Here is the story of how I came to be a writer (and other things):
"My granddaughter can read English! The first child in our family to go to an English-medium school," said my nani, my maternal grandmother, way back in the 1990s. While I stood near the kitchen window and read a story, she beamed with pride, even though she couldn’t understand a word. I knew then that English was my destiny—it couldn't have been otherwise; I loved stories and English was the first language I was taught to write in at school.
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But some destinies are entangled in karmic debts, and mine certainly was. Generational poverty ensured that when my father succeeded as a scientist, science and related careers became the magic wand we all learned to wield in order to keep marching ahead on the road to financial and social progress. There was certainly no time to write or make art. But I had seen my mother, an over-educated homemaker, whose creative talents never reached beyond the four walls of her own home and I knew I had to somehow find the courage to nurture everything I had inherited from her. It was only much later, in my 30's, that I found the space and time to sidestep from a career in IT and start shaping a life centered around writing and art.
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The English I write, is in one way or another, a translated form of the languages most close to me: Hindi and Gujarati. This is the reason I feel at home while reading works translated into English, be it novellas by Japanese women authors or Russian classics from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. My stories tell of protagonists on restless quests, their thwarted pursuits like a dream we all know too well—searching endlessly for what cannot be found, caught in the haze of something always just beyond grasp.​
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I am currently drafting a novel set in a small town in India, where the sole surviving member of a family grapples with her inheritance, torn between its legacy and her search for deeper roots.
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Thanks for dropping by!
