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

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

Kesariya balam, padharo
mhare des.

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.

What happened next undid
me.

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.