56 | WRITER’S CORNER
THE INDIA OF MY DREAMS
Two acclaimed novelists pen down their unique vision of a ‘perfect India’
M
“SEEN” (FICTION) – MILAN VOHRA
y father didn’t come to see me for three months after I was born. My mother told me this when I was 18. I wasn’t surprised. For 18 years, my father hadn’t really even looked at me. I had lived in that household of men holding forth at the dining table at every meal, wondering if it was because there was something wrong with the way I looked or spoke. “It wasn’t that,” my mother told me much later. “It was because you were born a girl, Manasi.” No, no, don’t gasp. It was true in India then. At least the India I grew up in. I remember the first time I had added something to the conversation at the table. I had just returned from school, excited about discovering that all those stars in the sky were possibly many different worlds like ours. That many of them had names and satellites like we had the moon. I was thrilled at the wonder of all this. Until then, the biggest word I knew was ‘earth’. It was only five letters long. But that day I had memorised the spelling of
a big magical world. Planet – that was six letters! I had rolled the word around on my tongue all the way back on the school bus. At dinner, my father asked what we were taught at school. My younger brother spoke about, “This is Jane. See Jane run. Can Jane run? Jane can run.” My older brother
JANUARY 2020