Twenty years ago, a friend of mine had a great success with her third or fourth novel, and found that one of the results of sudden fame was to be invited frequently to festivals all over the world. “I’ve become a performing monkey”, she said ruefully, but soon worked out an efficient plan: she’d only appear in public to coincide with the release of a book, six months before or six months after, and save the rest of her time for writing and for her private life.

I’ve done my fair share of festivals over the last 15 years, but never to excess — my schedules didn’t allow that. And I’ve followed my friend’s rule quite closely — or at least my own version of it. I prefer not to appear in public between books, but it’s probably worth a writer’s while to publicise his/her book for up to a year after its release, and then perhaps retreat into a more interior world.

This year, having had a new book published in spring, I accepted some tempting invitations: I started with the Karachi Literary Festival in February (I hadn’t been back in two years). And then, after two others here in England and a couple of cancellations elsewhere, I went back east to attend the Sharjah International Book Fair in November and then to Lahore for the Khayaal Festival later the same month.

Today, with the proliferation of festivals in Asia, it’s all too easy to be invited to sit on a panel with several other writers to be asked to comment, not on your own book, but on some sweeping general topic — the novel in the age of technology, the death of the short story, the globalisation of literature — or even to address political questions of thunderous significance. Few writers of fiction are adept sociologists; often we’re not terribly well-briefed about the subject we’re holding forth on. I generally avoid such pontification. But after all, the panel’s only going to take an hour of our time — flatteringly, it’s our presence that’s required; we no longer need to be launching or selling our latest work. Best of all, we have a chance to meet our readers and also discover the work of some of our fellow writers.

Speaking of fellow writers, I’d been hearing from friends about Model Town, the new collection of stories by Bilal Hasan Minto, and it was high on my list of books to buy in Lahore when I got there this time. I was delighted to discover that Minto would be speaking at the festival; and in the way of such occasions I managed to tug myself away from peripheral conversations to attend the latter part of the session on dissident writing in which he was participating. The room was packed and I couldn’t see or hear very well, but the part of the discussion I followed with interest was mostly about Iqbal.

Today, with the proliferation of festivals in Asia, it’s all too easy to be invited to sit on a panel with several other writers to be asked to comment, not on your own book, but on some sweeping general topic — the novel in the age of technology, the death of the short story, the globalisation of literature — or even to address political questions of thunderous significance. Few writers of fiction are adept sociologists; often we’re not terribly well-briefed about the subject we’re holding forth on. I generally avoid such pontification. But after all, the panel’s only going to take an hour of our time — flatteringly, it’s our presence that’s required; we no longer need to be launching or selling our latest work. Best of all, we have a chance to meet our readers and also discover the work of some of our fellow writers.

But my real conversation with Minto took place offstage. Since we hadn’t read each other’s work yet, or even met before, we spent some hours sitting under the evening sky in the pleasant atmosphere of the Alhamra courtyard, discussing common passions — Urdu poetry and prose fiction, the relative merits of Ghalib and Iqbal, the problems of prosody; and, inevitably, the short story. We found we had some shared favourites, among them Ghulam Abbas. But the writer whose work we talked about most was Qurratulain Hyder, who, though I rate her short fiction very highly, was celebrated for her prowess in the novel. It’s the kind of conversation — held in Urdu, and about Urdu — I rarely have in London, and almost never on public platforms. (To most readers in England, Pakistani literature only means the work of a handful of writers who have been internationally acclaimed over the last two decades; and when, for example, the work of an Urdu writer such as Intizar Husain is recognised by Western critics and nominated for an international award, the attention it receives is brief and desultory.)

At a time when many younger writers are choosing to write in English, Bilal told me that was never a question for him: in spite of his fluency in English and his knowledge of its classics, he was always going to write in Urdu. Later, on my last night in Lahore before I took a morning flight to Karachi, I read three stories from his book — rooted in their milieu and at home in their lucid language, these stories, told in the candid tones of an adolescent narrator, subtly examine issues of class and sect, power and vulnerability without ever sacrificing their narrative freshness and vigour. Self-contained as each one is, the stories, when read in sequence, as the author requests of the reader, have something of the impact of a novel.

