Writer Showcase - MAY 2025

 Pavitra Menon

I am very pleased to introduce May's showcased writer, Pavitra Menon. I met Pav when she was a member of a small writing group I belonged to. The other four members, including me, were colleagues in an after-school tutorial centre who discovered that by an amazing coincidence we were all writing novels. Pav was the friend of one of the group's members. I was very impressed by the sections of her novel, River Laughter Moon & C, which I read as part of our group activities, and later read in its entirety. She is a wonderful writer of both prose and poetry. I have also been amazed by her illustrations. She is a woman of many talents, as you will see below:

Pavitra Menon

Biography

Pavitra means pure in Sanskrit. She was born in Bangalore, India, and  moved to England when she was twenty-four to join her husband who worked in North Wales. She was named by her maternal grandmother - her Ammamma - the first person who told her tales of the Ramayan which at the age of six sent her into a deep restful afternoon siesta; but a kernel had been planted that would germinate into the idea for her book three decades later. It was also her Ammamma’s battles with depression and her own mother’s dementia that led her to her second project on  ‘tender’ technology which she is currently working on.

During the probation period at her first job in a software company, she was failing most of her qualifying exams. On the verge of being kicked out, she was given precious advice by her tutor. He told her that the theory was no good without taking it for a spin, and it was in making mistakes that you actually learnt.  It is advice that she has followed devotedly ever simce, be it in early years as a software engineer, in her Masters in management, in running her furniture export business, her bakery business, and her career in management in the private and public sector. She adopts it unabashedly in her role as parent accumulating blunders at a rapid rate.

‘Learn on the go’ was her approach to her first book too. For Pavitra, on the one hand there was the bewilderment that theirs was the only ancient civilisation whose script has not yet been deciphered. The images of the statues excavated from the Indus Valley sites, especially the self-assured bronze dancing girl, had imprinted themselves on her psyche. On the other hand, there was a deep-rooted nostalgia for the vivid stories about Kerala and her love for the epics instilled by her grandmother’s tales and letters from an uncle. Pavitra wanted to write a story that would instigate a revolution to seek out and solve the mystery of the ancient civilisation, the origin story of more than 1. 5 billion Indians.  Magic realism became the vehicle to tell her story where characters of her favourite mythology became integral to its cast. In her true ‘learn on the go’ style, she burrowed into research on the Indus valley civilisation , into the Kozhikode - the land of the Zamorins, the resistance movements in pre-independent India, and made foolhardy attempts to analyse the complex relationship between the Irish and British in the aftermath of the potato famine.

Poetry has become handmaiden to her short creative outbursts. Working full time in programme delivery in the NHS,  Pavitra finds its form convenient to dip in and out of and uses it to chronicle her travels , rebuke her pet tortoise and express her love for the Yorkshire countryside. A note about her tryst with tortoises. They had a cameo in her first book and made an appearance in  her early illustrations. Serendipitously three years after publishing her book, she found herself at the ‘Snakes and Adders’ store looking for a baby tortoise for her daughter. Nelly is a Horsefield tortoise from Azerbaijan who is about two years old, eats three meals a day and can’t stand the smell of her own wee.

Pav would love to carve more time to write,  draw, paint and her dream job (in addition to becoming a loved and widely read author) would include working with old furniture from flea markets and Farrow and Ball paint. She illustrated her book River Laughter Moon & C and some of the drawings have been shared below.

Links

Pavitra uses Instagram to share her poems and can be found at @diy_author.

You can find Pav's novel on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=River%2C+Laughter%2C+Moon+%26+C&crid=3JGIVOGB58EM5&sprefix=river+laughter+moon+%26+c%2Caps%2C126&ref=nb_sb_noss

******

Pav has sent us an extract from her novel River Laughter Moon & Co, plus several of her fabulous illustrations for the novel, and several poems. Enjoy!

 EXTRACT

Charlotte

I had travelled with her on that expedition a year ago. My

ward had been a bundle of nerves and excitement. (My ward!

It felt strange calling her that.) She was kneeling in a trench, 

re-examining the implement and trying to rid it of its stubbornly

lodged gravel and grime. Their dig had been called off for the

day. She should have been at base camp but she had disobeyed

the curfew.

        Earlier that day, Kalyani had discovered the storage pits

at the bottom of a trench. Its structure had been beautifully

preserved. She knew of storage pits that, in previous

expeditions, had yielded treasures. She was disappointed to

find it empty. The implement she found outside the pit filled

her with anger.

        Robbers, she thought. So many archaeological sites had

been vandalised by greedy bandits looking to sell treasures in

the black market. On closer examination, she was certain that

the pocket tool was over a hundred years old. But this site had

only been discovered recently so her bandit theory seemed

implausible.

