“Every day of my childhood was a blessed one. I remember those days as if it all happened yesterday,” says Sivasankari Chandrasekaran, noted writer and activist. She even remembers her days as a toddler, about two or three years old, when her father used to make her sit on his left lap as he drove his car.
“When I was five, my dad was leaving for his friend’s estate. When he was about to get into his car, he turned towards me and asked, unakku enna venum Jibu? (What do you want, Jibu?)and I replied, appa enakku oru maan kutty venum (Father, I want a deer),” she narrates with nostalgia. “The next morning, I was still sleeping and I could feel someone nibbling the flower strands in my hair, and when I turned around, I saw a little deer, with sparkling eyes, and I named him Mani. My father Suryanarayanan was a chartered accountant, and such was the pampering all his four kids (two sons and two daughters) enjoyed as we grew up in a huge bungalow on Thirumalai Pillai Road, in T Nagar,” she recalls.
- Sivasankari’s Knit India Through Literature consists of four volumes of hardcover books:
- Volume 1 on the languages of the South (from Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu)
- Volume 2 on the languages of the East (from Assam, Bengal, Manipur, Nepal and Orissa)
- Volume 3 on the languages of the West (Konkani, Marathi, Gujarati, and Sindhi)
- Volume 4 on the languages of the North (Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and Sanskrit)
- Each book consists of travelogues of the states covered, interviews with leading writers of each language, a representative selection and an overview of the literature of each region.
Sivasankari’s recently launched two-part memoir, titled Suriya Vamsam [published by Vanathi Pathipagam], is filled with such memories of her childhood, her parents, her career. The latter comprises four decades of literary work, including over 36 novels, 48 short novels, 150 short stories, 15 travelogues, seven collections of articles, one talking book for children, four volumes of literary research books, two volumes of anthologies, and two biographies — of Indira Gandhi and Sri GD Naidu.
“I chose to call it a memoir and not a biography. I preferred to highlight only the positive aspects and experiences of my life and it proved to be a wonderful experience. The process helped me dig out almost 300 years of my family treasures. As a result, long-forgotten incidents also surfaced,” says the 77-year-old author, who eventually gave up writing to take up Knit India Through Literature, a project involving the literature of 18 Indian languages.
Of friends and family
It is the untimely passing away of her long-time companion and personal secretary, Lalitha Venkatesh, in 2018, that urged her to write Suriyav Vamsam . “It was Lalitha’s wish that I write my biography, and this book is my tribute to her. I am also grateful to G Meenakshi, editor of Mangayar Malar , who motivated me and agreed to record as I spoke and keyed it in and edited it. It was with her support that I managed to complete the project in just one and a half years,” says the writer.
She was recuperating from two episodes of health setbacks in a year, and this book was written during her period of convalescence.
The anecdotes, narrated vividly by Sivasankari, provide a glimpse of life in Chennai city, the customs, rituals and culture seven decades ago, and also how society has changed over a period of time. The writer also traverses the high points of her married life, her career (she worked as a relationship manager in CitiBank before she took up writing full-time), her life-changing experiences and valuable lessons she learned along the way. For instance, Sivasankari’s father organised food supply at the Indian National Congress meeting held in Avadi in 1955. “He donated food packets for the huge gathering, and for this he used a concrete-mixing machine to mix cooked rice and sambar , which was poured on to a huge palm mat. All of the family members used to sit around the mat and pack the food. This is how we learnt philanthropy and charity from a young age,” Sivasankari says.
Sivasankari’s father made sure that his daughters completed their minimum qualification degree, and when they turned 18, he would gift them a learner’s licence to drive the car. “ Appa was also in the habit of addressing amma as Madam, in all situations and occasions.”
The writer also tells us how she evolved as a writer and as a human being, due to her exposure to people from all kinds of backgrounds that she came across in her illustrious life. She does not hesitate to talk about instances of child abuse she experienced, even though recounting must have been difficult. The writer had been a little girl back then, and before she could muster the courage to tell her mother about it, the perpetrator had already been sacked from the household, for stealing. The incident, she says, eventually found its way into her short story Rakshasargal five years ago, but the memoir is the first time she is recounting it as a personal experience.
She concludes, however, by saying that living and ageing gracefully, with peace and contentment, is her focus for now.
Suriya Vamsam is available as a set of two volumes, priced at ₹600, at all major bookstores and websites.