Thinking about Bengaluru is a happy thing for Priya Balasubramanian. The gastroenterologist and transplant hepatologist from Sacramento, California, was at Champaca Bookstore in the city for the launch of her début novel, The Alchemy of Secrets (Westland). The layered novel tells the story of 24-year-old Mira who returns to Bengaluru after seven years in the US to spend time with her dying grandmother.
“I grew up in Bangalore,” says Priya. “I left India right around the time the book ends — in 1997 (the book ends in 2000). I was steeped in Bangalore, I felt like I knew it, and also I was somewhat homesick.”
Favourite haunts
Priya who counts “RT Nagar where I grew up, Malleswaram for the book, and traditional Kannadiga food, MG Road and Brigade Road for shopping, and Gangotree for chaat,” as her favourite Bengaluru haunts, is a frequent visitor to the city.
On what has changed and what has not, she says, “Many things have changed on the surface. The city has grown beyond all expectations. Traffic, as everyone is quick to point out, is terrible. It is hotter now and more densely populated. But I think the best things about Bangalore remain the same — the ever growing trees, the people, the way Bangalore has of finding a place in your heart... Most newcomers here seem to grow attached to it the way I did. It is hard to explain but Bangalore seems to be the same if you look hard enough, despite all that has changed on the surface.”
The author describes the time she was writing the novel as a period of transition. “I joined medical college (CMC, Vellore) when I was 17, graduated, got married, started residency and fellowship, had two children… I was trying to make sense of who I was and where I came from. All of that went into the book.”
Priya had this image of a little girl clutching an older, white sari-clad woman. “I thought about what was happening there. It seemed to me that those two were completely absorbed in each other, and the story grew out of that. This book took a long time but there was always that pay-off that came from writing about Bangalore, of thinking about Sampige Road and Margosa Road...”
Mira’s mother, Radhika, dies during the Emergency. “There were a couple of things that were fixed such as Mira’s age and when Radhika died. I was writing before Nirbhaya and was naive to imagine horrific things could happen only in an authoritarian state.”
Rather than being Radhika’s or Mira’s story, Priya says The Alchemy of Secrets is the story of a family. “It is all of their stories and that is why it is a multiple-perspective narrative. It starts off with Mira, which is in the first person and you tend to think it would be her story. But it is also Ajji’s story and her journey to forgiveness and redemption. Girish, Mira’s uncle has an arc, he is someone who does a bunch of small bad things that cumulatively becomes a huge bad thing.”
Priya dipped into her memories of Bengaluru — there is Casa Picola (the height of sophistication at one point of time), the trusty City Central Library that all of us of a certain vintage would definitely have visited. “I researched the Emergency, looked at a lot of maps. The novel is an exercise in imagination. I think with the level of detail and the scaffolding of historical fact, there is a temptation to read it as non-fiction but it is not.”
The title Priya says, speaks of “the transformation from base metal to gold that comes with revealing long-held secrets. Ajji holds this devastating secret and once it is released, it transforms Mira.”
The book took 10 years from first chapter to publication and now Priya is working on two projects. “One is a linked collection of short stories that has some characters that I had to cut out of The Alchemy of Secrets . It is a standalone book set in the apartment complex where Girish’s mistress, Sitara, lived. It will also be a Bangalore book. The other novel is set in California loosely based on the Indian immigrant experience.”
