Agony and Ecstacy of life in the Gulf
Asha Iyer Kumar’s novel ‘Sand Storms, Summer Rains’ is a book about life in the Gulf, observed from close quarters, MRUDU NAIK finds
WHEN the ambitious and starry-eyed Achu and the sober and subdued Mustafa embark on their individual journeys to the Arabian lands, they have only one aim — as do all others heading off to the enticing desert dunes — to earn money. Leaving their families in their villages in Kerala, south India, they go to make riches that would place them in the distinguished and envied league of ‘Gulfees’ back home. But the chimerical Gulf dream sours when tragedy strikes them in different ways, forcing them to reassess their priorities.
As they lurch between love and money, life gives them lessons in endurance, sacrifi ce and relationships. They return to their homes to make an attempt at resuscitating their family edifi ces that are waiting to collapse, to try and give meaning to their personal lives that have begun to wither, and to repentantly mollify their troubled consciences. But can they salvage anything worthwhile from the debris of their already mangled lives?
This is the gist of fi rst-time author Asha Iyer Kumar’s novel Sand Storms, Summer Rains. For Asha, the book is about a life she has watched from close quarters and incidentally the novel was written while she was in Oman, though she is now based in the United Arab Emirates.
In an interview with Thursday, Asha talks about Sand Storms, Summer Rains, which has earned good reviews.
THE BIRTH
Although I have been very fond of writing and have had great affi nity towards the written word from my college days, a novel wasn’t on my mind at all. It wasn’t like I had made a decision that someday I will be writing a novel or someday I will become a fi ction writer. I used to write small things, shorter versions of fi ction like stories and other articles of self opinion, but a novel was the remotest thing on my mind. I never tried too hard to acquire the special skills required to
write something as long and sequential as a novel. But being a keen observer of people and things around me, I realised that over a period of time, I had collected in my kitty, a lot of things to which I was raring to respond in my own personal way. Different people, their lives and conditions, their responses to life – it was like having a huge collage in front of me that was begging to be translated into written form. This included my numerous observations and experiences after I came to the Gulf in 1998. These impressions of people and life were such that they demanded a more serious treatment than an ordinary feature, article or a short story. Thus came about the idea to string the impressions together and create a novel. I think the first seed of thought was sown way back in 2001 during our brief stint in Sharjah.
THE JOURNEY
In all, it took three years for me to write this and this is excluding a few sabbaticals I took in between, owing to personal reasons. Although I had the basic premise of immigrants in the Gulf in mind, I couldn’t start until and unless I culled enough fi ctional material to weave a believable plot with characters that the readers could easily identify with. I had no direct biographical data to depend on, nor was it a plot that required too much of methodical research, but talking to people here without the intention of making them parts of the story, helped me understand the
common predicaments in their complex lives. It often had to do with the falling apart of the family structure, losing love, trust, confi dence and sometimes even the money they earned at the cost of all else. There was a general sense of resignation and commitment to fate in them that depressed me. And it piqued me so much that the world outside of theirs viewed them in a different light. Envied by friends and neighbours in their homeland, despised many times by compatriots here, I understood that many of them merely went through the motions of life. Nothing of what people thought of them back home was true, as far the men and women here themselves were concerned and I wove little incidents and instances that were purely fi ctional to take us through the lives of these two protagonists, who are symbols or representations of what life in the Gulf stands for. It meant getting into the skin of the characters who endured more than they could reveal, in ways more than they could express.
To make it life-like and to bring the story close to reality, I had to live their lives in my mind, vicariously feel their agony and ecstasy, and believe it or not, it was emotionally very exhausting. Add to it, the demands of literary expression and it was like being in the throes of creative childbirth. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. I never thought I was capable of going through such a prolonged creative journey that was also emotionally draining. I strongly think that for a story to become realistic and relative, the writer or teller has to know and feel the characters very closely and this proximity cannot be achieved unless there is absolute honesty in one’s creative pursuit. You have to tell a story because the story will not let you live otherwise. It has to be so intense an urge.
