When Gauri Trivedi was leaving India along with her husband and baby to settle down abroad, her mother raised a very simple yet pertinent question. Gauri shares what the question was and how her perceptions about moving out of India have changed from the time she left years back to now. Here’s a writeup in which a daughter opens up to her mother and introspects. Read on.
Gauri Trivedi has been associated with us since December 2011 and her very first submission made us sit up and say ‘wow’! Gauri’s stories and essays have the ability to establish an instant connect with the reader. Her writings for Spark have dealt with themes like women, children, motherhood, the art of writing, personal experiences and life. What we love about her is her ability to write sensitively about a chosen subject and her proactive nature in working with us on bettering a piece.
An interview with Gauri Trivedi.
What inspires a writer? Joy, pain, triumph, experiences or perhaps just a keen sense of observation? In poetic prose, Gauri Trivedi describes how the desire to write is always within her, surfacing only in times when things are not quite right. It is not an inspiration she deliberately seeks, it’s just the way it has turned out to be.
Two mothers, different worlds, decades apart. And yet, wonders Gauri Trivedi, at the core, didn’t that mother want the same things for her children then, as Gauri does today for her own?
Here’s an interesting conversation between a small girl who has been raised abroad and her mother who is from India. She can’t imagine someone else folding her laundry and surprisingly neither can her mother, now! Gauri Trivedi tells her story.
It has been proved that plants have life, but do we think of them and treat them as living things? Gauri Trivedi’s short story is about someone who gets attached to the little plant she brings home and will stop at nothing to help it grow. In the end, her wish does come true but whether it was her conviction that worked or the forces of science is anybody’s guess!
The transition from staying in a joint family to living in a nuclear family is often not as simple and joyous for children, as it is for adults. Gauri Trivedi shares an incident from her own life when she didn’t return home from school one day, much to the panic and dismay of her mother.
Fourteen-year-old Ipshita has questions about her late arrival and her place in the family. Her mother, though not revealing the odds she faced for wanting to have a girl, tells Ipshita exactly how it all happened! The story, by Gauri Trivedi, is an attempt to highlight the fact that even in some well-educated, urban Indian families the girl child is not as welcome as a male child. Read on.
Married for a decade and more, a wife-and-a-mother mulls over the lack of romance in her life these days. Annoyed with the hype surrounding Valentine’s Day, she is not so enthused about what the month of February has to offer, until she takes a trip down the memory lane. The lady in question could be anybody, it could be me, it could be you, says Gauri Trivedi. Picture by Gauri Trivedi.