I'm no Dan Brown, Damn it!

What does it take for someone (all right, not ‘someone’, read ‘yours truly’) to be a Dan Brown?
Why Dan brown you may ask, of all people on this flat, crowded, exploding earth?
I ask, why not?
Isn’t he the most happening, selling name in this given moment? And he happens (though not incidentally) to be an author too. An author, not like me, of course. On the contrary, an author who needs no publicity yet gets oodles of it, who needs no money anymore (come on, he must have stopped longing for money soon after Da Vinci), yet gets windfall after windfall, whose book needs no reviews actually, yet gets written about in mixed tones, although the writings have no bearing on readers’ decision to lunge at it.
So if someone were to ask me whose shoes I would like to be in these current times, it would be Man Brown’s. I mean, Dan Brown’s. But the trouble is the shoe wouldn’t fit, even if he were to give me a pair gratis. And getting the shoe to fit is what the struggle of a start up author is all about.
A remark that was casually flung at me recently woke me up to the reality of the unfitting shoe. I hadn’t even thought of it remotely till then. But when someone made a snide comment that I was no Dan Brown and I could expect no instant ground swell of response or support for my first book, I told myself, albeit wryly, “Well, it’s true. I am no Dan Brown.”
And it has become my favourite pick up line since then.
I am no Da(m)n Brown.
It has given me an apt excuse to hand out to people who thought my first book should have done a million copies by now and my name should have been splashed all over and I should have gone to the Alps to celebrate the success. (God save them from insanity and bless them for their innocence).
It saves me from explaining the difficulties of being a first timer, gives me the strength to fight, the freedom to fail and a point to ponder when I have little else to do – what, after all, does it take to be a Dan Brown?
I may never figure out the trick, but for the moment, I am content with the fact that I share a corner of the cyber space with him. Find my book nestling below The Lost Symbol on http://www.oxfordbookstore.com/dotcom/oxford/
It is nowhere near getting the shoe to fit, but it at least gives me the satisfaction of having gone to the same high end shoe shop from where he gets his pair, sat next to his seat for a while and then walked out dragging my unshod feet, acknowledging that I am no Dan Brown.” This time, not so wryly.

The New Indian Express

Write up on Sand Storms, Summer Rains in The New Indian Express
Click on the JPEG above to read

Write up in The Week, Oman

Spectator of life

Tridwip K Das

theweek@apexstuff.com

Novelist Asha Iyer Kumar, who is the third Indian expat in Oman to publish anovel in a year, says that Muscat inspired her more than anything else

The publisher of Asha Iyer Kumar’s book hammers the nail squarely on its head. “It is soaked with ordinary life. Our lives,” Sunil K Poolani of Frog Books wrote responding to an email query on what he considered was the USP of Sand Storms, Summer Rains. Asha is Indian and was a resident of Muscat – for nine years – when she wrote her debut novel. She relocated to Fujairah a year ago but is still hopelessly nostalgic about Muscat. “There is nothing that I don’t miss about the place. The beautifully laid out city, the clean, wide roads, the green sidewalks, the way the city breaks into colours in winter…” That descriptive style of narration is evident in her writing – it is full of imagery. Asha opens Sand Storms, Summer Rains with these words – “The flight to Muscat lasted three hours. The sky and the sea merged into a blue vignette at the altar of the universe. Straddling clouds hung from the sky like wads of cotton wool. From the window of the giant steel hawk, they looked like angels wheeling over a confused humanity.”

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What I saw of men here (the Gulf region) who came from their homeland (Kerala), leaving their
people behind, was a far cry from the stories I had heard of them back there. The much touted,
much envied Gulf returnee there was a sweating, slogging, lonely campaigner here. I saw them all around me, in the pick-up taxis, on the streets of Ruwi, on the lawns along the highway, under the summer sun, inside factories. I can describe them as my literary epiphany for the novel. They inspired such despair in me that I felt an urge to write about them”
– Asha Iyer Kumar

