Collecting Facts for Daughter of Luharu
“I have been collecting facts for Daughter of Luharu for decades”
– Monica Gupta
Science says, cerebrum is made up of grey and white matter, comprising of cells and nerves, but mine I say is made of stories, events and characters – real and imagined. I am an introvert, a little marginalized in expressing emotions. Forget reaction, I usually display delayed responses. And most often things are left inside me unexpressed. As a result, I ruminate over incidents and characters. I visualize their pain, suffering, spirit and fortitude and then there is an innate need to express it in my own way with my pen and paper.
I am often convinced while I am ruminating that my attention has always been drawn to pain and suffering. It pulls me. I get curious. How did they survive? What saved them from falling apart? What was the driving force? It gives me a high when I look at the sequence of events, how those unfolded and the consequences. This is what makes me a writer.
I have had the privilege and opportunity to travel, or let’s say migrate within India a few times in my growing-up years. I was born in a small town of Haryana and soon after my parents migrated to Gujarat for business expansion. I was later sent to a boarding school in Rajasthan for higher education and then I married and settled in Gujarat. While I was moving around, I was always in touch with Haryana, with at least an annual trip to my native place, to visit my paternal and maternal grandparents. Just as a plant shares its core with the soil it’s sown in, so did my core connect with the land of Haryana where the creator sent me when I came to this earth. Hence my inspiration comes from that land.
If I talk about my novel, Daughter of Luharu, I will say the major inspiration behind it was my formative years in Haryana and the person who always captivated my attention since childhood; my maternal grandmother (Nani). Like I said, I am an introvert so I never could express how intrigued I was with her life and personality. From the outside, she was the most ordinary, petite, innocent and kind person but inside she was quietly courageous. She wasn’t loud, brash or vocal, but I say she was courageous because in spite of all challenges that life threw at her, she held on to faith tightly. She never let go.
Like Rohinee, she was born privileged but ill-fated. Material gains and social status don’t fulfill the need for a family, for a mother, for human warmth. No riches can fill your heart that craves for a touch of love and embraces of care. And the social set up during those days added to her misfortune. Girls were a shame because they weren’t educated, couldn’t work, hence inheritance of business required a boy and also men didn’t take up roles of parenting. A man playing with his children and expressing love and care to his kids was considered unmanly. The father was always an authority, a distant figure, in a child’s life.
I distinctly recall a comment my grandmother had made on one of my annual trips there, it had stung me like a scorpion bite at that time. While I was fussing over food, when my mother was trying to feed me, she said, “Eat it, my dear! You are blessed that you have your mother’s loving hands to feed you.” Those words lay bare her wound; the pain she still felt although now she was amidst a family with her 9 kids and many grandchildren. I realised that day how she still missed being loved by her mother, whom she never saw.
Various such anecdotes that she and the family shared with me about her past experiences amused me, disturbed me, made me feel blessed to be born in a different time, in a progressive social set up and sometimes infuriated me about how there were still so much part of that unfair attitude towards women present in the society. My Nani was my pivotal inspiration to write Daughter of Luharu.
But Rohinee is not one lady, she is an amalgamation of many women, who have lived during that era in pre-independent India. Who are old now and happily share their stories. As a child, while I played in the lanes with other kids in the small town, I would be happily sitting around the charpoy, where my grandmother and other neighbouring women, young and old, indulged in gossiping and counselling each other. It’s their stories that have taken the form of fiction in my book.
So you can say I had unconsciously started collecting the matter for my book in my teens not knowing then that one day this would become a novel. I listened intently when the older ladies talked about how the Indian Independence Movement had gripped the whole nation. How the patriotic feeling brimmed in each heart. They spoke of how painful, cruel and inhuman the Partition was. Their eyes would be moist and grief still reflected on their face, while they narrated numerous incidents from the Partition and how badly it impacted their lives.
The fear of losing home, loved ones, identity ravaged the whole nation. When friends-turned-foes overnight, when their own home was called foreign land, and worst of all, the fear, anxiety and insecurity brashly brought out the most inhuman face of humanity. Rape, looting and massacre brought them face to face with a new face of human beings, they never even imagined existed. And not to mention, kids and women suffered the most.
Hence I was collecting all these stories on my regular travels to my home town and it has been a long process of collecting facts and collating it with research. It was a moment of isolation during lockdown when I thought I needed to express everything I had inside me for so long in a novel. That’s how Daughter of Luharu happened. It did not take me very long to write it because when I started at the keyboard I realised I had everything figured out long back. So there was no drafting and re-drafting, the story was told at one go. I guess that’s what happens when it’s a story that you really want to tell. Now the kind of reactions I am getting from readers I feel a strange sense of satisfaction that I have shared the stories with others and they have been able to identify with it and appreciate it. I have been able to give a rare insight into a turbulent time, into the lives of women, into a claustrophobic culture, into their silent struggles and into its culmination.
I can say with conviction that if you pick up Daughter of Luharu you will not be able to rest till you finish it. And for an author to be able to say this and have it ratified by reviews, is the greatest fulfillment.
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Monica Gupta is a freelance writer, creative writing coach and a published author of the books ‘Illuminating Darkness’ and Co-Editor of an anthology on spirituality, ‘Pause and Pen-Whispers of the soul’ and ‘Daughter of Luharu’ is her debut novel.
She hails from Haryana, went to a boarding school in Rajasthan and has received Honours in English Literature from Gujarat University.
Her writing journey began as a therapy, then turned into a passion and eventually became her profession. Monica relishes juggling her roles as writer, blogger, writing coach, nature lover and doting mother to her two sons. She lives in Ahmedabad.
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DAUGHTER OF LAHURU
Married at the age of eight, Roheeni had no one who can look out for her. She learnt to survive an evil mother-in-law, an absent husband, back-breaking work, heat, and a ghunghat (veil). After twenty years when her daughter faces the same fate; will she finally speak up or let the story repeat itself?BUY HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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