Tracing the lives of three friends, author Partha Sarthi Sen Sharma’s recent book, Lucknow Diaries: Of Love and Longing, explores the lanes of contemporary Lucknow as well as human choices that are often caught between ambition and ethics. The book, says the author, is a work of fiction. “But as happens with most authors of literary realism, this one too has real-life events and characters seeping into the story. That’s quite natural,” he says.
Brought up in Delhi, Sharma spent a considerable part of his life in Lucknow, working as a civil servant there. “Though there has been quite some amount of writing on Lucknow, it has all been non-fiction and mostly based on Lucknow of Nawabi era — the city of pre-independence, pre-partition era. Precious little has been written on Lucknow of today, especially in English,” says the author, adding, “But just like the rest of the country, Lucknow too has changed substantially in recent years.
It is no longer the city of Ismat Chugtai or Umrao Jaan.” He further adds, “I don’t know whether there is a word called ‘Lucknowphile’ like ‘Anglophile’ but I simply love the city. I have read a lot of books on Lucknow, both in English and Hindi, by authors like Abdul Halim Sharar, Ravi Bhatt, Yogesh Praveen and Ali Sardar Jafri.”
As a full time civil servant, it was always a challenge for Sharma to get adequate mental space and time to work continuously on a novel. “But as I went along, events and sub-events kept developing on their own. So my writing process was a combination of a basic plot and what people may term as ‘streams of consciousness.’”
Giving a peek into the book, Sharma talks about the dilemma Dinesh, one of the protagonists in the book, faces. “Dinesh finds himself at the crossroads of emotions when he sees politics, based on intrigue, succeeding all around him; even journalist Feroze, another protagonist, faces similar conflicting emotions in life. What’s worse is that sometimes people don’t see this as a conflict between ambition and ethics; they look at it as a conflict between sheer survival and ethics,” he signs off.