A MElODY OF THE WIlDERNESS
Author : leena Sarma
Publisher : liFi, Rs275
At the backdrop of her skills and bureaucratic knack, seldom does anyone know the interesting facts about leena Sarma’s ‘journey’ with Prime Minister Narendra Modi way back in 1990. DEEPAK KUMAR JHA elaborates
With her second novel in English mid-course and several Assamese literary works to her credit, leena Sarma however feels excited to talk only about her first English fiction, A Melody in Wilderness. Although she has many credits in her so far illustrious career, Sarma talks about the “confidence” she developed and the courage she could gather for writing fiction in English when authors of this language are in abundance. She is a well know senior Indian Railway officer now posted at elite CRIS in New Delhi currently.
After writing eight novels in Assamese, one fine day in the summer of 2011, leena decided to write A Melody in the Wilderness. It happened during her stay in America along with her husband (an IPS officer) who went there on the Fulbright Fellowship during 2000-01. In the novel, the protagonist is a woman who fought against all adversities like loneliness, lack of higher education, financial constraints, and so on in the wake of her husband leaving her for a White woman, and made it big in the alien country. All her real life experiences/anecdotes were fitted into the plot as the story was progressing. The book is about an Indian origin woman’s saga of struggle on the soil of America to find a foothold when she was deserted by her much celebrated bio-technologist husband on the ground of intellectual incompatibility.
The novel intersperses between India and America and focuses more on America, her social and political milieu in the context of historical development. Certain aspects of American life like consulting psychiatrist or counselors on the slightest provocation which may appear normal to an American but found weird by an outsider, the feeling of American superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, the Melting Pot syndrome: all these are dealt with in the book. In the end, it is anticipated that an Indian origin person may take over the reign of this country as the President in the years to come and halt Chinese hegemony.
“The confidence generated after the appreciation I received for a narration at a Sahitya Akademi in Gangtok. I was supposed to read my short story and also take questions from the audience. I was spellbound by the depth and range of content or unique style of other three stories read by my predecessors. Then came the turn of my story. It was not only my story but my translation as well. But to my utter surprise and relief, the story was much appreciated; there was applause, people came and clasped my hands, some even cried. I felt very confident that I could convey an emotion through my story written in English. That meant my English was not so bad after all,” says Sarma.
“I could see that many Indian parents wanted to impose an India on their America-born children. The parents had to face lot of resistance bordering on revolt from the children who couldn’t feel much for an entity far removed from their realm of thought. I felt that it was hypocrisy to tell the children that you extract everything from this country but continue to love the country of your forefathers. I wrote about that also extensively in the novel. But it is not a simple story of one Indian woman. Though she is there in every frame, so many other facets of American life have been put there that America itself has become a living character in the novel,” she adds.
Her next writing project is a novel in Assamese based on historical facets in the Andamans islands, and another work again in English. Amongst her several books, one involves the moment India attained Independence which talks about the Chakma tribe in the Chittagong Hill Tract of Bangladesh (Surya Uthaa Desh). The moving story narrates as how on August 15, 1947 the jubilant Chakma people hoisted the Indian flag in anticipation of their merger with India, but on August 18 as per the Radcliffe Award, the landmass went to Pakistan, and a sordid tale of dispossession, pain and loss began.
Another of her books, Ahno-Aporahno, deals with the topic of how the Italian Engineers and English managers managed to start work on Railway construction in northeast India on a tract where they had to contend with wild tigers, buffaloes, dense jungles and wild animals. Also, her Amrixa talks about four generations of women and their stories and a generation shift replicating a social history of Assamese society spanning almost over a century.
At the backdrop of her skills seldom does anyone know the interesting facts about Sarma’s encounter with now Prime Minister Narendra Modi way back in 1990. She had detailed about meeting this “simple” politician and Shakner Singh Vagehla in an article in 1995 for an Assamese daily (Dainik Asom, October 29,1995) to highlight how two “total strangers” then from Gujarat helped her and her friend in accommodating in first class coupe.
The story attained popularity after Modi became PM and the same was published in English version in The Hindu on June 1, 2014 and was later followed up by many in social media, electronic and the prestigious Readers Digest as well. Briefly, leena and her friend who were going to Ahmedabad for a railway training programme had no reserved berths and the then young Modi and middle-aged Vaghela had offered their berths to both of the ladies and the leaders had themselves slept on the floor of the coach.