The World Literature Blog

A short story, for a change.

A friend of his had got an award. It was a very big one. He went along as they were like Leonardo and Kate. The program was in the night and at the VJT Hall. There were a lot of luminaries coming, and so she wanted him to be there. It was fun to be back in the VJT again, where he had gone long ago as a child and played TT, and run up the rickety, wooden stairs to the bell tower at the top. Red brick painting with white lines on the walls as most of the buildings in TVM had been then giving it a distinctive edge. She looked resplendent in a chiffon and there were the usual speeches in which they got some things wrong like the name of one of her books etc. But it was all grist for the mill. Usual. You were given an award by the Governor who had never heard of you before that day and would give the book you gave him as a complimentary copy to an aide who would keep it in the shelf in his home library or office. End of story, usually, unless what you had written was so extraordinary that it compelled people to read it. Age of democratization and at the same time every book, almost, was worth reading once. However the photographs would fetch you a thousand likes on fb, she in her resplendent sari and the Guv., not to mention the Sec. of Culture and Arts, IAS, and the writers, grey, old, bald, grizzled, spectacled, and the publisher and journalists.

After the meet and greet, and the usual party and wine and dine after it, she insisted he drop her home and then go which he dutifully did, where he laughed at her in the cab for the book the Guv. would not read. Awards given by people who hadn't read them and didn't know what was really significant about them as writers but given mainly on hearsay or some such untoward thing. The world of the surface. He was the only one she would let do that, laugh at her, she knew he was incorrigible and hearltess, and she brushed it off after laughing first with an impatient wave of her hand, as both she and he knew that all these were things that only mattered temporarily, he being the confirmed rebel not interested in them, and she being the sensible one knowing that it was all part of life and needed too.

The taxi felt empty as he went home in it after dropping her. He tried remembering occasions when he had been given awards, lesser ones, and could hardly remember them. He wondered what had really mattered to him in his career. There had been moments when a writer he respected or honoured had come to him and said you are really something as a writer, Nobel Prize nominees and such like. Perhaps those moments had mattered, yes, definitely they had, but not as much as the one memory he cherished, not having another one he had wanted. His mother had passed away before all his books came and he had instead only his father left to show them to. So when his first or third book came his sister had taken it as a large print-out and given it to his Dad who had read it and that was to him the most poignant memory he had which he felt was a real achievement as the book had been dedicated to him. Later had come the one dedicated to his Mom, though written earlier, but she was no longer there to see it. It comforted him that his Dad had read the one dedicated to him, before passing away. No award could match that feeling. His friend had no mother or father to show them to, maybe that was why he mattered so much to her. We all need someone who will actually read us, understand us, appreciate, weigh, assess, judge and value us, assign or give us our real value, and that someone should be someone whose word we count significant, not someone superficial or from the rabble and the riff-raff.