Jayashree Misra has written her heart out in Ancient Promises- a touching story- a story of every woman, a story she prefers to be called 'a mother daughter story'. Ancient Promises is about a woman who gets into a bad marriage and struggles to get the right therapy and schooling for a child whom most people unsympathisingly refer to as a 'mentally handicapped' and shun like a contagious disease. It's the tale of a daughter who loves her parents and sacrifices a fledgling love for them and not just that but for the same love she tries to adjust to a system, which pricks her at every point. It's the realistic portrayal of true love - they say it comes back. In an era where divorces happen at the drop of the hat, it's a story where the marriage is given a very good chance before it reaches a point of no return

In an interview the lady whose novel is doing a record print run in just two and a half months talks about her book, the new genre of Indian women writers, and what exactly she has tried to convey through this fiction/semi autobiography.

What set you off writing this book?

To be very honest joblessness can be explained as the trigger. I have been working as a radio journalist for the BBC and had to chuck the job as I was put on the morning shift. Attending to Rohini - my daughter, I could not go off at 5 in the morning. Once my husband and Daughter would go to their work and school respectively, I saw a long day stretching before with nothing meaningful to do. The book grew out of this vacuum. Initially, I had only intended writing a short memoir but once I got started, I couldn't seem to stop.

The book seems to have a undercurrent of karma philosophy. Is Karma a part of your belief system?

More than any universal system, its more of a personal philosophy. In malayalam they use a term called - malay karma which means - some very ancient debt to which is attributed the present sufferings of a person. The title of the book refers to this. I believe that joy and sorrow, beginning and end seem to follow each other in a cycle.

DO you think being a Keralite who spent her formative years in Delhi, gave you a better perspective while writing?

I can really understand what Rushdie is trying to say when he suggests that you have to be both an insider and an outsider to write about anything completely. I do not have my roots anywhere, which is something I am pretty comfortable with - happy to float around! This position did give me the ability to step outside the frame and observe.

What do you feel about the new genre of Indian women writers like Arundhati, Sunetra Gupta, Shauna Singh Baldwin and Radhika Jha? How do you feel now that you've joined the club?

I met all these writers recently and it does not feel at all like a club to me, unfortunately. There's obviously an abundance of talent emerging - some say it is Indian women who are hogging the limelight at the moment. Although I believe that people just read books, without really bothering about whether the writer is male or female. It is another matter altogether that it is in the publisher's interest to 'sell' their writers in different ways and being a woman /young/photogenic/articulate etc etc are all selling features that publicists jump upon if they can. That's just the way publishing has gone in recent years and I am too much of a pragmatist to try and fight the system. I do feel, though, that at the end of the day it really should be about good writing and nothing else.

The book indirectly, brings out the flaws of the arranged marriage system. What do you think about this Indian tradition?

I was actually very keen that the book doesn't read as a tirade against arranged marriages! All I was setting out to do was explain how easily as a girl who is in love with someone else gets drawn into an arranged marriage. It's a story about family loyalty, generational love and generational conflict. In fact one of the reasons Janna (the chief protagonist) gets drawn into an arranged marriage is precisely because she is surrounded by arranged marriages that have worked well. I'm certainly not against the system, although I do have problem with forced marriages, which is a very different issue, particularly among Asian youngsters in the West. These days the West has its own version of arrange relationships - with all the singles clubs, dating agencies, dinner clubs etc that abound. In some ways, our marriage system that usually takes place within the circle of loving, concerned friends and relations is a more compassionate one.

You've kept the ending slightly ambiguous. I s it meant for the reader to guess?

Actually, I did not want a chocolate box ending to the novel. I myself, in fact we as a culture do not like to leave things unsaid. Happy endings are always needed. So, after the novel ends, I decided to add a page that comes as a sequence and also reveals the fact that it is a fictionalised form of my real life story.