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October 1, 2006
AUTHORS: Three lives
A depiction in an American travel magazine of three Rajasthani women standing in their full traditional garb, facing a sand storm, set off Bharti Kirchner, an avid reader and cookbook writer, to begin her first novel, Shiva Dancing. Two years later, the novel was complete, accepted for publication and Kirchner had a contract in hand for a second one. Bharti Kirchner is the author of four cookbooks, four novels, and is an ex-systems engineer at IBM. I was intrigued after reading her novels and learning of her changing career paths, so I contacted her. Upon her suggestion, we met at a teahouse in a quaint urban Seattle neighborhood. “I feel like I’ve led three lives,” she revealed to me laughingly, “one as a systems engineer, another as a cookbook writer, and a third as a fiction writer.” Listening to Kirchner tell her story was elating, especially for someone like me with my own partial departure from the information technology field in pursuit of a writer’s life.
Living in the States for the last 20 some years, Kirchner was born, raised, and educated in India. “My educational background was always math and science,” she explains. “But writing was something that I always wanted to try.” She enrolled in writing classes at the University of Washington while working at IBM. Then, after many years in the computers field, she decided to quit and take up writing professionally. “I am a very passionate cook and I really wanted to write cookbooks.” Kirchner recalls the shock among her friends and relatives regarding her decision. “People would ask me, ‘How can you leave such a good job at a company like IBM to write cookbooks?’” Having made up her mind, Kirchner began by writing articles for cooking magazines and newspapers. “Getting my articles published gave me more confidence.” After several articles, she wrote a proposal for an Indian cookbook — specialising in the cuisine of her native region of Bengal. After some hurdles, she finally found a publisher by which time she had already written most of the cookbook.
As expected, Kirchner found writing to be a vastly different experience than her previous profession. “Working as a systems engineer requires a certain type of mindset, and writing requires a completely different mindset. Even writing a cookbook, which is more of a step-by-step process as opposed to fiction. Still, it is a very different discipline than working in software or technology. [In an office], you work with a team of people and there is a certain structure to your day. Whereas, when you are writing, you work by yourself. It requires more discipline and trust in yourself. In that sense writing can be more difficult [as a career choice].”
With four published cookbooks under her belt, Kirchner felt she needed to try something new. So she gave fiction a try. “I had this image of a young Rajasthani girl in mind.” And then I saw this scene in a travel magazine of three Rajasthani women going to get water, facing a sandstorm. They had on these pinkish orange saris and they covered their heads.” She felt drawn to the scene as if it had something to do with her story.
As it turns out, her first novel, Shiva Dancing, begins with a wedding scene in which the bride is a seven-year-old Rajasthani girl. The wedding party is attacked by bandits and the young bride is kidnapped. The rest of the novel actually unfolds in the US city of San Francisco where Kirchner herself has lived and worked.
With four published cookbooks under her belt, Kirchner felt she needed to try something new. So she gave fiction a try
Describing the experience of writing the first novel, Kirchner says, “I put a lot of work into it.” Having had no background in fiction writing, she enrolled in some classes. “I kept writing and polishing. I didn’t outline so I didn’t always know where the story was going and didn’t really know until more than half-way into the novel how it was going to end.” The novel tells the story of Rajasthani-born, Meena Kumari, kidnapped in childhood and adopted by an American couple who bring her to America where she is raised. Meena grows up and works in San Francisco as a systems analyst at a software firm. In her mid-thirties, she decides to return to India and visit her hometown and the house where she was born.
The work Kirchner puts into her stories is not limited to writing and re-writing. She does extensive research on her subjects. For Shiva Dancing, she went to Rajasthan. “I spent a good amount of time there. Bengali culture and Rajasthani cultures are very different so I really had to familiarise myself [with the latter].” So, much like the protagonist of the story, Kirchner went to Rajasthan and hired a taxi driver to take her around. “I really wanted to get a sense of the place,” says Kirchner who believes in experiencing a place before writing about it.
Her most recent novel, Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries, is set in Seattle where Kirchner currently resides. The protagonist, Sunya Malhotra, is a pastry chef and owner of a small bakery and her specialty the ‘Sunya cake,’ with a secret recipe, is a city favourite. When a large retail bakery opens doors and a “bakery war” is declared between the big business and Sunya’s small shop, Sunya struggles to hold on to her business, at the same time realising that she has reached a baker’s block. She feels she has lost her touch in baking as nothing she bakes comes out right. At a crossroads in her life, with a struggling business, an estranged father, her resentment for her mother’s new fiancé, a not-so-perfect love life, Sunya decides to rediscover herself and her baking skills by enrolling in a course by a master chef in Japan. A real-life French bakery Kirchner unexpectedly discovered during her visit to Japan once inspired the bakery Sunya visits in Japan. There, Sunya also learns about the Buddhist tradition. To familiarise herself with Buddhist teachings, Kirchner says she visited Seattle’s Buddhist temples many times and spent a lot of time talking to the monks and sitting in meditation sessions to really understand what it was all about.
Bharti Kirchner decided to take up what she loved and hasn’t looked back since. Still when offering advice to new writers, she adds a strong note of caution. “Even though, I myself decided to just quit my big paying job to write, I wouldn’t necessarily advise it to others,” she says. “It is a gamble, a risk.” It’s a gamble that paid off for Kirchner. Her other two novels include Sharmila’s Book and Darjeeling, and she is currently working on a fifth one.
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