            The question troubled her and suspicion gnawed at her

all day. It was why she disobeyed curfew and came back to the

site. Her re-examination of the trenches had produced further

deviations. Fragments of pottery found in the same layer

seemed different in style and composition. It went against the

rules of stratification. She had been taught how objects, and

sometimes structures, were found in layers of soil, along with

other materials that had resulted from human activities. This

sequence gave indications of the relative age of the styles of

architecture and crafts. But she was certain the layers in the

trenches she examined had been disturbed. If thieves had done

it, they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of restoring

the site after removing whatever they had been after. The more

she thought about it, the more she was convinced that over a

hundred years ago, someone had attempted to excavate this

site. But why?

      I recognised the place from Chandran and Aaji’s description

of Sindh. Surveying the terrain, I wondered how those two had

survived the cruel elements of this godforsaken land. I sat a few

yards away while Kalyani persevered with that pocket tool. She

examined it. The sight of it made me laugh. Kalyani had found

the tool Aaji had misplaced all those years ago. It connected her

to our world. She was in the same place as my friends had been.

Then a slow drumming began and I felt myself stiffen with fear.

It was Kalyani’s first experience with the Team.

     Their team—a crew of American, Pakistani and Indian

archaeologists—had been warned of the dangers. The rules

were absolute. It was hostile territory and the curfew had

been imposed for a reason. Dusk was approaching and

she was growing increasingly desperate. She surveyed the

surroundings, which were fast becoming opaque in the

darkness. She surveyed the section of trenches that she hadn’t

checked yet.

      I noticed a flicker in the distance. A lone turbaned and

bearded man approached his bunker on the rocks. The turbaned

man had spotted Kalyani’s torchlight. The drumming reached

a crescendo. The din of the percussion within me became

unbearable. My anxiety produced a strong gust of wind that

swept the sand into the trench and into Kalyani’s eyes. I felt

a tingling as I touched the torch. Kalyani was plunged into

darkness. The darkness now cloaked her, protecting her from the

Kalashnikov- wielding militant who had been assigned the task

of taking out as many of the archaeology contingent as he could.

 ILLUSTRATIONS

Character illustration - Damu

GIrl and Elephant

Four illustrations

Family

Saraswathy

 POETRY

Pav has also let us use several of her poems so you

can see the range of her work below:

Colleague

I sent him a photo, not on WhatsApp or Instagram

He didn’t ‘like’ it, instead he sent me some lines

Of how the dog in the photo was made in Germany

One of the first by a fledgling toy company.

 

Ask Alan a question, you   learn the most vivid and strange details

A repository of bunkum, he says, I call it the definition of his ways.

To ‘like’ is an insult to his nature, his is not to reduce the multi layered appeal

Of a photo, of things, of objects, but to marvel at their journey.

 

He had a crush on Laura Kuenssberg, it was fairly certain

There was not a day during Brexit chaos, that he didn’t mention her name

When he corrected my grammar, or my pronunciation

It was done with those knitted brows and sharp tongue, never to shame

Only brown person in the team, I got ssome English wrong

But when he had a go at the Indian menu, it was my turn to go on and on.

He retired in twenty twenty, a year of amuck aplenty

In his home office Helen served him tea, glad he no longer had the 3-hour motorway journey.

There was much he was looking forward to, use his jet wash, ride on the TransPennine,

Broker the peace between Joy and Sorrow, his two   garden magpies,

I’ve enquired about them in my latest letter, following the one where he said he was still alive.                                                                                                                                                      

Stuck in the lurch is my letter, unfinished friendship, an unspoken goodbye.

"The following is a poem about families keeping in touch during the pandemic. For those with Alzheimer’s, it tipped so many over the edge. The utterance of memory from long ago provided a striking glimmer of hope in those dark times." - Pav

 

Toothpaste for Acne

There’s a man in the house; he comes and goes,

He has a bag, an umbrella, a mask.

Likes my food I think, he arrives at meal times,

‘Have you eaten?’ he asks.

 

There’s a man in the house, he does odd jobs

He fusses about the photo frame.

When it doesn’t respond?  he gets excited

His voice is high pitched, shakes it in vain.

 

The talking photo in a frame

I take it my hand, lift it up and down

How long is that boy’s hair I cannot see?

His nose looks so big and flat, Is that a smile or a frown?

 

Every evening at three

The man makes me sit

To pay obeisance to the photo frame

He waits and then picks it up, shouting some name.

 

Sometimes he is everywhere, like that time

obsessed about putting that thing on my face.

