Swathi Sasidharan felt that the warm days were probably behind her just when, as a newly-wed, she first set foot in Ireland in biting cold. “Overnight, I moved from 35 degrees Celsius in my hometown to freezing temperatures. I was 26 then,” remembers a 41-year-old Swathi, who moved to the North Atlantic country where her husband, Sajeevan Achuthan, works as an engineer with a telecommunications company.
But soon enough, she realised it wasn’t so much as the frigidity of the weather as the “culture shock” that made her yearn for the fond company and comfort of her family and home in the city. Having lived all her life in Kerala, it wasn’t easy to so quickly adapt to the new, exotic environment in Athlone, a town in central Ireland. As weeks elapsed, the sense of deracination snowballed and Swathi felt the need to “creatively” channel her struggles and that’s when she decided to put pen to paper to write her “memories, thoughts and experiences”. She started writing blogs in “an attempt to connect with the world.”
Her memoir, Raindrops on My Memory Yacht, is born out of stringing together these vignettes. A compilation of 30 select posts, the book is essentially diary notes authored in an informal prose. Though her intention was to merely “give vent” to her feelings when she started blogging, she felt encouraged by the response to her writing. “If no one had responded, I probably would have stopped writing soon,” says Swathi, a computer engineer and mother of two girls.
The light-hearted memoir is peppered with humour and pathos and covers her life from 2005 till around the time when her eldest daughter was born. “Originally, I had put up over 120 blog posts and I had to sieve through them for the best and the most appropriate ones for the book,” reveals Swathi, who counts S.K. Pottakkad and Arundhati Roy as her literary inspirations. The posts, in varying takes and moods, cover a range of topics and emotions and there are discourses about her grandfather, skin colour, dreams, hostel life, eve-teasing, harmless bloopers to life experiences as quotidian as nyctophobia and dancing. However, the book could do with better editing.
Swathi Sasidharan with her daughters | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Each chapter is preceded by a thematically relevant quote taken from a diverse bunch of personalities — from Euripides to Kamala Das to Bobby Valentino to Anon (anonymous). Swathi, who’s fond of reading autobiographies, says while she came across some of them in her reading, others she chose by doing “research in quotes to find a matching quotation.” Raindrops on My Memory Yacht received the Fokana (Federation of Kerala Associations in North America) Kamala Das English Literature award this year.
Swathi continues to blog, now in English and her mother tongue, but only to keep a rewarding hobby going. “The book is a memoir now, but at the time of writing those posts, it was akin to a diary for me. I wrote everything in the present tense. Now, life is different. We get used to our circumstances,” she says, adding that her partner has been a cornerstone of support in challenging times.
But today, Swathi says, her biggest challenge is as a mother — to teach her daughters, aged four and six, to face a changing world with fortitude. “My kids are more Irish than Indian. They don’t speak a word of Malayalam. They are so used to Ireland that they think its is their country. As they are too young, I can’t make them realise that they are actually Indians,” she says with a laugh.