Stabbed by a toothpick: lit fest parties and the slim pickings of authors’ lives

It’s the season for literature festivals (and thus lit fest parties). That means it’s also high season for small bites and small talk.

At a recent lit fest party, the Kolkata night still had a trace of chill. My shawl had emerged from its naphthalene hibernation. As I smiled, attempted witty banter and balanced my glass of wine, a waiter approached with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

I skewered the grilled prawn delicately with a toothpick, popped it into my mouth and returned to my conversation. Then I realised I was stuck with the stick. I stood there, wine glass in one hand, stick in the other, hoping my carefully arranged shawl would not require any sudden adjusting.

Writers are often socially inept creatures used to being on their own. Holding on to a glass of wine and a starter gives them something to do instead of awkwardly hanging out on the fringes of a conversation. So we tend to eat more starters than necessary and are then stranded with tell-tale signs of our nervous gluttony. Those discarded sticks are the debris of fancy parties. They represent the slim pickings of our literary lives.

I saw an eminent poet looking around also fiddling with a stick. He caught my eye and shrugged knowingly. The more adept among us confidently hailed a passing waiter, picked up a chicken kebab with a new cocktail stick and jettisoned the old one in one smooth move. The poet pointed at the pizza counter. There was an unused corner with a few discarded toothpicks. He added his. I sidled over and added mine.

‘Hilary Mantel grappled with it too’

I realised my stick dilemma was not so petty when I found even the redoubtable Hilary Mantel had grappled with it. In the  London Review of Books, she wrote about going to a book trade event at Buckingham Palace, an occasion graced by the Queen. Little kebabs were going around on trays. “It took some time to chew through one of them, and the guests were left with the little sticks in their hands. They tried to give them back to the flunkeys, but the flunkeys smiled and sadly shook their heads, and moved away.”

As she left the party, she looked back and at the base of every pillar was a forest of abandoned and gnawed sticks. That is exactly what the Queen would have seen too if she too had looked back. It was like gazing at the ratty prosaic underside of the pomp and splendour of monarchy — “the scaffolding of reality too nakedly displayed, the daylight let in on the magic.”

As a man, I am luckier than Mantel. If push comes to shove, and I am unable to locate a waste basket in the arid expanse of a brightly lit hotel ballroom, I can unobtrusively stuff the sticks, wrapped in a napkin, into my pocket.

But until I read Mantel, I didn’t understand that these were not just cocktail sticks. They were little sticks that flimsily held up the entire spectacle. Whether royals or writers, we like to preen smugly when placed on a pedestal. When you suddenly get wined and dined and plied with gift bags, it can leave you a little light-headed. Suddenly for one evening, you are a very important person, not someone who works in his pyjamas. There are people dancing attendance on you with trays of canapés. “Could you bring those  achari prawns,” you ask the man trying to ply you with mushroom vol-au-vents.

Bursting a bubble

All that glamour is built on a house of cards. Or a pile of little skewers. While the descriptions of the starters might ooze sophistication, all we are left with, in the end, are little pointy sticks. Sometimes to humiliate us further, the  galouti kebab falls to pieces as we try to skewer it and lift it off the tray. And there I am with half a  galouti teetering on my stick, the other half fallen ungracefully onto the tray while the waiter looks on utterly deadpan, discreetly ignoring my cocktail stick ineptitude.

Any air of smug superiority I had felt about being feted and dined instantly vanishes, skewered on my stick. It’s not a cocktail stick any more. It is the petard on which I am hoisted, a way to burst my ego bubble. Defeated, I pick the  kebab up with my fingers. The waiter remains studiously expressionless.

Then the lit fest season ends. The shawls and party duds are packed away. We return to our shabby writerly lives until one day, for some dinner, I put on those formal pants or that blazer. And I stick my hand into the pocket and get stabbed by a toothpick, a remembrance of parties past from a world to which I don’t really belong.

It’s like a pinprick of conscience.

The writer is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.