A Celebrity Author Sighting

In January 2006 I was in Mumbai with my wife. I was quite ill, having eaten a chicken salad sandwich that hadn’t been properly refrigerated in a little restaurant near the Ajanta Caves two days earlier. Dianne somehow knew the food was bad and warned me, but I didn’t listen to her and was sorry later.

We were staying at the YWCA, which was clean, quiet, a bit Spartan, and relatively inexpensive given the rates in cosmopolitan Mumbai. There was a small air conditioning unit in our room, but it didn’t work very well.

The Y is located a few blocks from the Taj Mahal Hotel. This is the place that came under attack by terrorists in December. It is huge and gorgeous; a throwback to the colonial era, but the hotel’s powerful central air conditioning system was all that mattered to me. I knew I would feel much better if I could just sit in the lobby for a while. Late in the afternoon I shuffled over there with Dianne’s assistance.

When I walked into the hotel lobby the first person I saw was John Updike. He was dressed in green slacks and he looked sharp and relaxed. He was smiling.

I didn’t greet him or attempt to start a conversation. I respected his privacy and I was in awe of him. I was also afraid I might vomit again.

I was deeply surprised to see this iconic writer in the Taj lobby, a man who chronicled life in the American suburbs with such acuity. John Updike was the last person I ever expected to see in Mumbai.

But why shouldn’t he be there? This story is really just another example of my midwestern parochial tendency to stereotype people.

I had seen him a year earlier standing behind me in line at the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore holding a stack of books to purchase, but no one would be surprised to see John Updike in the Met.

* * *

I attended a dinner with a group of booksellers, writers and publishers last weekend in Salt Lake City.

“We lost a great man in American letters this past week,” Eric Price, Executive Vice President at Grove Atlantic, said. He invited us to raise our glasses in a toast to Mr. Updike.

A few of us shared Updike stories. I described my sighting in Mumbai.

What really matters, of course, are his remarkable novels, stories and criticism. Updike could write sentences so emotionally precise and incisive that they are shocking.

There is a moment early on in Couples. Piet Hanemas is in church, half listening to a bad sermon, imagining his mistress naked, deeply aware of his own mortality, and watching his daughter in the choir. The paragraph ends with this image: “his death leaned above him like a perfectly clear plate of glass.”

Astonishing.