Cafe

When Jerry Met Sujata

Herald Team

Precisely twelve years ago in September 2010, the Bombay-based writer Jerry Pinto showed up at the fifth anniversary celebrations of Bookworm Library.“ It was like a birthday party,” recalls Sujata Noronha – the cheerily formidable force who leads this famous haven of kids books– “and Jerry watched it all very closely. There was an immediate spark of trust and recognition between us. It was like kindred spirits finding one another. Soon after he went back home, there was a cheque from him to support our activities, and another the next year. Books, art supplies: not always grand gestures, but this warm consistent presence that means so much.”

Fast forward the dozen years since that instant connection, and Sujata and Jerry are still going strong. Each has racked up unique records of achievements, but they have also come together for the Mehlli Gobhai Visual Arts Programme, which is scheduled to be celebrated in two Bookworm locations today: the main library in Panjim at 11, and later in the evening in the brand-new Vinay & Jean Kalgutkar Community Centre in Saligao. Visitors are welcome to both - and will also get the chance to purchase Pinto’s new book The Education of Yuri – but only the latter includes an exhibition of 70 artworks.

“I am in exile from Goa. I am in flight from Goa. Both these statements are equally true,” writes Pinto in his introduction to Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, the 2006 Penguin Books India compilation(disclosure: I am a contributor). “Mahim ka Jerry” - as he used to be known on Twitter – explained that he was part of the diaspora who only visited Goa in the summer vacations, but that changed in adulthood: “choosing to go, instead of returning instinctively. I know that each time, Goa surprised me a little. I know that each time I leave, I feel I have left a little of me behind. And I know that when I reach home, back to the slick allure of the city of my birth, it is a part I can manage to live without.”

As readily evident from even that short passage, Pinto’s writing possesses uncommon sensitivity. So much so that when he first became a professional, his prose was in such demand that he was inveigled to operate under several pen names, in an astonishing range of publications including the financial newspapers and women’s magazines. Even while churning that journalistic tsunami, his calibre was always evident, and the only question was when the breakthrough would come. This was the deeply affecting 2012 novel Em and the big Hoom, which won The Hindu Literary Prize, the Crossword Book Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (one of the world’s richest literary prizes). Salman Rushdie accurately described it as “one of the very best books to come out of India in a long, long time.”

Since then, Pinto has further distinguished himself as one of the invaluable cross-cultural literary giants of our times, most especially via his string of path-breaking translations: Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar and I Baluta by Daya Pawar (from Marathi), I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir by Swadesh Deepak (from Hindi). Coming up is his first translation from Konkani, by the Jnanpith Award 2022 winner Damodar Mauzo. Meanwhile, though it received fewer plaudits than his debut novel, I really liked Murder in Mahim- which its jacket description accurately calls “a compelling, often poignant exploration of loneliness, greed and unlikely solidarities in the great metropolis – and now there is The Education of Yuri to look forward to, said to be “among the best ever written on urban adolescence in India.”

In parallel, with happy consequence, there has been an increasing relationship with his ancestral homeland. Pinto explains it very well in Reasons for Returning, in the catalogue of Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa, the paradigm-shifting art exhibition curated by Ranjit Hoskote in the old Goa Medical College building (which I was also involved in organising). He said his eyes were opened by an Archaeological Survey of India guidebook: “I stood there, a Goan in a Mumbai bookshop, getting to know about my state. I stood there, reading the measurements of the naves of the churches of old Goa, laborious descriptions of the ruins of a monastery, of an old jetty and the remnants of an arch built by a king, and I wondered if I had done my native place justice.”

Aparanta had been about exactly this: to understand the magnificent cultural heritage of Goa, in the incontrovertible presence of paintings tracking the “invisible river” (in Hoskote’s brilliant phrasing) of generations of Goans who have profoundly enriched Indian art. Pinto noted that “My Tamil friends, my Bengali friends, my Andhra friends, their parents, all told me we were a lovely people, so nice, so easy to get on with. They never spoke of culture. That was their terrain. Ours was to dance well and speak English with a little lilt – “so sweet, say it again” and to run the schools and the switchboards and the surgeries.” As all Goans know, this leaves us in difficult places: “I didn’t want to play the numbers game. I didn’t want to count the poets and the writers and the editors and the journalists and the others who had contributed to the culture. That would seem stupid.”

Instead of complaining, Pinto wrote and translated, and has never stopped writing and translating. About his oeuvre, I think the Windham-Campbell judges put it especially well: “Jerry Pinto’s writing is deeply empathetic, humorous, and humane, drawing on personal experience to tell stories much larger than the lives they contain.” After he read that commendation, and properly digested the news of its accompanying largesse, the award recipient responded equally suitably: “My first thought was: there is a God. Then there was: freedom to write. Then: that’s America for you. Then: I have to sit down. Then: Me? Then: I am a writer, I should know what to say. Then: I don’t know what to say. So I think I am going to say those simple words, which should be worn out by use but are so powerful still: thank you.”

Back in India’s smallest state, of course, another dramatic success story was taking place with Bookworm as well, as its small, tightly-knit team of professionals sallied forth bravely from their Panjim headquarters to take the impact of literature and good books far and wide. This year, they’re running 104 classroom libraries in government primary schools, and an additional mobile library with over 400 members in 9 different villages, as well as buzzing community libraries in Mala (the main branch), Aldona, Chimbel, Cacra and Ribandar, and four state care homes. Now – thanks to the grant of 25 lakhs from the estate of Mehlii Gobhai (an important Indian artist who died in 2018) of which Pinto is an executor – there’s also an ambitious arts education programme, of which the first fruits will be seen in Saligao this evening. Another promising step in a most momentous journey. We cannot help but be excited, with great anticipation for what Jerry and Sujata will manage to achieve in their next dozen years together.

SCROLL FOR NEXT