THE STORYLINE
The book tells the story of Achu and Mustafa, the two protagonists, and their families. We first see the events that lead up to their Gulf journey and thereafter, the numerous incidents
in their lives that make them consider returning for good. While Mustafa returns in good time, albeit to be met with a trail of woes at home, Achu stays put, despite a crumbling personal life. He is the obstinate man of the two. The two men meet 18 years later and exchange notes on the vast distances they have travelled since they parted ways — their lives now completely changed and their circumstances entirely different from each other — one, a symbol of summer rains and the other, a dismal representation of sandstorms.
It is a story that, through its characters, makes us assess our priorities in life.
No, it doesn’t pontifi cate, but makes a subtle effort to defi ne wasted exercises. I must mention here that I have not dwelled much on the protagonists’ everyday life in the Gulf as I did not want to make the book, even in parts, an essay on an expat’s everyday hardships, as one would expect it to be by the mention of the background. That would have been very predictable and documentary.
The book deals more with the characters’ domestic and personal predicaments in relation to people in their lives.
THE SETTING
Back in Kerala, from what I had heard and seen during my school days (and I am talking of some two-and-a-half, three decades ago,) working in the Gulf was the ultimate dream come true for people. The great lengths they went to get a visa and land here are unimaginable, although things have changed to some extent now.
I had a couple of close friends in school whose fathers worked here, and what I saw of their lives, made me believe that it indeed was a worthy thing to achieve. But this perception changed when I came here myself. I don’t know what it was that debunked the Gulf myth in me. It perhaps started with the trips we used to take in the pick-up bus in Muscat, where we saw the work-burdened labourers in the evenings, or our weekend outings to Ruwi, where I saw clusters of expat men around telephone booths and other places or meeting a few men and women who had left their families behind and were slogging it out here, with the dull, nagging ache of being
away from home.
It was one or many such things that told me categorically that there was much more to a working class expat’s life in the Gulf than making money. With age, I discovered that the gulf dream wasn’t as shimmering as it looked. It was a realisation that broke my juvenile fallacies and the novel is an outcome of this slow and systematic understanding of the living-alone expat people in the Gulf — the man out there who toils in the sun when the rest of the city cools it off in the interiors, the woman who puts the picture of her son on her desk and wonders every morning if he must have eaten his breakfast, gone to school or given a headache to his grandmother, the young son who lives in the perpetual fear of not being next to his aged parents when they pass away, the family back home that although enamoured of the new riches, still thinks it was better if the man of the family had not
been so far away.
The kaleidoscope of their lives presents endless patterns. Even today, when I see these men and women, my heart goes out to them. You can read the despair on their faces, if only you take a moment to read them.
THE INSPIRATION
As far as this novel is concerned, the story is inspired by real life, people we see almost everyday, whether here or back home. It is hard to pin the infl uence to any one person or incident. There is a bit of my characters in everyone we see about us, because essentially, the story is a sum total of every man’s fears, faults and failings.
THE FUTURE
More books. I would continue to write, for writing is now a cant-do-without part of my life. I have a collection of short stories ready and I am looking for a good publisher for the same. Meanwhile, I have begun to toy with the idea of another novel. It is still sketchy up there in the head. But looks like it will soon begin to shape up and become manifest. I don’t know how long it will take to write it, but yes, there is certainly another novel in the offing.
THE OMAN CONNECTION
That’s an interesting question. You will be surprised to know that the opening sentence of the novel reads like this, “The flight to Muscat lasted four hours.” So there you have Oman, right at the beginning. After this, the setting moves entirely to the UAE, because in the past, it was Dubai and Abu Dhabi that caught the imagination of people. So it was easier and relevant to have these two cities as the background. I thought it was easier for readers to relate to these two places than any other country in the Gulf.
But there is another major Oman connection — it was written during the years I stayed in Muscat between 2002 and 2008. It has been only a year since we moved out of the wonderful place that Muscat is. Had the book been published before April 2008, it would have been a novel from an expat writer based in Oman!
I am in talks with Borders, Family Book Shop and Turtles for the retailing of the book in the stores. I am hopeful of the deals happening soon. However, the book can be bought on www.amazon.com. Yes, they deliver books to the Middle East.
