Perfect Horse Sense

As one of India's most promising riders in her youth, Shauna Singh Pasricha displayed many of the attributes of the perfect horsewoman: a light touch with the reins, a knowledge of when to give her horse its head, and a sense of balance. Some two decades down the line, it's the same qualities that drive the very varied career of Shauna Singh Baldwin, author, IT consultant and erstwhile radio show host. English Lessons, her first collection of short stories, and What The Body Remembers, her first novel, debuted to critical acclaim in both the West and in India. The former offers a wide array of stories from members of the Sikh community as they settle into life in India or resettle as immigrants in alien lands; the latter returns to Partition as seen by two Sikh women, Roop and Satya, who are married to the same man. The common strand linking the two is Baldwin's ability to tune in to the voices of individuals and gather them together. It also helps that, despite her emphatic sense of herself as a member of the Sikh community, Baldwin feels little conflict over her identity as a writer who embraces several cultures, several nations.

 

"I was born in Montreal, brought up in India, and I have lived much of my adult life in the US as well as in Canada," she says, "and I prefer to see myself as a writer whose work transcends nationality." Pretty much what you might expect from a woman whose early nineties radio show, Sunno, was subtitled `The East-Indian American Radio Show where you don't have to be East-Indian to listen'.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate Baldwin is to watch her as she sets up a relationship with an audience composed of friends, readers and book enthusiasts. Chic and self-possessed, she listens patiently to the familiar questions, and if her answers are rehearsed, some of them emerging straight from her Bold Type essay on her work, she manages to make them seem spontaneous.

Baldwin frequently blends her two disparate professions of choice _ IT and writing _ as she did when researching for What The Body Remembers. "I spent about two weeks in Pakistan meeting people who had gone through Partition," she recounts, "but I had spent much time before that on listserves and on email making the initial contacts. My cyberfriends helped me organise an itinerary and set up meetings." She has vivid recollections of her time in Pakistan. "Slowly, I realised that I was being subjected to a test," she says. "Everywhere I went, I was offered food and drink. And if I ate from the same utensils that they were using, I had passed _ that was how they knew I was a Sikh, because that was what the Sikh community used to do when they were there. After that, people opened up and talked to me freely."

Her next book should be concluded fairly soon; insiders say that it is, again, a wonderful blend of 21st century techniques married to stories as old as India itself. This is, clearly, one author who has the reins well in hand.