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Released in India in April and expected in Borders outlets in Oman soon, Asha says she owes it to Muscat for providing an atmosphere conducive to literary expression. Asha came to Muscat soon after her marriage in 1998 and worked as a freelance writer for publications in India and the Gulf region. This followed a stint teaching English grammar, literature and creative writing to expatriate and Omani students at her residence. “It was during this time that the idea for the
novel came up and I began to write. It took three years to complete the novel. If places can be one’s muse, Muscat was it for me.” Nevertheless, the story is not set in Oman. It begins to unfold with a flight to Muscat but, curiously enough, the rest of the Gulf setting is in the UAE. “That’s because people relate to Dubai and Abu Dhabi more when we say the Gulf. It was so at least in the past in Kerala (the Indian state to which a large proportion of the Indian migrant workers in the Gulf region belong). So much so that the Gulf used to be synonymous with Dubai – some even called it Abu Dubai – several years ago. So I set the story in these places. But it could be the story of any Indian expatriate in any of the Gulf states. Take out Dubai/Abu Dhabi – the names are mentioned very sparsely in the story – and insert Oman, Bahrain or Qatar, and the plot and the story would remain as relevant.”
Sand Storms, Summer Rains tells the saga of two men from Kerala who arrive in the Gulf – one chasing a dream, the other under compulsion. The plot is a maze of twists and turns. These could reflect a fertile imagination or even an ability to be inspired by real life. Either way, Asha tells a compelling story with her vivid imagery. At the heart of her novel are its ironies, which no matter what the reader’s cultural conditioning, can’t be missed. In Asha’s own words, “A resonating sentiment in the novel is the fact that everything in life comes at a price, a price which many times fails to justify the very gains.”
Considering fictional writings tend to be autobiographical, when asked if the generalisation held true in her case too, Asha said hers is biographical. “A novel cannot happen unless you draw on the huge resource of either your or others’ experiences in life because art, in its essence, is a reflection of the real.”
Asha’s husband, Vimal Kumar, who is now getting used to life as a novelist’s husband – “Her literary achievement is adding quality to our life, except that we get less time for many other things these days” – did not see himself anywhere in the story.

The response to her book, Asha claimed, has generated interest among expatriate communities
spread across the world. “But the response in Kerala, where I hail from and where the novel is partly set, has been overwhelming.” She has, however, been slammed for committing a linguistic flub’. One reviewer caused Asha enough grief to prompt her to post an entry on her blog for the ‘unpardonable’ offence of not knowing the difference between a mangrove and a mango grove. “It’s an error; I admit it happened because I was genuinely ignorant. It was just one of the many plain things that I did not know of in this world,” she wrote on her blog.
Asked what’s next, Asha let loose another volley of literary idioms and phrases typical of her style. “I shall continue to write till I stop being a keen spectator of life. I love the feel of words, the throb of literary expression, and revel in the experience of putting my thoughts down.” She has just completed a collection of ten short stories, titled Marie Biscuits and Other Snacks.
“There is another long story knocking on my head. The idea is still sketchy, the plot is embryonic, but I can feel it brewing inside me. It looks like sooner or later, it will become apparent as a novel.”

Band-Aid for the world

Eight years have passed since the dreadful Manhattan Tuesday - the day when the world felt as though it were looking up from under a chimney hole on the TV screen. Yet it is inevitable that the world discusses or dissects it all over again, albeit in feebler tones given the time that has elapsed and revokes and relives the single binding emotion that rippled across the world years ago. First as horror, which later whittled down to fear and paranoia. It did not dilute for days and months. It stayed in us in varying measures. It outstripped our everyday sensibilities. We rechristened the emotion overnight. It suddenly had tags of a white turban and a flowing beard. It became a gargantuan surrogate to the emotion we feel when the lights go off abruptly in the night or an alley cat suddenly jumps across. Curious how our mundane domestic worries ballooned to take gigantic aspects! It suddenly had to do with getting on planes and living in high rises. To do with bombs and bullets. Terror took a definite form that day – the form of human beings completely devoid of it. Of human beings who took draconian oaths to destroy despite their lives. And silly, we had panicked that someday the extraterrestrials would invade and annihilate us!

Every year the anniversary of the event that would go down in history as one of the most uncouth demonstrations of the human spirit will be ‘laden’ with a palpable wariness. There will be a sense of foreboding. A presentiment of a recurrence. Folly. It would take sometime for us to realize that history repeats but in different versions. That the same would not happen again. Something else, but not the same. History hates to be typecast and the playwrights of the event would be well aware of it.

