How was life for Goans living in the bustling cities of Karachi and Lahore before the partition of India? Third generation Goans can only look for these answers in either pages of history or through oral stories. However, the inquisitiveness for this part of history will always remain in the minds of Goans especially those who had relatives who lived through the partition.
Priya Hajela from Pune, who also calls Goa
her home has written her first novel, ‘Ladies Tailor’ based on the life of her
protagonist, Gurudev, who has to leave Pa-kistan and travel east to enter
India, and create a new life for himself in a new country with new friendships.
Priya moved to the US when she was
seventeen, studied there, met her husband, worked for eleven years, had two
children, Ashad and Nishika and returned to India in 2004. She continued
working here, at Tata Communications, IBM and others. “I quite enjoyed my work,
my colleagues and the experience. I had never written before but had always
been an avid reader. Given that we have just this one life, I dived head first
into something completely different from what I had been doing for the past 22
years, with full encouragement and support from my kids and my husband,” says
Priya, who now resides in Olaulim, Aldona.
Her grandparents lived through the partition and were her
inspiration to write the novel. “My grandparents were also my guardians and
friends because my parents separated when my sister and I were very young. We
were in boarding school but spent a substantive part of our holidays with them.
I always asked for stories and I always got them about my grandmother’s life
when she was young, when she got married, and then jumping straight to when
they built their home in Ludhiana. Neither spoke about the move from Pakistan,
or that they missed their home or that they wanted to go back,” says Priya,
whose book has been shortlisted for Cover Design for the Atta Galatta Bangalore
Literature Festival Book Prize.
However, the partition was a memory that they wanted to suppress
and not speak about the life they left behind, “My grandparents never spoke to
us about what they missed but they had assembled a whole community of people
who were from their old homeland. This group, they called it the Singh Sabha
(an actual movement which started in the 1870s to restore Sikhism to his former
glory this group had no such intent), met regularly. They spoke in their
village dialect, a version of Pun-jabi that was quite different from what we
usually heard them speak. I would listen sometimes, sitting between my grandparents,
but never understood or registered anything,” she says.
Though a novel, Priya has researched well about the
characteristics of the people from both regions of that time. “The people on
both sides of the border are much the same as is the food and clothing.
However, there are nuances, fashion, local dishes, and such that are different.
I talk a lot about fashion, embroidery and food in the book to not only
highlight what’s different but also what is the same,” she adds.
Priya’s association with Harper Collins began with the contract
signing almost two years ago. Priya took three years to write the book, writing
full time and she even wrote eight versions of the book over time. She
explains, “I actually finished the book towards the end of 2019. It took me
some time to find an agent, then some time for her to sell it. Harper Collins
bought the book at the beginning of 2021 but told me they would only publish it
in June of 2022, in time for the 75th anniver-sary of independence. So, my book
was my own, Harper fit it into their schedule.”
Speaking about the challenges of researching for the book, Priya
says, “I did extensive research for the book, a fair bit on historical events
but a whole lot on cultural norms and mores of the time. I wanted to understand
that and express it as accurately as I could. This was hard because the kind of
details I was looking for were not readily available. I had to look at
photographs and fill in the color, the situations, the details.”
Besides the role of the protagonist, Gurudev, what were the
aspects of life after mi-gration that she wanted to highlight through the book?
“Writing a book at my age makes for a lot of ideas, beliefs, values and
experiences to form my work. Some of the elements I ended up with in my book, I
had not intended such as the value of home. I have written about and described
12 different homes in the book. The elements that I intended to write about
include the importance of strong women char-acters, even though the time period
didn’t favor that. Decisive characters, people who make hard decisions to keep
moving forward in life this was an important one I wanted to highlight. It is
what makes Punjabis who they are. Life was hard after migration things you
thought were resolved got reversed and you had to start over it took grit and
hard work to keep going my characters demonstrated that.
Priya has had book discussion on ‘Ladies Tailor’ at Dogears
Bookshop in Margao and at Prose in Nachinola. Readers can next catch the
authjor at Museum of Goa on November 20 in conversation with Nirupama
Krishnaswami at 11.30 am.
“I
write regular feature articles for The Daily Guardian (Delhi). I also have a
couple of short stories coming out in the near future one in The Muse, others
still in de-velopment. I have finished a new novel which is currently with an
editor and am working on a new one which will keep me busy for the next year or
two,” says Priya, whose book is available at DogEars Bookshop in Margao, at
Literati in Can-dolim and at Crossword in Panjim.