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Manpriya Singh
Every time a writer keeps a story open-ended, there is a transfer of the energy onto the reader. The characters, the plot and everything else are left to the reader’s interpretation and, of course, imagination. “My story, my characters, my plot belong to the readers eventually and they are free to treat them howsoever they want,” California-based English novelist Simrita Dhir talks of her book The Rainbow Acres during a literary interaction organised by the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi. With that she introduces us to 17-year-old Kishan Singh, who in the spring of 1916, is euphoric in his village Noor Mahal in Punjab, British India as he dreams of going to college, landing a government job and marrying his heartthrob Roop. The summer flies in with promise but ends in disaster when heavy rains flood the fields, and triggering influenza which leaves behind a trail of dead villagers. Devastated, he sets off on a life-threatening voyage across two oceans for a distant and unknown land.
On a cataclysmic day in 1919, Sophia’s idyllic world in Guadalajara, Mexico, falls apart when she becomes a hapless victim to the ravages of the Mexican Revolution. She battles hunger, and near prostitution before embarking on a perilous night journey across the border. Will their paths cross in the land of opportunities that is overrun with racial and class barriers? A saga of migration, selfless love, fortitude, friendship, and the quest for land and identity, set against the backdrop of old Punjab, early California and revolution-torn Mexico.
You know it’s California...
As the author said, she lived with the story for years and the one she truly wanted to share with the readers. “The story has to be close to your heart. Writing is an intense and a solitary process, you have to ready to rewrite, again and again.” Having tried narrative technique on her editor’s insistence, she finally kept the format linear.
Personally speaking racism is not what she encountered in the very diverse California when she moved in the year 2000. There are a few things she’d like to give the land, the credit for. “Any person with any kind of enterprise, hard work, talent will get recognized.”
Stories waiting to be told
With any immigrant’s story, successful or otherwise, come a series of stories on struggle; having already touched upon that in The Rainbow Acres, is there any plot, social issue, character currently sitting unfinished in her laptop. “I think I’d love to explore the old Punjab in my next. The land of five rivers, the community, its contribution towards the Freedom Struggle, the Armed Forces…”
manpriya@tribunemail.co
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