Home wasn’t built in a day

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In a relationship, one is used to hearing about the seven-year itch. In the case of Heather Saville Gupta’s love affair with the city of Mumbai, it was more of a four-year itch. Four years into her stay in India, she felt she had had enough.

“I just felt like life was passing me by,” Heather says of that time early 2007. “I’d been single except for a couple of disastrous experiences, I was 37 and had found that it was so hard to date in this country as a white girl. So hard to get into anything serious. I loved Mumbai, but I knew something was missing.”
A month after she made up her mind to leave, she met the man who would become her husband. “Since then, I’ve never looked back,” says Heather, who juggles a career in advertising with motherhood (her older son is two-and-a-half years old, the younger seven months) and her writing ambitions — a blog, Becoming Desi, along with her just out book, Becoming Mrs Kumar.
Becoming Mrs Kumar tells the story of Julie, a restless 30-something from England, who comes to Mumbai with a well-timed job offer, and finds not just adventure, but also her Mr Kumar. It mirrors Heather’s own story considerably, although it is a far different book from the one that she actually sat down to write three years ago.
“I wanted to write a non-fiction, observational account of India from an expat’s point of view,” says Heather. “Then I sent what I’d written to a friend of mine, and he said, ‘why on earth aren’t you writing your own story?’”
So Heather did begin to write her own story, and 40,000 words in, realised it wasn’t going to be easy. “You don’t want to bare too much of your soul,” she explains. Her publishers then gave her what Heather calls the “most important piece of feedback” — a fictional narrative that stayed true to her own experiences, but gave her the freedom to bring in a whole lot more.
Becoming Mrs Kumar, its author says, is about 60 per cent real and about 40 per cent fiction. The tone of the book — even though it deals with Julie’s heartbreaks and frustrations and the inevitable clash between mindsets, as well as her triumphs — remains light throughout. Heather says it was important to her that the book not be bogged down by anything too serious or sentimental.
“The tone came very
instinctively,” she says. “The way I feel about India, it’s very optimistic. I love being here. Of course, sometimes it can be exhausting, but most of the time, I really feel happy here. I wanted the book to reflect that. I also wanted people to have an alternative to the rather more serious books about India because there is this
Western belief that India is deep and meaningful and spiritual, and it is in many ways, but it is also about millions of people getting on with their lives, struggling for survival.”
Among the real episodes in the book is one where Julie runs into Salman Khan at a bar and mistakes him for a waiter. Heather laughs when she recalls the incident, terming it “pretty embarrassing”. She admits she’s more of a Shah Rukh Khan fan. “Salman doesn’t do it for me. I think Shah Rukh is gorgeous. From the day I landed, I said I want to meet him, I want to meet him, I want to meet him! Never happened,” she rues.
In the years that she’s lived here, Heather’s taste in Bollywood films has become far more discerning than when she first landed (for the first three years, she watched every new release and bought every soundtrack). The expat community has changed a lot too. “When I first came here, there were fewer foreigners. Now you go to some places in Bandra and you’ll see so many foreigners, not an Indian among them!” Heather says.
As we look out from the balcony of Heather’s eighth floor Bandra office (the view is of a mishmash of concrete structures, the soundtrack one of impatient traffic), she agrees that Mumbai has been good to her.
“I’ve always been accepted by people. There are things that are difficult, like you get stared at all the time, but then you get used to it. Every year it gets harder and harder to get a visa. I don’t
have a problem now that I’m a PIO (person of Indian origin) because I married my husband. Foreigners have to pay 25 per cent more to get medical treatment. I’ve been fighting against this, especially when I had my second baby. I live and work here, I pay taxes, I’m married to an Indian and still they charge me 25 per cent more! So that can be frustrating. But the upsides are more than the downsides,” Heather says. “I’d say being a foreigner here has definitely made things easier overall.”