My arm squeezed, my finger pinched, the bitter taste

A doctor? In that old tired t-shirt, he’s not.

 

‘Mummy’s mummy’, she had dark rings

A face of the little Match girl,

Such pain I see, ‘I will buy them all’,

The tears don’t stop they come faster, was it something I said?

 

He who is everywhere has a new girl,

In blue plastic makes him sit on the ugly armchair,

Looks into her photo frame, call it names

At night she sits by my bed, holding her hands in prayer.

 

They ask how I am when I can plainly see

They are not doing well, bags under her eyes

Grey hair before forty, ‘Enough’ I say to the questions,

Enough about me.

 

Her face has grown abnormally,

Why are her spectacles so mucky?

The pimples are getting worse

‘Toothpaste’ I say, Match girl giggles, ‘I Love you Mummy’s Mummy.’

 

 

Soul’s Blockade

I watched a blackbird approach

I held my breath, was this an omen

 He soon flew off with her, the two merry and lithe

Only biding by my window, while she gathered titbits.

 

Their story not worthy of us most advanced;

Taint the colour, doubt the stance

Double bind of fickle time and feckless fate

So tarmac the garden, what is one or two more at their rate?

 

 

******

And finally we come to The Big

 Interview, in which Pav kindly

 answers writing-related 

questions and lets us into 

some of her writing secrets...

1.      How old were you when you first knew you wanted to be a writer, and what set you off down that journey?

My first foray into writing was, at the age of 30,  with  the short skits I wrote and directed for children. This was for Diwali and  Holi that was celebrated with great gusto, organized by the  the Indian cultural association and attended by residents from Chester and North Wales. I grew up in Bangalore, India. Home was in an apartment complex of about 60 families, where everyone knew everyone’s business and festivals of every religion were celebrated with  fervour. The skits were a way of introducing the myths and legends surrounding Indian festivals to children  and I took ample liberties with them. I can vaguely remember that for the festival of colours - Holi - I reimagined the demon king as the CEO of an insurance firm.  I got more time to write when I quit my job to be a stay-at-home mum and spent time waiting in car parks outside music, gymnastics, tennis classes to write my  first book, River laughter Moon & C.

 

2.      Tell us about the books and writers that have shaped your life and your writing career.

My grandad published a short and very perceptive commentary on cricket and I remember being blown away by his vocabulary. Until recently, I carried a crumpled copy of his work in my hand bag. My mom did her MA in English literature and wrote the most beautiful essays full of feeling and colour. So, whilst I was never a voracious reader and pursued a career in engineering, I was surrounded by a love for language. I volunteered at my daughter’s school, where I read for kids some afternoons. This opened my eyes to Judith Kerr and Michael Morpurgo. I remember thinking how lucky the children of this country were and wanted to do what they had done for Indian history- to make history beautifully accessible and unforgettable. Being part of a book club has kept that awe and love for language very much alive and I worship the story telling and language mastery of Maggie O Farrell, Berlie Doherty, Hillary Mantel,  Bernardine Evaristo, Elif Shafaq and Amor Towles- to name just a few.

 

3.      Have your children, other family members, friends or teachers inspired any of your writing? In what way?

River Laughter Moon & C is a locker of anecdotes I was told by my grandparents about where they grew up. The paddy fields that stretched beyond the horizon, the temples with their row of oil lamps, the elephants that travelled every year some 500 kilometres from Kerala to Bangalore, the sounds of the bells and drums that pulsated through you during the evening prayers. The palace of the king of Calicut was destroyed, and there is very little architecture left to tell of the time of bravery, of deception, of pride and shame so, through my first novel, I attempted to resurrect the walls of that lost time.

 

 

4.      Does the place you live have any impact on your writing?

Not as much space as a state of mind that seems to impact my writing. I find I write the most when I am sad or disturbed. If there is something that has hurt or troubled me, I find that is the time when I seem to have an endless stream of thoughts.  A bad mood for me brings out a torrent of words (not all palatable), like a laxative !:)

 

Pav & The Peaks!

5.      How would you describe your own writing?

I take my cue from the story. In River Laughter Moon And C, the  story took the form of a  first person account by four protagonists, which was extremely challenging.  The nagging doubts around the sufficiency of my research and knowledge and wanting to  strike the right balance between artifice and verisimilitude gave me many sleepless nights .

 

6.      Tell us about how you approach your writing. Are you a planner or a pantser?

With my first novel, I unleashed the inner geek. I loved history, binge-watched documentaries on ancient civilization, made countless notes. I also  wrote pages to practice writing . I made several versions and found so much value in being a part of a writers' group that gave me feedback and exposure to good writing. I had an English lecturer and writer review some chapters and I used their feedback to finesse my work. I entered the Novel Slam at the Off The Shelf event in Sheffield, 2019 and came away with a consolation prize!

