The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Snapshots of the world as crafted by wordsmiths
This week the Royal Society of Literature revealed the shortlist for the Ondaatje Prize, a £10,000 award for ‘a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place’. Michael Kerr chooses extracts from the six books
Bloomsbury Circus overcrowded Black Town. There the natives lived to serve the White Town. Even then, that division was imperfect, for the white sahibs lived with retinues of personal servants, just like the native elite. Now, White and Black Town were all jumbled together. The rich and the poor lived everywhere on top of one another, amid the roadside hillocks of garbage, the baying of stray dogs and the ubiquitous stench of urine.
The city offered few of the escape hatches of a typical Third World metropolis. There was no historic district, frozen in amber and packaged to lure tourists. The whole place simply looked old. Its colonial buildings were mostly just falling apart. Even the new concrete boxes looked mildewed and ancient. For a global elite, the city had neither the comforts of modern leisure nor the easily digested “character” that is available even in other poor cities. Calcutta was clueless about the global aesthetic of urban cool – which is the same in Berlin or Shanghai. Its strangeness was truly strange.
constructed. He is justly proud of it. It rises higher than deer can leap, and is all made of new-quarried stone. When completed, it will extend for upward of five miles.
I said, “I wonder, are we making a second Paradise here, or a prison?”
“Or a fortress,” said Mr Rose. “Our King has had more cause than most monarchs to fear assassins. Lord Woldingham is courageous, but you will see how carefully he looks about him when he enters a room.”
“His safety could be better preserved in a less extensive domain,” I said.
“He craves extension. He has spent years dangling around households in which he was a barely tolerated guest. There were times when he, with his great title and his claim on all these lands, had no door he could close against the unkindly curious, nor even a chair of his own to doze upon. He has been out, as a vagabond is out. Now, it seems, he chooses to be walled in.”
AVintage
part from the elderly, you never saw anyone just sitting in front of their house, contemplating the clouds, as was normal in Shitang. Everyone in Wenling (“Warm Mountain”) seemed to be very proud of their work and dedicated to building a strong industry. My new surroundings seemed much nicer and more modern than my grandparents’ draughty stone house, yet I wasn’t sure if I was going to be happier here.
The big news for me upon arriving in Wenling, however, was that I had a brother. He was two years older than me, and we hated each other immediately.
The reasons for our enmity were many and complex. We had never lived together. He was nearly nine when I first met him. I noticed how his upper lip quivered and how he squinted at me through his glasses, as if I was an irritating pest. I was an invader, a threat to his material and emotional comfort. My brother had an instant prejudice against me and I was convinced that this attitude was encouraged by my mother, who had given me away to the goat-herding Wong family for adoption when I was born.
The hierarchy in our family was obvious: my father was most important, then my brother, then my mother, and I was the insignificant flea unworthy of attention.
At mealtimes my mother would save all the precious pork for my father and brother. If I reached for the meat, she would beat my chopsticks back and order me to wait until the men had finished eating. I was her last concern. Not only that, but I was also one of the youngest in the compound, and became an easy target for the boys. Warm Mountain turned out not to be so warm after all.
The winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize will be announced on May 14 – see rsliterature.org/award/ rsl-ondaatje-prize
To order the books highlighted on this page, see books.telegraph.co.uk