Essence of life

Jasmine Singh

Suchita Malik has a message for the young generation, which is applicable to all of us. ‘You cannot have a future without having a past,’ the soft-spoken writer elaborates and weaves a story around this message, and gives it a form of Scent Of The Soil, her fourth book, and the third in the trilogy, the first two being Indian Memsahib and Memsahib Chronicle’s published by Rupa Publications India.

Saturday morning saw friends, fans of her work and many dignitaries gather at Haryana Niwas, Chandigarh to talk about her latest book, the one that comes straight from her heart, like the rest of her works. 

“I do not write anything for the heck of it, I write about things that I strongly feel about,” says the author whose heart found a setting, a space, a scenario, a reality that she was compelled to write about. 

“There comes a stage in one’s profession (in the book this comes in the life of a civil servant), when enough is enough. This is the saturation point from where one is left to think about where life is moving or should it be.” 

And this is how her latest book Scent Of The Soil progresses. Suchita gives a peek into the inside world of her protagonist, a male civil servant. 

“I was asked when would I ever bring in a male protagonist in my books, since her earlier two books had a woman as the leading lady. So, this time my lead character is a male,” Suchita smiles as she takes us along the storyline of her new book. 

“My protagonist is a celebrated civil servant who has only focused on his professional commitments, and his family life is in complete mess. His wife has left him and kids have gone astray. It so happens that this civil servant lands up in a hospital, and he finds himself surrounded by his family, his ex-wife, children and his grandmother, the ones he didn’t care about when he was working. It is here that the kids strike a bond with their granny, who talks about the village life, and how the protagonist is already toying with the idea of going back to the village,” Suchita gives a brief of the story for which, of course, she has done her research. 

“I went to a village, spoke to the people there and stayed with them for a few days. So, though this book is a work of fiction, it has the flavour of what I felt and saw in the village,” says the author. 

And it is time to ask her about reactions from the family. She smiles, “My daughter is also a civil servant. I have asked her to take the message seriously but not everything as she is too young to feel exhausted or run away from something so important,” Suchita holds that smile. 

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