By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS
New Delhi : Booker Prize winning novelist Kiran Desai is experimenting with non-fiction for the first time in her life.
Her book “The Inheritance of Loss” won the Booker Prize in 2006.
“It is a very difficult genre because it requires thorough research. I am not on familiar ground with non-fiction, it is much easier to write a novel unlike my father who is comfortable with non-fiction,” the New York-based author told IANS in an interview.
Kiran was in the capital Sunday for the launch of her father Ashvin Desai’s debut book.
She is also learning about the grim realities in the heart of India as part of an essay that she has written for the Gates Foundation in a recent anthology of 15 articles on women and girls affected by HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The multimillion-dollar Gates Foundation run by Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda supports the HIV/AIDS awareness and intervention campaign under a project called “Avahan” in India jointly with National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO). So far the foundation, which funds major development and social responsibility initiatives across the world, has pledged $258 million.
“The anthology comprises 15 essays and mine is one of them,” said the New York-based writer, who spent considerable time in rural Andhra Pradesh recently for the Gates Foundation project.
“For the first time, I interacted with sex workers and abused women who are in the HIV high-risk category,” Kiran said.
“The Andhra Pradesh trip was an eye-opener. I came across girls as young as 13 or 14, who have been sold by their parents either to earn their dowries and/or to fend off poverty for sums as paltry as Rs.10,000 to Rs.20,000. Almost all these women have been forced into the flesh trade in the small towns and along the highways. They are exploited by the truck-drivers,” Kiran disclosed.
The author also studied rural migration as part of her assignment for the Gates Foundation and met members of several itinerant communities like the acrobats, whose women are exposed to the risk of HIV/AIDS. “They have been completely uprooted from their hearth and are very vulnerable,” Kiran said.
The author is also working on a few journalistic articles off and on in New York. “No more non-fiction for me, I have had enough of it. I am returning to fiction and planning a new novel,” she said.
Kiran’s family has been her inspiration. “My father has been my greatest inspiration. We are a family of readers and writers. Every morning, all of us wake up and head straight to our desks – my dad, my mom and me,” says Kiran, recalling her childhood.
“I picked up my reading habits from him. We would talk about everything – philosophy, music, creative styles, books and everything that was happening round the world at the end of the day. We were a closed kind of family that mostly kept to ourselves, to our books and our music,” she said.
Music has played an important role in Kiran’s intellectual growth as a writer. “I love music like my father does. Every morning, I would wake to the sounds of either the Dagar Brothers or western classical music which my father would play as a wake-up call,” she smiles.
An entire chapter in her father Ashvin Desai’s debut novel “Between Eternities: Ideas of Life and Cosmos” is devoted to the mysticism in Indian classical music through songs and lyrics.
Desai senior gives daughter Kiran “10 on a scale o f 10” as a writer. “Kiran is a wonderful writer. And we are great friends. We read together, travel together, listen to Indian and western music together and even booze together,” said the 75-year-old proud father.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])