Goodbye 2018!

The last days of the year cannot help but turn into nostalgia time. What was, what should have been and what shouldn't have been.
I try to focus on what was good for me or I'd become terribly weepy. And right now I'm trying to congratulate myself on the two books published last year: Sacked! Folktales You can Carry Around and You Cannot Have All the Answers, a short story collection for a grown up audience. Both books are special for me because their publication comes after years of effort.

·       What is Sacked about?

As it's title indicates, it’s a collection of folktales from different parts of India. To give a few examples—if we travel from north to south, “Why did the Fish Laugh?” hails from Kashmir, “The Palanquin of the Goddess” and “Roll my Pumpkin” from Uttarakhand, my home state, “The Fruit of Hard Work”, “The Barber’s Secret" and “Night into Day” from different regions of Uttar Pradesh, “The Talking Parrot and the Flying Horse” from West Bengal, “The Music Loving Demon” and “The Pots of Plenty” from Tamil Nadu, and “The Talking Doll” from Karnataka. At the same time I must reiterate that folktales are great travellers so it is hard to strictly fix a location. Different versions might be claimed by different regions.

I must add too, that there are stories for different tastes and different moods. While some are reflective, others will tickle your funny bone, and still others lead you into world full of the most amazing fantasy. There is also woman power, the power of devotion, the power of wit and the wisdom of the young. Best of all it’s the underdog who comes up on top each time. And this what I love about folktales!

You Cannot Have All the Answers…that’s exactly what this book is about. The answers we struggle to find while negotiating the maze of human existence. Frankly, not just these, but a lot of my stories are an attempt to search for answers to questions that have plagued me through the many years of my life, right from my childhood. Why does this happen? Why not that? And numerous other such puzzles. A lot of the time it remains a futile quest. But I feel that if I don’t persist in pursuing them, stories that need to be shared would remain buried.

The question some people have asked is how come you decided to write stories for grown-ups? Well, all kinds of stories take root in a writer’s mind and some of them relate to experiences that will resonate only with grownups. And when a story takes hold of you it won’t let you rest till you have narrated it, so children's writer or not, I had to tell these stories.

It’s hard for a writer to explain why a particular story seeks you out. I don’t want to make it sound like an arcane process but you cannot help wondering why someone decided to share a particular experience with you. Here I’m talking about the story “Cradle Song”. When it first appeared, a friend asked me, how did you think of writing a partition story? Your family did not experience Partition. I can’t remember exactly what I said then, but I feel in a sense we have all experienced partition. True, it was someone else’s story. But I got the feeling it was clamouring to be shared with a wider audience. It was the same with many of the other stories in this book and one by one they took shape on my computer screen.

Once a story is out of your system and nicely contained in a book, the empty space begins to fill up with more stories that want to be told. And writer that you are, you begin to search for the best words that will imprint them in the hearts and minds of readers.

But that is material for the new year...