Mumbai: When Heesoo Lim was a 16-year-old back in Korea, her elder sister stole money from her piggy bank and ran away from home for a week. She later came back home, but this memory three decades ago is something that Lim had never told anyone, because of the shame associated with it. It is only after Ms. Lim joined the ASB (American School of Bombay) Writers Club that she felt comfortable about sharing the story, which the group welcomed without judgement.
The club, created in September 2015, comprises mothers of children studying at ASB, most of whom are expats. From seven members then, it now has 35 members, most of whom meet every Friday morning for 90 minutes, and it has become is a space for sharing memories and experiences of being a new resident to Mumbai.
This tiny community of writers has produced two self-published (under the Vakils, Feffer & Simons imprint) anthologies of multilingual essays and poetry: Memories from the road (2016), in English, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Mandarin, French, German and Bahasa, and Letters from the road (2017), which added Malay, Italian, Marathi and Afrikaans to the bouquet. For most of the writers, these were their first forays getting published, or for that matter, writing seriously.
The club is the brainchild of Gayathri Durairaj, Mumbai-born, but who has spent most of her life abroad. When her husband’s job brought the family to India, she decided to give up her successful finance career and focus on raising her 11-year-old daughter. She enrolled her daughter in ASB, and become a part of its parents-teacher association, eventually becoming its president. She noticed that many parents, most of them mothers, would sit in the library when they would come to drop their children. She wanted to build community, and had also always wanted to pursue her writing seriously. Combining that with her observation that most of the women were expats like herself, with much to share about the joys and tribulations of a life on the road, and started the Writers Club.
The other members joined in not knowing what to expect, except that they would be guided in their writing. But what emerged was a safe and comforting community. “It became a refuge for some, and therapeutic for others,” Ms. Durairaj says, “Especially since so many of these women have left their careers and are stumbling to find their ground in a new city.”
Ms. Lim says, “In the beginning, I wasn’t ready to write because my English was not so good. But a native English speaker would sit with me and help me write. But most importantly, we are all very relaxed within the group and I felt I could lower my inhibitions and even share about unhappy instances from my past, something that we Koreans don’t do easily.”
Along with words, tears have often flowed during the meetings. “Some of them are unable to even buy their own groceries for not knowing the language,” Ms. Durairaj says. “The husband is often at work or travelling and the children are at school and are also exposed to a new culture. But for the women, it’s a larger challenge to not feel foreign. So, a like-minded group that is aimed at writing and sharing helps.”
Katya Schodts, a Belgian national, was wary about the group at first; she didn’t want the cliched expat life of brunches and shopping. But after her first meeting, she changed her mind. She contributed an essay in English to the first book — “I wrote about moving to India and how it got under my skin; how I felt immobilised by the poverty around” — and is hoping to write in Dutch for the next. “The group enabled me to see that what I was feeling was not because I was too sensitive,” she says. “Every woman in the group shared their challenges about moving to India, and this validated my feelings.” Ms. Schodts does not call herself a writer, but she loves the opportunity to share and write together, as well as the freedom to not write too. “I wanted to find something to look forward to, and the writing group has welcomed me in ways I had never expected.”
The ASB Writers Club will be discussing their literary journeys on Saturday, October 29, 2017, at 11 a.m., at Trilogy Book Store, Raghuvanshi Mills, Lower Parel.
