Accompanying Ira Mathur in the presentation of her memoir, Love the Dark Days, at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
Teresa White
A couple of years back, I lost a friend over a book. The author of that book has consistently apologised to me for being the source of that lost friendship. As if it could possibly be her fault. As if the lost friend had ever really been a found friend.
A much-loved team member at my former employer would often say, “Only you, Teresa, would have friend drama over a book.” Being no longer employed means that I can now live more keenly into that friend drama and follow the author and her recently republished book across a couple of continents.
The objective of this big journey is to bear witness to her presenting her new edition at the prestigious Jaipur Literary Festival, her return to the land of her birth and where the gripping memoir starts.
Actually, our journey started over a week ago when we left our husbands at Piarco Airport and braved the Atlantic crossing, armed with some books and glasses of bubbly (she’s a teetotaller and I enjoyed being a bad influence).
I was grappling with Wise Women, a fine collection of European folklore and fairy tales on “hagitude” as retold by Angharad Wynne. The accompanying socio-psychological inferences and insights proffered by the main author, Sharon Blackie, were not so fine. Oh well.
Ira was delighting in her read, The Husband. This is a novel translated from French by an imperfect virago of a narrator whose confabulations reminded me of some of the family stories surrounding my pre-menopausal grandmother.
All that was before my time, and she, contrary to popular views on women’s mental health, showed more measured equanimity in her long post-menopausal years. In other words, the years that I knew and loved her. Ira reads on a Kindle, and I ain’t lucky with that, so I will have to get a hard copy when I return to London.
We parted in London as we both went off to enjoy some daughter time, meeting up once for dinner with Ira’s London crew. We got back together with her husband, Imshah, and flew to Delhi. For me, this is the stuff of bucket lists.
We are, therefore, back at the books again. Ira and Imshah are sharing a book on the future of artificial intelligence. It has been offered to me to dip into. But I would rather cry. Having said that, Ira is telling me that ChatGPT is quite emotionally intelligent, that one can type in any drama one is involved in and ask about the other person’s POV and motives, and be given perfect insight and advice (assuming peaceful resolution is what you are after).
We will give it a go when we arrive in India and are once again WWW-connected. Perhaps I can ask about people who cease being friends with you over a book.
On the first part of the flight, I completed Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. Ira and I have a writer friend who, having greedily gobbled up a couple of Ernaux’s books (her words), including this one, had to lie down for an hour.
I can see why.
Erneaux tells the reader within the first 250 words or so: “It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that—the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.”
Ira is always nagging me to write, and I tell her that I am a lover, not a fighter, a reader, not a writer (Have you any idea of the bacchanal that is a bunch of talented and not-so-talented writers swimming around the Caribbean Sea?) So, I make Ira read this first part of the book. I want to know if this description resonates with her and if this is a new lens that I can apply to the writers attending Jaipur’s famous literary festival.
If it rings true to her, perhaps it is a pursuit that I should consider in my semi-retirement. Giving not too much change, she responds with an “I need to read that book.”
Love the Dark Days was the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction and has recently been republished by the Indian publishing house, Speaking Tiger Books.