Rating: 3 Stars
HOLLYWOOD: “I wondered what it would be like to be a grown-up woman who was running away from home, rather than trudging back,” says Half Life author Roopa Farooki. “I wondered where this woman would go, and exactly where she was running to. This led to the opening scene of Half Life, where Aruna walks out of her home and on her marriage in the middle of breakfast, and the rest of the story developed from there.”
Farooki’s narrative is reminiscent of Amy Tan’s writing. Written in first person, the narrative jumps from person to person. Bengali doctor Aruna Ahmed Jones marries a British physician hoping to forget a tragic romance with her childhood friend Ejaz Jazz Ahsan. Mentally unstable, Aruna leaves Jazz in Singapore’s Little India. When she first arrives in London to stay with a friend she starts taking drugs to cope with the trauma of the miscarriages she’s had.
“The idea for Half Life came to me when I was traveling home late one night after promoting Corner Shop at a literary festival,” says Farooki. “The train home had taken several hours, and it was long past midnight and pouring with rain as I finally arrived at the station. As I walked back to my house through an autumnal sludge of puddles, concrete, leaves and mud, I felt curiously disconnected and alone, as though I didn’t have a family sleeping soundly in a warm house after all.”
“The whole experience of writing Half Life was strange…like being hijacked in a storm,” says Farooki. “When I wrote the first chapter, I had no idea of where it would lead. But, once I had started, I just couldn’t stop. For the months that I was writing it, I was so obsessed with the idea, so afraid of losing momentum, that I did almost nothing else.”
Farooki says she did a lot of research on bipolar disorder, a condition that affects one of the characters in her book. She also researched the book’s locations.
“Although I used places I know quite well…London, Singapore, Malaysia, I felt I had to get the details just right,” says Farooki. “I went to Singapore and visited all the places mentioned in the novel so that everything I wrote about would ring true for a local. I also had some historical research to do, as one of the strands of the story takes place in Calcutta just after the Second World War, and covers the period of Indian Independence and Partition.”
Half Life reveals how the ghosts of your past can come back and haunt you, that you must face your demons. The story moves from London to Singapore.
Half Life by Roopa Farooki. Hardcover: 272 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; 1 edition (April 27, 2010), Language: English, ISBN: 9780312577902
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