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Saras at my Dining Table
May 11, 2022
Saras came to stay for a couple of nights. I had been asking her for ages to come and use my house for a writing retreat and this is the first time she has done so. She needs peace and space which she doesn't have at home with Kanan to look after. Her husband is also not very understanding.
She has her collection of short fiction to finish and it's high time it was out in the world. it's important and I think she manages to say what too many Indians in Malaysia are afraid to about the prejudices they face on a day-to-day basis and about the weight of cultural expectations.
And she's an excellent writer - several ofthe stories have been published before including the piece that won a major international short story prize a couple of years back.
I spent a couple of weeks (at the rate of a story a day) editing the manuscript for her making notes and marking up the text. There are some extremely strong stories, and others that still need work and more major changes (e.g. to point-of-view, narrative tenses). I was afraid that she would get upset by my suggestions, but it seems my comments mirror what she has been thinking herself.
She spent a quiet day at my dining table, rewriting one piece. I was sad when she had to go back to KL and drove her to the station.
This too-big house needs to be used like this - as a place for writers to come and work.
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