This weekend, I attend The Hindu Lit for Life fest in Chennai, while Bins takes off for his birthplace, Pondicherry. “Anyway I don’t like all your fancy writer friends,” he says to me as he climbs into the passenger seat of the car he has hired, “but good luck for the prize!” He admits that he’s a little bit impressed that my book The Island of Lost Girls made it to the shortlist for the prestigious Lit for Life prize hosted by The Hindu. He doesn’t think there’s any chance it will win. “It’s too violent,” is his assessment. “It can win the Morgue Prize for Gory Stories, maybe, but not the Lit for Life.”

For me, there are two reasons that I’m happy to attend this lit fest versus all the others. The first is, the venue. It’s a two-minute walk from my sister’s front gate in Chennai. The second is, the organisers and the audience make it a literary event rather than a social gathering with books as accessories. There’s never any doubt that the people who attend the fest are actually interested in books and reading. The fact that it’s supported by a venerable newspaper and the presence of its editors and top management at the three-day event, makes it real.

I still have my death-rattle cough, however. It starts with a tickle as delicate as an ant’s sneeze that escalates into a grand opera of uncontrollable barking. It always feels as though there’s a gecko lodged in my throat. I know from experience that the only way to expel the gecko is by turning my throat inside out and giving it a good scrub. Naturally, I would much rather not perform these intimate surgeries onstage, in front of a horrified audience. So I drink down all my pills and potions and hope for the best. I have two events to attend: a panel discussion on Young Adult literature on January 16 and the prize-giving on January 15.

My fellow contestants are Kiran Doshi, a sweet-faced retired diplomat with courtly manners; Kunal Basu, well-established Oxford-based novelist; Anil Menon, brilliant techie-polymath-turned novelist and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, medical officer and winner of the 2015 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Hansda is unable to attend, so only four of us will be on stage, on Sunday. We have been told that we must each read an extract from our books.

I have a copy of Island... with me and have marked out a reasonably sedate passage from my otherwise weird, dark story. But five minutes before we’re due to go on, I notice that Anil is not carrying a book. When I ask him if he’s got his novel memorised, it turns out that he hadn’t seen the email informing us about our onstage duties. Fortunately, though, smart-techie that he is, he’s got the whole thing on his phone.

Then it’s time. The event proceeds like a well-oiled machine. I don’t cough even once. The jury, led by the eminent poet K Satchidanandan, shares its deliberations and delivers its verdict: Mr Doshi, ripe in years, is the winner! Confetti twinkles down, cameras are flashing and everyone’s smiling.

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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