HYDERABAD: Ardh-Satya means half-truth, a deceptive statement that includes some element of truth. Ananya Mukherjee’s debut book with this mysterious title has equally intriguing stories. The stories are short and the style lucid. Short staccato sentences with ultra descriptive phrases to drive home the point. The short stories are about human emotions, thoughts, preconceptions and misconceptions. If the one titled ‘Maktub’ pulls your heartstrings to make you pray fervently that no Army officer’s wife in the room that night faces widowhood, Fake Finality punches your tummy with a twist in the tail-end. Golden God, on the other hand, is about how we hold our beliefs dearly to us to be aligned with our faith.
“‘Ardh-Satya’ is a collection of those fragile moments where I have allowed a pause to intervene into my roller coaster corporate life and questioned some of these senses and sensitivities,” says Ananya. Her stories, 20 of them, are influenced by four overarching sections – ‘The Equation’, which is about relationships and its complexities; ‘God Must be a Mother’ – about the relationship between a mother and child. ‘Between Divine & Mortal’, which is about all things that remain unexplained; and ‘Life Positive’ – which is about the incorrigible optimist and the indomitable, resilient writer.
This gorgeous Bengali dancer and artist admits that the years she stayed at Tarnaka in Hyderabad (2002 to 2004), are sweet memories. As a mom to a toddler in the early 2000, she restarted her career in a local newspaper. Although she did take a break after less than a year, she spent her days chronicling her life’s experiences in a blog which later on took the form of a book with some omissions and
commissions.
She recalls how the word ‘Amma,’ uttered by most Hyderabadis to address married women with reverence and affection, stumped her. “A man old enough to be my dad was calling me Amma. It hurt my pride, most importantly my fashionable alter ego. Anyway, little did I know then that the local culture was not particularly influenced by Oedipus complex or leaning on any incestuous dogma; in fact, addressing a woman as ‘Amma’ was considered a sheer display of affection and respect and accepted gracefully by anyone in skirts bereft of their seniority in rank or age. I, however, developed that insight only after I had spent a couple of months in the city.” .
An acclaimed writer with more than 1,000 articles to her credit, ‘Ardh Satya’ is her first book. This 236-page paperback book (LeadStart Publishing, `245, available on Amazon) and to be formally launched at Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata this week gives us a glimpse of her eventful life which involves extensive and frequent travel across the world as a communication specialist with a Singapore firm.