| December 15, 1997 | ||
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AUTHORSPEAK: NISHA
DA CUNHA The Late Bloomer An academic weaves melancholy tales. By Nandita Chowdhury
It is a form that she has held on to. "Telling a short-story writer to be a novelist is like telling a water-colourist to paint in oil or a wood sculptor to carve in marble," she says. It's a burden she refuses to carry. True to style, her stories reflect the ease of a form she is comfortable with -- right from her first offering Old Cypress:Stories (1991) through Permanence of Grief (1993) to her latest labour of love, the just-published Set My Heart in Aspic. In story after story, readers encounter the predicaments of ordinary women and men dealing with longing, sorrow, grief and disillusionment, courage and gentility. Stories in Set My Heart in Aspic are shrouded in melancholy and have a wistfulness and fragile delicacy."They are sad stories as people would call them," says she. "My temperament tends towards grief." To colour her universal themes, da Cunha draws heavily on memory -- of parents in the title story, "Set My Heart in Aspic" or "My Ma, Her Ma", of students in "Girl in a Burqa, Riding a Cycle", or even of her dead pet dog, Ginger, to whom the book is dedicated. The stories are set in places far and near -- Kew Gardens, Kodaikanal, La Noire, Mumbai or Goa, her husband's ancestral state. "The Roman Catholicism in Goa is fascinating. The majesty of the structures attracts me at the same time it's symbolic of dominion which repulses me. But being a Hindu I can talk about things like rituals with a different perspective." No two stories are alike. Some are epistolary, others first-person narratives. "It's frightening as it is to have a late start. And if you have taught literature, it becomes more difficult to write because you can never measure up to the writers you love and admire. There is always the feeling that you are writing pedestrian stuff," says the late-blooming writer. For da Cunha, however, there are many reasons to plod on.
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When she was ready with her first collection of short stories,
Nisha da Cunha was in her late 50s, "traumatised and going round the bend". She
had just resigned as English professor in St Xavier's College, Mumbai, after a frightful
row with the authorities. Though she needed to do something, she was "not good at
just running the house". Embarking on a new career in the autumn of her life was hard
because she didn't have the resilience of youth. But for da Cunha, now 63, the short story
form provided the much-needed salve for a sudden and painful emptiness in life. 
