The Many Incarnations of the Girl in a Red Silk Sari

By Sharon Maas

Of all my sixteen novels, Girl in a Red Silk Sari has the most tumultuous history: a twenty-something year backstory that has seen it jumping from publisher to publisher, from incarnation to incarnation, from title to title; almost as if searching for an identity of its own. A final identity, now found.

It’s a backstory that really begins with my first novel, Of Marriageable Age which was published by HarperCollins in 1999. This was my break-in novel. The HarperCollins editorial team, my editor specifically, was quite excited about it; it had sold to several foreign publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and they were hungry for Book Two.  

So was I: hungry to write it. And so I plunged right in, with a story about two step-sisters in Guyana. The writing came easily to me, and I was about 20000 words in when my editor asked for a preview – how was it going? What was it about? she asked, for I had not provided her with a synopsis. I never write a synopsis, never have a outline or a plan. I write by the seat of my pants, as they say, without an outline, letting the story develop as I write, so she had no idea at all what I was writing. She’d trusted me. But now she was, quite rightly, curious.

I’d known from the onset that this novel would be set in Guyana – my country of birth, where I’d grown up, the country I loved. As a voracious reader, I’d always missed books set in my home country, and writing such books was my entire motivation for wanting to be a novelist at all. This had always been clear to me. Not so to my editor.

Of Marriageable Age had also been set in Guyana, but only partly. The main setting was India; it had been marketed on the slogan of ‘an epic love story of three characters, three eras, three continents.’ I had managed to interweave the Guyana and the Indian storylines into an intriguing puzzle. But now: ‘We want a story set in India!’ my editor said. Apparently readers would be interested in books set in Guyana. India was in trend at the time.

‘OK,’ I replied. I’m flexible; the work-in-progress wasn’t set in stone, so this was entirely doable. The two main characters were, after all, ethnic Indians (Guyana has a large Indian population) so all I had to do was pop them over to India. And I already had, in the back of my mind, an idea for an Indian novel. So all I had to do was combine the two stories: I’d take those two Guyanese sisters and weave them into the Indian storyline which was already developing as quickly as I could write. 

The Indian storyline was based on a true story, the story of Tulasa, a twelve-year-old Nepalese girl who had been abducted and sold into the sex trade in Bombay (today’s Mumbai). Tulasa’s story had appalled me and had inspired the idea for a novel set in Bombay; the story of an abducted child and her rescue. It had been germinating in my mind for some time;  so now, why not just merge these two storylines?
That’s what I did. I finished the novel without a hitch. My editor liked it; we settled on a title, and it was published in 2002 with the title Peacocks Dancing. 

Yet I had misgivings. The merging of two completely different storylines just didn’t seem to work. It felt forced, artificial. The two halves of the book didn’t really blend naturally. Discussing it with my editor, she agreed: the book had a ‘broken back’, she thought. The merging of the two stories was not organic. But it was too late to do anything about it, so I went on to write my third novel. 

Ten years later, the digital publisher Bookouture acquired Peacocks Dancing. By this time I had taken action; I’d cut that novel in two and rewritten the second, Indian, half entirely, to make it into a complete novel with the same basic plotline. I removed characters, created new ones and new subplots, and made a whole new book of it, a book I could stand behind because this story needed to be written; not as an appendage, not as a second thought, but as a standalone story in its own right: the story of Asha, a beautiful young girl who falls into the evil hands of child traffickers. It was published in 2014 as The Lost Daughter of India.

When the rights to this book reverted to me in 2024, I decided to revise it a little and change the title to something more specific, less generic. I self-published it on Kindle as Girl in a Red Silk Sari. 

Later that year, the publisher Storm acquired the rights and released it in November. And Asha’s story – a tragic one with a happy end – went out into the world in its fourth incarnation.
And by the way – that original story of the two stepsisters in Guyana? I didn’t let that fall into oblivion. It was published by Bookouture in  2021   as The Faraway Girl. 

And that’s how one book became two!

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Sharon Maas was born into a prominent political family in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1951. She was educated in England, Guyana, and, later, Germany. After leaving school, she worked as a trainee reporter with the Guyana Graphic in Georgetown and later wrote feature articles for the Sunday Chronicle as a staff journalist.

Her first novel, Of Marriageable Age, is set in Guyana and India and was published by HarperCollins in 1999. In 2014 she moved to Bookouture, and now has ten novels under her belt. Her books span continents, cultures, and eras. From the sugar plantations of colonial British Guiana in South America, to the French battlefields of World War Two, to the present-day brothels of Mumbai and the rice-fields and villages of South India, Sharon never runs out of stories for the armchair traveller.

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GIRL IN A RED SILK SARI

Madras, India. Caroline steps off the plane into the searing heat, senseless with worry. So much has changed since her first visit. This time, a piece of her heart is missing. This time, she is here to find her daughter…

Caroline Mitchell has never truly made peace with her past—and the circumstances that led to her separation from her beloved child. And when thirteen-year-old Asha vanishes without a trace, she faces every parent’s worst nightmare.

Desperate to find her, Caroline returns to India determined to do whatever it takes. The search will mean reconnecting with her estranged husband Kamal, and burying the memories of everything that happened between them. It will lead to the darkest corners of Mumbai’s infamous red-light district—a world of shadows, secrets, and unspeakable horrors. There, she discovers her precious daughter has been caught in a trafficking ring that preys on vulnerable children.

As Caroline navigates the labyrinthine streets and corrupt systems of Mumbai, she must find the strength to become the mother she has always wanted to be. Her mission will test her in ways she could never have imagined—but can she reach Asha in time, and save her from a terrifying fate? And if so, will she finally be able to heal the wounds of the past.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing