Alka Joshi, THE SECRET KEEPER OF JAIPUR: A Novel

[1:39]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, My website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.

[2:49]Zibby Owens: Alka. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's No Time to Read Books to discuss The Secret Keeper of J. Perk.

[2:56]Alka Joshi: Really good. Thank you, Zibby.

[2:59]Zibby Owens: We were practicing my pronunciations, but FYI, I didn't want to mess anything up. Well, congratulations on your second book in this trilogy, starting with The Henna Artist and now The Secret Keeper of Japer, and now Another One to Come, which I wanna hear more about. But tell everybody what this book is about and how I mean, I know it said your fans are the one who were kind of demanding more stories. So talk a little bit about that and how this book came to be. I think that I had so many readers who fell in love with Malik,

[3:32]Alka Joshi: the eight year old boy in The Henna Artist. I had loved him, but I didn't really think everybody else was going to respond so much to him. But, you know, they all said, we want to know more about him. How did he come to be in the Pink City? Who took care of him? What's going to happen to him now that he's going off to Shimla with Lakshmi? And so I thought, well, you know, I can actually answer a lot of those questions because they were written in pages for the henna artist that never made it into the book. There were so many pages that never made it into the book because as you know, writing a book means that you are editing, cutting, adding, subtracting, you know, all the time. So I thought, okay, I can answer a lot of those questions. And then Malik himself kept bugging me in my brain and said, you know, I would like you to do the next story just about me. It's got to be mainly about me. So here is how I write. A scene comes to me first, just like it did for the Henna artist. There was one major scene that came to me. So here's the scene that came to me. It is Nimmy, this tribal woman, she's 20 years old. She is at her stall along the pedestrian mall in Shimla. Now Shimla is a place where a lot of people go for honeymooning, for vacationing, because it's much cooler at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains than it is down in the Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh or in the middle of India, which is really hot. So a lot of people go up there and the pedestrian mall is one of those where all the tourists congregate. They walk from one of the tourist sites to another to another, you know, there's the library that Rudyard Kipling used to hang out in. There's Christ Church, which is a beautiful architectural monument. There is the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. You know, there's all kinds of wonderful things there. So people are milling about this mall and there are vendors who set up shop along there. Nimmi is one of those vendors. What does she have splayed out in front of me? I am looking at this visual image that I have and a moving image. Like I see people moving around in it. And what I see is that she has her wares from the flora that she has collected along the foothills of the Himalayas. So she has rare flowers that you don't normally see at this level, but only much higher in the mountains. She has herbs, she has all kinds of interesting things spread out. And there are two people making a beeline for her. One is Lakshmi and the other is Malik. And I see that Malik is much older now. He's about 20, which means Lakshmi has to be 40. And they are coming towards her stall. And as they approach her stall, I realize that she and Malik have a connection. I don't know quite what it is, but they have a connection. I also see that Lakshmi does not approve of this connection, and that she needs to make sure that this is not going to happen between the two of them. And at Nimmy's side in a small basket next to her are two small children. Are tethered to the basket and they're playing with each other, tiny little kids. And so then I have to answer the questions as a writer. What is a tribal woman doing at the pedestrian mall when really she should be up in the mountains with her tribe going up and down, you know, to the changing of the season? She should be migrating with the sheeps and the cows and the goats and whatever. Now I have to answer this other question. Why is Lakshmi not approving of this liaison? Why would she not approve of Malik being interested in her? And then I have to answer this other question. What time of the year is it? Why is Lakshmi, you know, much better turned out than she used to be before? And I realized that her name is Lakshmi Kumar, which means she married the good doctor. So that is the scene that comes to me and I am seeing all of these people moving around in it. And so now I start asking the questions that I need to ask as a writer and flush the whole story out. Wow. So Lakshmi does end up sending Malik away so that she, this liaison is thwarted And she sends him to Jaipur where she has all of those contacts with the Maharani's and Manu, who is the director of facilities. Manu and his wife are the ones who adopted baby Nikki. So now Malik is at an apprenticeship at the Jaapur Palace. He is taking care of some of these projects and learning about the projects that the Maharani's are involved in these construction projects. Of course, he meets up with the Singh's again, who are the largest construction company now in Rajasthan. And then meanwhile, in the Shimla area, Lakshmi is having to placate Nimni because Nimni is upset that Lakshmi has sent away her beloved. And so she hires Nimni for her healing garden also to be able to expand it into these other flora that she has no knowledge of, but Nimbe does. So there are tensions on both sides because they are apart, but the thing that's going to bind them together are the secrets that Malek is finding out in Jabber. And as he finds out these secrets, he has to figure out how to protect those he loves, including Nimmi, who is compromised up in Shimla as well. So that is the crux of the story. It is more of a mystery at this time. It has an element of mystery in it that the Henna artist did not have, but it has all of those character arcs and people coming out at the back end with a little more knowledge about themselves and about the people in their relationships.

