Finding the Story in the Experience

Over the years I've taken a lot of photographs, mostly in India. But I've also missed a lot of good ones too. My favorites are usually those of people engaged in traditional work, exhibiting skills and practices that are no longer commonly known. Perhaps I should have been an anthropologist, but I find writing about them in fiction enormously rewarding. A recent story I wrote grew out of this combined interest in photography and traditional work.

I always stay in the same hotel in Kovalam, India, and, if I'm lucky, the same room. From the terrace I can see the ocean, beaches, people passing by, and, best of all, the men climbing to harvest coconuts. I've been watching this process since 1976, when the climbers visited the lots across the street from where we lived in Trivandrum. But only from the terrace of a hotel have I managed to get photographs that show the work of the harvester.

The government of India is concerned that fewer and fewer men are taking up this profession, despite good pay for good climbers. The government has invited ideas to make climbing easier for newcomers interested in the job, but most of the ideas have been as foolish as the climbers are agile. Inventors have proposed special ladders, cherry-picking machines, and the like. Their emphasis is on safety, which is understandable. Still, the equipment is absurd compared to what humans can do, and would be almost impossible to use in many locations where the trees are growing.

Traditional climbers use only a band made from a strand of the palm leaf to anchor their feet. They climb three and four stories with nothing but their physical strength to keep them on the trunk of the palm tree. And they carry a machete at their waist. These knives are heavy to carry and to wield. At the top of the tree they hold themselves in place with one hand and cut down the coconuts with the knife in the other.

These men are a marvel, but their skill is not as rare as one might think. An autorickshaw driver invited me to meet his family. We drove to his home and there, as I chatted with his wife and daughter, he offered me a drink. When I thanked him and said yes, he turned and climbed the coconut tree leaning over his one-story house. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to do, apparently.

I've watched these men climb and harvest since 1976, but not until I began talking about them with the hotel manager did I learn about their lives. As a young (well, younger) man he knew several as friends, and he could explain aspects of the profession few others knew about. The more he talked, the more I could feel a story taking shape. I wasn't sure what it would be exactly but I knew there was one in there.

A couple of months later, after I returned to the States, I wrote "Perfect in Every Way," a story about Anita Ray and a climber who works for Hotel Delite. The story concerns an older climber who marries a younger woman. I sold the story to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which has published a number of Anita Ray stories.

 

Anita's current investigation, in For the Love of Parvati, explores another aspect of Kerala, the pilgrimage season and practices for visiting Sabarimala, a holy site open to men and women of all faiths (with some restrictions on age for women).

I writ some of my best stories sitting at a desk at Hotel Aparna, glancing out the window at the ocean, the climbers, crows, and the occasional tourist taking the stairs to the roof of a nearby hotel.

Keeping Up with Your Characters

The hardest part of writing crime fiction has turned out to be something I didn’t expect, and something I’ve only now, after nine novels, started to think about. Working out some of the clues in the third Anita Ray novel, For the Love of Parvati, taught me some important lessons about keeping up with my characters. 

In graduate school I read through all of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels without ever being troubled by the woman’s age, or her failure to age along with the world around her. The elderly woman of the 1930s accepting invitations to weekend parties in the country was the elderly woman of the 1950s exploring the new housing developments on the edge of the village. In contrast I also read Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series, and enjoyed the subplot of the inspector’s personal life, including the challenges of dealing with his growing children.

When I started writing the Mellingham series with Chief of Police Joe Silva, I hadn’t considered how his life would change. He was a man in his fifties when he walked onto the page, and I thought I would find enough murderous business while he was in that decade to not worry about anything else. I was wrong. He fell in love at the end of the third book in the series, Family Album, and his beloved came with a ready-made family.

Things have evolved differently for Anita Ray. I hadn’t given much thought to her getting married and starting a family, but I assumed that would happen, and was waiting for the right setting to develop. But again, I was wrong. Instead of the traditional passage, Anita becomes more deeply involved in photography. She appeared as a photographer in the first line of the first story, and in every adventure she’s using her camera to solve crimes.

Anita uses a Pentax because I use one. I have my eye on another camera but that will have to wait. Meanwhile I find myself trying to keep up with Anita. She’s curious, so she has opened her camera to see if there’s anything wrong inside. Professional guidebooks always warn against this, but Anita doesn’t take advice. And apart from the advice for beginners, professional photographers like to know their equipment intimately. This was a challenge for me, but I rose to it and opened my camera and took a look inside.

Anita looks at everyone and everything as though she were looking through a lens. This gives her distance and a sense of the narrative of what she’s looking at. To her everything is an image, and everyone is telling a story.

For a while Anita has had a gentleman friend, someone her aunt doesn’t approve of. This has provided me with numerous opportunities to play with Auntie Meena’s prejudices and frustrated dreams as a mother and marriage broker. But the man in question is leaving Anita in Book 4, and will not return as her beloved.

Anita runs a photography gallery, which brings her a modest income and gets her out of her aunt’s Hotel Delite, with its attendant duties and mini crises. I have mounted two photography exhibits for a local library gallery, so I know how much work it takes. I’ve also submitted to juried shows (and been accepted for a few).

I’m keeping up with Anita, but just barely. For each story I have to learn about and do more with my camera. Usually when writers talk about characters getting away from them, they mean the characters say unexpected things. With Anita, she veers off in directions as a photographer that make me scramble to keep up. She forces me to learn, and perhaps in the end I’ll be as good a photographer as I think she is.

For more about Susan and the Anita Ray series, including links to her books, go to http://www.susanoleksiw.com