"I felt like a privileged grandmother throughout the process,” smiles children’s book writer Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan. Just moments before, a gaggle of kids had gathered around her, standing on tip toes to slide their books across the table to have her sign their books. Answering questions from the author about their names and ages, they in turn, had one question for her: where is Mrinalini – the 13-year-old co-author of Shobha’s latest book Bird/Dog? Awaiting her granddaughter’s arrival at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival, she continues, “We had a lot of fun writing together. It began with me writing the first chapter and sent it to her. It inspired her to write her chapter. Then, when I read hers, I thought, ‘My God, this is so much more descriptive and wonderful. I’ve got to write my chapter that way.’ And we continued!” Incidentally, Shobha is also known for being the first ‘Amul girl’.
It all started around a year ago with the duo deciding to write together, followed by intensive brainstorming, recalls Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan, saying, “I like books that have two distinct voices alternating chapter by chapter. So we settled on a bird and a dog because they are both symbolic – the bird in the sky is freedom while dog, man’s best friend is all about comfort and safety. We also knew we wanted parallels between the two of wanting a different life.” The process wasn’t without its minor frictions, with Mrinalini grinning, “There were some difficulties, she wanted to work in MS Word and I wanted Google Docs!” She adds, “Overall though, we were working really hard to stay on the same page and it just kept growing bigger and bigger. By the end, we had this huge book ready to be edited.”
It wasn’t just the duo speaking at the festival. Mrinalini’s mother and Shobha’s daughter, academic and writer Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan was there too – moderating a well received panel on translation among others. Unlike the other two, as an associate professor at Rice University in the US, her writing has largely been academic. But last year, she took a more personal turn with the epistolary memoir The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once, a collection of letters exchanged between her and colleague Chi Rainer Bornfree throughout the pandemic. She explains, “We started writing because, like everyone else, we were really called to witness our lives and world transformations in a new way, while also keenly feeling the importance of friendship. It does something really quite unusual for a pandemic book – it unfolds in real time. It refuses to accept the idea of the end of the pandemic. It’s more about its ongoingness.”
For Ragini and Shobha, the closest they have come to a collaboration is the former writing the epilogue to the latter’s book about her mother, Lily Tharoor titled Good Innings. But the two have inspired each other in a different way, as Ragini shares, “She gave my brother and I a love for literature and language. She herself was an English PhD student once and comes from a very literary family... it’s a total privilege and inspiration seeing her build an extremely impressive writing career at a later stage in life, committing to the project of connecting with young Indians. I take inspiration from that.”
For Mrinalini, being from a family of litterateurs has shaped her in a similar but different way. Crediting her mother with encouraging a love for reading too, she adds, “I was inspired to write because of my mother and my family which has so many writers, but I also think my passion for writing is my own. I would have been a reader and a writer because I just love it so much.” Still, recollecting her debut book’s launch last week in Delhi, which also saw her granduncle MP Shashi Tharoor, in attendance, she is all smiles. Shobha adds, “My brother, in fact, read the book in one sitting as soon as we gave it to him. He thought it was great and said ‘When is the second book coming out?’