Printable VersionPrintable VersionIt is such a pleasure to address an audience
openly celebrating children’s literature, where no one is ashamed of
delighting in children’s stories, and where no one wishes to have grown-up
covers for children’s books, as though reading children’s literature is a
slightly dirty habit that must be hidden at all costs.
I also write adult fiction, under a pseudonym Rachna Mara. My one
collection of adult short fiction, Of Customs and Excise, came out
in 1991. When I meet with other writers, particularly those who write adult
fiction but not children’s stories, I almost inevitably get probed, either
directly or obliquely, as to why it’s been so long since I wrote adult
fiction.
Some people go for the flattering approach: “I hope you’re not going
to give up writing adult fiction, Rachna. I’d love to see what else you could
write—a novel maybe? Of course,” they continue, “I know you’ve been
writing children’s stories, and I know there have been some awards and
well...” Often, at this point they trail off before rushing on, “Not that
children’s writing isn’t important, but, it’s just, well, your collection
of short stories was so good.”
No one has come right out with it, but what they’re thinking is: when
are you going back to the stuff that matters? When are you going back to the
Grown-up stuff? Yes, yes, we know children’s writing is necessary, but all
those picture books, well, anyone can dash them off and so...
But children’s literature is so much more than a lower or less-skilled
or less-insightful version of adult fiction. We know this because if we are
asked to remember books that resonate within us, we almost always come up with
some titles that we have read as children. The impact of children’s fiction,
of books we read as children, reverberates through our lives far more than the
books we read as adults.
I certainly do not consider writing for children a lesser form of my art.
The process of creating is the same, whether it’s writing for children or
adults.
It seems to me that as writers, we are co-ordinators of images, directing
the mind towards a new way of looking at a particular situation in life. We
examine the plethora of images, experiences, ideas, thoughts, feelings and
dreams in our lives—the whole mess and mass of them that swirl and flow
disconnectedly in the untidy way that life works—and we select certain ones,
linking them to tell a tale. We juxtapose them in new ways, weaving strands of
seemingly unconnected images from far and wide to say: look do you see how it
works? Did you think of it this way?
For me, personally, to begin any piece of writing is an act of faith. I
have to trust the links my heart and mind and soul and spirit make. I have to
honour the images that surface, and trust that the ideas that want to be
connected, that spring from somewhere deep inside me, are there for a reason. It
is very much a process of discovery, with false starts and wrong turnings and
some dead ends before the way becomes clear, and the story flows. I don’t
think the initial leap of faith is any easier even after several attempts. I see
it as climbing up a tall tree in the woods, taking a deep breath and jumping off
without a rope, without a parachute, but jumping off knowing that I will
land all right. And I always have.
Often, the ideas and experiences we link and weave into stories have been
submerged within the body, locked or waiting. Just waiting for the right moment
to surface. And I don’t exactly understand what the triggers are, or when or
why certain ideas seem to ripen—but ripen they do, and then surface. And
honouring that process, and having faith in it, involves accepting that the
images, thoughts and ideas that surface with such ringing insistence, are the
ones that must be investigated, that they warrant my spending a couple of
years or more trying to find the links that fit.
Most people would agree that many of these ringing images and
experiences, the ones that have the most resonance and clarity, are created and
locked in during childhood. Not only do they surface and impact on our day to
day lives, on the kind of people we are, but also on the kind of stories we
write, and why we write.
I’d like to share here some of the images, experiences, landscapes,
stories and books that have left resounding echoes within me, and which have
nudged and guided me towards a writer’s life. And it seems to me that in
telling that story, I am doing exactly the same thing that I do when I write
fiction—I’m linking some specifics to tell my tale. I could select other
images and echoes from my life and tell an entirely different tale. It is my
choice of which particular nuggets I select to link, that direct the outcome of
my story.
For instance, I could build my story around images of how, when I was a
child, I was influenced by the fact that my mother was a doctor; and how I used
to watch her lining up the kids in our neighbourhood to give us various
vaccination shots; and how impressed I was by the importance of my mother as she
did this; and how I studied the sciences in school because, of course, I was
going to be a doctor, too.
All this is true, but I’m not a doctor, and so that is only part of the
story. There were other images and experiences that had more lasting impact on
me, although I didn’t always know it at the time. Experiences that shaped and
influenced a certain desire and ability to listen to an inner song—a song I
didn’t even know was growing and gathering force inside me.
One of the strongest images I have of story in my
life is of my grandmother telling me tales. I was born in India and lived there
until I was fourteen, when I moved with my family to London England. In India,
we lived in Bombay, which is a big city, dirty, crowded, noisy as big cities
are; and my grandparents lived in Jaipur, in Rajasthan, which is a dry desert
state. My grandmother was a small serene soft-spoken woman. She and my
grandfather lived an orderly life that was tied to the natural rhythms of the
day. My grandmother wore simple cotton saris, mostly in subdued colours—off-white,
pale yellow, soft shades of green, blue. Her grey hair was always tucked in a
tidy bun at the nape of her neck, and she had even features and a small straight
nose, which I envied even as a child, regretting my own rather more assertive
honker. Mostly what I remember about her is how small she was, and how peaceful
and deliberate in all that she did.
