HYDERABAD, Feb 19: Indian writer Saaz Aggarwal, whose book ‘Sindh: stories from a lost homeland’ was launched on Sunday at the fourth Karachi Literature Festival, has said her book is a biographical account of different people, including her mother.

Speaking to Dawn at a reception hosted by civil society activist Zulfiqar Halepoto at his residence on Tuesday, she said: “The book is a biographical account of different people starting with my mother. I’ve discussed other people’s stories and mostly childhood memories, including good or bad experiences of childhood.”

She talked about her mother, who hails from Hyderabad and speaks Sindhi. She was born in Pakistan and after partition migrated to India. She said her mother was 30 years old when she moved to India and she was an ordinary person and “every person has a story”.

She said her father did not know Sindhi as he belonged to Karnataka, south India. She said she did not have much knowledge of Sindh and its culture and could not speak Sindhi either but could understand it.

“I wrote childhood memories of my mother when I started writing this book. This is a domestic kind of project…mother’s childhood memories and some stories of her childhood,” she said. She added that Sindh “is a wonderful place and it is different from other places in world in terms of history, geography, culture, tradition and nature of people. It is so different.”

She said people of her generation did have some connections with Sindh in the shape of their parents in India, but the generation that migrated from Pakistan did not look back “as they look forward”. “They don’t have any connection with Sindhi culture,” she remarked and added that she was a non-fiction writer. She said she had written a number of books, including biographies.

She said she grew up in India and studied mathematics at the University of Mumbai. “I started writing when I was seven,” she said, adding that she had written a number of columns also. She said her paintings, which focused on contemporary urban life, were also very popular in India.