When I picked up Rasana Atreya’s Daughters Inherit Silence this Sunday, it was because I wanted a quick emotional read. After lunch I headed to Facebook to see if I could get some latest recommendations for a quick read. The title of the book caught my attention and I also remembered Rasana being anxious about the name of the protagonist sounding similar to Covid when the pandemic broke out a year ago. Eventually she persisted with the name and I wanted to check out what her Covid had been up to!!
It turned out it was Kovid and he had been busy building lives rather than ruining them.
A roller coaster ride of emotions
I ordered the book around 3:30 p.m. and 8:30 the next morning I turned the last page. Okay, flipped it since I was reading on Kindle!!
The book was a roller coaster ride of emotions that I could not put down. It was very obvious from the page one that the widowed protagonist Jaya would remarry but still the words held me in. And the biggest surprise was when she does remarry just half way through the book. So what was the rest of the book about?
Well, it was about the back story of the women in this story, the story of how we as a society treat our women and girls. The story of how we fail to look beyond the surface because we lack both perspective and maturity.
My journey as a reader
I found the book to be special for a different reason as well. I am not ashamed to admit that I grew up on bocks by foreign authors. If my tweens was spent poring over Three investigators and Hardy Boys, the teen ages were absorbed by Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. When I discovered Jeffrey Archer and Eric Segal in college, I was completely hooked. Yeah, I was never into Nancy Drew or Enid Blyton in school or M&Bs in college. As I grew up I discovered Ayn Rand and Alvin Toffler, who brought some depth to my reading!!
When it came to Indian writers, at least till my school days it was limited to Hindi. The likes of Premchand, Benipuri, Hari Shankar Parsai, Jaishankar Prasad, Subhadra Kumari Chouhan and Bhishm Sahani. In my adult life I discovered the likes of Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga and Jhumpa Lahiri.
A reader becomes a writer
All the books that I have mentioned till now were read as a reader. It was only some eight years ago, when I turn to freelancing that I thought of writing my own book and then I turned to reading books as a writer.
I of course revisited many of the books I had read earlier, now as a writer, and also gorged on new titles. I had always been disappointed, or maybe I had picked up the wrong books, in the way Indian writers were writing, starting with the esteemed Mr Chetan Bhagat. No depth in the story, superfluous emotions and just the need to hook the reader till the last page.
But when I read Daughters Inherit Silence, it brought out emotions in me and I connected with the characters. As a reader, that is most important for me. Unfortunately even as a writer that is very important for me and why I end up relegating my stories to a corner in the hard disk where I can forget about them. Because I feel I have not written as well as Erich Segal or Jeffrey Archer would have!!
But when I read Rasana’s book, I realised that penning down thoughts, stringing one sentence after another was more important. If my writing could connect with even some of the readers, I would have achieved my target.
You need good people in your life as well as stories
Coming back to the book, at some point in time I felt that Jaya, the protagonist, had been portrayed as being too fortunate in having a fiercely loyal brother and an understanding husband. It was the stuff fairy tales were made of and it didn’t happen in real life. At least not in India.
But then I realised, the story of Jaya became a story to be shared only because she had the good fortune to have such positive people in her life.
And that’s what stories should be — tales of optimism, love and empathy for each other.
Happy reading and writing to all my readers. I firmly believe that there is at least one story in every person, waiting to come out.
