AN INDIAN Odyssey

British-Iranian author MELODY RAZAK wrote her debut novel, Moth, while travelling across India in trains and buses, soaking in the experience. She tells Shraddha Kamdar about how these experiences made her narrative richer

- Shraddha Kamdar

Before she wrote her debut novel, Melody Razak owned a cake shop in Brighton for eight years (Treacle & Co, she says, that served, the best cake on the south coast) and, most recently, worked as a pastry chef with London-based restaurant Honey & Co.

Her affair with India has lasted over 20 years and five trips in total, one of them a whole year long, and she instinctively knew what she wanted to celebrate in her writing. Which is why she plunged neck-deep into the history of the Partition. While she was dismayed by the facts, by the sheer brutality of a country unravelling overnight, by the number of families displaced as well as the number of women who were raped and abducted, she was also searching for a way to tell her story through the voices of many different women. She wanted to find a way to set the intimate domestic stories of the individual against the larger political and geographical ruptures. As she read fiction around the topic - by Salman Rushdie, Ali Ahmed, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Anita and Kiran Desai – she became very aware that there were not enough stories from the point of view of women set during 1947. And it was here that the idea for her debut book Moth germinated. It tells a heart-wrenching story of a liberal Brahmin family in Delhi caught in the violence and social unrest of post-partition India. At the heart of it are Ma and Bappu and their daughters, the 14-year-old Alma and the five-year-old Roop.