01/02/09

The Book Launch: Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”, Delhi (UKYPE09)

[Written as part of our visit to India with the British Council. All such posts will be listed in a dedicated category; apologies if this isn't of interest. If it is of interest, then you can also see more on our Flickr set]

Lucy and I have been invited to the launch of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders at his publisher Chiki’s house in Jorbagh, Delhi.

The house is wonderful, top floor with views over the tropical garden and with white marble floors. There are beautiful prints and sketches on the walls; and her built-in bookshelves, going from floor to ceiling, contain not only many recognisable UK and US hardback editions next to their Indian counterparts, but ample space to house even more books. We’re jealous.

After being introduced to Daniyel, we meet lots of people: members of Chiki’s team at RH, authors Tash Aw and Nadeem Aslam (who urges us to come to his book launch two days later) but for the bulk of the evening Lucy and I chat with Ravi Mirchandani (editor of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger at Atlantic UK).

It’s a great party, in part so familiar with wine, gossip, delicious home-made nibbles and even a couple of dramas – a scarf catching fire, a broken glass, a smashed bottle of red wine on the floor – that we catch ourselves using “here” to describe the London publishing business. Ooops. We couldn’t be further removed from freezing, recession-obsessed London – but a publishing party is a publishing party half way around the world.

As the evening accelerates into night, we decide to go to say goodbye to Chiki, and get instantly sucked into conversation with her. She is sitting in the next room, on her sofa, talking to a friend who runs a shop called Good Earth, selling locally produced, often organically produced home stuff. She tells us the address, in swanky Khan Market, and tells us to visit.

Into the room come a handful of other interesting people, and we talk with them as Chiki hovers over her blackberry at midnight – a young professor of Indian art history at the university, who meets my question about Indian modernism with a fantastic story: in 1922 an exhibition of Bauhaus work was organised in Kolkata, one of the very first international showings, in a specially built tent. The day before the event opened, the tent caught fire, and although all artworks were destroyed, no remnants were ever found. Foul play is suspected, or at least (he suggests) provides enough material for a novelistic speculation. He suggests that if they were looted, the lack of photographic evidence would mean they could easily slip back onto the market 20 years later. He gives me the name of some Indian modernists to check out — Ramkinkar Baij, Amrita Sher-Gil, Santiniketan — and, after chatting a bit more to Chiki about her list (she is fantastically excited about an RHUK title “The Case of The Missing Servant“) – we say our goodbyes.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in UKYPE India Trip.

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