Life of a Rhodes shortlist: Why this Booker Prize is a cruel reminder

Finally, I thought, a reward worthy of a shout out, of true merit for this beautiful emirate otherwise sold on brick-and-mortar pride. Finally, something different!

For the whole of Thursday evening gone by, I was not just hopeful but fervidly confident that this year’s Booker Prize, the showpiece literary award that’s brought more riches than recognition to outstanding English-speaking fiction writers for over half a century, was coming to Dubai. Finally, I thought, a reward worthy of a shout out, of true merit for this beautiful emirate otherwise sold on brick-and-mortar pride. Finally, something different!

And I was not alone in the newsroom that evening who believed Burnt Sugar, the story of a complex mother-daughter relationship, described by the Booker panel as “sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit” by first-time American author of Indian origin Avni Doshi, had won. And that it was just a matter of time before she would rise above the shimmering Dubai skyline, with her acceptance speech to make global headlines.

Such was our conviction that we had already set ourselves up for a live interview with the mother of two at her Jumeirah home. It was agreed that she would speak to us on camera the moment the winning author’s customary press conference was over, post-results ceremony. Of course, that would have meant waiting until well past midnight here in Dubai (we knew the virtual awards ceremony, with today’s Covid-19 norms, would only begin streaming 7pm GMT, 8pm BST, and 11pm UAE time) on a lovely November weekend night when most people who watch us would probably be making merry. But, we stuck to it because for us it was not just another page 1 story that we were after but one that belonged to Dubai. One that had to be done at any cost.

So, for a whole lot of us, the wait only got nervier with every minute as the hour hand got closer to midnight.

The copy had long been written and subbed in anticipation, the headline fixed, and the page ready to be spooled. And although the deadline hour had long gone, it just didn’t matter as we waited on, watching Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, share her love for reading at the virtual awards ceremony, also headlined by none other than Barack Obama.

As the interviewer assigned for the job, I even began seeing that moment playing out in my head, of meeting the latest winner of the famous Booker Prize. One that’s gone to Nobel laureates like VS Naipaul, William Golding and J.M. Coetzee and literary giants like Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood in the past. One that’s made coloured authors from faraway countries famous, writers like Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss), Aarvind Adiga (The White Tiger) and Ben Okri (The Famished Road) household names.

But all of that came crashing with one tweet just past midnight when the Booker committee finally declared Scot Douglas Stewart the winner for his debut novel Shuggie Bain. And within minutes, Avni Doshi was all but forgotten. An American best-selling author of Indian descent, a mother of two, a Dubai resident and a Booker hopeful was now just that and someone in a list of six that had been whittled down from 160-odd entries. And by this time next year, she would even have to make way for new shortlisted authors ready to soak up fresh newspaper inches and columns.

The spotlight had, in a flash, shifted to a 43-year-old man and his moving account inspired by his own life while growing up in hard times in Glasgow in the 1980s. An Indian mother and her daughter’s story that until moments ago seemed so overpowering had suddenly faded into nothingness. Just like the fate my statements of purpose met, twice in a row – in 2004 and 2005, at the hands of the members of the committee that selects six Indian Rhodes Scholars to study at Oxford University every year. Just like how the spotlight flickered and faded away when it was only promising to shine on me – not once but twice.

That was the Rhodes scholarship, one of the world’s most prestigious student grants and this is the Booker. But who knows? The feeling of ending up on the wayside of a shortlist is perhaps the same. The freefall from being potential ‘someone’ to a ‘no one’ in a few months, if not weeks, perhaps hits you just as hard and rough. Who knows?

On Thursday (early Friday), while pulling myself out of the interview that never happened, Stewart’s win (and Doshi’s loss) served me yet another cold reminder of the downsides of living life as a shortlist!

abhishek@khaleejtimes.com