As I read them with pleasure, I was also impressed by Bilal’s commitment to Urdu, which augurs well for the language and its search for a new aesthetic. I looked back to the panel I had spoken on that morning; it was supposed to be about the development of Pakistani literature after ’47, but had swerved abruptly to the question of languages and hegemony. Had Urdu sidelined the regional languages of Pakistan? Was English going to take over from Urdu? Also, was there a chance that the Roman script would replace the script we use and love?

The latter possibility elicited an impassioned response from a teacher in the audience who was attending with a posse of her students, but unfortunately I had to leave to participate in another panel with two other writers who write in English, H.M. Naqvi and Musharraf Ali Farooqi. Expertly steered by our moderator, we spoke of the multiple linguistic, literary and cultural influences on our work. Farooqi, who is almost as well known for his translations of classics such as Tilism-i-Hoshruba as he is for his novels, spoke mostly in Urdu, and Naqvi in both languages, but all three of us addressed the question of how we used, or adapted, our mother tongue in our writing — and in my case, of how I represent English speakers in my Urdu stories.

Naqvi, a skilled raconteur, recounted an anecdote about how, in Sharjah, he found himself launching a book on a panel where everyone spoke Malayalam, of which he didn’t understand a word. I remembered how, just a couple of weeks before, fellow short-story writer Mahesh Rao and I were also in Sharjah, listening on earphones to simultaneous translations of the Iraqi and Egyptian critics on our panel, earnestly discoursing in Arabic on theoretical aspects of the short story; I was unsure of how much I actually understood, but more so about how well my rather spontaneous and practical comments on the craft and status of the story would be understood by the audience, most of whom had no direct access to my words.

But at Khayaal words had a multiple significance; writers may have been in the majority, but from the outset we were exposed to a multiplicity of voices including those of politicians, film-makers and mountaineers. Opening the festival with their thoughts, social activists Taimur Rehman and Jibran Nasir, Samina Baig, who climbed Everest, and Zar Aslam, who is responsible for the Pink Rickshaw scheme which allows women to earn an independent living, spoke of cultural events such as Khayaal as sites of pluralist resistance to all kinds of tyrannies. A spirited performance by Horeya Asmat, the only female Pakistani player of the dhol, followed the keynote speeches. Deeply moved by their words and music, I wondered whether my change of cultural milieu was responsible for my reaction, but when I looked at my friends from Karachi, writer Asif Farrukhi and celebrated poet Fatema Hassan, who were seated on either side of me, they were similarly affected by the morning’s proceedings.

Perhaps the most stimulating session I attended was a three-way conversation with Tahira Syed, Rafae Jamil and Zohaib Kazi, who focused on the fading away of traditional forms of singing and the new emphasis on hi-tech modes of studio and televisual recording. Tahira’s career encompasses both tradition and modernity — highly educated, she gave a subtle modern relevance from the ’70s onwards to the classical lyrics she revived in her distinguished career and presented to her generation. She spoke of the increasing redundancy of the kind of vibrant vocal art she embodied, which even in the recording studio never lost its proximity to the spontaneity of performance and improvisation, and above all to the authentic and technically perfect interpretations of songs.

Today’s technology renders the singer ‘lifeless’, as they’re expected to repeat scattered musical phrases ad nauseam in pursuit of perfection, out of sequence and devoid of the living context of the lyric to which they belong. Underlying Tahira’s statements was a passionate respect for the lyric, the written word — the ghazal, nazm and kafi, as essential to her performative art. She concurred, however, with her fellow panellists that Coke Studio, the latest musical phenomenon, was attempting to redress the balance by giving back a measure of the vitality and spontaneity that folk music requires to the performances it showcases.

I’ve heard Tahira sing live many times over the last 30-odd years: her nuanced performances on stage have an additional magic which her recordings, exquisite though they are, can only partially capture. She didn’t, to my disappointment, sing on this occasion, but after all these decades I finally had the chance to meet her and tell her that in those difficult months in which I learnt about Urdu poetry, her seminal renditions of the whole range of Urdu poetry from Mashafi and Mir through Miraji to Fahmida Riaz, which she presented in fresh and sparkling new ways, brought alive its rhythms and inflexions more effectively than any lecture in a classroom, however erudite, ever did or could.