Indian-ness unlimited

Gurnaaz Kaur

Travel stories about India are aplenty and so are the writers writing them. But it probably takes one with a different kind of a heart to look beyond the superficialities of travel and delve deep into the lives of people who are as much a part of the travel experience as the various landscapes. One such writer is Elisabeth J Singh, who has authored 23 books till date, many of which are about her experiences in India. And she has no plans of stopping anytime soon.

Fresh off the positive response to her last book Oh! India, which is a collection of short stories, Elisabeth, at the age of 60—which she considers just a number—is gearing up to write her 24th book, which, by no accident, also happens to have a strong Indian connection.

Ask her what compels her to write about India so very often and she quips, “I don’t know how or why, but I was born with one foot in India. My family stems from Norway, Sweden and Germany, but I’m sure I’ve lived several of my previous lives in India… My connection with India is just there; like people need food and water, I need India.”

The teenager from Norway had set out on a journey in December 1975. She knew she was going to India, but that was all she knew. Sans much knowledge of the country or of its people, she continued with a heart full of love and eyes full of dreams. She loved one of us. She married him. The wedding ended but the name Singh was there on her passport and she chose to live with it all her life.

So, practically, her Indian connection got cut in seven years. But she remarks there’s a certain kind of love that never passes away. “Yes, my Indian connection lasted for nearly seven years at that time, but I really cannot imagine my life without it. It has made my life so much richer. My life is quite unthinkable without my Indian marriage,” she remarks with a smile.

However, today, 42 years later, she feels like she hasn’t even scratched the surface when it comes to knowing and understanding the India we all seem to take for granted and have resigned ourselves to. Her writings are her attempt at understanding a country she holds so dear.

With the latest book she’s writing, she intends to shed new light on the Partition of India. This is going to be a story about love, about the endurance of love, no matter what the circumstances. It’s about the blatant disregard for any state-sponsored crimes and the refusal to hate in the name of nationality and religion. It’s about two families preserving their loving relationship amidst the never-ending, ever-increasing turmoil and chaos. It’s about people who don’t and won’t let the physical boundaries drawn by others define their relationships with their loved ones.

Considering it will be her 24th book, it would be easy to dismiss her as just a full-time author, but nothing could be further from the truth. Elisabeth’s life has not been short of a rollercoaster. She has donned many hats — from studying German, French and political science to being an editor for one of the major publishers in Norway to being a visual artist; from running her own publishing business to running her own art gallery for over 20 years; from stepping out of her house at an early age and getting married to an Indian at 18 and getting divorced not that soon after, she has had her fair share of life experiences. But she believes in taking them in her stride and growing and enriching her life and also the lives of everyone around her, something that egged her on to associate herself with NGOs as well.

Elisabeth is one of the many authors we have had a chance to meet, but what she has left with us as a lesson is her undying love for all that she is and all that she does; be it a foreign country or a job she never thought she would take up. And, her self-discovery started with her love for an Indian man and it grew with her love for the country called India.