e-Paper
Amrita Kaur
For newly-minted author Anittha Thanabalan, this year's Deepavali is glowing brighter than usual. She is celebrating the day with her recently-launched novel The Lights That Find Us.
While the festive occasion is always a merrymaking affair with her friends and family, she decided to give her first novel a dramatic spin, also set during Deepavali.
Her book is based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, one of her all-time favourite books. But instead of an elderly miser visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, a Singaporean teenager, Shreya, is forced to deal with a deed she committed two Deepavalis ago that tore her family apart.
The book opens with Shreya and her family celebrating Deepavali. Her older brother Dhiren is missing from the celebrations. He had left home two years before and no one in the house talked about his painful absence.
As Shreya goes through an emotional turmoil, she calls on the Hindu gods to bring her brother back to her - and they answer by sending Apurva, a gandharva, a Hindu angel, the first of three who will guide her towards redemption.
He pulls Shreya back through time to rewatch key scenes from her past, so that she can realise how her belief that she means less to her parents than Dhiren and her growing resentment of his achievements coalesced into what she did to him that Deepavali.
Not wanting to spoil the story and reveal the mistake Shreya commits, Ms Thanabalan, 30, said it lies in betrayal and makes her feel intense shame and guilt.
The book follows the same format as A Christmas Carol where the lead character goes back into the past and the present and is then taken into the future. "That whole process is meant to emphasise the difficulty of healing and how much help we may need to overcome a difficult situation," said Ms Thanabalan, a freelance writer and English tutor. "The idea is that healing isn't easy; that it is messy and it is enormously uncomfortable but that ultimately, it is achievable."
The healing process that Shreya went through after committing a mistake is comparable to Ms Thanabalan's experiences when she was going through a "very difficult period" last year.
"There were some friends in my life I was close to but it had to come to an end, and often you don't see these things coming." Though she and Shreya went through different experiences, the healing process she wrote for Shreya was very relatable, she said.
"My hope is that readers would see that there are very few mistakes that are truly insurmountable. It gets better and I think it's a point that is very important for young adults to grasp."
Ms Thanabalan, who has a degree in psychology from the Singapore Institute of Management, took just under two months to write the book after she came across an advertisement on the Epigram Books Fiction Prize last year. She is already writing her next book on a cult.
Ms Thanabalan is looking forward to Deepavali and a yearly tradition that is particularly special to her - the making of murukku.
Her late grandfather, who had a background in carpentry and mechanics, built a murukku maker decades ago that the family still uses.
Every Deepavali, she starts the day by taking an oil bath, having an Indian breakfast of idli and thosai with her family and visiting her grandmother's house. In the evening, her family hosts relatives and friends for dinner.
lThe Lights That Find Us is sold at $18.90 at all major bookstores and Epigram online.
