“The Road from There to Here“: The 2012 Neustadt Prize Lecture

cover feature 44 World Literature Today photo: shevaun williams / shevaun williams & Associates january–february 2013 • 45 A few months before I was to leave Bombay for Toronto, a friend asked to borrow my copy of A Hard Day's Night. It was 1975, and the Beatles had long since recorded their last studio album, but my friend—I'll call him Harish—working his way backward, was now enthralled by their earlier work. He was constantly trying to find hidden meanings in songs, parsing, analyzing the lyric as though it were Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer. When B. B. King moaned that his woman had done him wrong, Harish was happy to spend an afternoon in the St. Xavier's College canteen debating, over endless cups of tea, what it was that the bluesman and his guitar were actually saying. With his ever-present flicker of a smile, Harish was agreeable company; the mischief he sought to provoke, the arguments he instigated were always welcome, as was his readiness for laughter. Borrowing and lending within our circle of friends was rampant, second nature to us, learned long ago in kindergarten with rubber balls and painted wooden toys. And later, books and records, too, were considered common property , more or less. We traded, bartered, borrowed, and lent with a reckless disregard for Polonius's advice; otherwise, childhood and youth would have been bleak places. When I gave Harish the Beatles LP, his request had barely registered. In 1975, India, in grave turmoil, had gripped everyone's attention. People were filling the streets in the hundreds of thousands, marching daily against misrule and corruption. Newspapers wrote, before censorship silenced them, about goon squads and torture, police brutality and custodial deaths, the disappearance of dissidents and union leaders, and about bodies found, bloodied, and broken, beside suburban railway tracks. The prime minister 's response to all this, the unleashing of a State of Emergency, was barely a month away. Changes in my personal life, though less drastic, were no less unsettling. My Canadian immigration visa had arrived. The convulsions that racked the country I observed detachedly, as I got ready to go. After all, my lower-middleclass life, like countless others, had been spent preparing for this moment, with encouragement from parents, friends, teachers, and counselors. The picture painted could have been titled India: The Sinking Ship: no prospects, no future in this place of ignorance and disease and poverty, where, instead of the rule of law, there was the law of bribery, where government would forever remain in corrupt or incompetent hands, where the only solution was to settle in the West, to Rohinton Mistry immigrated to Canada in 1975, shortly after completing a B.Sc. in mathematics and economics at Bombay University. For the next several years, he worked at a bank in Toronto while taking evening courses in English and philosophy. He began writing in 1983. Two years later he left his bank job to write full-time, completing a collection of short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987). Three novels followed, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Mistry was awarded the Trudeau Fellows Prize by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in 2004 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize. His work has been published in more than thirty languages. The Road from There to Here" The 2012 Neustadt Prize Lecture Rohinton Mistry " 46 World Literature Today It strikes me now as odd that in the endless talk about what would be gained by migration, no one ever wondered if something might be lost. The stark choice, between clinging to the sinking ship or booking passage on the luxurious ocean liner, left little room for hesitation and deliberation. make a better life for oneself, and where one would actually fit in much better, thanks to one's upbringing. It strikes me now as odd that in the endless talk about what would be gained by migration, no one ever wondered if something might be lost. The stark choice, between clinging to the sinking ship or booking passage...

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