Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile. <br />You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead. <br />No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll <br />Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead. <br />The world is too opaque, distressing and profound. <br />This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day: <br />To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around, <br />Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away. <br /><br />- Sit by Vikram Seth <br /><br />We both laughed. We drank coffee. I am not twenty-six. But there is a lot of time ahead. Outside, the world continued being profound and distressing. A red book glowed in the lamplight. It is poet Vikram Seth’s translation of the Hanuman Chalisa that’s recently been published by Speaking Tiger Publications. <br /><br />After some point, the poet picked up the mango and smelled it. <br /><br />“Ripe,” he announced. <br /><br />There was the implied sense of smell and touch and taste of the Digha Malda in the notebook and in the camera that recorded the interview. <br /><br />He had jokingly said the entry fee would be five Digha Malda mangoes. He had spent some years in Patna in Bihar long ago and had first recited a part of his translation of the Hanuman Chalisa almost a decade ago at the first edition of the Patna Literature Festival. <br /><br />“To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman,” Seth had written in his novel A Suitable Boy. <br /><br />Mangoes arrived. Strangers from Bihar sent them. They know the longing for that taste of those mangoes from home. <br /><br />Seth is a wanderer accumulating material for future nostalgias. That’s what he said in one his books. Mangoes are nostalgia. <br /><br />We sat on little stools surrounded by hundreds of books about thousands of people and places and emotions and animals and birds. <br /><br />We spoke about translating the most beloved poem of Indians, the rising intolerance and how Seth started writing. <br /><br />"If I am such a beneficiary of translations, who am I to hug my translations close to myself?” <br /><br />That’s what Seth said. <br /><br />He had first translated the Hanuman Chalisa for his now 90-year-old aunt and at her insistence, he agreed to publish it a decade later. <br /><br />“I don't share the vision to misuse it—a great, wonderful, sacred text—to do unkind, cruel, arrogant things because Hanuman was not an arrogant person; he did it in the service of someone else,” he said. <br /><br />There was a lot more. <br /><br />But there is always another time for it. <br /><br />In the meantime, the green of the mangoes alongside the red of the book stood out. <br /><br />Follow us: <br />Website: https://www.outlookindia.com/ <br />Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Outlookindia <br />Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outlookindia/ <br />X: https://twitter.com/Outlookindia <br />Whatsapp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaNrF3v0AgWLA6OnJH0R <br />Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OutlookMagazine <br />Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/outlookindia <br /><br />#VikramSeth #HanumanChalisa #Book