[9:09]Zibby Owens: Wow, good synopsis. Good. That was awesome. Wow. So when I was reading all about the collapse and the cinema and the different characters and getting to know them because as you wrote in the book, everything was sort of, like, before and after. Right? Each chapter was, like, three months before or two months before or during or after or whatever. Everything is sort of in relation to that. And I found myself wondering if it actually happened, but it sounds like it didn't now. And then I didn't have time to Google it, but it sounded like from the notes in the end that this actually is an event that happened. Is that right? No. No, you made it up? Oh my gosh, I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry. No, it's a good

[9:47]Alka Joshi: delighted that you think it actually happened because then I've done my job as a writer to make you think it has.

[9:52]Zibby Owens: But I don't know why I thought. Well, now the cinema house is modeled after a No. So this is why. Because what you said, my father, his encyclopedic knowledge of India and almost everything else comes in handy when I'm writing about India and her people contributed to the engineering details of the Royal Jewel Cinema. So I thought that maybe so no.

[10:12]Alka Joshi: But what my dad did tell me, though, is that when incidents like this happened, because they were all privately funded sort of buildings, when something like this happened, if there was a collapse or anything like that, the people involved in the investment would all take care of it. There wasn't any such thing as, you know, trial lawyers and lawsuits and things like that that happened. So the Maharani's Maharajah's, they would take care of anything like this that happened if it were was a private enterprise with a bunch of different businesses who had put together some large, let's say stadium or something, they would take care of, you know, anybody who was injured or dying. Okay. All right. Well, I got that wrong. Okay. No big deal.

[10:54]Zibby Owens: And when you said you had one scene, I was wondering if it was going to be the scene of loss where and now I'm blanking on the name of the character. I promise you, I just was reviewing this before and I got no sleep. No, and her husband and the sheep go falling off into the ravine and she has to deal with the loss and the trauma and then having a baby right after and not even spending that whole week not even knowing where she was and having to caretake an infant while mourning the loss of a spouse. I mean, that is like, I don't know. I thought maybe that was what came to you and said, This is like a book.

[11:30]Alka Joshi: No, but that did come to me in a scene where she is, Nimmi is in the throes of labor pains and realizing that her husband has just, you know, died on one of these mountain treks that the nomads take. And by the way, this still happens. There are nomadic tribes who migrate seasonally, winter to summer, up and down the mountains. There are many different tribes that do this kind of thing. And consequently, you know, they live a very dangerous life because these mountainous tracks are oftentimes filled with boulders or ice or something like that, which can cause a collapse. And so I saw this scene where yes, she was panicked. She was really distressed and she ends up inducing her labor early as a result of this anxiety that she's feeling about her husband. And then I see that Doctor. Kumar and Lakshmi are tending to her. So I did see that scene happening. And then I incorporated that into Nimmi's account. So you see, what I wanted to create Zippy is this idea of gratitude that she owes Lakshmi something for having saved her baby. You know, they helped deliver this baby at a time when they were up in the mountains and there was nobody nearby who could have helped them. At the same time, is very frustrated with Lakshmi for having sent Malik away. So it's this contradiction, which I'm always interested in. How much do we owe people who helped us even even when we're upset with them, even when we're angry, even when we are pissed off at them, you know, like how do we reconcile

[13:15]Zibby Owens: the balance of what we owe them versus what we want them to owe us? Do you have something in your actual life that reflects this in some way? Or this is all theoretical? It sounded pretty specific.

