The Pineapple Trail

Recently, I published my novel The Pineapple Trail on Amazon. I feel pleased and grateful that I have achieved this long-held dream.

This blog has been an important part of the journey towards this goal. So thank you to all my blogger friends, fellow bloggers and readers for being part of that journey. ( Thanks also to Goodreads friends for sharing their reading recommendations and insights.)

Here’s a description of the novel:

Two sisters, Safia and Nora, grow up in a town in Malaysia where the pineapple is king, where the fruit’s factory and plantation provide livelihood for the residents. As young women, they start their adulthood at the factory.

Nora is happy to stay in her hometown with all that it offers. Charming and bubbly, Nora has many suitors. Will she make the right choice?

For Safia, the older sister, a chance encounter with a glamorous woman unveils a side of her that she never knew existed. She leaves home to follow the lure of a bigger dream. Alone in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, through her timidity, Safia loses the drive to seek her goal. Then she meets an ambitious young man who revives that dream. At a time when the city is brimming with new opportunities and new wealth, can they pool their yearnings and achieve all that they want?

The sisters tread life’s journey through expectations, unfulfilled dreams, joys and resolve. This is the story of their pineapple trail.

Read Full Post »

The Artist

 

Here’s an excerpt from my novel, set in Malaysia. Hope you enjoy it.

 

They walked slowly towards the house, taking in the greenery around them. The garden felt expansive. Four sturdy trees looked like sentinels guarding the house. One looked like a mango or kuini tree. The fruits were still small and green. It was hard to tell. Another was a rambutan tree. The red fruits dangled from the branches, like rubies playfully hiding away in their hideout.

“Oh look at that rambutans,” Jee whispered excitedly. “We have to ask Zain if we can pluck some.”

The house came into view, and Nora saw a traditional Malay house on stilts. A wooden staircase painted cream, flanked by two brown pots of bird’s nest fern, led up to the verandah. From a large window on the right side of the house, Zain popped his head. “Glad you found your way. Welcome.” His voice rang from the higher level of the house. It sounded like an echo to Nora.

He led them pass the small verandah into to the living room. Furniture was minimal here – just a sofa, a coffee table and a small bookcase. One side of the living room was bare, but there were several Malay pandanus mats in beige and pastel pink shades spread on the floor. Two big cushions were thrown on the mat. On the wall above the mats, hung a painting, Zain’s presumably, of two stylised red flowers. The deep shades of the paintings accented the colors of the mats.

As though reading her thoughts, Zain said, “Please excuse the unconventional arrangement of the room. I like to read, rest, on the mats. More comfortable for me.”

He showed them around the house. He told them that the rumah ibu, the main section had four bedrooms. But Zain had knocked down two bedrooms and converted the area into the kitchen. He explained that the kitchen was previously on the lower level of the house, in the old style of Malay houses. “It’s called rumah dapur, the kitchen house. Interesting isn’t it, the language of our forefathers.”

They walked down a short flight of wooden steps into a huge open area. “So, the kitchen is no longer a kitchen. But has become my studio, where I work every day. Well. almost every day.” Zain said, as though expecting them to appreciate it. Nora could hear the pride, or was it joy, in his voice.

The walls were painted white and the floor was tiled with big, light cream tiles. Splashes of colors were added by the paintings hung on the walls and some stacked against a wall, as well as a variety of paints and brushes on a table.

The three of them, never having been in an artist’s studio before, didn’t really know what to say. “That’s good. You have a nice area to work in,” Jee said. She and Mak Cik walked towards the steps to go back to the main section of the house, followed by Zain.

Nora lingered, curious about an easel with a big canvas on it, situated close to a wall. Nora moved closer and saw that Zain had started just on one spot at the bottom of the canvas. They were strong strokes of blue. She tried to imagine the completed painting. She wondered what kind of painting he already had in mind. Then she realised the rest had left and she made a move to join them. As she turned towards the staircase, she noticed the wide window in the studio. Something drew her to it. She looked out and saw the merry cluster of banana trees, its leaves glistening emerald and bright.

