Randhir Khare: Welcome to the Lime Lit World, Leena

Leena Chandorkar is not your usual professorial sort with head in air and feet walking on a cumulus of academic flotsam and jetsam.  An ‘army daughter’, she studied English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College where she began her Lit Romance. And of course it didn’t end there and she went on to do an M A and an MPhil in English Literature, followed by a PhD. “Those were special years,” she reminiscences, “Incredible teachers… Prof Sinha, the HOD, became my guide for MPhil and later PhD… a mentor in many ways.  I had a fantastic peer group, which was devoted to literature… we all wanted to be writers!  My pieces began to be published.”

But then…..  “Life intervened.  In a pleasant way.  I got married!  And because I had no permanent job, I was free to travel the world with my husband who was in the merchant navy. I literally sailed the seven seas during the four years before I had my daughter and decided to settle down like a good girl in Pune.”

But despite life intervening, the good girl’s  PhD thesis Eye Me Myself : A Study of Six Women’s Autobiographies was published as a book in 2003.  “Soon after that I got a permanent job teaching English at the Senior College level in Garware College. It has been a hectic life since then – balancing career, home and my writing. I held on to my dream of writing during those busy years.  I took a sabbatical from 2010 to 2012 and joined my husband in Norway, where he is based.  Those two years were years of extensive travel across Europe, many travel articles getting published –a time of making international friends and widening my horizons.  When I finally rejoined my job at Garware College, I was a changed person. I had always been cosmopolitan in my outlook, thanks to my fauji background, but my international exposure gave me a wider vision of the world and its people.”

And so she was ready to write her first novel which had fermented inside her over the years. During her annual breaks in Norway, she worked on and completed Bends and Turns, a novel that will be out from Leadstart Publications  in September this year.

Interestingly, the novel is far from stuffy nosed and highbrow as one would have expected…coming from an academic sort. On the contrary, it is beguilingly simple and engaging in its narrative flow and insightfulness.

“Bends and Turns deals with the growth towards maturity of a young woman, Sona Jaykar.  Enmeshed closely with her life is the story of her mother as well as the stories of her husband Rajeev Jaykar, best friend Prof Nafisa Ahmad, colleague Shubhendu Roy and most importantly, Brigadier Vikrant Singh—VS.The relentless flow of life takes Sona from darkness to light, from childish petulance to mature wisdom.  The choices she makes extract a price from her and mark her forever.  The collision of the past and the present; the choice between duty and love; the separation of the personal and the public— these are the issues that get highlighted as Sona Jaykar makes her precarious way through the minefield of expectations that young Indian women have to negotiate today in their quest for happiness.”

Welcome to the Lime Lit World, Leena.

Randhir Khare
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