Ahead of R.K. Narayan’s 120th birth anniversary, a new book inspired by the R.K. Narayan Museum in Mysuru, tells a story about friendship, memory, and how people can come together to preserve legacy.
Author Sita Bhaskar was born in Bombay and educated in different cities in India but completed her college education in Bengaluru. “I’ve lived a significant part of my adult life in America. My entire career has been in information technology. Now I distribute my time between Mysuru, India, and Madison, Wisconsin, in America,” she says. For as long as she can remember, she has always been interested in books, especially reading them. “I grew up back in the day when you went to the British Council for books. My parents imposed no restrictions on what I read – which, to me, was the best gift they gave me,” she adds. A self-admittedly ‘late entrant to the writing arena’, Bhaskar started writing when she was an empty nester. “There wasn’t a Eureka moment when I got interested in writing. I just drifted into it, and when I realised how woefully inadequate my knowledge about writing was, I started attending different creative writing workshops and honed my skill sets in that area,” she says.
Her first two books, ‘Flirting With Trouble’ and ‘Shielding Her Modesty’, were cross-cultural stories about the Indian diaspora and their intersection with different aspects of life in America. “Since I belong to this diaspora, it was an interesting experience writing those two books because sometimes you are the outsider looking in and in other cases, you are the insider looking out. My third book was an epistolary novel, written with a co-author, Sabarna Roy. That was the first time I had worked with someone else on the same book, and it was a great exercise. The letters were tossed back and forth between the two of us. So, I didn’t know the next steps my female protagonist would take until she received a letter from the male protagonist,” she says.
Her new book tells the story of Rukmini aunty, whose newly built house in Mysore is next to the illustrious writer R.K. Narayan. His heritage home is being torn down, but city authorities declare it as a heritage building and stop the demolition. The book takes one on a fascinating journey of how Rukmini aunty and the ‘R.K. Narayan Fan Club’ ladies group beat the odds to save the house. “I am an outsider to Mysuru. I moved here about five or six years back. I don’t have the two- or three-generation history that other folks here have. I find that very liberating. While creating a protagonist like Rukmini aunty and her mission, I am not burdened by the set-in-stone narrative that would weigh down an insider, and it frees up my mind to explore the constant questions I asked myself while writing – what R.K. Narayan would do in this situation,” she explains.
While Bhaskar likes to read contemporary literary fiction and translations from regional languages into English, she writes largely on cross-cultural fiction since her life experiences straddle two cultures. For someone who infuses a dash of humour in writing she admits that if the sentences and dialogue flow easily while writing, it isn’t hard. “It depends on the characters. I am in the head of my characters when I write. I carry on imaginary conversations in my mind without thinking if what I am writing is humorous or not. Most often it is only after I read what I have written that it dawns on me that it is humorous. Forced humour is hard to write and even harder for the person reading,” she explains.
Human behaviour is the source of her inspiration – their quirks, their laments, swimming against the tide, and their battle with life. “I am an unabashed conversation listener and an avid people watcher. At airports, hospitals, or any gathering, I am probably one of few people who is not looking down at their mobile device but looking around with insatiable curiosity. I draw my inspiration from the hustle and bustle of the world around me,” she says. Looking ahead, she wants to overcome her tendency to start writing books and abandon them when she gets stuck in between. “My future plans would be to impose some self-discipline and hunker down and finish those books,” she signs off.