I remember one particular visit. I don’t know for sure how old I was,
perhaps 7 or 8, but I know that my mother’s siblings were there, too—her
brother and sister—each of whom had two children. My grandparent’s house was
a large sprawling brick structure, whitewashed a mellow yellowish-ochre colour,
and built around a huge central courtyard which was tiled, I think, with red
stones, and open to the sky. And it was in that courtyard that we slept—partly
because there were so many of us, but mostly because it was hot, being I
believe, the summer, which is a whole different story from the heatwaves we
complain about here in Canada.
My grandparents rented a whole bunch of charpoys, which were cots, or
beds, consisting basically of a wooden frame with thick jute rope woven across
to form a base, over which was placed a mattress. Being middle class Indians, my
grandparents had servants as was the norm, and each night the servants would set
out the cots on the courtyard, put on the mattresses and sheets and, I think,
also a mosquito netting around each cot. In the morning, the process was
reversed, and the cots were piled one on top of the other. This was a huge
delight to me and my cousins. There were six of us; my brother and I, and four
cousins. We’d climb atop the piled cots, kings and queens of all we surveyed,
and eat our breakfast there before the heat of the day chased us indoors. Of
course, we played and fought together, like most kids. And often, often, we
would run to my grandmother and beg her for stories.
I regret infinitely that I don’t actually remember any specific story
that my grandmother told us. All I remember is us kids gathered around her,
sitting on mats on the floor, or on the cots, somewhere in the shade of the
courtyard, as she spun her magic. The stories were, I think, Aesopish tales,
many involving animals, likely with some kind of lesson or moral attached; and
my grandmother told them in Hindi. It’s possible that I don’t remember any
of them because her repertoire was so vast that she rarely repeated them. Or
perhaps she made them up as she went along. I remember clearly, though, that
we’d beg for more and more stories, and somehow, from somewhere inside her
small body, she would bring out yet another one—a seemingly endless supply of
delight.
The only story I recall parts of was one in which there was some
scatological reference. My cousins and I were hugely, hysterically amused by
this, because my grandmother was so mild and restrained, so naturally refined,
that any vulgar reference from her was quite unusual. But of course, it was not
gratuitous—I think the reference was to some man who was so scared that he
soiled himself. I still remember my grandmother’s shy, soft laugh as she told
us this. But we kids laughed immoderately over the image, and retold that part
of the story to each other with enormous glee. And although I don’t recall the
specifics of my grandmother’s stories, what was locked into me was the feeling
of safety as she told us stories. The rightness of being still around her,
listening. The orderly energy emanating from her. The security and love.
And what was also locked into me was the shape of the stories she
told. She was obviously a gifted story-teller. She knew how to keep our
attention, she knew where the story needed to be more exciting, and how to pique
our interest and sustain it. She must have, because otherwise, we wouldn’t
have asked for more. She taught me the shape of stories, although I didn’t
know it at the time. And even though the stories are lost, the way of framing
them, of developing a satisfying emotional arc, is ingrained into every cell in
my body.
Of course, when we are children we don’t see any aspect of our lives as
being unusual or out of the ordinary. Everything is just a simple given. So I
don’t think I considered myself lucky to have a grandmother who told us
stories, or understood the value of it. It just was.
There are two other images I associate with the time spent around my
grandparents. They don’t have to do with story directly, but somehow, I think
they nurtured and cultivated a sense of wonder, as well as wondering, in
me—both of which, I believe, are necessary impetuses for the exploration that
is writing.
One of those images is of being at my grandparents’ house and going out
to the courtyard at night, to gaze up at the night sky. Such a vast bowl of
night, with the stars like dust, so many, so many more than I could possibly
have imagined living in a big city as I did. I remember gazing up at the night
sky, at the hugeness of it all. There were no specific questions, just wonder.
An all-encompassing awe.
The other image is of early mornings spent with my grandparents. Both my
grandparents were very spiritual people and they retired to bed early at night
and awoke early, for their morning meditation rituals. When they visited us, or
when we visited them, I, too, would wake early to spend time with them. I
don’t quite remember where, but I do remember several times during the dark
stillness just before dawn, going with my grandmother to a nearby tree which
nightly dropped an abundance of small, fragrant, white flowers. I remember
gathering them up in my skirt. They weren’t jasmine flowers, but something
very similar. The fragrance of jasmine is much like that of mock-orange, only
sweeter—it has a piercing sweetness that is like a rush of cool water and
intense sunlight all at once.
