It’s not unusual that Shree Ghatage decided to set her second novel Brahma’s Dream in India. After all, many diaspora writers set their works in their native lands. It is unusual that she set the novel in the era of the Indian independence.

It’s been 57 years since the Union Jack was replaced by the Indian tricolour flag. A thin layer of dust has already coated the memories of August 15, 1947 for some South Asian Canadians. Jawaharlal Nehru’s crackling voice, delivering that famous “tryst with destiny” speech, is probably on its last spool for others.

But Ghatage so deftly weaves history into her story about young Mohini, and shows us a version of Bombay with such lyrical prose, that you can almost see what the city would have looked like before it became Mumbai, and synonymous with Bollywood glam.

Brahma’s Dream is about Mohini, a 13-year-old girl who suffers from Cooley’s anaemia. Through Mohini’s astute eyes, we get to sense some of the ambivalence surrounding the events of 1940’s India, which have come to shape the country today.

Although her book started as an inquiry into the iconic stature of some Indian independence leaders, Ghatage is quick to deny that her book has any revisionist agenda. Brahma’s Dream is primarily about Mohini, and the discovery of the inner self.

“I’m not making a political statement at all,” says Ghatage, 47, in a telephone interview from Calgary, where she has been based with her husband and two teenage children for six years.

“Mohini’s illness is largely metaphorical with the kind of illness that has kind of affected all us, in all our time. I mean we are certainly living it on a global level right now, with all the wars happening around, and all the needless suffering that’s happening. India was facing it, this needless suffering. And we really need to find a way out of it. So (Brahma’s Dream) is not a politicized inquiry I am making either, it’s more intrinsic to what human life is about.”

The black and white picture peering out of the jacket cover shows a kind-faced woman, with just a hint of a smile playing at her lips. Her face is unadorned, save for a small bindi, and her sari pallu is wrapped across her shoulder.

“That photo was taken at my niece’s wedding, that’s why it’s such a formal picture,” laughs Ghatage. “But I wear saris quite often. In fact, when I go back to India, I take an empty suitcase and wear saris all the time. I wear jeans and sweats as well. I am both, like all of us are over here.”

It’s been seven years since her first book Awake When All The World Is Asleep came out. But the seeds for Brahma’s Dream were sown much earlier.

Ghatage had left India as a young bride in 1981. The Ghatages’ first stop was North Wales, United Kingdom. Ghatage isn’t sure about the date, but she thinks it was in 1982 she saw Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Over the years, Ghatage was questioning Gandhi’s persona.
“I knew Gandhi was a towering figure in the independence movement and in many ways instrumental to the way the Congress conducted itself. But I didn’t really know he was a saint. That thought kept nagging me,” she says.

Around the same time, the renaming of one of Mumbai’s arterial Cadell Road as Veer Savarkar Marg puzzled Ghatage. Although Savarkar is considered another stalwart of the Indian independence, Savarkar had been implicated in the plot to assassinate Gandhi.

“He was charged, he was imprisoned, and he was acquitted,” says Ghatage. “And I thought there was paradox there. Somebody who ought to have been really stained by his association with the assassination of this extremely saintly figure was nevertheless being honoured now by the city of Bombay, for his contribution to the independence movement.

“And I hadn’t really heard about him, even a fraction as much as I had heard about Gandhiji. So I was very interested in kind of shedding light, or illuminating this paradox. I thought one of the vehicles would be if I set Brahma’s Dream in the time of the independence. It would allow me that opportunity to go back in time and research, which I hadn’t really read growing up, not the history of India.”

The research took Ghatage through several tomes on Indian history, even the testimony of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin. For almost a year Ghatage made notes, for her own understanding.

The research led her to believe that there was a whole other viewpoint, which existed between the freedom fighters.

“This approach to freedom wasn’t instinctive, and it wasn’t about the country’s birthright,” says Ghatage. “But it sought to use independence as a tool to make progresses of a different kind that didn’t exist in India. And this segment, which had nothing to do with Gandhi’s assassination, didn’t agree at all with the way Gandhi was thinking.”

Despite its subtle explorations on Indian history, as well as long dips into Hindu tenets and beliefs, Brahma’s Dream never really bogs us down. And that’s because the book really belong to the feisty-spirited Mohini. Like some other characters in the book, a family member was Mohini’s muse.

“Actually the central character Mohini is inspired by my sister (Shamala) who was a Cooley’s anaemia patient,” says Ghatage. “I was 16, and she was 23 when she passed away. I was away for seven years (at boarding school), from the age of 9 to 16, and when I returned, literally within a month or two she was no more. So I can’t say that I’d had a chance to watch her first hand.

“But as I grew up, she stayed with me, as often the dear departed do. And she literally stayed with me on a daily basis. And of course my interest in finding out more about her grew, as I grew older. I was struck by her zest for life, and her courage, which I had been privy to.”

An accidental writer, Ghatage tells a beautifully crafted story. Having studied economics, law and French, it was only a fortuitous recommendation by a friend to join a writer’s workshop that led Ghatage to discover her passion for writing. A fulltime mother, she wrote her first book “in the bathroom and near the kitchen stove.” And she still only writes on weekdays between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., when the children are at school.

Brahma’s Dream is definitely worth the seven-year wait. Her descriptions of the landscape and the characters are effortlessly evocative. There’s none of the artificialness of some diaspora writers today, whose descriptions and metaphors are evidently constructed. Although some explorations into the Hindu belief system are fairly academic, the book’s definitely a page turner.

A delight to read, Brahma’s Dream leaves you wanting more from Ghatage.