Poornima Manco

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Hurry up, slow down

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Where has 2019 gone? I mean, seriously! I know we tend to say this every year when we look back, but this year in particular, has just sped past. Scarily so! Is this a side-effect of ageing? Remember when we were children and time seemed to pass soooo slowwwwly?

So why the ‘hurry up’ in the title of this blog post? Well, it’s quite a personal thing. You see, I am now more than ever, acutely aware that my time on this planet is limited. Gone are the days of youthful insouciance, knowing in one’s bones that there are decades to follow, many many years to accomplish, live, love, party and work. Now, it’s a slow winding down to a more sedate living; less partying, possible retirement and fewer accomplishments. Not yet, I know, but not that far off in the future either.

Hence, there is a need within me to try and hurry up in accomplishing all the goals I have set myself. Writing more books, travelling to far-flung places, reading all the classics I missed the first time around, watching highly-regarded Television shows, discovering little-known gems of movies, doing more and being more. All these desires and the realisation of the paucity of time.

One could argue that no-one knows exactly how long we have to live, so really, the mantra should be to live every day as if it were your last. In reality, though, that is an exhausting thought. Who wants to spend each day chasing goals? I don’t know about you, but I have good days and bad days. Days that I want to do sod-all and days that I am at my productive best. It is in fits and starts and bursts of energy and inspiration that I move forward.

My slow down is an appeal not just to time (when has that ever happened?) but also to myself. In hurtling towards doing more and being more, it’s easy to miss the beauty of just being. There is so much joy and satisfaction to be found in sitting around a dinner table with your family, discussing the mundane details of life. Such pleasure to be had over a cup of coffee with a friend, catching up or reminiscing. So much contentment in sipping a glass of wine in front of the fireplace, sitting quietly with your partner, letting the hypnotic dance of the flames lull you into a serene state of equanimity.

Perhaps it is finding a balance between the hurrying up and slowing down that allows one to live one’s best life. So, here’s to 2020. May it be the best of both.

🍾🥂🎊

Half of a lifetime

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Today is a pretty significant day in my life. I haven’t tom-tommed about it everywhere, in fact not even my nearest and dearest know, but I have been thinking about it all day long. Today marks exactly half my life of being in Britain. This was the first day, all those years ago, that I entered the United Kingdom with a work visa in my hand, stars in my eyes and trepidation in my heart.

It was meant to be temporary, no more than three years and then I would’ve transferred to Hong Kong. Three years seemed like a very long time, but here I am, more than two decades later and it seems to have gone in the blink of an eye.

I am a naturalised British citizen now and very proud of the fact too. However, somewhere within me, an umbilical cord still binds me to my birthplace. I miss the seasons, the colours, the clothes, the food and most of all, my family and friends who still remain in India. However, Britain has given me so much as well. I have my own family here, I have many friends, my job, my hobbies, the freedom to be who I want to be, to reinvent myself, to be fearless and experimental, all of these are boons granted to me by this land.

I cannot lie though and say that everything has been smooth sailing. Adopting a new country as your own and adapting to its culture and norms can be quite terrifying. Even being fluent in English wasn’t enough at times, because my accent wasn’t right. The Indians here weren’t like the Indians in India, and I had to learn a new subset of behaviours and beliefs. Similarly, with the Britons, I had to understand that it could take years before acceptance and true assimilation could occur.

In all of this, I have learned to grow, to evolve, to change that which needed changing and hold on to that which I refused to change. My value system is Indian and will continue to be so, but my outlook has broadened enough to see the fault lines in what I left behind.

What would I consider myself today? An Anglicised Indian? I think not. The world is shrinking at a breathtaking pace. Not in terms of geography, but certainly in terms of connectivity. I am fortunate enough to have travelled to many parts of the globe, and if there’s one thing I can say confidently, it is this: I find myself falling in step with a country and a culture almost seamlessly, even if the language, currency, food and features are palpably alien.

Hence, even though I detest labels, the one I would most identify with at this point, is that of a global citizen. A hokey sentiment? Maybe. But one that feels most true to who I am today.

All those years ago, when I left home to pursue my career ambitions, I had no idea where I would end up and what I would end up doing. In twenty-odd years, I have lived a life I could only have dreamed of. A life filled with love, laughter, happiness, sorrow, career highs and career lows. I have been delighted to discover some wonderful facets to myself and been equally dismayed to find that I am also chock full of flaws. I have become a wife and a mother, I have become a teacher and a writer. I have travelled the world and I have retreated into superlative books.