After we’d gathered these flowers, we’d go back to the house and my
grandmother would string them into a garland for my hair. I’d wear the garland
around my pony tail, delighting in the aura of sweetness. Then, with the dawn,
the silence would be broken by the sounds of birds chirping, of people stirring,
the clang of pots being taken out to cook breakfast, taps turning on, perhaps a
radio playing Indian film music. As the blessed cool of the morning was quickly
smothered by heat, the flowers in my hair would fade. First, they’d droop a
little, then the white petals would tinge brown at the edges, until, by the
afternoon, the garland was ready to be discarded. A fitting metaphor for the
stillness and potential of those mornings being used by the bustle of the day.
But the stillness of those mornings remains within me. It is a memory I
treasure deeply. The early morning was such a perfect time—a time of wonder,
serenity, ease. A time to reflect. A time of infinite possibilities, with the
day ahead a yet untold tale. I don’t exactly understand how, but I know that
it is the stillness of those mornings, the stillness of the night sky, the
powerful potential inherent in both, that is the source of the energy for
creating stories. Because the delight I feel when I’m caught in the flow of
creating story, is the same as the delight of those mornings.
Even when I returned with my family to the city of Bombay after those
visits, I valued the stillness of the morning, although I could no longer relish
the night sky. My friends and I would wake early and go for what we called our
“early morning walks.”
Bombay is on the west coast of India, and we
lived fairly close to the ocean. I think it was about a 30-40 minute walk to a
place called Nariman Point, which is now all developed with high-rise buildings,
but back then, was a peninsular of rocks jutting out into the Arabian Sea.
We’d try and get there before the sunrise, and watch the translucent sky
lighten, lighten, and we’d wait for the first rays of the sun to set the water
dancing and blazing with light. I distinctly remember the feeling I had when I
returned from those early morning walks—a sense of escape, of having been away
a long time to a remote place. A sense of newness, of being temporarily free of
the habitual filters through which I viewed life; and most of all, a sense of
being able to embark in any new direction and undertake anything. A powerful and
pure feeling.
The ocean has always played a strong role in my life—its sounds and
echoes are locked in my body. Those visits to the ocean, the time I spent gazing
at the water, listening to the waves lapping and slapping against the rocks,
created a force that guided my future. To paraphrase Meridel Le Sueur in The
Ancient People and the Newly Come, bodies reflect their landscapes, and
each impacts on the creation of the other.
I would go further to say that the landscapes locked within our bodies
pull and influence us, and are an abiding and significant force in directing our
lives.
Certainly, that was the case for me. Perhaps in part it was the tug of
the ocean that brought me to Prince Edward Island from England, after I
graduated from University. But it wasn’t entirely that. There was another
significant factor that motivated both my coming to Canada, and my becoming a
writer—another landscape that played a part.
It was in my school in India, and I think when I was in Standard 4, which
is the equivalent of Grade Four here, that I first encountered a book that has
now become an old and cherished friend. My school was run by the Anglo-Scottish
Education Society. It had the rather grand title of Cathedral and John
Connon School. It was a private school—a hangover from Colonial days—and
considered to be the best one in Bombay. The girls’ school and boys’ schools
were separate back then and we wore school uniforms—grey dresses over white
shirts. The grey dress was a smock like affair with broad pleats falling from a
yoke. We wore sashes tied around the waist like ties. The colour of the sash
depended on the house to which we belonged. Unlike Harry Potter, there was no
sorting hat, and we chose the house we wished to be in. I chose Red house, so
wore a red sash. It just so happened that in my class, there were more girls in
red house than any other. I was never one of the really cool kids. I guess I was
somewhere in the middle, not a total loner, but not one of the acknowledged
leaders, either.
My class was quite large—possibly over thirty girls. But what a wild
bunch we were. We had the reputation of terrorizing teachers. Of blithely
flouting authority. We were a bright group of girls, full of energy, and, I’m
ashamed to admit, complete disregard for the feelings of teachers. I suppose
that this was partly due to the classist society in which we lived. In any case,
I suspect that when the year began, the teacher who drew the short straw and was
assigned to our class groaned inwardly, and resigned herself to a torturous
year. That is if she were dignified. If not, she probably fell to the staffroom
floor writhing, flailing and screeching. Of course, not all teachers were
treated in the same manner—in the uncanny way of children and wild animals, we
knew which teachers we could get away with sassing.
This particular year, our teacher was an Englishwoman, Mrs. Chaubal. She
was small, tidy, with reddish hair, a slight, straight nose and she wore
tailored clothes. To my complete fascination, she always had her red hair up in
a bun, a French roll, the ends of which were tidily invisible. Back then I had
long hair, down to my hips, and I could never figure out how Mrs. Chaubal kept
that bun so neatly in place.
Some time during the school
year, Mrs. Chaubal began the habit of gathering us around her chair first thing
in the morning, and reading to us. Perhaps she thought it would have a
salubrious effect on us, channel our energies constructively. I can’t remember
what she read apart from this one book. Sitting crammed with a bunch of girls
squirming against each other in the gathering heat, the overhead fan whirring,
lightly stirring our hair, our white sneakers adding a somewhat rubbery overtone
to the other classroom smells of cleaner and chalk dust—that’s how I first
became acquainted with Anne.
