Whispers from the past

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Many a secret lies buried in the past, and uncovering them makes an exciting story. Maria’s Room, a novel set in Goa, is a tale of love, memories and buried truths by Shreekumar Varma, the author of Lament of Mohini. The protagonist Raja Prasad is a writer who is still coping with the criticism he received for his last novel, Throttle. To start afresh, he heads to Goa to begin working on his next novel.
Maria’s Room opens with a grim, dark view of the usually scenic Goa through the eyes of Raja Prasad. “The Goa that Raja finds is the Goa I discovered when I went there the second time. The beginning of the novel is more or less a reflection of what happened with me. Goa was a dark, brooding, forbidding host. And I haven’t visited it since then,” says Varma.
So, Raja is in Goa with two characters in his mind — “B from Mumbai and M from the village in Kerala” — for his next book.
It is here that he encounters Maria, an enigmatic woman and a name that is whispered into his ear from a past as treacherous as the ghost he dares to confront. As he settles down to write his second novel, Raja stumbles on to the mystery surrounding Maria’s death. And in the process he uncovers secrets of his own.
“I conjured up my characters. I filled my mind with possibilities of their combination, but was startled to find them rudely upstaged by the couple in the car. As if I was being forced to change my story.”
The novel dwells at length on the many stages in the writing process. “Even Raja’s fascination for another plot came from my own experiences. I was working on another novel, which was pushed aside by this new emerging story,” he says, adding that he tried to write down what goes through the mind of a writer when such a thing happens.
“Writer Raja is almost a replica of Shreekumar,” says Varma, who also left many stories incomplete as something else came his way.
Varma elaborates, “Maria’s Room happened while I was trying to write The Third Monkey set in a Kerala village. Afterwards, I went back to it when I was in Scotland for a residency program, and it was again checkmated by a new novel set in Scotland named Indian Scotch. And that’s been pushed aside now by a Chennai-based novel — The Gayatri Club. All this may sound terribly inconsistent, but fortunately all three novels are alive, well and waiting,” says Varma.