The Lightness in All Things | Outlook's Editor Chinki Sinha in Conversation with Vikram Seth

"Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.
The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away."

Sit by Vikram Seth

We both laughed. We drank coffee. I am not twenty-six. But there is a lot of time ahead. Outside, the world continued being profound and distressing. A red book glowed in the lamplight. It is poet Vikram Seth’s translation of the Hanuman Chalisa that’s recently been published by Speaking Tiger Publications.

After some point, the poet picked up the mango and smelled it.

“Ripe,” he announced.

There was the implied sense of smell and touch and taste of the Digha Malda in the notebook and in the camera that recorded the interview.

He had jokingly said the entry fee would be five Digha Malda mangoes. He had spent some years in Patna in Bihar long ago and had first recited a part of his translation of the Hanuman Chalisa almost a decade ago at the first edition of the Patna Literature Festival.

“To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman,” Seth had written in his novel A Suitable Boy.

Mangoes arrived. Strangers from Bihar sent them. They know the longing for that taste of those mangoes from home.

Seth is a wanderer accumulating material for future nostalgias. That’s what he said in one his books. Mangoes are nostalgia.

We sat on little stools surrounded by hundreds of books about thousands of people and places and emotions and animals and birds.

We spoke about translating the most beloved poem of Indians, the rising intolerance and how Seth started writing.

"If I am such a beneficiary of translations, who am I to hug my translations close to myself?”

That’s what Seth said.

He had first translated the Hanuman Chalisa for his now 90-year-old aunt and at her insistence, he agreed to publish it a decade later.

“I don't share the vision to misuse it—a great, wonderful, sacred text—to do unkind, cruel, arrogant things because Hanuman was not an arrogant person; he did it in the service of someone else,” he said.

There was a lot more.

But there is always another time for it.

In the meantime, the green of the mangoes alongside the red of the book stood out.

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