[13:27]Alka Joshi: Well, know, I think that probably a lot of it is growing up with parents, right? Yeah, your parents take care of you. Your parents do everything for you. And so you owe them, you do have this huge gratitude toward them. But then on the other hand, if they want to be in your life, if they want to tell you what to do, you think, okay, how do I balance the fact that I need to be grateful to them versus I want them out of my life because now this is my life, this is what I get to live. So, I think that there's always that thing that's tugging at us. And then I think that there's also a little bit in our relationships with our spouses. So they do nice things for us. And so we're grateful for what they do do for us. But then there's all these other times when we get upset with them and we think, okay, no, I have to remember that they do these nice things too. It's not just the fact that they left the crumbs on the countertop. It's not just the fact that they left the wet underwear just lying on the floor, that kind of thing.

[14:30]Zibby Owens: I think I need that reminder too. So can we discuss how neat it is that you started writing at age 51? I mean, that is you had a whole career and then I read that you took a writing class and

[14:44]Alka Joshi: now look at what happened. Tell me that story. That's amazing. My husband had been telling me for years, for about sixteen years, he'd been saying, You know, you make up stories about people all the time when we go out to eat. You know, the people sitting next to us or on a plane or wherever we happen to be. You're always making up these fantastic stories. Why don't you learn how to do this so that you can actually write about them? And you know, he said, I think you can do this. I said, No, no, no, I'm just an advertising hack. I'm a marketing hack. I write brochures, I write commercials. I don't really write long form fiction. And he said, I know you can do this. So finally, when I had a break in my work, I took the plunge and decided to enroll in an MFA program. I was probably the second oldest person there. There was one guy who was like 70, and I was probably the next in line. And so in a lot of my MFA classes, I had 20 and 30 year olds in those classes. And they had come many of them straight from their BA. And I think they were looking at me like, what's grandma doing in this room? What does she have to offer? But here's the thing, as we get older, we have so much more to say, we have so many more experiences that we have accumulated. We have grief, we have loss, we have love, we have frustration, we have betrayals, we have the learnings from the bad things we have done and the good things we have done. And these are all things that we can incorporate into our writing in a way that I could never have done in my twenties or thirties, or even forties. I just think I know more now and I have more empathy for everybody else who has made the same mistakes that I have had. So I love to talk about characters who have both strengths and weaknesses. And I'm interested in how they deal with the tougher parts of their lives. So I feel that when I was a reader, I read books so that I could learn from those characters and what they decided to do with those obstacles in their lives. And now I am one of those writers who gets to write those characters. And I love that because now I hear from readers who say, Hey, that really helped me to figure out what I'm going to do now for the next phase of my life based on what Lakshmi did or what Malik did or, you know, whatever. So it's very rewarding. Writing is so rewarding.

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[19:26]Zibby Owens: Wow. I totally agree too. I mean, the problem is that I think a lot of people know that deep down they are writers. Right? Like, that's that that's a skill they have or that's a passion they have. And there's no great, here, be a writer right out of college path. Like you have to wait a little bit. It's just as you were saying, like to get some of the It's like after college, it's like the black and white sketch, but to get all the colors and the watercolors in it, have to just have the life experience. But

[19:58]Alka Joshi: anyway. Yeah. No, no, no. You're absolutely right because your podcast, you know, moms don't have time to read. That came from your experience. I mean, you came from that experience where you probably love to read and all of a sudden you're a mom and now you have no time. And how can you help other moms, you know, carve out some time for themselves. And I think it's so important when we have small people, small whatever is in our lives that we have to look after. We need to carve out time for ourselves or we will go nuts.