If I am fortunate enough to have another few decades of life left on this planet, then all I could ask for, with humility and gratitude, is more of the same.

The extroverted introvert

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Does this sound like you?

I’ve just come back from the largest Indie book conference in the world, where I learned so much and made many new friends, but you know what my most surprising takeaway was? The fact that, at heart, most writers are introverts. As am I.

I’ve always pretended to be an extrovert, be happy in company and at parties, even enjoyed the spotlight to a large extent, but somewhere within me I’ve always known, that given half a chance, I would rather be curled up on my sofa reading a book.

A lot of it could be down to my background and upbringing. I am an only child, and in my childhood with both parents working, I had no choice but to embrace reading and escape into other worlds or do the same with my imagination. Which, I suppose, in turn, led me to become a writer.

The other aspect of my nature is the desire to melt into the background, to become an observer of people and life, to take mental notes and file them away for future reference. What are writers but people who carefully curate experiences to create experiences for their readers?

So, looking around a room of 1000 strangers, I had a mild panic attack. How would I possibly get by for the next three days? I knew no one, and although we were all there to learn something, to grow, to expand our minds and our readership, we were still unknown quantities to each other.

I really needn’t have worried. Just as a country has its own language, we had ours. ‘Reader magnets’, CPCs, Beta readers, Bookbub deals – words and terms that would be incomprehensible to a layperson, became the vocabulary we introduced ourselves with. ‘Reverse harem’, ‘LitRPG’, ‘Space Opera’ were genres I started to grasp. Most importantly though, I came to understand, that here was a humongous tribe of (mostly) introverts who had pushed themselves out of their comfort zones to mingle with and learn from other equally terrified introverts.

There was absolutely no pressure to socialise if you didn’t want to. If you did, however, you were welcomed into groups with a rare and genuine kinship. In an extremely intense and enjoyable few days, I found myself relaxing into being just me. This me could be an extrovert or an introvert, depending on my mood. And that was okay because these were people who understood because this was them too.

On any given day, we are a multitude of things. I know that I am, for the most part, an extroverted introvert. Which means that after I have spent a lot of time in the company of people, I need to retreat and recharge my batteries for quite a while before I venture into company again. Some people will read this and say, “You? Never!” Because the facade is a good one. But I am also the person who can get extremely shy, awkward and tongue-tied amongst people. Often I’ve had to give myself a very stern talking-to before meeting someone new, for fear of making a complete fool of myself. I am incredibly diffident about approaching people, and the tiniest rebuff can dent my confidence for days.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to be aware that sometimes people aren’t who they appear to be.

For the world I may seem to be a confident go-getter, travelling around the world, ready to plunge into any new experience, up for a laugh or a party at the drop of a hat. In reality, I am shy, very critical of myself, lazy to a large extent and an over-thinker to a painful degree. I am no different from any other human being. We are all bundles of contradictions.

Maybe its time to discard all such labels and to embrace our faults and our foibles, to delight in the many positive qualities we have been endowed with, work hard to overcome our shortcomings, but also to never ever lose sight of the fact that regardless of who or what kind of people we are, there is a reason for and a value to our existence.

 

Distil and percolate

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I was asked an interesting question recently. As most of you know, all my books have Indian settings and characters. It is a milieu I am intimately familiar with, having been born and raised in New Delhi. Those formative years are what I plumb for my locales, my characters and their stories. I am an Indian by birth, and even though I am a naturalised British citizen now, nothing can take that Indian identity out of me.

The question was, why didn’t I write stories based in the United Kingdom? After all, I have lived here for over two decades and surely that counts for something?

That got me thinking. Why am I unable to translate what I see around me, or my own experiences into stories worth telling? The answer, I think, is distance and perspective.

When I look back on my time in India, it seems like another life. A life that I lived well and enjoyed too, but I was a different person back then. It is so much easier for me to distil those experiences and percolate them to you in the form of my stories or novella. Far far more difficult to do that about my life in the here and now.

That’s not to say that I will not do this someday. Maybe even someday soon. But chances are, that it will take a few more years for these stories to fructify. In the meantime, I will continue to write what comes naturally to me, and if that just happens to be another tale, set in the fertile land of my birthplace, well, so be it!

