Cooking Up A Book by Cauvery Madhavan 

by Cauvery Madhavan

Twenty years ago, I abandoned my husband and three children for a brief ten days and headed down to deepest West Cork to figure out if I wanted to be a writer or a cook. Was I going to start my first novel or was I going to make something out of my love for the culinary arts? In the end, I didn’t have to make a choice – all these years later I’m doing both – because writing and cooking are comfortable, compatible companions, sharing the same creative processes.

Much like my cooking, my writing begins with extensive prepping. I gather everything relevant about the era and period I’m writing in. I watch movies and documentaries, look at art, listen to music, browse through catalogues and letters, official state papers and newspapers. I try and travel to the places were my story is set, visit any existing buildings, premises and homes and take photographs of locales, houses and streets. This is invaluable when you need to season your writing with detail but have a menopausal memory.

Sometimes food and ideas can be enhanced with careful and select marination. Total immersion is a useful technique that can give a flavoursome result but if one lingers too long , as I have learnt to my dismay, can leave you completely overwhelmed. The danger of over enthusiastic prepping for a novel is that you can easily get side tracked . I know – I was researching Irish soldiers and their Regiments in India in the 1920s and instead, two years later, found myself no further in my writing but an absolute armchair expert in the sport of pig sticking.

Dear Reader, I lie not.

Once the background material is gathered, it’s time to bring things together – I’m thinking along the lines of a stir fry. I almost always know when I’m ready to write – the plot feels hot, the brain begins sizzling with ideas – and that’s when I commit finger to keyboard. Mixing and blending your story lines with information gleaned from research and bringing everything together on a high flame takes more than a bit of care. You have to be sincerely committed at this stage to keeping the momentum going. Lower the flame and your writing will go from crisp to soggy and who could stomach that?

At this stage, I read and reread my writing constantly, editing as I go, tasting and then seasoning, if needed, on a daily basis.

But what if your soufflé has collapsed and you have writer’s block? If you think like a good cook you can be creative – eat out instead, call to your mothers’ even. My solution is to tell myself that suffering from writer’s block affirms my belief that I am a writer. I then jump into my car and head down to West Cork to sit at a desk by a window. This single-glazed window with stiff catches and beads of condensation glinting in the early morning sun is no ordinary window for, beyond it is the Ireland I love. A few yards from where I sit, the Kealincha river rumbles over a series of tall upright rocks, moving swiftly past banks of hazelnut groves in a headlong rush towards the wide expanse of Coulagh Bay, a mile or so away. On the flat sands where river meets ocean, the mingling of waters is fluid and gentle, they wrap arms around each other like long lost friends.

Miles across the bay are the mountains of Kerry and I look at houses, mere dots on that faraway peninsula and speculate about the lives of people who live in them. Is there anyone there, in distant Caherdaniel, struggling with writer’s block or a collapsed soufflé? Or am I the only one sitting at a window?

Closer still is Kilcatherine Point, where ancient stone walls run right down to cliff edge and a yellow tractor parks up in the yard by a pink farmhouse. Nearby a lone bull has been galloping the length and breadth of his steep field and suddenly comes to a stop beside a bank of
bright yellow gorse.

What’s his story I wonder?

Even as I write, the green collage of hillside pastures begins to fade in a fine mist. A band of rain moves in and the wind plays with the rain, driving it in sideways sheets. I am not despondent, I can see the clearance following from the West – there will be rainbows and soon I’ll be waxing lyrical, cooking up a book again.

—

THE TAINTED, Cauvery Madhavan

It’s spring 1920 in the small military town of Nandagiri in southeast India. Colonel Aylmer, commander of the Royal Irish Kildare Rangers, is in charge. A distance away, decently hidden from view, lies the native part of Nandagiri with its heaving bazaar, reeking streets, and brothels. Everyone in Nandagiri knows their place and the part they were born to play—with one exception.

The local Anglo-Indians, tainted by their mixed blood, belong nowhere. When news of the Black and Tans’ atrocities back in Ireland reaches the troops, even their priest cannot cool the men’s hot-headed rage. Politics vie with passion as Private Michael Flaherty pays court to Rose, Mrs. Aylmer’s Anglo-Indian maid, but mutiny brings heroism and heartbreak in equal measure.

Only the arrival of Colonel Aylmer’s grandson Richard, some 60 years later, will set off the reckoning, when those who were parted will be reunited, and those who were lost will be found again.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing