Kesariya Balam: Finding arrival and belonging at the Jaipur Literature Festival

I arrived in Jaipur on the fifteenth the way one arrives at a long-awaited reckoning: fevered, fogged, fragile, my body trailing behind me like an unwilling accomplice, my spirit racing ahead with an appetite no illness could dull. Antibiotics in my bag, aches in my bones, a head heavy with congestion—and yet a hunger sharpened by sickness, not for food but for arrival. Jaipur has that effect. It does not ask how you are; it simply receives you as you are. Pink

walls holding winter light, dust soft as memory, the city breathing in centuries while pretending it is just another January morning.

And almost immediately, before panels and passes and polite hellos, there was a song.

O saffron-hued beloved, please come to my land.

That was all it said, and somehow everything it meant. No interrogation, no insistence, no credential- checking. Just an open palm of an invitation. Come. The Manganiyar voice carried it without urgency, without ornament, as if Rajasthan itself were speaking in its sleep. In that single line lives a civilizational ethic the

desert perfected long before conferences and constitutions: survival through hospitality, continuity through welcome. The desert does not endure by exclusion; it endures by shade offered before names are exchanged, by water shared before questions are asked.

The song lingered, as songs do when they are older than their singers, and it seemed to fold itself quietly into the scaffolding of what I had

come for—the great, improbable, generous commons that is the Jaipur Literature Festival. Conceived with imagination and nerve, shaped over years of listening and labour, the festival has, year after year, performed a quiet miracle. It has made listening fashionable again. It has made disagreement dignified. It has made thought feel like a shared inheritance rather than a competitive sport.

By the time I settled into the rhythm of the days, the fever still hovered, but something else had begun to steady. Mornings unfurled into conversations on astrophysics and nuclear ethics, on mathematics that bent the imagination and histories that refused to stay buried. Scientists spoke of black holes and dark matter, their equations shimmering with wonder rather than intimidation. Nuclear physicists argued precision

with humility. Historians quarrelled lovingly with the past, refusing both amnesia and nostalgia. Novelists carried entire geographies in their sentences. Poets compressed lifetimes into lines that landed softly and stayed. Over the years—from 2020 through this moment—the festival has gathered voices across continents and disciplines, scientists and storytellers, economists and essayists, activists and aesthetes, each

bringing a different instrument to the same unruly orchestra. The result is not harmony in the shallow sense, but resonance—a tuning of frequencies where difference does not dissolve, it deepens.

Outside the tents, music threaded everything together. Not as entertainment, but as argument. Percussion thudded like a collective heartbeat. Stringed instruments sighed. Voices rose and fell, carrying

centuries without strain. At one point, the song returned, gentler now, almost domestic.

Padharo mhare des. Please, come to my land.

It sounded less like an invitation and more like a reminder—of what this festival has always been doing at its best. It does not demand allegiance; it invites presence. It does not flatten

difference; it dignifies it. In a world addicted to speed and certainty, this is a place that insists on slowness of thought, on the pleasure of doubt, on the courage of saying “I don’t know” in public.

And then there was another arrival, more intimate, more trembling with consequence. My book, Tell My Mother I Like Boys, found its way into the world here. A memoir of a

gay boy who chose, again and again, to live without fear. That this book was launched at this festival felt less like coincidence and more like choreography. It was opened to the world by Shobhaa De—incisive, fearless, incandescent—and my family filled the first rows: my mother, steady and luminous; my sister-in-law; my chacha and chachi; my masi; friends who had travelled from near and far, carrying their belief in me like talismans. My

mother had driven from Delhi to Jaipur with family, not as a gesture, but as a given. Presence as love. Love as arrival.

Shobhaa stood on stage after cutting the ribbon, after quite literally bringing the book into the world, and said she would not read from notes. She would speak from the

heart. And she did. She spoke of a co-mother. She said the words as if they had always existed and were only now being named. Co-mother. As she said it, my mother sat below the stage in the first row, unaware of the way the room was about to tilt. Shobhaa asked her to stand up. She asked her to take credit for having raised me. She spoke of the pages in which I had written about my mother, of the woman she was, of the parenting my

parents had given me. She marvelled at it. She celebrated it. And then—embarrassingly, extravagantly, tenderly—she praised me to the hilt. She said things that landed not on my ears but somewhere deeper, where defences don’t work.

For the first time, this grown man—this Suvir Saran who has lived, loved, survived, and stood tall—cried. I cried on stage. Not a strategic tear. Not

a cinematic moment. But a sudden, helpless spilling. I cried because I had never felt othered in that moment. I cried because my mother was being honoured publicly, lovingly, without irony. I cried because here was Shobhaa, naming herself co- mother while my own mother stood there, radiant, unflinching. Two women holding me up without asking me to shrink. Two cities collapsing into one embrace.

When the conversation began with Asad Lalljee—the interlocutor who had me in conversation for the launch, a man whose life has moved from Madison Avenue in New York to the Opera House in Bombay, carrying with him the intelligence of advertising and the sensitivity of culture—I was still trying to steady my breath. Asad held the conversation with grace, curiosity, and care, asking questions that opened rather than cornered, that allowed

the book to breathe. But the moment before that conversation, that unguarded breaking open, stayed with me like a benediction.

In that instant, something larger than a book was being said. About India. About possibility. About how openness here is not a borrowed virtue but a lived one—imperfect, evolving, yes, but real. A gay man telling his truth on one of the

world’s largest literary stages, with his mother in the front row, with a co-mother on stage, with applause that did not feel performative but earned. If you wanted a rebuttal to the lazy cynicism about who we are becoming, it was there, untheorised and undeniable.

The song surfaced again in my mind, unbidden.

Gora gora haathon par mehndi rachayi. Henna has bloomed on these pale palms.

Adornment not as vanity, but as readiness. Hands prepared to receive, to bless, to hold. That is what this festival does at its most potent: it prepares us. It readies the mind to be unsettled, the spirit to be soothed, the ego to be nudged aside. Success does not arrive here as armour; vulnerability

is not treated as a liability. Accomplishment converses openly with doubt. A Nobel- level intellect can sit beside a debut poet, and neither needs to shrink. A question from the audience can reroute a conversation. A sentence can loosen a certainty you have been clutching too tightly for years.

By the third day, my fever finally broke—or perhaps it was something else that broke

first. The brittle insistence on being right. The reflex to categorise. I walked lighter, listened harder. I noticed the children sitting cross-legged beside scholars, the elders nodding thoughtfully at ideas that challenged them, strangers becoming temporary kin through the radical act of attention.

Another line drifted back to me, almost like a benediction.

Mharo jeevan dhanyo ho gayo. My life has been blessed.

It landed differently this year. Not as triumph, but as gratitude. Gratitude for love. For welcome. For a mother who raised me without fear. For a co-mother who named that love in public. For a festival that understands that enlightenment is not about erasure, but embrace. That thought, when shared

generously, can still stitch a fraying world together.

As the days wound down, Jaipur returned to itself, the tents slowly emptied, the conversations echoing a little longer in the mind than in the air. I packed to leave still weak, still tender, but strangely well. The city had done what it always does when it is at its most honest: it had not cured me, but it had steadied me.

And the song, faithful and unhurried, closed the circle one last time.

Kesariya balam, padharo mhare des. O beloved, please come to my land.

By then, I understood it completely. Not just as Rajasthan speaking to the world, but as the world

speaking back to itself. An ethic disguised as a melody. An invitation that does not end when the music fades. Come. Sit. Speak. Listen. Let words do their slow, necessary work. Let love be public. Let welcome be the point.