Margaret Atwood is the oracle of our troubled times

"The prologue to the Margaret Atwood story is the Margaret Atwood story."

I caught that gem of a line eavesdropping on a pair of women (whom I had dismissed moments before, a trifle irrationally I admit, because one them had said: I met David Remnick on a plane! He writes so beautifully!) seated next to me at the India Habitat Centre's Stein Auditorium, while waiting for Canada's best export (okay, at least in the pre-Justin Trudeau era) to show up on stage.

I was 40 minutes early to an event, a rare occurence by all measure, and I was accosted by a battalion of aggressive litterateurs greedy for a slice of the Margaret Eleanor Atwood. Beating my diminutiveness with a handy press card, and flaunting the acquired sense of entitlement that Delhi bestows on the political class and the media, I got in, elbowing out the less fortunate army of disgruntled others who couldn't. The theatre was jam-packed, not a seat unoccupied: a sign that Delhi took "global authors" very seriously.

Yet the "standing ovation" which followed right after Atwood (along with historian and author Patrick French) stepped on the lit-up dais, said something else. That, I fathomed, was not exactly a by-product of any literary high seriousness, but of pure adulation, something Delhi usually reserves for male Nobel laureates like Orhan Pamuk and VS Naipaul. But here, was a different story (the Booker may be a reason). Almost everyone had a copy of an Atwood book - The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, MaddAddam, as well as the latest, The Heart Goes Last. (Confession: I had carried none.)

Just back from Jaipur Literature Festival, where she delivered the keynote speech (as well as was a part of two other sessions, remarkably engaging, I am told by my colleagues who covered JLF this year) Atwood beamed like a beacon of wisdom accumulated over the years. Yet, as she started speaking, it quickly became evident that she was easily the youngest person in the hall. She had the youngest mind - agile, alert and ever self-deprecating.

Sample these snippets:

• Patrick French: "You were born in 1939."
• Margaret Atwood: "At the end of it!"
•  
• PF: "How was it like to be from Ottawa in remoter part of Canada?"
• MA: "Ottawa wasn't the remoter part; it was the capital!"
•  
• PF: "What do you think of Justin Trudeau?"
• MA: "He's cooler than Canada… Canada needs to live up to young Justin first."
•  
• PF: "What would you say is your genre?"
• MA: "Genre is only good for bookstores."

So much for "old age", of which she reminds everyone all the time. And for someone who specialises in dystopic "speculative fiction" (Jules Verne is the Big Daddy of spec-fic, as opposed to HG Wells, the progenitor of sci-fi: she says), she has a ready hilarity about her. She's mildly amused by the early propriety of French's questions: "Are you formed by wilderness?" "Did security feature in your early writing?" "What about survival?"

And she answered them all, with a quirky smile and a twinkle in her eye (I imagine it was there, despite the glare of spotlights, and she often shielded her face with her hand to look at us, the audience).   

"No kindergarten during war, you know."

She meant the Second World War, of course, which had begun almost coevally the year she was born - 1939. "My brother had a better oeuvre then; I was supposed to be the botanist. Now he's a neuroscientist, he's cured I guess, and I got the writing bug."   

How easily she shifts from the Earl Grey Players who dished out Shakespeare for the Atwood kids to how "nebulous" the concept of Canada was in the 1950s, to everyone except New York City publishers, of course, who wanted more "roots". But there was something deaf, dumb, and mute about the Canada of novelistic imagination then, she says, because it simply wasn't there.

In a way, Atwood is perhaps both the mother and the mid-wife of Canadian literature, at least of its Anglophone version, although she has undertaken numerous collaborative projects of translation, writing down of Inuit and indigenous experiences, bringing out voices previously unheard from native "First Nation" quarters, and firmly standing behind a narrative (and political) equality for all.

(Just how proud she is that Canada's new justice minister is a person of indigenous origin, and that its defence minister is a Sikh!)

Her domicile gave her enough foreignness on Euro-American shores. Canada's colonial past gives her, and a horde of other writers from that country, the envied of dual/multiple consciousness that comes from a natural sense of exile. And in this time of the great migrant churn (hardly extraordinary, she gently chides), the émigré experience is basically thrust upon individuals with a particular background. The roots are floating, because the land is being remapped, every single day.

India is not new to her: in fact, this is her third visit. There was an Iran-Afghanistan-India sojourn in the 70s, she says. "I was writing in the bathrooms then", she declares, because that's what you apparently do when you have a toddler which needs to sleep. Okay.

Obviously, now the discussion steers towards religion, because it seems that these lands are "known" for such stuff. "No religion has a monopoly on how they treat their women." See, that radiant wisdom. I think of the Oracle, from the Matrix trilogy, and certainly not as an affront. (She blooms at the very mention of Trudeau, in whom, and just take my word for this, she sees a veritable Neo.) Also, Oracle, the computer language; because she's such a nerd herself, obsessing ever so soberly about all things tech.

Surveillance, for-profit prisons, a reversible citizens becoming inmates becoming citizens arrangement, a high-tech world that's essentially a panopticon - everything is incarcerated and monetised. That, in Atwood's eyes, is just how it is. Almost. "Human beings need to invent themselves out of their inventiveness now," she kids.

[Here she gives us all an exercise in counter-intuition. "Imagine 1491, the year before Christopher Columbus set sail to (unwittingly reach) America. More than all the violence wrought by war, by the sword and the cannon fire, something was even more deadly. Measles. Ninety per cent of indigenous Americans died because of European diseases that sailors brought with themselves, against which the Red Indians and other aboriginals had no immunity."]

Before there was biological warfare, biology was warfare. And she drops this blistering nugget of profundity casually, wearing a tragic smirk of awareness across time and space.   

Religion, technology, vanishing languages, barren lands, snow, snow, trappers, agriculturalists, Inuit mothers, Canadian children, Lord Voldemort/Darth Vader of Canadian politics (aka Stephen Harper): is there anything that doesn't interest her? Even Donald Trump does, it appears, for she sternly warns against dismissing America's Mister Fool as just a comic distraction. "Evil does as evil speaks", she admonishes. Evil is farcical, yes, but don't take it lightly.

We won't. But can you come back already, Margaret Eleanor Atwood?