Publisher's Synopsis
The author, Prema Sastri's (1932-2017) return to India from the United States was a life-changing moment.
In the early 1950s in the midst of the US Civil Rights Movement, McCarthyism, and the crusade against Communism, she was offered a job in New York and was engaged to a young American who she met in New York City. She never went back to the United States even though she had a job at the American Institute of Management, New York. Nobody knew who the mystery fiancé was, except for a photo she kept of them in a rowing boat on a lake. The author's work is characterised by a layering of stories with more than one theme, one style of writing and one voice. She observed humanity with empathy, kindness, sorrow, a feeling of isolation, irony but above all with a never-ending sense of hope. From the despair she had seen in her early childhood, through the 1930s and 1940s, as India was shackled under the constraints of foreign rule to the hope of an emergent new, free India, she often said, hope and dreams were the only things that kept her going. Through her life she had seen many dreams shattered and the darkness broken with new light and new beginnings.She used her unusual upbringing to traverse a range of classes and cultures - from references to the Bollywood actress, Hema Malani, whose family often visited the author's home in the 1960s, to Babulal, the bearer in The Blue Convertible, drawn from the cast of hundreds of workers, cooks and helpers in the Indian households and staff retainers from her father's Civil Service days. As the wife of an army officer, she keenly observed how different actors across class and caste divides can impact one's life and was able in her writing to easily shift points of view.
Bitter-sweet romantic stories Going Home, the eponymous title, and A Song for Doctor Gopalan, reflect some of her own thoughts on the twists and turns of fate.
Emerging through these early themes is a sense of irony and comic humour that is more well-developed in her later work. The Hobbyist was one of the early stories in this genre. Written in the late 1960s through the early 1970s, the character Murti was loosely inspired by the many young Indian men she was seeing growing up in an India free from its colonial constraints.
