Mumbai: As a writer, Sudha Murty’s books invariably make it to the bestseller lists because they draw on real stories and relatable characters. Her latest, Three Thousand Stitches , a collection of 11 short stories that draws on snippets and vignettes from her own journey through life, is no different.
Ms. Murty was in the city last week to release her new book at an event at the NCPA, where she was in conversation with Anil Dharker, founder and director of Literature Live! Without going into explanations about the larger themes discussed in the book, the two dived straight into the stories themselves, starting with the story of Ms. Murty’s time in engineering college.
Growing up in Dharwad in Karnataka, Ms. Murty said, she was determined to become an engineer, but the concept of a girl doing so was unheard of. “If girls had to study then people thought that they should either pursue an MBBS and become a doctor or pursue mathematics and go for teaching. The idea that a girl wanted to be an engineer was as surprising as a lion walking onto this stage, for instance.”
The operative phrase, of course, was the question of who would possibly want to marry a girl who was an engineer. Even her father — a doctor himself — felt engineering was a man’s domain.
She persisted, however, and the principal of the local engineering college told her father that while he could not deny her a seat on merit, he was unsure how the boys would react to seeing a girl in the class. “Tell her that since we’ve never had a girl here, there are no toilet facilities for girls in the college.”
She said, “I decided to do it anyway. I said I will train my body and from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., after I had walked from home to college, I wouldn’t drink water at all. I would come back home in the afternoon and then maybe drink a litre of water.”
Those years of intense focus impacted her deeply. “I realised from those years what it meant to not have a toilet, and that’s why the Infosys Foundation (which she heads) has made sanitation a priority, building over 14,000 toilets.”
Ms. Murty was allowed a seat in college on three conditions: that she would always wear a sari, never visit the canteen and never talk to boys. She followed the first two, but not the third, reasoning that it would not be right to go through years without speaking to her 149 male counterparts. Eventually, she found that anything they could do, she could do better, finally finishing at the top of the class.
Three promises
In another chapter, Ms. Murty speaks about her visit to Kashi (Varanasi), inspired by her grandparents who had always spoke about the need, one day, to detach from worldly possessions.
“They spoke about Kashi many times, but never visited. So when I went there I took a dip in the Ganga and made three promises. The first was to my country, the second was to the Ganga, which is synonymous with life, and the third to my grandparents, who I remembered at the time.”
She chose her love for shopping as the one material thing to give up.
“I used to be really good at mixing and matching colours. Somewhat like the Manish Malhotra of Hubli,” she joked. But on that day, at the age of 46, she decided that the time had come to draw the line.
Helping hand
Ms. Murty and Mr. Dharker then spoke about many issues, ranging from the Infosys Foundation to her love for books and cinema. Before the 2% corporate social responsibility (CSR) law, she said the foundation used to spend nearly ₹40 crore annually, and she never thought of having a separate office building, always reasoning that the money could be spent instead on helping people. “After CSR became 2%, our annual figure came to ₹300 crore, and I decided that we could afford an office,” she said.
Ms Murty closed with the title story, Three Thousand Stitches , about Devadasis in Karnataka and how their rehabilitation became the first major social work project. She spoke of the lessons given to her by her father and how she eventually made a breakthrough with the community, working year after year to find them better homes and better jobs.
Her father once told her that he would be proud if his daughter managed to make the lives of 10 people better, but the Infosys Foundation recently reached a milestone of rehabilitating 3,000 families from that community. At an event to commemorate this milestone, a shawl was presented to Ms. Murty. Made by the Devadasi community, the shawl has 3,000 stitches.
A picture of the same shawl is on the book’s cover.
