According to former trade union worker turned short story writer Mridula Koshy, the best stories are those of working class people on the streets. The writer’s collection of short stories ‘If It is Sweet’ was released in New Delhi on Wednesday.

The book has been published by one of the youngest publishing houses in the country, the Westland/Westland/Tranquebar Press,

According to Koshy, the book "travels through the streets of Delhi picking on odd lives and the disavowed dramas that play themselves out on the stretch of the crowded BRT and in the adjoining residential neighborhoods like Defence Colony, M-Block Market (of Greater Kailash I), Chirag Delhi flyover and Humayun's Tomb".

Koshy is a creative writer who regularly contributes short stories to Penguin Books-India anthologies, American and European publications such as American and European publications like Wasafiri, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review and Existere.

Koshy was born and brought up in Delhi till she was 15. She migrated to the US in the 1980s. Koshy then became a full-time trade union activist and community organizer after studying from Occidental College, which is on the outskirts of Los Angeles. This is the college where current president Barrack Obama studied. While she was a trade union activist and community organizer, she held several small time jobs like waitress, back stage dresser and silver ware polisher.

She finds a strong link between her career as a trade union worker and her stories, as being full of sweat and city grime. Her narration incorporates facets like graffiti, italicized excerpts, and twisting of words to put across the regional characteristics of her characters.

In a conversation with IANS, "Somehow when I started writing about India, I felt I had to begin with Delhi. The issues that the city threw up were serious and complex. I worked in the US as a trade union organizer, talking to workers in the public sector units, healthcare and those in jobs that were not represented by other unions.”

"It was largely because my mother worked as a nurse in the US for some time and I realized that the US was a very complicated society. It is divided along racial and class lines. The city of Los Angeles, where I lived, saw quite a bit of upheaval in the mid-eighties. I found some of it in Delhi,"

Having been a part of immigrant society, that was festering with complicated problems such as welfare doles and idlers; she says “I had to come up with an analysis to convince myself why I was a second class citizen in the US. I brought my intelligence to use in the working class society to understand the gender forces at play and the whole migrants' issue.

"So, after college I joined this radical trade union Local 11 HERE, which came to my campus seeking volunteers. I was arrested for the first time while working for Local 11. Then I joined the United Farm Workers and finally the Service Employees' International Union in Portland, where I worked for six years, organizing workers as a pro,"

Koshy’s stories reflect the working nature that she has in her. One of her stories ‘Today is the Day” which is a cross between a novella and a short story which is divided into seven-sub heads, is a tale of Suraj, who is a domestic help tired of working in a big household. Suraj resents the class-divide and the frills of sophistication that are present in his employer’s home. This forces him to hit back in a out of the ordinary manner.

‘The Good Mother’ is a heartrending and rather shocking take on single mother hood. It is the story of a woman’s pilgrimage to immerse the ashes of her dead sons. While she is on her way from Rishikesh to Delhi, she ends up picking up a younger lover and tips the brass urn that contains the ashes of her sons of the window sill at a rented location in Defence Colony that she shares with her foreign lover, instead of immersing them in the holy waters of the Ganga. Koshy’s next project is a novel set in the United States and Kerala.

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Posted by Jigar Gondalia on 26 May, 2009 5:07:07 PM IST #