[20:28]Zibby Owens: I agree. Yes. I have carved an entire job out of my self care. Now I just have to find time to go to the gym. Just kidding. Well, do you feel like when you sat down to write, and by the way, I do the same thing when And I was just talking about this at our book club the other day, how when like I go on vacation and there's like the other family over there by the chairs, like I'm always trying to figure everything out. Like, who are they Like, are they fighting? And is that their babysitter or their sister? And I'm always not stalking, but I'm just super curious about it all. And I mentioned that to the book club and then a fiction writer who was there said, Well, I don't just wonder, I make up full on stories. So I think maybe that's the difference.

[21:11]Alka Joshi: When you're a real novelist, you make the stories up. Yeah, that is exactly what I used to do. I used to make up full on stories and backstories about them and all of this. But I do think that a lot of my training as an advertising copywriter helped me with that. Because essentially when you write a commercial, when you write a radio spot, you are creating a scene with characters and dialogue and you are envisioning all of their backstories at the same time. You have to communicate within a half a minute or a minute exactly what's going on in that scene. All the viewers understand what's going on and all the listeners understand what's going on. Yeah. So true. I worked in advertising for a little bit on putting the creative briefs together on the strategy side and the strategic planning,

[21:58]Zibby Owens: brand planning. Yeah. And then having to take and see what everybody comes up with when you give them these 16 points, right? And then next thing you know, it's like, here's Dove with like their ad campaign. Anyway, very cool. So tell me about your next book and the third installment. Okay.

[22:13]Alka Joshi: So the third installment, and this of course also is something I had written in The Henna Artist and, you know, I got a chance to expand on it in The Secret Keeper, but now I really get to expand on it in book number three. And this is a story about Radha. She is 30 years old. She lives in Paris with a young man whom she met in the Himalayas as she was going to school there at her fancy boarding school. And she, they fell in love and in typical Rada style, because she is so impetuous. She eloped with him and they live in Paris. They have two little girls now. They actually made a pretty good marriage. So kudos to Rada for having grown up and matured. The other thing that she did, because she was so good at mixing henna paste and also the peats for the old man in the village, she got herself a chemistry degree at the Sorbonne. And now she went to work in the fragrance industry. How do you work in the fragrance industry when you don't have any pedigree? The fragrance industry in Paris, and this is the year 1973 would have been something that would have been passed down from father to son. And all of the knowledge would have been passed down in a very patriarchal way. There were very few women who were master perfumers, but rather got lucky enough to work for one of them. So she is a lab assistant to a master perfumer, and she is on the cusp of helping this master perfumer design a signature scent. And there's a creative brief, just like you were talking about the creative briefs you were doing in advertising. They do the same thing in fragrances. So when they have a client who has a perfume that they want to create a fragrance, they want to create for something, there's a creative brief. And that is what the lab assistants and the master perfumer are working towards. So Radha is on the cusp of helping design this scent. And what she does is she goes down with Lakshmi down to India. Once again, a lot of the base notes of perfumes are made in places like India because they have the heavy oils like sandalwood, like tuberose oil. Those are all things that are manufactured down there. So she is down there with Lakshmi. Meanwhile, there's a knock on her door in the 7th Arrondissement and she answers the door. No, actually she's not there to answer. Her husband answers the door. And on the other side of that door is somebody she has not seen in eighteen years since she left India. Now that is a huge sort of shock to the senses. And this young man on the other side is going to want to know who are all these other people who is rather, who are the other people who were supposed to be in his life that he never knew about. So that is what's going on in book number three, without revealing too much. I just want to reveal that much. I think you can probably figure out the rest if you have read book number one.

