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Walk the dateline

Photo: Shanker Chakravarty

A keen eye and ear Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar wrote “The Long Walk Home” believing, “it’s good not to forget, it’s important to keep the past alive”. Set in Ferozepur, a border town in Punjab, her book traces an arc from 1946 to the pre sent, through the Bhalla family.

While covering the tumultuous history of Punjab, this Harper Collins publication never ignores the human story at hand. While providing a historical chronicle, it does much more by telling an honest and earthy tale.

Having spent her childhood in Ferozepur, the author’s earliest memories extend to fleeing the 1971 war, as planes shelled artillery. Sitting at the Harper Collins office, the author recalls, how as they fled, she lost her favourite pink slipper. To stop her crying, her father went to search for it, even as a “randomly dropped shell could finish them off”. As her father was a criminal lawyer, she also remembers overhearing the hushed conversations about men who had disappeared at night, during the horrors of Punjab militancy. She writes of these experiences with the detail and sentiments that only firsthand accounts offer. The book arises from her experiences, but stretches further. While she had initially planned to cover the 20 to 25 years of militancy, she soon realised she would have to begin at Partition, when “Pakistan was surgically removed from India”.

This Hong Kong based ex-corporate says the protagonist Baksh is based largely on her father. He is a vital figure not only for the book but also for our times. Manreet explains, “For my father, religion was an internal matter. It was not something to be worn on the sleeve,” adding, “I feel today’s Punjabis are far less secular. Today, we are much more aware of our religion.” Manreet is worried at the lack of interest teenagers evince in their historical past. She adds, “This is not about a history lesson. It’s about creating empathy.”

Ferozepur perfectly lent itself to the book for being a border town with a history of conflict. Manreet says, “It might be a dirty little town but I think India’s soul is in these cities.” She might have changed some coordinates, but the city in the book is authentic in its texture and feel. This authenticity also seeps into the book’s language. Spurning the fad of annotations, Manreet effortlessly incorporates Punjabi phrases and words into the text, rightfully believing that if used well, they can be easily understood.

“Long Walk Home” is the second book by this engineer and graduate from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Her first book, “Earning The Laundry Stripes”, dealt with the corporate world, where Noor, the protagonist, tries to assert herself as one of the very first women sales managers at Hindustan Lever. It followed the footsteps of previous IIM authors who have used the autobiographical to tell a contemporary tale.

While “Earning The Laundry Stripes” might have been published first, “Long Walk Home”, which saw seven drafts in five years, is actually Manreet’s first book. As a break from it, she started “Earning The Laundry Stripes”, which was “much easier to write”.

Manreet took to writing nine years ago, as respite from her corporate life.

Today her visiting card announces only “writer”. “Long Walk Home” is soon to hit stands, but this amiable author has a thriller ready, which features an iconic Indian monument and the Taliban, she lets slip.

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