The Wheel Turned

My Debut Novel

The Wheel Turned

They say there is a story in each one of us waiting to be told. The Wheel Turned had been in me for years and In needed to put it down in words. The novel tells of the world I grew up in, a world that lives on in black and white in family albums and in full colour in my memories and dreams. In this book, I have sought to create not just the microcosmic world of an army cantonment in a remote Himalayan town, but also to recreate the social milieu and mindset of small town South India in the sixties.  It was the cusp of a new age, when intellectual awareness would occasionally raise its head, only to be pushed down again by archaic beliefs and customs. 

In a world of fashionable cynicism, I courted the risk of being called an idealist, a Utopian. Because in my story, the soldier goes to war with zeal and passion and the soldier’s wife is content to ‘also serve, who only stand and wait…’ Fighting the enemy, protecting the motherland becomes of utmost importance; it little matters that as a Nobel Peace laureate once said, ‘War leaves no victors, only victims…’

Here is a small summary of what the story is all about…

The Wheel Turned…

 It is the dawn of the nineteen sixties. Meena is married to Anand, an attractive young army officer and goes to live with him in an army cantonment in the verdant hills of Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. But their life together turns upside down when the unit is suddenly called away to resist the Chinese in the North East where they have made incursions into Indian territory. Anand goes to war and never returns. There is no news of him nor is his body found. Has he been killed? Did he abscond from the battlefield? Was he captured alive? As her family and friends prepare her for the worst,  Meena remains staunch in her belief that Anand would have fought like a brave soldier and would be safe somewhere, and would return to her some day. But the weeks turn to months and the months to years…

Another man enters her life, but Meena is not ready for this relationship when she is convinced that Anand will come back some day. She clings to her dreams, and her most precious possession, an old Tibetan prayer wheel, becomes her talisman of hope and happiness. She knows that it had brought her happiness once, and it would again.

This is the story of a soldier’s pride and courage on the battlefield and of a woman’s faith and commitment; the story of tireless waiting and endless believing. Told with deep sensitivity, understanding and gentle humour, this story of Meena and the two men who love her moves to a heart rending climax because whatever may happen at the end, someone has surely to be the loser. When the wheel turns, only Destiny knows who will   be at the top….

Fortune… smile once more, turn thy wheel.

(William Shakespeare)