The author of the engaging Garden of dreams, a novel about the atrocities of child trafficking in India, chats to GLAMOUR about her inspiration, her writing and her literary pursuits.
1.
What inspired you to write Garden of Dreams?
I’d wanted to write a novel for years, decades, actually. And when I enrolled in the University of Cape Town’s MA Creative Writing programme in 2009, I had to write one as a thesis. I was inspired to write about a ‘rights’ issue; I was inspired by India, where I spent some months in the mid-eighties, and I was inspired by my own fractured family.
2.
The topic your novel centers around, child trafficking, is a very gruesome and difficult one. What made you choose to write about this subject?
Human rights are important to me. A lot of my career as a journalist has been devoted to ‘rights-based reporting’, or reporting that exposes human rights violations. Oddly enough, my husband Hannes (who is an international mediator, and the inspiration for Anton, the father in the novel) was based in Nepal when I was thinking about what to write, and he provided me with a lot of information about the child trafficking between Nepal and India – which is the focus of my novel. Nepal, a very poor country, is particularly susceptible to trafficking (because of the poverty, poor border control on its southern border with India and the cultural undervaluing of girl children) and India is probably the biggest child trafficking hotbed in the world. I wanted to write a book that would entertain but also challenge people, raise awareness and perhaps even spur people to take action. I also think that having a son – my inspiration for Eli – has made me more sensitive to these issues; children’s rights, child trafficking, child soldiering and child labour – which I touch on in the novel.
3.
Garden of Dreams has some incredibly intricate descriptions of India and is clearly very well-researched – you’ve used some Hindi dialogue and you’ve described child-trafficking systems quite knowledgably. How did you go about conducting your research for this novel?
I went to India for about four months in the mid-eighties, but I knew I had to go back, India has changed a lot in 30 years! So, I went back for several weeks in January 2011, and then travelled on to Nepal, where I’d never been before. This was my primary research (plus my notebooks from my previous trip). I basically traced the route that Eli takes in the book, which took me across northern India and into Nepal (I don’t want to say too much… spoiler alert!). I started in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, in the Thar desert near Pakistan and travelled on to Delhi (where I interviewed prostitutes and pimps on GB Road), Agra, Varanasi. In Nepal I travelled through the southern jungles and spent a lot of time wandering the alleyways of Thamel, it’s a tourist area but also home to dance bars (where many trafficked children can be found hiding) and much of the local sex industry. I had tea with my Nepali friends in the Garden of dreams, a real place – a 19th century neoclassical garden, an oasis in the midst of Kathmandu’s squalor and craziness, and the novel’s namesake. In Kathmandu, I interviewed several people working in counter-trafficking, most notably Anuradha Koirala and Bishwo Khadka of Maiti Nepal, an organisation that rescues trafficked Nepali girls and/or intercepts them at the Indian border before they are taken, and helps rehabilitate and heal them. The Hindi translations, and in certain chapters, the Nepali and Tharu translations, are thanks to my friends Rakesh Pushkar in Delhi and Shyam Basnet in Kathmandu. I find that ‘home languages’ add authenticity. In terms of secondary research, I read a lot of reports on child trafficking, and I watched video/documentary clips – mainly formerly trafficked girls testifying about their experiences – on YouTube.
4.
How did writing a novel about such heavy subject matter affect your state of mind?
I thrive on ‘heavy subject matter’! The last thing I wanted to write was a piece of fluff. I am interested in stories, in the people who ‘own’ those stories, which goes way beyond whoever I am as a writer. So I guess you could say that writing about child trafficking made me feel that I was writing about something important, that I was facilitating something, acting as a channel for something much bigger than me and my imagination.
5.
You started off as a journalist. Do you think being a journalist helps you with novel writing? And with this novel in particular?
Yes and no. Yes, because as a journalist (which I still am, always will be), and especially as a features writer or long-form journalist (most of my career has been spent writing for magazines or writing scripts for documentary films), I have used and developed many of the same skills that a fiction writer uses: scene and summary, plot, dialogue, description, developing character. I have also taught both narrative journalism and fiction workshops at Harvard, UCT and the American University in Cairo.
No, because what we write as journalists is much, much shorter than a novel (my longest journalistic piece was maybe 6 000 words, my novel came in at 116 000!), so it took some adjustment. The other huge leap was imagination; with journalism, you generally have a fairly finite set of choices after you’ve reported the story and are writing it, but with fiction, the choices seem infinite. This was terrifying in the beginning. Luckily, by about Chapter 17 (out of 40 in total) my characters kicked in and helped me make choices, based on who they were at that point.
6.
How did you keep yourself motivated while writing this novel?
Well, I wasn’t getting any younger, and it was something I always wanted to do. And, as I say, tackling a ‘bigger issue’ made me feel committed to getting the story out there, even a fictionalised representation thereof. I also had a fantastic set of classmates in the UCT writing programme (which I did not finish sadly, but I did finish the novel) who were a great support and inspiration. Thanks Yewande Omotoso, Shaun Johnson, Jacqui L’Ange, Wilna Adriaanse and Michele Rowe as well as my wonderful supervisor who became a dear friend, writer/editor Joanne Hichens.
7.
Where do you like to write?
My desk, more like an old table – a long, thin, antique Oregon pine table full of holes and scratches (previous writers’ frustrations?) – in my room overlooking the sea and the mountain in Noordhoek. But give me a notebook and set me travelling, and I can write anywhere. I miss the pre-computer and pre-cellphone days when we sat at cafes on a Greek Island or Paris or Rome and wrote postcards, drinking carafes of vino!
8.
What are the three things every writer needs to know to finish a book, in your opinion?
Not sure I can answer that, surely not for everyone. I am more comfortable with suggesting what you should ask yourself. Ask yourself: Why am I writing this book? Who is my audience? How is my book unique, and how is it like other books (and which ones)? These are just three of the many questions you ask yourself as you write – as well as, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’ (That last one is rhetorical, see the first question when you feel like this and answer it as fully as you can, because you may feel like throwing in the towel more than once…)
9.
What can we expect from you next?
I’ve got two ideas for novels, both thrillers, and one memoir concept. Not sure which one I’ll run with – or maybe I’ll do something entirely different. I’ve started one of the novels, it deals with (false) witchcraft accusations against children in Limpopo made by charlatan priests and sangomas – yes, this is actually happening. The other novel deals with the humiliation, alienation and debilitation of the Bushmen, specifically the Khomani San, in the Northern Cape/Kalahari. I spent some time tracking with the Khomani San five years ago, and have always wanted to write about it. The memoir deals with my wild, adventurous youth in Egypt, Palestine/Israel and South Africa in the eighties. I wouldn’t mind reliving a lot of those years, and writing a memoir may be the way to do it, in a way – and I hope it will take readers along for a memorable, evocative, provocative, slightly manic ride.