I’m talking, of course, about Anne of Green Gables, by
Lucy Maud Montgomery. I suppose it says something about the skill with which
Mrs. Chaubal read, that we were entirely quiet during her reading. She was
adroit at skipping over any long descriptive passages that might make us
fidgety. I remember clearly her reading out the part where Anne asks Marilla if
she could call her Cordelia. Or failing that—Anne with an e. Mrs. Chaubal read
with animation, and at one point, during Anne’s intense speech, Mrs. Chaubal
inadvertently spat. This would have caused enormous hilarity and scorn under any
other circumstance, but I don’t think anyone cared as we listened to this
book. From the moment Anne whacked her slate down on Gilbert’s head, I had
to know what was going to happen. Would they ever be friends? I had a stoical,
don’t-care, tomboyish persona, which I had carefully cultivated, but
internally, I delighted at the sniff of romance.
Mrs. Chaubal never finished reading the book that year—we must have run
out of time, or else we misbehaved so badly that she stopped. But I insisted on
going to the bookstore and finding the book. I had always been a voracious
reader, and I spent almost every paisa and rupee of my pocket money on
books—mostly second hand to maximize the numbers I could purchase. I
couldn’t find a second hand copy of Anne of Green Gables, so I
bought a new one with my precious horde of money and devoured it with delight. I
was thrilled that there was a sequel, saved my money for it and bought and
devoured it too. I bought all the Anne books the bookstore carried, and read
them over and over, until the characters were as familiar to me as close
friends.
I still have some of those books I bought so long ago. One of them, a
copy of Chronicles of Avonlea, was given to me as a prize in my
school. The end of year awards always comprised of books. Apparently in Standard
5, when I was ten years old, I worked diligently enough to get honours. What a
splendid way to reward kids—with books. The year after, when I did well in my
Standard 6 exam, my mother bought me as a reward, at my request, Anne of
the Island. It is dated as having been given to me on the 5th
of May, 1964, when I was ten and a half.
I didn’t realize at first that the world created by L.M. Montgomery was
based on a real place. I had no idea it was in Canada or that Prince Edward
Island existed. I’m not entirely sure how, or even when, I learned this, but I
remember the electric charge of discovery when I found that PEI was real, in
this world—a place I could actually go to some day. And I knew with the kind
of ringing certainty that comes when the future seems to reach back and yank you
to the course you inevitably have to follow, that I would go there one
day.
Many of you are teachers, librarians, parents. You don’t always
know the impact you have on the children you deal with daily. You don’t
always receive thanks for your work or the validation you deserve. Often, it
must be disheartening to encounter obnoxious kids—much as I expect I was as a
child. But I hope you can take heart from my story. You may never know who you
inspire, or when you inspire, or how you inspire. But be assured, that inspire
you do.
I’m sure Mrs. Chaubal never considered that the simple act of sharing a
book she loved would have such far-reaching impact on one girl sitting in front
of her. Who knows how many others were influenced by that book, or by others she
read aloud? I don’t know with absolute certainty if in fact Mrs. Chaubal did
have a small straight nose and red hair. Quite possibly she did. Or was it that
as she read about Anne, Montgomery’s vivid description transposed over Mrs.
Chaubal, so that now, when I think of Mrs. Chaubal, I think of her as looking
like Anne?
Isn’t it extraordinary how books and words and stories cross time and
cross distance in less than the blink of an eye? The power they have to negate
time and space? They give us more than mere insight into other cultures and
places and landscapes—they let us live them. Lucy Maud Montgomery,
sitting in her room at her grandmother’s house in Cavendish PEI at the early
turn of the previous century, chafing at the sterility of her existence,
frustrated by the self-imposed duty of caring for her stern, aging grandmother,
who was, for the most part, not a kindred spirit, escaped into a world of
greater delight when she created Anne. Amongst other things, Maud wove into the
story her love of the Island landscape. It is palpable in the pages, it
breathes and swirls in the way in which Anne gazes at the fields, as she wanders
through Lovers Lane, as she runs past the Dryad’s Bubble and walks through the
Birch Path with Diana on her way to school.
When Anne wakes up that first morning at Green Gables, she goes to her
bedroom window and looks out. She smells the dizzy fragrance of nearby lilac
trees, glories in the cherry and apple orchards, thick with blossoms, and gazes
with delight at the green rolling fields, etched with fir and spruce, and at the
distant, tantalizing glimpse of a blue sea.
The images of this landscape fascinated and intrigued me. Living in the
heat of Bombay, in a house in which every single room had an overhead fan—a
complete necessity—I had never seen snow, except during one trip to the
Himalayas. I had never snowshoed as Anne did, never experienced seasons, other
than muggy summer, the months of rain, often torrential, during the monsoon
season, and the marginal relief from heat that came with the so-called winter,
where, at most, one might need a light cardigan.
