ARVASHNI Seeripat has led multibillion-dollar businesses over the years and presently sits as the head of innovative medicines at a pharmaceutical company in the US.
But, throughout her career, she has always wondered – what’s next?
One morning in 2022, she got her answer.
“In February that year, I woke up thinking, ‘I may die at 81’. I can’t explain why that age specifically, but I thought to myself, ‘my life has been good’. I have been in the pharmaceutical industry for many years and done incredible things.
“However, at the back of my mind, I knew I always wanted to tell stories and thought it was time I wrote a novel,” said Seeripat, who was raised in Woodhurst, Chatsworth, and has lived in New Jersey for the past eight years.
“As a product of indenture, I knew I wanted to share their journey, especially of the women, as their roles and hardships were often not told or held in the collective memory. So began my research, from reading academic books to speaking to people around me.”
The result was her debut novel, The Story I Told Myself.
The 280-page novel was launched last Friday at the Oyster Box in uMhlanga in Durban.
“I chose to launch my novel in Durban for various reasons but mainly because this is where I grew up and where all my family still reside. It is also where the story is set, and what better place than a Unesco literary city?”
Seeripat, 50, said while fellow Indian diasporans have told their stories beautifully, The Story I Told Myself was her attempt to tell the story of courageous people, who came as indentured labourers to South Africa.
She hoped others would write the stories of their ancestors.
“In a world where the sugar trade decided economic powerhouses, Indians were the cheap and often abused labour
that the British exported globally, from Mauritius to the Caribbean and to South Africa.
“Lured by a promise of free passage to the green fields of Port Natal, they left their homes and villages for what they believed were better economic opportunities,
but little did they realise that they were bonded into a life that no one could thrive in.”
She said the Indian diaspora have, however, been successful globally.
“From being world leaders to statesmen, religious and business leaders, and
just good human-beings. Sadly, we are so busy building lives and communities, promising ourselves that we will never allow ourselves to go back into the yoke of poverty, that sometimes we forget to pick our heads up and remember how we got here and how incredible our
people are.”
Seeripat said the self-published novel followed the lives of a mother and her two children as they journey from Ishapur in India to the then Port Natal in 1887.
“Shivali, a woman with a dark secret, is on the run. Remaining in her village isn’t an option. She has followed society’s rules – be a ‘silent wife, keep your eyes down, and serve your husband’, but that obedience has brought nothing but pain and anguish. When circumstances leave her no other choice, she must escape by taking a harrowing three-month trip across the Kaala Paani to South Africa with her two children, Hari and Uma.
“The journey aboard the ship is fraught with danger – drunken men, violence, and lack of food. In Port Natal, Shivali attempts to build a new life for her family on a sugar cane farm owned by the Thompson family. There, they perform the backbreaking work of indentured labourers. Over time, they forge strong connections, create a new family, and lay the foundations for a community. But will these relationships survive a second family secret that threatens to tear their community apart?”
Seeripat, who is married to Pravir and has two sons, Armahn, 23, and Aryan, 16, said that apart from telling the story of the lives of the indentured, she also hoped to share the message that “kindness matters” in her novel.
“I believe being kind to others is important and that is what you will see throughout the chapters. The reality is that communities, back then and now, were built because of kindness. That is what matters.”
Seeripat said while she hoped to write another novel, her focus was to reach as many people as possible through her first one.
“My hope is that many more people read the story of the Indian diaspora, especially those of us who are from South Africa and understand the impact that the trans-oceanic sugar trade had on the movement patterns of people.”
She added that there were plans in the pipeline to launch the novel in the US. She will return to the US on August 26.
