Whether it is 57-year-old Savithramma, whose life revolves around her family, or a staid Rosie looking for love, the characters in A Brigand for a Night and Other Tales, by Madhavi Gunasheela, touch a chord. Written in a literary, engaging style, the collection of short stories, spanning different time periods and genres, evoke a gamut of emotions.
Madhavi says she wrote the book because she loves to write. “I used to write medical articles for newspapers. One day, I started writing. It kept going on and slowly became a story. I wrote the first story. The second story took time. I wrote in-between work and enjoyed it. I spoke to a friend and he said why not publish it.”
The stories are detailed and layered, everything from the settings to the emotions of each character have been vividly described.
“I wanted to describe so that readers would get a complete picture. They can picture the setting, the homes, and the people. It’s like a movie,” says Madhavi, who earned her medical degree from Bengaluru, followed by a Diploma of the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation from New York.
She says creativity flowed from pen to page, and that there wasn’t any conscious method to writing the stories. “I wrote from the heart. There is no single theme. There’s rural India, urban Bahamas, Africa. I wanted to give myself variety and keep myself stimulated. Every story was fun. I loved creating the stories.”
She agrees that writing is subjective. “Your writing reflects what you’ve seen in life. I feel strongly about certain issues, so I put them in the stories.”
The title of the book comes from the last story, A Brigand for a Night . Madhavi recalls with amusement how she came across the character, Velu Natarajan. “I was driving in the night and saw a boy holding a laptop, trying to cross the road. I immediately thought, he’ll be a character in my book!”
Finding time out of her busy schedule as a medical practitioner to write was driven by her love for writing. “Writing is a passion, so I would find time for it! It’s a fix. I hope it continues!” she concludes.
A Brigand for A Night and Other Tales is a Partridge India publication.