Read Full Post »

The Where and When of Fiction

Keating: Dickens and Graham Greene were masters at crafting setting. (pic: wordriot.org)

Setting, the time and place in which a work of fiction occurs, is a crucial element in a novel.

In the words of Eudora Welty : “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place.”

Have you read a novel where a few pages into the book, you feel that you have forgotten where the story takes place, and you have to go back to the first few pages? On the other extreme, I had read books where the description of the place was so detailed and long I started to get bored.

The trick, I suppose, is to get it just right so that the setting is described sufficiently, and inserted seamlessly into the story. I attended a talk on “Setting and Story “ at the recent Los Angeles Book Fair where a panel of writers shared their experiences and perspectives on setting.

Kevin Keating has just released his debut novel The Natural Order of Things. It comprises 15 interconnected stories set in a decaying Midwestern urban landscape. He said that he learned and has been influenced by the works of writers such as Charles Dickens and Graham Greene who were masters at creating a sense of place. Dickens, in particular, was a master of describing the setting of the working class and one of urban decay.

Jami Attenberg, author of three novels including The Middlesteins said that she was interested to find one wonderful detail in the setting, one thing that is thematically right.

Michael Lavigne, the author of Not Me and The Wanting said that he was greatly influenced by E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, in which the setting was critical to the story.

(pic:penguin.com.au )

(I studied “Passage to India” as part of our English Literature syllabus. Guided by a superb teacher, Miss Tan, Forster’s setting became memorable. And the scene that somehow made the deepest mark was the courtroom scene with the punka wallah, a worker who manually operates the fan, and its symbolism.)

Lavigne also said that he prefers to set his story in a time setting of about 10 to 20 years back, as he would have a better sense and understanding of  the background and events.

This point came up in my mind when I recently read a contemporary crime thriller.

The cell phone played a big role in the story. The detectives were calling each other and emailing data from the phone from various locations. In some parts of the story, the narrative was greatly impacted by a missed call, or a cell phone flung out of reach. It wasn’t so long ago that the mobile phone had no role in the flow or narrative of thrillers.

The panel left a few pointers for the writer who has decided on the setting for his or her novel.

The authors felt that it was necessary to visit the place or location where one’s novel would be set. Take photos too, if that would help. Talk to the people, and get to know them really well, added Keating. That would also enable you to pick up nuances and particularities of their speech.

Lavigne added: “When you use setting from your experience and memory, you will know when it is authentic on the page.

“In good writing, the setting reveals itself, the way the characters do, at the right place.”

Read Full Post »

Cloudless Sky

An excerpt from my upcoming work:

Yunus could tell that the young man admired his mother, June, for all she had done for her children.

Yunus’ admiration for her also grew each time he stopped at their home. He admired her not only for her determination, but for the fact that she did not become bitter and still took pleasure in injecting beauty into her humble, everyday life.

He feared that he was falling in love with June. He knew that it wrong for him to have those feelings as he was a married man. When he imagined the faces of his wife and children, he felt a jolt of guilt. He would try to dismiss the situation by telling himself: “I’m just being silly.”

And yet he could not deny himself this feeling. It was like waking up to a cloudless blue sky: it made him feel vital, happy and he looked forward to the start of each day.

He wondered if June suspected that he had these emotions. He knew that he often stared at her when they were talking, and once when they were sitting on the sofa, without realizing it, he had moved his hand close to hers. She did not move for a while, then she abruptly got up and excused herself to fetch some snacks from the kitchen.

Yunus wanted more from their friendship. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted to buy her presents; he felt that it was time that she was pampered by someone, instead of being the selfless one all the time.

But he knew that those desires could only be in his imagination. It was dreadful to be between two worlds – the real world of his home and the dream world of this pulsating new love.

But that was all he was entitled to at that moment.

Read Full Post »