MY TALE OF A LITERATURE FESTIVAL

So this is how it happened. I got an invitation from an organization called Khayyal to participate in the arts and literature festival that they were organizing on November 2^nd 2013.  I was thrilled to have been invited as a guest speaker at a literature festival for the first time. I was supposed to sit with a couple of other prominent travel writers and talk about the health of travel and tourism in the country. The theme of our talk was wanderings in Pakistan.

To  wander is my second nature so I decided to hop on a Daewoo bus bound for Lahore and crash at a friend’s house for a couple of days. But lo and behold, a week before the festival, I got a call from Khayyal. “We have arranged your stay at Gymkhana Club and you will be flying to Lahore from Islamabad and back.” Ayesha Husain chimed on the phone. I felt very special and very literary and boarded the plane a couple of days before the festival was to start. I wanted to party and connect with a lot of friends down in Lahore that I hadn’t seen in a while.

I had never stayed at Gymkhana club in Lahore. It was palatial, ostentatious and very colonial in its environment and make up. When I wanted to have tea in their Veranda restaurant and gawk at the golf players, they politely refused to serve me as I was wearing casual clothes and sporting my mountain flip flops. I profusely thanked them and headed out to revel in the age old embrace and hospitality of the boisterous masses on the streets of a living Lahore.

His name is Julian; he is a French man and a good old friend of mine. He has been living off and on in Pakistan for about ten years working for some international NGO. But Julian is also a playful babe and a man of letters.  He speaks fluent Urdu and Punjabi complete with a colloquial flair and has penned four novels in Urdu language that have been published and widely acclaimed in Pakistan. Julian was in town so off we went to meet the literati of Lahore.

Julian wanted to visit Nasir Kazmi’s grave in Mominpura but I wanted to visit the living and soon to be dead writers, so we took a rickshaw to Intizar Husain’s house. Intizar Husain is considered to be the  living legend of Urdu literature and was recently nominated for the Booker Prize.

There we sat in Intizar sahib’s bedroom with Zahid Dar the cute poet in his late seventies who had just recovered from Dengue fever but was still chain smoking Morven Gold cigarettes and not saying much, just listening intently and absorbing the usual flavour of the evening. Then there was Ikram Ullah sahib, the writer of the novel Gurg e Shab that was banned in General Zia ul Haq’s time and is still banned in the province of Punjab. Ikram Ullah sahib was passionately explaining to us the reason de tre of Pakistan as envisaged by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. “He didn’t want a secular Pakistan; rather he was exploiting religion to carve out this country. I have personally heard a few of his speeches. I was there and I know what he was trying to sell to the masses”.

Meanwhile Intizar Sahib smiled, drank his tea, played the role of a generous host and explained his own reasons for migration to Pakistan and how the theme of migration played a major role in his earlier writings and novels like “Basti”.

I had always wanted to meet Akhtar Mamunka, a successful tour operator, a painter and a prolific writer of travel books and articles. His travelogues like “Paris 205 Kilometre” and “The Final Frontier” are iconic for people interested in travel, women and general bohemian wisdom. So I called Akhtar Mamunka and he invited me over to his house for drinks and dinner. Surrounded by his paintings and books Akhtar sat in his shalwar Kamiz still looking young and handsome for his 71 years.

We mostly talked about his travelling experiences over the years and his wandering hippie days in the seventies when he travelled overland to Switzerland from Pakistan four times to be with his Swiss girlfriend. “Paris 205 Kilometres was the product of those four trips that I made on the hippie trail. Those were different times my friend, the times of freedom and free love”.  Akhtar reminisced with a far off look in his eyes.

The man was inspiring and I had a few drinks in me so I called up one of the organizers of the festival and asked her if I could invite Akhtar Mamunka next day to be one of the speakers on our panel. What an amazing woman. She said I could totally invite him that is exactly what I did. Akhtar graciously accepted the offer and as I was leaving, he put a friendly hand on my shoulder and quipped. “But I want full protocol as I was literally invited at the eleventh hour to speak at the festival”.

I was visiting Lahore after a long while so I let my hair down that night and next thing I know I was still up and buzzing at six am after having consumed a lot of drinks and tonics. I reached Alhamra at the mall at eleven am where the festival was taking place. It was a beautiful fall day in Lahore and I was terribly hung over.

The festival was immaculately organized and managed by the Khayyal people who were extremely hospitable, efficient and intellectually thoughtful. I was impressed by the fact that for the first time someone has considered travel writing as part of literature and invited travel writers to share their views and experiences at a literature festival.

There were artisans displaying their crafts, musicians singing and people gorging food in the open lawns of Alhamra. There were people all over the place, milling about, socializing on their way to listen to the musicians, speakers or performers of their choice. There were events happening simultaneously in two auditoriums. I stepped into one and listened to Mekkal Hassan band. Their music appeased by jangled nerves and then I made my way to the canteen for a cup of tea where I ran into Sarmad Sehbai, Julian and few other literary hangar ons. Sarmad in his signature bohemian mood sweared at ninety miles per hour and regaled us with spicy stories from his life. There was one in which he compared Oscar Wilde’s “Weeping Prince” with Faiz Ahmed Faiz and we all laughed except one woman in the group who made a face and left the raucous company.

Then it was our turn to speak at the travel panel. Akhtar Mamunka had walked into hall one and taken a seat next to me. Salman Rashid was standing around looking agitated and bored. I had never met Tahir Jahangir before nor read his work but we compared notes and it turned out we had a common friend in Mansehra.  Our moderator, Mr Masood Hassan whose columns I read in the newspaper and who I thought was a middle aged man turned out to be an elderly gentleman. It was hillarious as we sat down and he looked at me and said, “After going through your profile I thought you were an old fellow”.

We all took our chairs in front of the audience and the talk began. I spoke about the death of tourism in Pakistan and so did Salman Rashid. Tahir Jahangir and Akhtar Mamunka had good things to say about the future of tourism industry in the country. Later on I changed my tune as well and sang along with the choir, while Salman Rashid who had looked sad and indifferent throughout the whole affair I guess had had +enough and left in the middle of the talk. Someone remarked that he had an attitude problem but I said he had to be somewhere as the session started thirty minutes late.

After my session I socialized like crazy and ran into many interesting and beautiful people like my good friend Nighat Chaudry who had a classical dance performance at the festival that evening. We planned on hanging out afterwards and that is how a bunch of us ended up at Sarmad Sehbahi house in the evening.  And then you can well imagine how the night progressed afterwards.