But as I read and re-read Maud’s books, the love of the land, the love
of Prince Edward Island, the landscape that Anne relished and gloried in, crept
into my skin and bones, and worked into every cell in my body.
I also indirectly imbibed the
Presbyterian attitudes and ethics of the Scottish settlers who came to Canada,
and experienced the somewhat cloistered and strict world of Maud and Anne, of
rural life in Prince Edward Island during the latter part of the nineteenth
century. I experienced the delights of walks through fragrant spruce and pine
woods, the thrill of going down cellar for apples, the way lit only by a candle.
I experienced the cosiness of a small knit community, and all the gossip that
eddied through daily life. I don’t think back then, though, I recognized the
rigidity and intolerance of some of the views expressed in Montgomery’s books,
which were a reflection of her times, or really understood the flip side of that
small community, nor yet the power that gossip had to wound and destroy. I was
simply fascinated by the closeness of Anne’s world and community. It was one I
rarely encountered, except perhaps with my grandparents, because my life in
Bombay was that of an upper-middle class child in a big city, which, in that
place and time, meant having servants to take care of all the chores, so our
parents were free to go out as often as they pleased.
But Montgomery’s books and landscape had a
lasting impact on me. When I graduated from University in England in 1974, I
decided to travel. Canada appealed to me for a variety of reasons—it seemed so
full of possibilities, and it seemed to be more culturally tolerant than the
England I was then living in. Of course, if I came to Canada at all, it would have
to be to Prince Edward Island. I’d lived in big cities all my life, but
Montgomery’s descriptions of PEI had woven into my body and become my
landscape. When I read the books, I don’t recall being particularly conscious
of lingering over Montgomery’s at times flowery descriptive passages. I may
even have skimmed over them, to get to the good part, to see what Anne would do
next, if she’d ever forgive Gilbert Blythe. But enough of those passages
permeated into me anyway, and I think what I longed for was the delight
that Anne felt at the beauty of her world. It struck me as being impossibly
romantic and perfect to do some of the simple things Anne did—walk through the
woods entranced by mayflowers and violets. What were mayflowers and violets? I
wanted to see them myself, experience that delight, too.
So I came to PEI. In the
extreme earnestness and dignity of youth I was probably not too keen to admit
back then that a kids’ book was a significant motivator to my being there. I
remember being embarrassed by it when someone brought it up. But the rural
landscape did indeed delight me—after all it was familiar, already within me.
And not surprisingly, the landscape of PEI that most appealed to me was the
north shore of the Island where Maud Montgomery had lived. This was quite apart
from the association with all the Montgomery sites and the touristy stuff one
finds there, some of it rather exploitive, and not always tasteful. Best of all,
the ocean was there too, waiting for me—calling and recalling early mornings
spent gazing at a different body of water from a jut of land in Bombay.
The year I asked for and received Chronicles of Avonlea for
Honours in Standard 5, I also received another book. I didn’t ask for this—I
expect when I saw it, I thought the title was dull and pretty sucky. The book is
dated as being given to me on the 7th of February, 1964, when I was
ten and a half. I can’t remember if I devoured it with eagerness soon after
getting it, or whether it languished on my shelves for a while as I read the
more interesting Biggles books by Captain W.E. John, the William
books by Richmal Compton, the Enid Blytons, even Jane Eyre and Pride
and Prejudice. But eventually I did pick it up and read it. It was Little
Women by Louisa May Alcott.
I do know that right away I was caught up in the
world of the March sisters, and I identified strongly with Jo. When I read about
Jo’s efforts at writing stories, something inside me whirled with excitement.
I don’t expect I articulated it clearly at the time, but I think that that is
when the idea and possibility of being a writer was born. What an enchanting,
wonderful way to earn a living, of living! The idea appealed to me enormously. I
loved to read, had always done so. Books were very likely an escape for me, a
refuge—but I had always preferred the world of the imagination to the more
prosaic humdrum world of reality.
What could be better than
honouring the truth of that imagination by giving it tangible form through
writing?
So, as I read Little Women, the seed was planted, the seed
of being a writer. I read the book and its sequels for the sheer delight of
them, eager to find out if Jo would or would not marry Laurie. Like countless
others, I cried when Beth died, was disgusted that Jo settled for the portly Mr
Bhaer.
And I was enormously impressed and fascinated by Marmee—that mythical
mother who never lost her temper. She was outside my experience in real
life—none of the mothers I was acquainted with, mine or anyone else’s, was
remotely like her. When I became a mother, I certainly was not like that either,
much to my secret dismay, at first. I suspect, that at some level, my first book
My Mother is Weird is an antidote to her. I also have tongue in
cheek references to Marmee in my new young adult novel, A Group of One,
due to be published by Henry Holt in June 2001.
