WHAT is the relationship between spaces, their representation in literature and the effects they have on writers? Two sessions at the LLF this year, ‘Imagining Cities’ and ‘A View from the Himalayas,’ explored this question with writers whose work has a profound relationship with cities and those who are drawn to vertiginous mountain landscapes.

‘Imagining Cities’ brought together novelists Mohsin Hamid, Amit Chaudhuri, K. Anis Ahmed and Raza Rumi with Shahid Zahid chairing the session. For Hamid, the relationship to the city is like that to a character or a person; just as the self is woven with the strands of innumerable stories, so an individual is linked to a city through the umbilical cord of stories and tales. Cities, said Hamid, allow us to recognise ourselves outside of ourselves; they hold a mirror to us. Fertile, inescapable and a ‘person,’ Lahore continues to recur in Hamid’s fiction, to the extent that he feels that his novels are more Lahore-centric than he is.

The way Lahore has overwhelmed Hamid and his fiction is similar to Chaudhuri’s relationship to Calcutta. Although Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay, it was Calcutta, with its vividness, despair, dysfunctionality and decrepitude that instructed him in “what a modern city is.” One of the reasons for this, he reflected, was that during his time in Bombay he resided in a high rise building whereas in Calcutta he lived in a double-storey house which gave him access to the streets, helping him to encounter, for the first time, “the truth of a city.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s The Return of the Flâneur, Chaudhuri described how a city makes it possible to glimpse ordinary lives and imbibe the sense of history seemingly ordinary lived spaces are steeped in. The description of these glimpses, which may seem like “background fillers,” are what Chaudhuri considers the “lifeblood” of his writing.

For Ahmed, the cities he read about when growing up — Tolstoy’s Moscow and Balzac’s Paris and so on — were more vivid to him than real life and so he felt that he needed to write about Dhaka in order to make it “real,” to capture its essence, vitality and ferocity in literature. In Ahmed’s novel, the setting is a fictional city based on Dhaka which is an expression of a longing for the city which could only be expressed through trespass.

Raza Rumi’s account of Delhi came forth from the relationship between Lahore and Delhi and the need to explore a shared sense of identity and the linkages which have bound the two cities together for centuries. In both deeply historical cities, Rumi felt a vivid sense of ancient and living histories permutating into present identities. He became aware of how the neglect of space wipes away remembrance. It is to cultivate this sense of remembrance and heritage that Rumi embarked on writing his book Delhi by Heart.

Moving to a completely different landscape, Namita Gokhale, chairing ‘A View from the Himalayas,’ claimed that anyone who visits the Himalayas is reborn, much to the assent of the panellists Gavin Francis and Libby Owen-Edmunds. Gokhale and Owen-Edmunds talked at length about how every nook, cranny and crevice of these great mountains is “filled with a sacred energy,” and lamented that the mountains “no longer belonged to themselves;” they are being ravaged by commercial tourism, greedy contractors and mining industries. Vikram Seth, although initially a part of the audience, joined the panelists upon the insistence of Gokhale and described his ventures into the Himalayas. Almost all of the great rivers of India and Pakistan, Seth pointed out, come from these mountains and so all of us partake from their essence.

Giving an overview of the historical perspective of literature on the Himalayas, Francis spoke of how they have always had great bearing on the collective consciousness of the people of this region and of their great captivation of the human imagination with innumerable myths, stories and religions being associated with them. Francis also stressed on the distinctions in approaching mountains; there are those who make a pilgrimage and humbly venture into these great giants while others nurture the vanity of ‘conquering’ them. Compassionate writers usually belong to the former category.

Gokhale talked of the urgent need to preserve dying mountain languages and cultures and the session ended with silence, for what could be said in the face of such ineffable majesty.