I couldn't help gushing: something that I all along believed was not part of my natural self. Could you help it — if you read a 12-year-old's “The Mahabharatha: A child's view” and that too illustrated? “So how…, and then…, but why…?” I was full of questions that barely concealed my wonderment and the 26-year-old self-effacing Samhita Arni, who, by now, used to handling people like me, made it seem like given her circumstances, it just happened.
Samhita first read the Mahabharatha as a four-year-old. Her father worked for the Indian government and was posted to Karachi. “Growing up in Pakistan was very different. My brother had just been born and being away from India was difficult for my mother. But I went to school, made lots of friends,” recalls Samhita, who has distinct memories of how the ISI officials trailed them back and forth to school everyday. “Initially, it was disturbing, but after a while we had a name for each of them and turned it into a game.” Once she got home from school, Samhita did not have much to do; going out to play was ruled out. The books she found at home were Mahabharata and Ramayana and at the Consulate Library, it was the same, except that there were several versions available. Before she realised what was happening, the epics had taken over her life. In the preface to her first edition (1996) Samhita says: “I was soon engrossed in the details of the Kurukshetra battle and in the exile of Rama. Often, I would hear the panchajanya blowing or see the ape banner of Arjuna fluttering in the wind.”
The greater shock for the little Samhita was coming back to India as an eight-year-old. Kids at school in Delhi ostracised her when they learnt she had “come from Pakistan”. “It was 1992, the Babri Masjid episode had taken place, I felt extremely lonely and it didn't feel like home.” Samhita found that she had no friends. “You imagine home to be something and you find it is not what you imagined. That's perhaps why books became my best friends,” she says. Samhita's mind was fully occupied by the epics and soon she was dictating Mahabharatha to her grandmother in her “own words”. As her grandmother wrote, Samhita did the illustrations. She added her own stories, changed some, but in her overall scheme, they had a very clear purpose. Two years later, when her mother discovered all this on bits and pieces of paper, she decided to take it to a publisher.
But how was it possible for a ten-year-old to see the other side of the story? “Living in Pakistan helped me,” says Samhita. It was difficult for her to see the Pakistanis as enemies. “My position was always different from my father's. Pakistanis are like us, and I had my emotional attachments there. To see my friends as my enemies was impossible. I began to unconsciously apply this to everything I read. That's possibly what helped me read the epics from a different viewpoint.” The futility of war and our notion of the enemy was something that constantly bothered Samhita, which was also why she could never disentangle herself from the epics.
The nerdy, geeky Samhita was reason for worry to her parents. Her father especially, was troubled that she was a “slow learner” at school. But Samhita's mother took her to art exhibitions, put paper and pencil before her and encouraged her to draw. It turned out that she was extremely skilled with her lines. “I gradually found myself,” says Samhita, who went on to do her post graduation in Film and Religious Studies in Massachusetts.
In her growing up years, and till recently as well, Samhita didn't particularly enjoy the “Ramayana”, and in fact resented Sita's character. She felt Sita was a burden on the feminist movement and surely not the way Indian women must be. “But I recognise that she had a quiet strength to her. She went away when she had the opportunity to become queen. She brought up both her kids all by herself.
The way the character develops is fascinating,” says Samhita, who was rapt by the manner in which the epic came alive in various parts of the world, particularly in Thailand where she lived.
With many short stories in her kitty, Samhita loves it for the freedom it brings. Non-fiction is limiting, but fiction is extremely challenging. “I had to make eight drafts of Sita,” she says of her work to be released in June. “Initially you set out knowing what you want to do with your characters, but it doesn't necessarily take you there.”
So, the struggle is on and Samhita is not really someone who religiously spends hours at the writing table.
On the editorial board of the online magazine “Out of Print”, which is a forum for the short story form, Samhita has serious concerns. With writers getting huge advances and the lure of international markets, most young writers now work on these paradigms. “There is a big readership in India and I think it is important to write for an Indian market. For instance, I don't think an international reader would want to read my latest work, Sita.”
It was easy for Samhita to choose academics and live comfortably in the West. However, she made the hard choice of living by writing. “I wanted to come back to India. It's an exciting world here. A life of the mind at the university was wonderful, but everyone lives in a bubble. I wanted to be in touch with ‘real' people who live ‘real' lives with all its tearing problems,” explains Samhita. “The uncertainties that my choice brings bothers me, but it's my choice nevertheless.”