So Little Women became an old friend, like Anne of
Green Gables, to be read and re-read and treasured.
As a child, during one of my infrequent fits of
organization, I decided to sort my books and categorize them in order of
importance. I no longer have my first copy of Anne of Green Gables,
having in a fit of utter stupidity given it away when I left India, but I do
still have Anne of Avonlea and it was marked as Number Two, with
this little verse written on the front page by me:
The grass is green
The rose is red
This book is mine
‘Til I am dead.
In some of my other books, I added this:
P.S. Even after I’m dead.
Chronicles of Avonlea was number 3 and Anne of The Island number
4. Obviously, Anne of Green Gables was number 1. Little
Women came in at 16. But although the books from four to fifteen are
forgotten, Little Women is with me still.
During those years in Bombay, the first fourteen of my life, I saw no TV,
because there wasn’t any in India at the time. My favourite activity was, of
course, reading, but there was still lots of time to hang out with my friends,
play games, sketch, paint, mess around with crafts. It’s amazing the time that
is freed up when we don’t have that box dictating our lives. Books were such
an integral part of our lives, that my friends and I derived many ideas from
them. Living in a city, I could not relish, as Anne did, walks in the
country—but I could at least have a story club as she had.
And so, around the time I was twelve or thirteen, inspired by Anne’s
story writing club, and by Jo’s fits of scribbling, I persuaded my friends to
form a writing club. There were four of us, and for some reason I cannot
remember, we called ourselves the Lulu Club. We were to meet at regular
intervals, each having produced a piece of writing on an agreed upon topic or
theme. I don’t have the originals of any my writings, but later, after I left
India, I wrote to my one of my friends, Padmini, and asked her to copy out some
of the stories and send them to me. She did. Back then there were no
photocopiers, so the fact that she hand wrote as many as she did, is a sign of
her extraordinary faithfulness and generosity.
Not all our stories were gruesome and tragic as Anne’s stories were,
but we did have our share. One particular gem written by me begins in this
charming fashion:
Blood! God! How it had gleamed! Old Meg shivered and licking her
shrivelled lips darted a look behind her. How she wished she had never killed
Crackpot Casey. How well she remembered that scene. He had cried for mercy but
she had shown him none and he had died with vows of revenge which she had
thought would never come. And now...she shuddered as she recalled the blood.
I don’t know exactly when the idea of becoming a writer grew upon me,
but I do remember the day it surfaced into my conscious mind. I was about twelve
or so, really thinking about it, and I felt the idea settle and lodge within me
with the satisfying ching of something falling or slotting into perfect
place. I lived on the top floor of a three story Georgian mansion—a leftover
from the Colonial days. It was an old building that had been converted to flats.
My family lived on the top floor. My best friend, Viji, lived on the floor
below. At the front of the house was a large verandah which jutted out from the
rest of the building. From the front bedroom window of my flat I could see into
Viji’s verandah below, and my preferred method of communicating with her was
to stick my head out of my window and to holler for her, until, no matter where
she was within her flat, she heard me and came.
I remember clearly that when the idea settled into me that I would one
day be a writer, I went to the front window and bellowed for Viji until she
came.
“What?” she asked impatiently. I’d obviously interrupted something
important, perhaps an exciting part in a book—she, too, was an avid reader.
“Guess what?” I said, all excited and earnest.
“What?”
“I’m going to be a writer when I grow up.”
Viji looked irritably at me and clicked her tongue. “Yeah, I know
that.” Her tone said plainly: why are you telling me something so obvious?
I don’t think I really considered how this wanting to be a writer fit
with my other goal of becoming a doctor. At times, the writer’s dream
submerged almost completely—because I pursued the sciences in school—but at
no time did it dissolve and disappear. It simply waited for the right moment to
reappear.
And the ocean, the sound and energy of
water lapping against the shore, which had so delighted me in my childhood,
played a part in helping it come to fruition.
I
was around thirty at the time, married
with two children, and living in Prince Edward Island. My husband, Ian, and I,
loved the beaches. Ian is a bona fide Islander—his ancestors were among the
early settlers who came to PEI from Scotland. We used to escape to the beaches
of the north shore of the Island as often as we could. It was our way of
balancing and harmonizing our lives, putting things in perspective, and
unwinding.
I remember this one visit. I was a full time stay at home mother. I had
started a pottery studio in my basement and I still scribbled stories. I carried
around a notebook in which I jotted down ideas, descriptions, fragments of
conversations. I thought and talked a lot about being a writer, and I had done
so for years, ever since I had decided not to study medicine after all, but
somehow, I couldn’t, or didn’t, really manage to work steadily at it.
It seems that many of my life’s significant decisions and insights come
to me when I’m on the beach. Certainly it was the case this time. That
particular beach on the north shore of PEI was within a few miles of where Maud
Montgomery had been born over a hundred years ago, and closer still to where
she’d lived with her grandmother from the age of two, when her own mother
died. It may even have been one of the ones that she visited and walked on, or
perhaps glimpsed from her grandmother’s house in Cavendish.
