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A stage for your story

It is common for authors to create an imaginary domain to narrate their stories.
Last Updated 05 March 2015, 17:44 IST

A writer friend, incidentally a Scotsman, happened to tell me about a collection of ghost stories that had apparently been set in good old Bangalore. “Wonder why anyone would want to base a spooky tale here?” I said genuinely flummoxed. “Bangalore’s quite...tame, really.” “You’re brutally frank,” laughed the gentleman, “Yes, this could very well be a case of literary suicide, but also, Miss, you’d be surprised as to how often the most banal, insipid places (his words, not mine) could set the tone for a brilliant ghost story!”

This exchange got me thinking about the milieu of a novel and the aura surrounding it. Jane Austen’s 19th century England, with its balls and dancing, sewing and playing the pianoforte, provided the perfect setting to enact the comedy of manners, centred on property and matrimony. Against the backdrop of wild, romantic moors in Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, unfurled the tale of fierce, almost savage love between the lovely, high-spirited Cathy and the brooding, vengeful Heathcliff.

In the unforgettable ‘Crime and Punishment’, Fyodor Dostoevsky sketches a picture of a Russia, fraught with poverty and hardships, wherein the impecunious student Rodion Raskolnikov takes it upon himself to murder a mercenary elderly usurer in order to rid the society of a ‘louse’ and also to give practical expression to his theory that some people have the moral right to commit murder even if they are not driven to it by their circumstances.

In Rabindranath Tagore’ novel ‘Gora’ set in 18th century Bengal, the lead character’s rigid Hindu orthodoxy is offset by his lady love’s and her adoptive father’s allegiance to the Brahmo Samaj, which professed universal fraternity and the emancipation of women.
Experts in the field say that while establishing time period and atmosphere, one has to get the verbal equation just right, not giving sketchy details or too much of it. Now, not everyone could be an Ernest Hemingway, who combined brevity with genius, or a Thomas Hardy who was often overly liberal in his descriptions, yet marvellous. Also, a good writer should possess the ability to engage all five senses of the reader, not just the visual.

It is not uncommon for authors to create an imaginary domain to narrate their stories. Malgudi, a concocted blend, apparently of Malleshwaram and Basavanagudi, became the turf of RK Narayan’s memorable narratives.

In my internationally released recent novel, ‘Gold and Datura’, I too created the fictitious suburb of ‘Pattina’, which could be the sample representative of any small town in Karnataka. Pattina has many typical elements of small-town India i.e. narrow pot-holed roads, umpteen little temples, old traditional houses with shingled roofs or new garishly painted ones, apart from an ambience of religious hypocrisy and stifling social norms, making it a decidedly difficult place for the golden-skinned protagonist, Kanak – incidentally, born with the ‘boon’ of a super high IQ and the ‘bane’ of a complex loco-motor disability – to thrive.

The setting, along with other circumstances, is instrumental in the transmutation of the noble, golden-hearted girl into the lethal vengeful datura or poison, raising haunting, pertinent questions about the various malaises plaguing India, especially the lamentable plight of its differently-abled citizens.

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(Published 05 March 2015, 17:44 IST)

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