It took me about ten years to write this book. But don’t think that I sat at my desk everyday for ten years writing it. In fact, I wrote this novel in between doing many other things, like editing a quarterly magazine, putting up stage performances, writing articles for various papers and journals, repairing my old house, painting pictures, rehearsing my dances, looking after my mother….
I must admit that I enjoy writing short stories and it is that format that suits my way of looking at a story. The structure of a novel is a different matter altogether.This is why it took me a long time to decide the path this novel was going to take. The structure of the story evolved as I wrote, it wasn’t planned from before.
The chapters are often conversations between two people or more and this is the main aim of the novel. It is the exchange of ideas between people of different cultures. There are many facets of life that are seen in completely different perspectives by people of Western societies which the Indians find hard to understand and vice versa. These discussions form the body of the novel.
All love stories are complicated and this one is no exception. There are two people who are trying to find a common ground on which they can stand in order to live together. How difficult it is in the world in which we live! Of course, the story is set in the mid-1990s so many things are not the same anymore. However, human nature remains the same.
The more one looks at the news every morning the more one sees divisions between groups and there seems to be more and more hatred than there was even a decade earlier. But behind all this is something that is preparing itself that will bring about a greater understanding between the various cultures of the world. I hope that the reader gets a glimpse of that something in this novel. All I want is to get people to think that Human Unity is a possibility.
(The book is available in India from Notion Press: https://notionpress.com/read/the-bridge-of-love
Elsewhere it can be bought from Amazon.)