[25:02]Zibby Owens: Doctor. Wow, that sounds great. I also worked, by the way, I helped launch a fragrance for Unilever, the Vera Wang fragrance. And we had to go down and like meet the nose and all this different we had like a scent tasting, if you will. What do you call it? Anyway, we Yeah. And we had to learn how to identify all the different scents and everything, and I learned so much about that industry, which is fascinating. Were you in France at the time? No, I was here in New York, but they have there was what was it called? There was some center here downtown,

[25:32]Alka Joshi: like the Center for Fragrance and CFF, I don't know, something like Yes, it's IFF. Right? Yes, IFF. And, you know, I was just there a week ago in New York City and I visited the IFF labs and just wanted to know, like, what does what does a lab look like? And we see all those little vials everywhere. Yes, it was so cool. Yeah, it was totally cool. And so I'm learning a lot and the research that's involved in book number three is about the fragrance industry, how fragrances are made. And then of course, there's a lot about adoptions. There's a lot about, you know, adoptees. There's a lot about I'm doing all this research on, you know, what does it feel like to find out that you are adopted at some point in your life.

[26:12]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Yeah, right. Because that was a theme in this. It's like keeping the secret from a 12 year old, which it is not easy to It's not easy to do. What

[26:21]Alka Joshi: advice would you have for aspiring authors? You know, I have three magic potions that I think I have come up with over time. One of them is passion, you have to have the passion for what you're writing about. The moment you get tired of your characters or your story, your reader will also. So you have to have some kind of passion for why you're creating this story. I created the original Henna artist because I wanted to reimagine a life for my mother as a far more independent woman than the life that she actually got to live. So this was all fiction and just reimagining this life where she leaves her marriage and she decides not to have children and she decides to fashion her own life for herself as this amazing henna artist and herbalist. And then in The Secret Keeper, you know, my passion is I love Malik. I want everybody to know what happened to him And also that he grew into this man that you didn't expect of him at the age of eight. But now, you you think, oh my gosh, I'm so happy that he grew into this guy. And he's still loyal. He is still, you know, a true blue kind of person. So, you know, very happy for him. And then I have this passion about gold and jewelry that comes into play in The Secret Keeper. And then in book number three, I have a passion for fragrances and scents, and that's going to come into play there. Number two, I think of the magic of the three P's has to be persistence. You have to stay with it. You know, the first book took me ten years and 30 drafts. The second book then, because I learned how to write a novel and I learned how to sustain character tension and plot tension throughout. It only took me two years total. So persistence pays, you have to stick with it. And you have to keep going even when you think, no, it's not going to work. It's not, you know, I'm not meant to be a writer. This novel sucks, whatever it is that you're thinking, you need to stay with it. The third magic of the three P's has to be patience. I am not patient with myself. I get frequently frustrated when things are not easy enough. Like I think, why isn't this coming so easily? And my husband is the one who has really taught me to be a lot more patient because he said, you know, writing is like anything else that you want to get good at, whether it's painting or, you know, Olympic skiing, you have to tell yourself, okay, that didn't work. I'm going to try it again. That didn't work. I'll try it again another way. And that is the only way that you get good at writing. So passion, persistence, and patience,

[28:58]Zibby Owens: I think are the three keys for good writing. Maybe like perfect husband, which it sounds like maybe you have.

[29:08]Alka Joshi: I think that we all- Throwing that out there. We all are throwing it out. The partners in our lives who are really going to support us throughout our journeys, just the same way that we support them. I think it's just as important for husbands to support wives throughout their journeys too. Yeah.

[29:22]Zibby Owens: Yes. Well, you, Alka. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Time to Read Books. Thank you for putting all of your wonderful stories in the world. And I can't wait for your new book to come out whenever that one comes out too. So

[29:38]Alka Joshi: congratulations. Hopefully Zibby is going to come out about the same time that we'll be filming the TV series for the Henna Artist.

[29:45]Zibby Owens: So- Oh my gosh. So

[29:47]Alka Joshi: it's all gonna like, you know, I just feel like it's all, everything is lining up to that moment and it's all going to be all henna all the time.

[29:57]Zibby Owens: Amazing. I can't wait for that too.

[30:00]Alka Joshi: You, Zippy. Take

[30:01]Zibby Owens: care. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.