Currently, I am in full time work and am a blundering parent to an adolescent. I have found working on poems easier to fit into my schedule but, even with that, I struggle and it takes me weeks to finish a poem. I have the skeletal form of a novella in my computer which I look at guiltily now and then. Th topics I choose tend to be areas of technology or history that I am interested in but they also require a lot of research. So poetry for now seems to be a way of staying creative within the confines of time and  without the guilt.

 

7.      What do you think about getting feedback on your work from other writers and/or non-writers?

I find feedback hugely beneficial, especially as I  have had no formal training in writing. I would love to do a creative writing course. There is so much to gain, not just from the feedback and pointers, but also in the way writers think and feel and approach subjects. Any feedback for me is a bonus, regardless of what it says or who it is by, because to me they have taken time out of their busy lives to read my work, so to know what made the time they spent worthwhile (or not) is of huge importance to me, helping me to hone my craft. Also a lot of how I have approached the different projects in my life is by doing and learning.

 

8.      If you have experience of self-publishing, what have been its challenges and rewards? 

I had a literary agent but we parted ways because it was taking time and I  had a personal deadline I was working towards. My mum was diagnosed with young-onset dementia and I was very keen for her to see my book published before she lost the ability to comprehend. I found self-publishing, which was enthralling because of its entrepreneurial nature; the process of brainstorming ideas and to have a team to execute these. Of course, the sobering thought is that there is a price attached and every service adds to the expense. I justified it as an investment in myself and which I do hope will lead to many more writing projects and perhaps one day a ‘proper’ 😊 book deal.

 

9.      Beyond your family and your writing, what other things do you do?

I enjoy long walks and  am fortunate to have the Peak District at my doorstep. My wish as a child was to be a singer. I have trained in Indian classical music but suffer hugely from stage fright and my mouth clams and dries up at the sight of a mic. So my contribution to the creator is a huge appreciation and love for music. I did a stint in teaching Indian classical music to kids and loved mashing thousand year old melodies with contemporary pop. My day job is  in managing delivery of digital clinical programmes so  I try to stay updated on the latest developments in technology and I enjoy working with clinicians and technologists.

Pav and tortoise

 

10.  How did the Covid pandemic affect you as a writer?

   COVID made me an illustrator. The lockdown fuelled an         eagerness to illustrate the much loved and familiar vignettes      of Kerala so that, alongside the story, my drawings would       help  transport my readers to the shores of Calicut which is       where my book is set. The second edition of River, Laughter,    Moon & C, included these illustrations and a  glossary of all    the historical references and events that had inspired the            story.

 

11.  There is a lot of talk at the moment. in the publishing world and elsewhere, about political correctness, the Woke movement, cultural appropriation, ‘cancel culture’, ‘trigger warnings’, sensitivity readers and the importance of diversity. What are your thoughts on this, with regard to writing?

Writing, to me, is a deeply rewarding process of creating and I have endeavored to do it in a manner that is respectful whilst staying authentic. It has helped me grow in awareness and knowledge and made me more empathetic. In this day and age, innocent words  very quickly turn from being well-meaning to harmful.  For me, racial justice, diversity and inclusion are positive values and society is richer because of it. 

******

Thank you very much, Pav, for such an entertaining and fascinating showcase. 

******

In June, I will be showcasing 

another fabulous writer: 

Suzanne Burn

Not to be missed!

******

So far in this series, I’ve showcased the following writers:

Ruth Loten – March 2023

Jane Langan – March 2023

Beck Collett – April 2023

Ron Hardwick – June 2023

L.N.Hunter – July 2023

Katherine Blessan – August 2023

Jill Saudek – September 2023

Colin Johnson – October 2023

Sue Davnall – November 2023

Alain Li Wan Po – December 2023

Lily Lawson – January 2024

Philip Badger – February 2024

Glen Lee – March 2024

DHL Hewa - April 2024

Tonia Trainer - May 2024

Mike Poyzer – June 2024

Judith Worham - July 2024

Chrissie Poulter - August 2024

Adele Sullivan - September 2024

Lin De Laszlo - October 2024

Wendy Heydorn - November 2024

Elisabeth Basford - December 2024

Karen Honnor - January 2025

Sharon Henderson - February 2025

Gae Stenson - March 2026 [collaboration]

Dr Trefor Stockwell - March 2025 [collaboration]

Karen Downs-Barton

Pavitra Menon

[28 so far]

You can find all these showcases by scrolling back through the material on this blog.

******