SPLENDID DEBUT: Fracis with his wife

In Bombay there’s a fantastic tradition of telling dhaaps—tall tales. I see fiction as an extension of that oral tradition,” says Thrity Umrigar, author of Bombay Time. Surely, there is something about Bombay—one can never quite call it Mumbai in the realm of literary tales—that makes for great drama, comedy and pathos. In the past month, two Parsi writers—Umrigar and Sohrab Homi Fracis—have made critically acclaimed debuts and Bombay figures prominently in their tall tales. Umrigar’s novel has been getting high praise on three continents and Fracis’ book of short stories, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, won the prestigious 2001 Iowa Short Fiction Award.

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Expected Twists Q. How did the characters in Bombay Time evolve? A. Some followed a logical path. For instance, after finishing the first chapter, where there’s a long passage talking about Dosamai, the resident gossip, it seemed as if she demanded her own chapter. But others, like Tehmi, just showed up out of nowhere. I’ve been asked what Tehmi’s bad breath means and the honest answer is, I don’t know. That character came about with just this line that kept going through my head—grief has its own odour—and somehow, Tehmi came to personify that idea. novel uprising: Umrigar shared success Q. How difficult is it to juggle teaching and writing fiction? Do you compartmentalise the two or does one flow into the other? A. I have always kept the university’s summer sessions free to either research for my fiction or just sit down and write. That’s how I made most of my progress on the stories in Ticket to Minto. Nevertheless, teaching composition and literature consolidated a lot of my own writing fundamentals and literary aesthetics, so I don’t regret it at all now. Plus, I really enjoyed passing on my knowledge and insight to budding writers and watching their fiction blossom. So even though I’ve been setting more time aside for writing ever since I was awarded the 1999-2000 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, I still intend to teach fiction workshops at UNF at least one semester of the year.

Just last month, another Parsi, noted author Rohinton Mistry, created headlines when Oprah Winfrey picked up his 1995 novel, A Fine Balance, for her show; it hit the New York Times Bestseller List and printed over 750,000 copies. And of course, there’s Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India and The Crow Eaters. Other noted Parsi writers in the diaspora include Firdaus Kanga (Trying to Grow), Farrokh Dhondy (Poona Company), Boman Desai (The Memory of Elephants) and Ardashir Vakil (Beach Boy). It makes you think, is there something in the Parsi genes that produces so many writers in so tiny a community?

“Maybe the Parsis’ historically high literacy rate has had something to do with it,” observes Fracis. “That, coupled with the emphasis on higher education and the generally progressive stance of the community. And every second Parsi seems to enjoy telling a good anecdote with playful irreverence. Put all that together and I guess it makes for fertile ground.”

“It’s a community that has always valued education, so I guess it’s not strange that many of us turn to writing,” says Umrigar. She points out that the migration from Persia to India, which took place a millennium ago, is still fresh for the Parsi community through the retelling of legends and mythology. “That’s what informs this peculiar insider-outsider status that Parsis occupy in India even today. And that position in society leads to a kind of critical distance, a sort of objectivity that is essential to fiction,” Umrigar adds. “Juxtaposed with another migration, this time to the West, it’s easy to see why so many Parsi writers can capitalise on their sense of seeing the familiar with strange eyes and seeing the strange with familiar eyes.”

Both these writers started out in Mumbai. Umrigar grew up in a large joint family and her earliest memories of writing are as a child. At the age of 21, she left for the US to study journalism at Ohio State University. After completing her masters, she worked at the Lorain Journal before moving to the Akron Beacon Journal. She recalls, “It had the reputation of being a real writer’s paper and had just won yet another Pulitzer. It was a great paper to work at. Still is.” A Nieman Fellowship allowed her a year at Harvard, where she wrote the bulk of Bombay Time.

Fracis is also a Bombaywallah. “It is a city that gets underneath your skin forever, no matter where you later end up. It’s certainly in my blood for good.” Growing up, Fracis was a voracious reader, devouring everything from rented comics to serious books. He recalls, “My one and only attempt at writing fiction as a kid was a one-page-long story about a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead until his own gravestone reveals it to him.”

He first came to the US on an engineering scholarship to the University of Delaware in the early 1980s. His childhood love of reading prompted him to acquire a second masters in English. He currently teaches literature at the university and is also a fiction and poetry editor at the State Street Review.

Fracis has plans for two novels about Indian American characters set in both countries. He is currently working on a non-fiction work called Countering Mortality, which, he says, “has been in many ways driven by my need to understand better why my parents, once so vibrant and alive, are now dead and gone. What significant, lasting purposes did their brief existence serve?”

In the realm of fiction, however, many immigrant writers often seem to inhabit an imaginary India. After Bombay Time, will Umrigar’s adopted country feature in her future stories? She says: “I think America will naturally and spontaneously pop up in my fiction as time goes by. I’m very interested in the transformations that occur when Americans come in contact with immigrants, and a future novel will have this as its theme.”

Fracis credits the Indian books coming with increasing frequency by relatively new authors to growing American interest in Indian fiction: “What that says is that Americans are more inclined to look beyond their own boundaries, are increasingly conscious of the lives and cultures and stories of people from the Asian continent, for instance.”

Why there are so many Indians writing in English? Umrigar says, “We have a damn good story to tell. India is rich in stories, bursting at the seams with epic-scale dramas of personal tragedies and rags-to-riches stories, of class conflicts and religious turmoil, and domestic clashes. Bombay is almost a mythical city in terms of the sheer operatic sweep of daily life there.”