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Three authors from Madras
CATCHING UP with three authors from Madras in a period of ten days, all published by Penguin India, two of them published abroad and the third who should have been, was quite a coincidence in the early days of the month. And meeting three rather disparate personalities was quite an experience.
Indu Sundaresan, who lives in Seattle, informed me that that was in the State of Washington in the northwest of the United States, then went on to congratulate me on pronouncing her name correctly. Leaving me rather nonplussed and wondering whether she thought I was an American or whether she thought she was still in America. Nevertheless, I got around to discovering that she had been as fascinated by the love story of The Twentieth Wife, Noor Jahan, and the Emperor Jehangir as she was by the architectural skills of the Empress. But I was rather taken aback by her view that if it wasn't for Noor Jahan, the Taj Mahal would not have been built. I'm still thinking about it, as suggested by her, trying to make the connection between Taj Mahal-builder Shah Jahan, Jehangir's son, Mumtaz Mahal and her aunt Noor Jahan's influence in the building of the world's most famous tomb, architecturally or otherwise. Maybe, the sequel, Feast of the Roses, those days of wedded bliss, will have the answer.
Not long after The Twentieth Wife, I caught up with The Uncoupling, indeed the story of the derailing of a long-surviving marriage. Its author, Cauvery Madhavan, is far more rooted in Madras still, so much so she drew a crowd of so many friends and relations that she burst into tears seeing them all and recalling the death of her father not so long ago that had touched all of them and left her with a sense of loss on the occasion of this first release of a book of hers in her hometown. Those tears, a new experience for me at the start of a book launch, left me rather bewildered over how to handle the situation. Fortunately, Cauvery Madhavan soon got into her stride and I was in minutes discovering that girls from Madras, even those from Stella Maris, were writing comfortably about Amsterdam's red light district and other such adventures, offering good old Madrasis a culture shock. Maybe there's a new Madras girl who has been emerging out there over the last twenty years whom I've not known and who knows all about canoodling beneath club cupolas in this staid city, to judge by what I've been reading in her first book, Paddy Indian, set in the Ireland she now lives in. Earthily Irish as Joyce's Blooms, Cauvery Madhavan's two books could be a pointer to Madras authors in the days ahead catching up with the more explicit world of English writing. My third author for the period was much more diplomatic than either of the others; which is only to be expected, seeing that T.S. Tirumurthi is a senior Indian diplomat in Washington. Of his Clive Avenue I have already made reference in this space (Miscellany, January 13). And the Alwarpet Brahmins he writes about are a nice comfortable experience, but the life around in Madras, that he provides glimpses of in the book and talks of a little less diplomatically, is not the most comfortable of experiences.
Factually correct or not, diplomatic or not, the best part of this ten-day period has been the discovery of Madras writing talent in English and the better crafting of popular fiction than many other Indian writers. Will this see many more writers from the city emerge, following the straightforward storytelling style of a R.K. Narayan, even if that is so different from their real or imagined worlds?
S.MUTHIAH
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
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Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
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