Strange are the ways of the new, aggrieved world. A world where there are no perfect rights or perfects wrongs. No perfect heroes or perfect villains. Where combat is the new order. Where wounds and pain are the only levellers. And death is the only upshot.

There is no clue to who would strike next. Or where. We are living a terribly frightful existence. There is no foolproof defense against maverick suicide bombers or schemers ready to take the gallows or decay in detention. On the other side there is no guard against the mighty force that can turn its heat on anything that rankles its whims and wits. Or anything it simply takes a fancy to. Caught between the two and ranged against its own idiosyncrasies, mankind is smarting. It is bleeding from its vital organs. And it needs palliatives. We need reprieve from the pain of our own devising and from the struggle we have taken upon ourselves. That is what we need to find in this anniversary week. And every week after this. Year after year.

The human spirit has failed miserably and it continues to crumble. The only power that can prevail over this eroding human soul and save it from complete devastation is the Divine. Religion, of the kind that guides, of the kind that teaches forbearance, of the kind that can help us see right from wrong and of the kind that heals, can be our only succour. Probably. It is a little like administering poison as anti-venom. The cause of pain turning into the antidote when dispensed in the right manner.

It is the only thing on my mind as I stand in the balcony of my flat at dusk in these holy, Ramdhan days, absorbed in the prayer call that draws the devout to its vortex. It gives the silence that preceded it an impeccable quality. It almost makes the presence of the divine in the air palpable. It marks the culmination of human endurance, determination and devotion. It is a slice in time when nothing except divinity prevails in the inky air.

Makes me wonder as I take in the brisling atmosphere around me, why and how do such delectable solemnity and serenity get marred by booms and bombs elsewhere in the world? What makes it so utterly urgent for men to sully the sacrosanct nature of these holy times?

Sometimes, nothing makes sense, not even faith and its manifestations.

Interview in 'Thursday', the Weekend magazine of Times of Oman

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.

From Khaleej Times, Dubai

A home away from home

Raziqueh Hussain
4 September 2009

Novelist Asha Iyer Kumar talks about her debut book Sand Storms, Summer Rains, and gives an insider’s view of an expat’s life in the Gulf and how she’s made herself at home and etched out a new life in her adopted land.

An article Asha Iyer Kumar was asked to write for the Khaleej Times’ wknd. magazine on ‘Gulfees’ (a term for expats she coined herself) was the trigger for her to pen her book Sand Storms, Summer Rains. “I decided to take the thread of privations from the article and weave a story, keeping the sentiment intact but filling it with fictional characters and instances. I stuffed it with my own observations and broad view of people and life,” she reveals.
The premise of her book is the life of expats living in the Gulf. The two main protagonists are symbols of the emotional and personal upheavals men suffer when they travel to distant lands to make money and support their families back home. The book takes the reader on a dune-bashing ride through their agonies and ecstasies, their lives summing up the futility of the expat journey in personal terms. It took three years for Kumar to write her book, and three more to have it published. Kumar moved to the Gulf in 1998 after her marriage, but becoming a novelist wasn’t a conscious choice. “It was joblessness and boredom that drove me to take up writing full time, not the intention of getting published,” she says. “It was a means of keeping myself busy. As my observations and experiences of life in the Gulf grew, I felt an urge to write them down.”
Although Kumar admires authors like RK Narayan, Ruskin Bond and Shashi Deshpande, she vehemently denies any marked influences in her style. “I haven’t tried to imbibe any particular style from any particular author. I doubt if any writer would consciously do such a thing and risk losing their identity. I think, as we evolve through reading and writing, our own style becomes a confluence of various influences — of theme, thought, technique, even the genre of writing. But yes, there might be a mild sway here or there that is evocative of some other author, but that cannot be intentional,” she says.
Kumar, who lives in Fujairah, feels the best part of being an expat is having to make a home for yourself in a different culture and learning 
to adapt.
“You are in a country that has a completely different culture from your own, yet you feel at home because of its adoptive nature and its multicultural and cosmopolitan fabric. I don’t think my first novel would have happened if it wasn’t for the fact that I live here,” she says.
But like all expats, she misses home. “Oh, how I miss the monsoon and the lush green landscapes of Kerala. How I regret not being able to partake in family gatherings and occasions.
“I see the life of an expat as an extended metaphor for life itself. There’s no guarantee of being here tomorrow, so live today to the fullest.”

- Khaleej Times