This is my first novel and I am pretty excited about it.
Reading has been a passion from as far back as I can remember, which goes back to the time that I had just started putting alphabets together to form words and I would try and make sense of the words I came across on any printed space or signboard on the streets.
As a child it was Enid Blyton who cast the spell and in my late teens, the Mills and Boon series and authors like Hermina Black and Barbara Cartland swayed my romantic heart. The community library just next to our house also provided us with a lot of books in my mother-tongue, malayalam.
As an adult, there was no particular genre that I preferred. I HAD to read, that was it.
In the job that I held for twenty five years in a Central Government Ministry , before I took voluntary retirement , ten years prior to my superannuation date, there was a lot of writing that took place. May be it was my proclivity to write that made me use my pen for the notings and draft letters submitted to the higher authorities on the files and made me depend a lot less that one normally would , to dictate them to my stenographer and have them typed out. But there was no scope for creativity in that milieu of presentation of hard facts and figures.
I was busy even after my retirement in matters that I had involved myself with , which again , had little to do with writing. But I had started a blog and later joined Facebook when i started putting up posts of this and that and pretty much everything that interested me or wanted to share.
It was only after I relocated from Delhi in North India , where I had spent close to thirty five years, to Bangalore where my daughter was settled , to sign in for the role of doting grandmother,that the seed of an idea of putting something together in the form of a book , was planted in my mind. I had in fact straightaway written the first chapter of a novel, which i thought would effortlessly take off, considering that I could call upon my vocabulary without too much effort and because I imagined that there would be plenty of time to spare.
But my grandson became my only area of abiding interest till he started to go to school. By that time , the initial fervour had subsided and i would half-heartedly take up the chapters with huge gaps in between. It was only in the course of the last one year that I approached it with any amount of consistency and then too, by the time I had finished putting together around twenty five chapters, I was gripped by impatience to be done with it.
Thereafter for a few months, I tentatively explored the regular pubishing platforms , but was left feeling dejected, seeing how long and tiring the process would be and that too without any guarantee of success.
So I went the self-publishing way and the book has been available online for the last three months.
To most of my friends here, the background and culture in which the characters are set in will be totally strange. But may be, just may be , it will make for an interesting reading. The society and places are all familiar to me from close at hand and hopefully, I have been able to add a touch of authenticity to the story. I will be delighted if you get a copy and read it.
It is an attempt to capture the changing patterns in the intra-community and inter community relationships that one has witnessed from my childhood up to the present time in my homestate, Kerala , a caostal state in the South of India.
In India the book is available on the Notionpress online store , amazon.in and Flipkart
For those outside India it is available on amazon.com
Here is the link:
https://notionpress.com/read/the-winnowing-waves
nadirafromkannur 