Writer and artist Belinder Dhanoa addresses issue of mental illness and poses questions pertaining to normalcy in her second novel 'Echoes in the Well'.
In her recently launched fiction, Dhanoa essentially focuses on the issue of mental illness and what qualifies as normal and deviant; the contrast often used as a means to control individuals and even communities.
A man lies dying tended by his two daughters. A strangely absent presence, their father has dictated the shape of their lives -- sometimes distorting and at others shaping their hopes, ambitions and desires. To these two narrative strands, the third is of the girls' mother --- a strong and single-minded woman, who defies society's expectations of how a woman should behave sums up the story.
Through her protagonists, Dhanoa tries to identify and gauge the differences which make people behave in a certain way.
Set partly in Shillong and partly in the Punjab, both places where Dhanoa has her affiliations to, the novel underlines pressures of living in a patriarchal society and the complexities of family loyalties, betrayals and love.
The author has also dealt with questions pertaining to ethnicity, illness and has questioned patriarchal values through a feminist perspective.
The fiction subtly brings to light the ethnic differences leading to discrimination when people are tagged "outsiders" in their own country.
Recounting her personal experience, she says,"I was born in Shillong to an Assamese woman and a Punjabi man. On the streets of Shillong, it did not matter what my name was- I was an outsider, a 'dkhar'. I suffered some insult but no injury from this status."
Dhanoa, who eventually left Shillong at her own will says early life experiences taught her what it was to be an outsider.
"The lesson was reinforced in the streets of Delhi where I became 'chinki'. I had not been 'chinki' enough for the Northeast but was too 'chinki' for the North," she told PTI in an interview.
