My friend, Roanna, recently published a short story on Eureka Street Online, called “Curry muncher.”
Ro and I met about ten years ago, at a Varuna Writers’ Centre retreat for emerging writers. In that week, I realised I did not want to be writing the book I was writing back then, and Roanna worked out, conversely, that she did. Which is good, because she is an excellent writer, as you’ll see when you read her story.
Funnily enough, I can see some of the themes from the story I was writing back then, emerge in more subtle ways in my current written work, even though it is quite radically different in story terms. It reminds me that I am still deeply interested in the same big questions as I have been since I was 12, when I used to lie by the living room window, trying to work out if dust motes were really atoms – was I was seeing light? And after church on a Sunday, wondering – what does eternity really feel like? And later, when I used to spend lots of time staring at the branches of trees, fingering the bark – what was matter, anyway? What did it mean to “exist?” What happened to your consciousness when you die? (Then an ant would invariably bite me and I would rather unromantically flap away, trying to ignore nature’s less palatable realities).
But this post was not supposed to be about me (sorry – what can I say, I’m a blogger, after all) – back to Roanna! Her story is a really interesting insight into the Indian student affair in Australia which has recently been in the headlines – Indian students being subjected to dodgy education providers and racist attacks.
Thanks Ro, for sharing your brain with us.