Meghna's collection of short stories was recently longlisted for the frank o’connor award
Cover of the book. (Photo: DC)
Hyderabad: Growing up in a home filled with books, Meghna Pant, the author of One & A Half Wife and Happy Birthday (her collection of short stories that was recently longlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor Award), recounts reading everything she could get her hands on.
Enid Blyton, Sidney Sheldon, Jeffery Archer, Somerset Maugham, Ruskin Bond, Shakespeare, R.K. Narayan, her head was always buried in a book by one of these authors, and by the age of 12, she was prescribed reading glasses. The first “all nighter” Meghna pulled was for a book too staying up until 6 am one day, reading Gone With the Wind.
In the close-knit Pant family, recounting stories from everyone’s day was part of the routine. “Perhaps that’s where my need to tell stories germinated,” says Meghna, who wrote her first short story, Aberration, when she was 19.
“Writing helps me make sense of the world I live in. I was 19 when Aberration, was published online. The plot and characters stayed with me for months before I gathered the wherewithal to finish the story. But the discipline of writing, its stark loneliness, does not usually appeal to the young and skittish. So I started writing seriously only around six years ago, though at that time it was only short stories. To improve my art, I took several writing courses in New York, and after a fair share of rejections, my short stories began to be published in US literary magazines. The idea for a full-length novel, One & A Half Wife, came only in 2010, and that’s around the time I also started putting together short stories that would come together in the collection Happy Birthday,” she says.
While the path from wanting to write and becoming a critically acclaimed and published author may seem straightforward in Meghna’s recital, it really wasn’t. She had a demanding career as a financial journalist and for five years Meghna found herself working non-stop, “filling the days with a job with which to pay the bills and writing like a maniac during every free moment”.
She recounts being so consumed by her writing that she wouldn’t sit through a movie or TV show, or go out for dinner or parties, as she’d feel guilty about “wasting time”. “My social life dwindled to 10 per cent of what it used to be, and I’m lucky that my deepest friendships were formed before I started writing so I still have a strong support system!” Meghna says.
Finally, Meghna decided to resign from her job so that she could work on her second novel (and third book), tentatively titled Son of Gods. “Even our country’s best-selling authors have alternate sources of income as, sadly, there is very little money to be made by selling books. The jhola-carrying-kurta-wearing writer is not just a Morparia cartoon,” she says, then adds, “That said, real writing, that raw savage beast that you walk with, comes with the axe of insecurity, of a little madness, hanging above your head. So if writing consumes you and it’s all you see yourself doing, then let no desk job distract you!”
That “madness” for writing consumes Meghna even today. She admits that on the occasions that she does go out, she’s so busy observing people and making mental notes that she forgets to enjoy the moment. “I once had my laptop tip over and cut my upper lip (a ‘horizontal’ writer, Meghna writes in bed), and I didn’t get up till my T-shirt was bloody because I was in the middle of writing a crucial scene. That is mania, love, passion, obsession,” she says. “That is writing.”
( Source : dc )
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