Walking along the firm sand at the water’s edge, I began to talk about
writing again, and wondered why I wasn’t settling down to it. Why wasn’t I
able to overcome the inertia, or whatever block it was, that tripped and stalled
me?
And Ian replied that sometimes we are afraid to embark on our dreams
because we are afraid of failing. It’s so much easier to be successful in our
imaginations and daydreams, than to put it to the test in reality.
This really hit home. I realized it was true. I remembered something from
one of the Anne books, Anne of the Island, where an indecisive
character, Philippa Gordon, discovers a way to cure her indecision. She does
this by projecting what she thinks she’d wish to have done when she is eighty.
It struck me that I didn’t want to wake up one day and find myself eighty,
still lamenting and bemoaning about not writing, and wishing and wishing that I
had started years ago. So it is around that time that I took my metaphorical
dive off a tall tree, my leap of faith. That’s when I began to really focus on
my writing.
All the stories I’ve related are of specific echoes and images lodged
within me, ones which played a pivotal role in my life and in my becoming a
writer. Of course there are many others:
I’d like to mention my English teacher in Standard six, Miss Halegua,
who read out Oliver Twist, who didn’t let us disrupt the class,
and who suggested that we keep a notebook in which to write down ideas and
quotes, which I did.
I’d like to mention Zoe Bebbington—an unknown Colonial lady who
conferred upon my school in Bombay a prize in her name for an essay competition,
which, to my infinite surprise, I won one year. The title of my essay was Monday,
and the gist of it was decrying school and the sadistic tendencies of the
teachers. It was a tongue in cheek essay which I thought was somewhat
predictable, boring and obvious, because if I could think of those things,
anybody could. But when I won that competition, for the first time it occurred
to me that something I thought and felt, that something I wanted to say, might
possibly be of interest to other people. That it might have some small
merit—and perhaps even be original.
I’d like to mention the kind librarian, with grey hair and dark circles
under her eyes, who kept the library stocked with books at the Theosophical
society across the road from my house in Bombay. She overlooked my lamentable
tendency to be late returning books, and encouraged me to borrow more, and read
and read and read.
I’d like to mention Dr. Metcalfe, a small, elderly man with gnarled
arthritic hands, my microbiology professor in King’s College in London,
England, where I studied biology, who properly took the conceit out of me by
insisting that I write plainly and simply, and not pad my essays with
flowery and irrelevant asides, which I did as a means of covering my ignorance.
I’d like to mention the wonderful
old art of elocution, which was encouraged in my Bombay school. Elocution
develops, I think, a keen ear for the cadences and rhythms of language as well
as a love of language. I remember hours of listening to kids practise and then
perform memorized pieces of poetry—mostly cautionary and didactic
ones—fragments of which linger still.
I
‘ve sketched many images here, from the mess
and mass of experiences and thoughts and ideas and books in my life, and I’ve
linked moments that influenced me to became a writer. But when I consider the
echoes and images influencing the writers and people who influenced me, the
frame of my story widens considerably.
Maud Montgomery, in writing the books that impacted so strongly on me,
was in turn influenced by her favourite books and authors. She quotes
Tennyson in her books, referring to his Lancelot and Elaine, one of the
books in The Idylls of the King; she quotes Robert Browning, Alexander
Pope, Wordsworth, as well as the Bible. Nineteenth Century literature appealed
to her and she also read Walter Scott, Byron, Carlyle, whose influences, I
think, are apparent in her writing, in her romantic portrayals of nature. She
wove together their ideas, visions and interests with aspects of the society in
which she lived, spiking her work with a wonderful sense of humour. She poked
sly fun at the foibles of her community, writing about domestic comedy and
drama, with all its safe rituals, unexpected traumas and disturbances, spinning
together familiar jokes with the tragedies, both small and large, that occur in
every family.
Louisa May Alcott, too, had her spheres of influence. Her father, Bronson
Alcott, was part of the Transcendental Club of which Emerson and Thoreau were
important members. Born in reaction to scientific rationalism, Transcendentalism
emphasized the importance of intuition. It was a movement that proclaimed the
spiritual unity of all living beings, and deeply honoured the natural world.
Many of the Transcendentalist theories and ideas are close to those espoused in
the ancient Indian spiritual texts, the Vedas, which were also the source of
inspiration for the Theosophical Society, of which my grandparents were members.
It’s a bit like the thigh bone is connected to the knee bone, is
connected to the shin bone—on and on. The American Transcendentalists were
influenced by the German Transcendentalists, whose doctrines are reflected in
the work of Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth, who also in turn influenced Lucy
Maud Montgomery. Louisa May Alcott wove many of these philosophies along with
her own life experiences into her books about the March family.