Parvathy’s Well & other stories

Damage

The Intimacy of Loss: A Novella

Up close and personal

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Loss is universal. It is something each one of us will encounter at some point in our lives. Yet, how we deal with it is an intensely personal experience. Some of us will rage against the unfairness of it, some will accept it as our due, others will go into a state of denial, others still will perhaps find unhealthy crutches to lean on. No matter how we process loss, one thing we can be utterly and completely sure of is that we will be touched by it.

My own biggest loss was that of my mother. I was 27, newly married, living over 4000 miles away, and still trying to come to terms with the separation that my career and now, marriage had created between us. My mother had been my fulcrum for most of my life. She was the strongest, bravest, most beautiful lady that I had looked up to for nearly two decades. However, she was not without her faults, and as I grew out of my teens and set foot into my twenties, suddenly, for some unknown reason, her inadequacies were all I could focus on. Perhaps, that was Nature’s way of making sure that I would be able to fly the nest. But how hurtful it must have been for her to see this daughter, her only child, the one who had previously idolised her, turn cold and indifferent. Thankfully, that state did not last long. Sadly though, much before I could tell her how much she meant to me and how much I loved her, she was gone.

Everything I write today, is in some way or the other, dedicated to her. I can only hope to be half of the woman she was.

The Intimacy of Loss, my first novella, deals with the loss of innocence, the splintering of a family and the loss of a society’s morality. Puja is a teenage girl grappling with her sense of self, the dynamics of friendships and family ties and a strange, inexplicable bond that springs up between her and an outcast of society. It is a tale laced with loss, but also with love and hope.

I hope it is one my mother would be proud of.

You can buy the book at:

The Intimacy of Loss: A Novella

Don’t forget to review it once read. All your feedback is immensely valuable to me. Many thanks and happy reading. 🌹

Wrung out

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“I don’t know how you do it!” is a refrain I hear often. The ‘it’ being – working which involves a lot of travel, taking care of home which involves cleaning, cooking, doing the chores while also parenting and trying to be a supportive partner, while keeping up with my exercise and friends, TV shows, movies, reading and writing. All of this is in no particular order as depending on the day and the need, the hierarchy gets moved around a fair bit.

Now, if I were to be honest, while I may look swan-like getting it all done, there is some furious paddling going on beneath the water, and often times tasks are either hurriedly done or left completely by the wayside. Neither of which are desirable outcomes. My story is no different to any other working mother, some of whom don’t even have the kind of super supportive husband that I do.

The month of June was meant to be the month I took off social media to focus on work and writing. I have done both, but life does have a funny old way of throwing a spanner in the works.

My daughter’s A levels are going on, and rather than being that nagging mother who is on her back 24/7 haranguing her to study, I thought, this would be the perfect month to work to my max, and stay out of her hair. After all, at this late stage, it’s better for her to have a relaxed state of mind to sit her exams. What I couldn’t possibly have foreseen is the ill health of my second daughter. An ear infection that has her screaming in agony, sleepless nights, an allergic reaction to the antibiotics, another rushed visit to the doctor’s, being given an unsigned prescription on a Friday evening making it near impossible to procure the medication, husband running from pillar to post and finally, miraculously, through some fortuitous messaging, getting a hold of the meds.

While the medicines do their work, I am at work again. This time, however, I find I have a short fuse, am completely exhausted and totally unable to string a coherent sentence together. Writing? Once again on the back burner.

Sometimes I despair that I’ll never become the sort of serious writer I aspire to be. The one who gets up each morning and in a very disciplined manner, trots out a couple of thousand words before serenely taking out the garbage and getting the rest of her chores done.

Me – I write when I can, where I can. Sometimes, not for weeks. And when I do, it’s not always the best quality. What hope is there for me?

My mother always said that I could be a bulldog about the things that I wanted. I really want… no, I really need to write. I guess its sheer tenacity that keeps me going. That, and a sense of catharsis and peace. Each time I sit down to write, I feel like I’m coming home. This is where I’m meant to be, this is what I’m meant to do.

So, in answer to the oft repeated question, how do I do it? I do it. Badly, haphazardly, intermittently. Still, I keep going. Tired and wrung out as I am, it’s the only way I know how to live. All those multiple balls in the air… some will fall, some will roll away, but I’ll keep juggling them till I have breath left in me.

Now, I’ll go take a nap.