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.