NRI author's new novel deals with dispute resolution

Author Shilpi Somaya Gowda deals with a slew of subjects like relationships, family dispute resolution and medical residency experience in her new book which is a love story spanning India and the US.
"The Golden Son", published by HarperCollins India, follows a young man through the three years of his internal medicine residency program at an urban American hospital in the early 2000s.
"While historical experience provided the inspiration for my story, all of the details of specific cases in this book are purely fictional, as are the village of Dharmala, India, and the town of Ashford, Texas," says US-based Gowda, who has also authored the New York Times bestseller "Secret Daughter".

Anil comes from a large family in rural India and as the eldest boy, he is expected to inherit the role of leader of his clan and arbiter of its disputes, dispensing wisdom and good advice.
Leena is his closest companion, a fiercely brave girl who loves nothing more than the wild terrain they inhabit and her close-knit family. As childhood friends, they are inseparable, but as adulthood approaches, they grow apart.
Anil is the first person in his family to leave India, the first to attend college, the first to become a doctor. Half a world away in Dallas, Texas, he is caught up in his new life, experiencing all the freedoms and temptations of American culture: he tastes alcohol for the first time, falls in love, and learns firsthand about his adopted country's alluring, dangerous contradictions.

Then things start to go wrong: Anil makes a medical

mistake with tragic results, his first love begins to fray and a devastating event makes him question his worth as a doctor and as a friend. On a visit home, Anil rekindles a friendship with the woman who seems to understand him better than anyone else. But their relationship is complicated by a fateful decision made years earlier.
As the two old friends discover each other again, they must also weigh the choice between responsibility and freedom, and between loyalty and love.
"In India, there is a long tradition of settling disputes between individuals and families within a community. In its original form, the panchayat - the assembly (ayat) of five (panch) respected elders - was the inspiration for the name of the fictional village in this novel, Panchanagar. In less formal ways, I have witnessed the same practice of navigating disputes in my own family and that of others, usually by an elder male in the family," Gowda says.

"For the purpose of this narrative, I chose an individual, the eldest son of the clan, to be the arbiter; in reality, the practice of informal dispute resolution can be carried out in as many different ways as there are families," she says.
The author had generous help of many people, including patients, hospital staff, physicians, nurses, and current and former interns and residents at several medical centres across the country during her research process.
The fictional Parkview Hospital in this book is not modelled after any one hospital, nor is Anil's experience a perfect representation of any single residency program at a moment in time. Rather, it is a composite based on my research.

"While I have tried to remain true to the spirit of the medical residency experience, which has evolved significantly over the past two decades, I have also taken creative license to change some details and compress timelines to suit the narrative," she says.