Such a web of ideas and influences moving back and forth. The echoes and
images within L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, and other favourite writers,
are all manifest to a greater or lesser degree in their work. And if we trace it
backwards, there are even wider sources of influence, inspiration and life
experience impacting on those who impacted on Alcott and Montgomery.
These ideas and influences don’t move in a tidy linear fashion, but
rather they boomerang back and forth, in and out, in all directions, to create a
web of stories with a web of sources.
I heard somewhere that all the atoms of oxygen breathed in, and the
molecules of carbon dioxide breathed out, have been breathed in and out by every
living being who has ever inhabited this planet at any time. I’m not certain
if this is true or not, but I like to think of stories, too, having that kind of
universality. They reverberate within us all, ricochet back and forth, speaking
to the common condition of being human, springing from that common
condition of being human. They negate boundaries and barriers. If we trace these
sources back far enough, perhaps we return to the first attempts at storytelling
that may have occurred around fires outside caves; the first attempts by people
trying, not just to comprehend, explain, and find the meaning of life, but also
to express the delight and wonder echoing within their hearts. The first
attempts at creating stories for the sheer joy of it. Faint echoes, perhaps, of
that big bang which began all creation.
As a writer I’ve learned to honour the synchronicity of seemingly
disconnected events, and to trust the juxtapositioning of what appear to be
random thoughts and occurrences. And whether I tell the story of how I came to
write, or an entirely fictional one, whether the experiences are real or
imagined, still this one thing is constant—I aim to tell the truth.
It’s a delightful paradox that writing fiction is, in a way, telling
the truth through lies. One of the reasons I write fiction is because I firmly
believe that the truth we tell through lies is often greater than when we stick
to bald facts. But sometimes, sometimes the bald facts suffice—because truth
can be stranger and neater than fiction.
So here are just two more to add to my story. The first one is simply
this: my name, Rachna, an Indian name, means in Sanskrit, creation or
literature. My mother doesn’t know why they chose this name for me—just that
one of my father’s sisters suggested it.
And the second one concerns
an incident, that occurred this past summer, while I was visiting PEI. My family
and I now live in Ottawa, but as we have friends and family in PEI, and we
desperately need to get a regular fix of our ocean, we visit the Island yearly.
Usually, during the summer months, we avoid Cavendish, where Maud Montgomery
lived, because we feel it has become commercialized and overly crowded and
touristy. But this summer, we stopped off at a place I had not visited before. I
expect that when I left PEI ten years ago, it may not have been open, or
possibly I avoided it then, because I thought it was another exploitive gimmick.
I’m talking about the site of Montgomery’s Cavendish home, the
home she shared with her grandmother, and where she lived until 1911,
when she was 36. It is in this house that she wrote Anne of Green Gables.
The Green Gables house is not modelled after this, her home, but on another
house belonging to a friend of hers. That Green Gables house is now part of the
National Park in PEI, and tourists come from around the world to see it.
But the house I’m talking about, the site of Maud Montgomery’s home
in Cavendish, is just that—a site. The house itself is long gone. Distant
cousins of hers, who still own the land, have opened it to the public. There are
placards at intervals with information about the site, and with relevant
excerpts from Montgomery’s books and journals. All that remains is the red
Island sandstone foundation, which was the cellar of her home; the long
homestead lane down to the road; and many of the trees and views loved by Maud,
including the apple orchard.
But before we entered the site, we had to purchase tickets from a small
wooden bookstore nestled against a grove of trees. And when we went into that
bookstore to get our tickets, I saw there, amongst the collection of books
available for sale, my first book, My Mother is Weird,
which was published by Ragweed Press on PEI, and which is available at many
Island outlets. A young girl was holding it in her hands, eagerly turning the
pages as she read it. She was oblivious to her surroundings.
Later, as I stood under what would have been Maud’s gable window, where
she wrote Anne of Green Gables, I gazed out at the fields and
trees she would have seen, and felt somehow, not the presence of Maud
Montgomery, but the memory of her passing there, echoes of her having lived and
loved there. It was almost tangible, her love of that landscape, and I
felt grief at her having to leave it—which she did when she married a
minister, Ewan MacDonald, and moved to Ontario.
And strolling down the lane that Maud must have traversed so many times,
heading to the cemetery where she is buried, it felt somehow fitting, almost
like coming full circle, that I, the child who heard Anne of Green Gables
in a classroom in India, should be here, where the author wrote it, and see a
child reading one of my books. That I, carrying images from Maud
Montgomery’s books, came to Canada, and, encouraged and inspired by the
openness and possibilities of the landscape and the culture, intertwined some of
the landscapes and cultural traditions of India, along with those of Maud and
Louisa—to create books containing echoes and images of the Canadian ethos and
landscape in this particular moment of time.
In the words of Basho, the great 17th century haiku master:
The temple bell stops.
The sound keeps coming
Out of the flowers.
HOME | SUBMISSIONS | CURRENT ISSUE | ARCHIVES | EDITORIAL BOARD | EMAIL US