. The world, as I know it, seems in need of some.
Then it was time for the festival, for poetry readings and an introduction to the Lillehammer Bibliotek, a beautiful sun-filled building which provides readers a code so that they can come in at night and read. Next door was a new cafe, run by Ali and Nina; both artists and both wonderfully warm. Ali was from Morocco and thanked me for the music of Bollywood. I said in my broken French that I had not had much to do with it but I would convey his thanks back home.
So here goes: Thank you for the music, Bollywood. In Lillehammer, there’s a Moroccan in exile whose heart dances to your tunes.
The author tries to think and write and translate in the cacophony of Mumbai.