Among the visitors in Dublin for Bloomsday is the Indian writer, blogger, and photojournalist Mayank Austen Soofi. The “Austen” comes from Jane, one of his early literary loves. The rest of him comes from Uttarakhand, a state in Northern India, bordering Tibet.
Since 2004, however, he has lived in Delhi and made that extraordinary city his life’s work. His blog is a Delhi-catessen of the city’s tastes, sights, sounds, and smells. It has been called “a one-man encyclopedia” of India’s capital.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of the works of Jane Austen will be in want of Marcel Proust and James Joyce eventually. Or so Mayank implied during his speech at the Bloomsday Festival launch on Wednesday night.
Pride and Prejudice has since been supplanted in his affections by Proust and Joyce. And impressed with his “fanatical” interest in the Irish writer, our embassy in Delhi made him guest speaker at its 2024 Bloomsday celebration.
Resurrected Reverend – Frank McNally on the Irish priest who “did a Reggie Perrin”
Passage from India – Frank McNally on a Delhi journalist and Joyce fanatic in Dublin for Bloomsday
Epistolics Anonymous – Frank McNally on a Joycean mystery wrapped in an enigma
Animal Farm – Frank McNally on how “Skin-the-Goat” Fitzharris was radicalised by the killing of a fox
This year, it went one better and helped send Mayank to Dublin, from where he will write daily dispatches for his column in the Hindustan Times, one of India’s biggest-selling newspapers.
In an exuberant address at the James Joyce Centre, he talked of the universal themes that made Ulysses understandable in Delhi as well as Dublin. His city even has a Martello Tower, he said. “Why? Because they ruled us too.” (No need to name names when you’re among friends.)
And there was at least one proof in the audience of the success of his Joycean evangelism. Shreya Gupta, a budding writer from Bengal who works for Google in Dublin, told me she’d read Ulysses because Mayank “kept going on about how good it is”.
It took her “about a month”, she said with apology. I assured her that was still a lifetime shorter than it takes most Irish people to get past the first page.
***
At one-twentieth the size of Delhi and (as I write this) 30 degrees cooler, Dublin will hardly be as daunting to Mayank as I found his city on my only visit there, almost 30 years ago.
It was a delayed honeymoon and on our first day, in the best tradition of mad dogs and Irishmen, my wife and I went out for a walk in late morning. The heat was already oppressive. Then we saw an elephant, ambling past with a load on its back. This caused me to gape in awe, which was like holding up a “newly arrived tourist” sign for every salesman in the area.
Sure enough, I was approached mid-gape by a young man offering miniature chess sets his grandparents had hand-carved in their remote mountain village. They were hard-working people, obviously, because as we later discovered, the chess sets were available on other street corners too.
But gracefully accepting our “no thanks”, the salesman then asked if we needed directions to the tourist office. We did. So, still off-guard from the elephant, we were led on an epic, sweaty journey through a maze of back streets until he delivered us to a private travel agency, where they were determined to plan every day of our three-week Indian holiday.
When we extricated ourselves from that, the chessman was still waiting and, undaunted by our failure to earn him a commission, offered to lead us back to where we started. Being lost, we accepted. Here I quote from an old diary:
“Then we were approached by a stranger who pointed in alarm at my wife’s sandalled foot, on which a large dollop of animal manure had mysteriously appeared. As he removed her shoe to clean it, the concerned stranger pointed skywards to suggest the manure’s origin.
“It struck me even then that it must have been a big bird. And in a way it was. When a similar accident happened on a different street two days later, we realised that the bird probably had a trunk and only flew in Walt Disney films.
“Whoever had furtively administered the Dumbo-dung, there were now three men attending the clean-up: one wiping my wife’s foot, one wiping her sandal, and a third standing by with shoe polish. Meanwhile, the chess-set seller stood by, like a man who knew he’d be getting 10 per cent of any action.
The Delhi sun beat down mercilessly, and we were already weak from dehydration. But we somehow escaped the clutches of our retinue and retreated to the hotel to recover, having learned the first lesson of Indian travel. Don’t stare at the elephants.”
Oh well, I’ll go back some day, this time armed with Mayank’s encyclopedia. In the meantime, more on the Bloomsday launch, which also featured a steady flow of Writer’s Tears.
No, that’s not a metaphor. It’s a whiskey, which was being served in a range of cocktails. But even before those took hold, everyone agreed with the suggestion of JJC director Darina Gallagher that Bloomsday should be a national holiday.
She pointed out that the event is now celebrated worldwide, in some 60 countries. It has become a literary version of St Patrick’s Day. And that’s even before Mayank Austen Soofi spends a whole week spreading the word to 8.6 million readers of the Hindustan Times.
