Renita D’Silva started writing because she had no other choice, “I was born in a small coastal village near Mangalore. I always loved reading but the small library in my home town was inadequate. There weren’t too many books and many of those had the pages torn out. So I had to finish those stories,” she says.
Her debut novel, Monsoon Memories (Harlequin, Rs. 350) is a coming of age story with two central characters—Shirin who has fled to London to escape a murky past and Reena, Shirin’s little niece who discovers a lost, forgotten photograph of her mysterious aunt.
“It is a story about a woman’s journey into the past, a family drama, the unearthing of secrets. There is also a feminist angle to it. It is an ode to Mangalore,” she says and much of the book has been drawn from her own growing up years in the city.
“I grew up in Mangalore and worked for a while in Bangalore before taking a break to have my children. My husband had been posted to UK, around that time so I did a creative writing course there—something I always wanted to do,” she says.
She went on to publish stories in various journals and other publications such as The View from Here , Bartleby Snopes , ‘ this’ zine , Platinum Page and Paragraph Planet before going on to write Monsoon Memories. “All my stories start with a picture I create in my head. This one had two girls drinking tea-one is talking and the other feels guilty because she isn’t listening,” she says.
On future plans she says that she is now working on her second book, “I want to continue to write, “she smiles. “ I love stories—both writing and reading them.”
