Literati meet with Navtej Sarna:
I was privileged to meet Navtej Sarna at the latest Literati meet last week.
Navtej Sarna is a career diplomat with a vast experience of serving in various capacities in several countries across the globe.
He has formerly been India's ambassador to Israel.
Sounds cool, isn't it! Well, we assembled to meet Navtej Sarna, the multi-faceted writer. He started publishing his works with a novel, ventured into a spiritual translation, produced a historical biography and has recently come out with a collection of short stories.
I was familiar with Mr.Sarna's writing from his column Second Thoughts in the Hindu Literary Review. His latest article Poems on the sand, where Mr. Sarna writes about Bedouin literature had already evoked a respect in me towards him as a scholarly writer. A glimpse of the article is here:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/navtej_sarna/poems-on-the-sand/article4679574.ece
Meeting him in person was every bit as expected. He has a dignified presence with a mane of silver hair just
below the turban and the sober tone of someone who has seen and experienced many things.
However the conversation was also laced plentifully with subtle humor.
We started discussion of his works with his first novel, We weren't lovers like that. He mentioned
that the title was taken from Lennard Choen's song, Sisters of Mercy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBFQg7P5YKw
As he says, some stories are inside your head. Until you exorcise them, you cant write anything else.
He revealed that, for him it was a truly honest and introspective book. He had to push himself while writing
the novel that " Let me not run away from this line... Let me write it". He seemed truly pleased when
Sumeet, our host, mentioned that he sounds like Albert Camus!
We then proceeded to Zafarnama. This is the Sikh Guru Govind Singh's 18th century poem where he rebels against the betrayal of a promise from the Mughal commanders. The original work is in Persian. Mr. Sarna read for us from the book and also parts of it's English translation. He said that this was truly a labor of love since every dot in every line of the Persian print was painstakingly reviewed by the author and several other scholars who supported him in his work. Incidentally Zafarnama has also been translated into Punjabi by Navtej Sarna's father Mohinder Singh Sarna.
Then we discussed The Exile, the story of Duleep Singh, yet another victim of the British slow poison, "divide and rule". Heir to the throne of Punjab province, he was separated from his mother as a child and sent to England to live as a squire. As he grew up and started understanding about his identity, he
tried to come back to his homeland to reclaim the heirdom that was rightfully his, but failed in his endeavors.
According to Mr.Sarna, Duleep Singh is a hero for his attempts. To quote him, "Heroes are not always successful; they commit suicide, they die!".He meant to write a true story of domestic greed and British exploitation in Punjab. Based on the reviews the book received he accomplished this feat beautifully
Review of "winter evenings":
His latest work is the short story collection winter evenings (notice the small case of the title which
looks pretty on the cover).The book takes its title from the first story of the collection, which Mr.Sarna read
to us.The cover is a beautiful winter scene which I kept going back to after each story. We were reminded of Edgar Allan Poe's words which said that a story should be about one single theme with each sentence building towards it. That's exactly how winter evenings is. In Mr.Sarna's own words the stories are about odd characters in cold places. The only aspect linking them is the mood.
I plunged into it soon after our session. winter evenings is about loneliness. These are stories about single men, with the exception of just one in the end. These are definitely not love stories. They are not even the complete saga of a life or a big chapter out of it. They are about one single incident, which is not necessarily the defining moment of a life. The author has embellished his work with a generous description of winter.Although the stories themselves are hardly comforting and are unlikely to leave the reader with a sense of finality, the setting is so calm that many a times I found myself about to drift into a relaxed slumber. They highlight a feeling of peace and quiet associated with winter.
Just before this book I read The Grass is Singing by Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. In Lessing's story, the unbearable heat of Africa kills a marriage, a girl's will to live and slowly but surely drives her crazy.
winter evenings stood in stark contrast to Lessing's work in terms of the mood and turned out to be a pleasant read.
Here are some quotes from the book to give an idea of the setting:
"it comes to him as if he were standing before it, from all those miles, hundreds of miles away. A yellow
cottage with a green roof, wild rose bushes tumbling over the old stone boundary wall, just above the road a
steep cemented path leading up to an iron gate under a curved trellis, also festooned with wild roses. He can
feel the light filtering through the thick deodar cover. He can see the road, uneven after the ferocity of the
monsoon, forking before him. The lower slope will sweep away to Naldehra and beyond, while the upper one will go swiftly into the bazaar, meeting it near the liquor shop, where the monkeys trapeze on electricity wires"
From the story "Halfway home"
"Saturday was a cold blustery day, the kind of day I have begun to like as I have grown older. Such days give me the perfect excuse for not going out"
From "A Saturday lunch"
I am looking forward to reading We were not lovers like that next and I expect it to be a completely different and intense work.
Mr.Sarna concluded his talk with us techies with tips for Time Management. He said time management is about compromise and if you give something up you end up accomplishing more.
The key takeaway for me from the talk was when he said "in tough times, your strength comes from within you!"
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