Poornima Manco

Author

Novella

Distil and percolate

by

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

by

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. 🌹