An idealist in a practical, harsh world
It was while attending a seminar that Sudha Murty got the idea of writing House of Cards, a novel circling the life of an idealistic woman from a Karnataka village. She had then heard a case study from a psychiatric hospital presented in the seminar.
She heard about women not being successful in their careers, because their priorities were different. Women who went through depression would not talk about it because they mistake it to be madness, and then it becomes a taboo. “But depression is is nothing to be ashamed of. You should treat it like any other disease and come out of it,” says Sudha. She was tracing the beginning of the story of Mridula – a character she created out of her observations.“The beauty of creativity is you make people believe in the story but it should not all be real. There are people who went in search of Alahadalli, a place I made up for the book, from where Mridula hails,” she says. Sudha had written the book 10 years ago in Kannada. That was easier because her different characters could use different local dialects of Kannada. “In English, I couldn’t do that,” she says. Her characters are also very different from each other. “Mridula’s sister-in-law Lakshmi will never go into a depression. It is a condition that comes to people who are sensitive, think a lot and not understand reality.” She had spent six months at a nursing home and in government hospitals talking to practitioners, understanding how patients behave, before writing the book.
The character Mridula sticks to principles and refuses to change. Neither does she understand why her husband – who started off as an idealistic doctor and later becomes corrupted – has to change. “When you are in a hospital, you have a certain way to deal with your work. You should never sacrifice the core values that you hold dear but you should also be practically optimistic,” says Sudha But then none of what she writes reflects her own views, she says. “This is the ninth novel that I wrote, But I am not like Mridula, I am an extrovert, outspoken and my concept of suffering is entirely different,” she adds.
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