At 50, she’s no stranger to life

“I love reading science fiction/fantasy… doesn’t mean I can write in that genre or even want to,” says Gouri Dange, whose second novel, The Counsel of Strangers, was released in Bangalore on Saturday, in response to the allegation levelled at many women authors about refusing to get out of their comfort zones.

“Alexander McCall Smith writes on family and people and so do plenty of other men,” says Dange. “It’s not a comfort zone; it’s hard work writing about how people get their sums wrong and try to fix the vexed arithmetic of their lives.”

People trying to untangle the ‘vexed arithmetic’ of their lives is what Dange’s The Counsel of Strangers is about. In the book, six strangers meet at a big fat Indian wedding where they are not required to be in the thick of things.

Each of them gravitates towards a location on the periphery of the posh resort where the wedding is taking place and stumbles into the others. What follows is an orgy of talking, through which each reluctant guest finds a solution or the simple solace of unburdening oneself. “It’s often easier to talk to strangers about really personal things,” says Dange. Being a practising family counsellor, she should know.

Dange, who lives and works in Pune, had originally planned to set her novel in an airport lounge. Two things changed that: She heard of Rana Dasgupta’s book Tokyo Cancelled (a very different kind of book but based on the same premise), and she went to a ‘quiet’ resort in Mahabaleshwar to write. The resort next door to her’s was hosting a wedding — one with sangeets, antaksharis and cocktail parties — and being a compulsive “people watcher,”

Dange realised that at a wedding, there are always a few people who are misfits, who have been dragged there against their will.
The most challenging part of writing the book was doing six different voices. Dange says she sometimes ended up writing the narrations of two or three characters at a time, switching between voices, a process her father called “working like a tailor.” “He thought it was really similar to how tailors work — make all the sleeves one day, collars the next…” she says laughingly.

Dange worked in journalism and publishing for many years as a freelance book editor before taking up two of the activities that occupy her primarily today: Writing and counselling.
Today, she is a popular family counsellor and has married both loves by becoming a well-known parenting columnist and writer, with her tips and advice on parenting appearing in various publications. She has also authored bestselling parenting book The ABCs of Parenting.

Dange was in her 40s when a chance conversation led to her joining up for counselling training, followed by a rigorous internship.

Around the same time, she started attending writing workshops and gave serious thought to becoming a writer. All this when she was in her 40s, and Dange says she often asked if it didn’t feel like she’d left these learning skills for too late. “Not at all,” she says emphatically. “I never felt I was too old. In fact, I felt I was perfectly placed to do both. And I saw young people around me handicapped by not having enough life experience to deal with others’ problems,” says Dange.

This get-up-and-do-it attitude came to her rescue when she was setting out to publish The Counsel of Strangers. Her first novel, 3, Zakia Mansion, had been published by Penguin, but the experience of working with a mammoth publisher that meted out step-motherly treatment to what it deemed a “small” book had left a bad taste in her mouth.

Dange set up her own publishing firm OMO Books, got herself an editor and proceeded to do everything for herself that a publisher usually takes care of — from organising book events in multiple cities to contacting the right kind of personalities to read from the book at these events. Not just that, she also launched a scathing attack on the way Indian publishing functions by writing a lucid, no-holds-barred indictment of the industry in a national newsmagazine. “I figured I would burn my bridges with the industry, but I realised I had nothing to lose,” says the intrepid author.

In the middle of a multi-city book tour, Dange, who just turned 50, is reinventing herself as a stand-up comedienne. A fan of observational comedy and its exponents such as Jerry Seinfeld and British-Pakistani stand-up Shazia Mirza, Dange looks at this as an extension of her satirical newspaper columns. “Keeping in mind that I am 50, I’m calling my act The Angina Monologues,” she says, tongue firmly in cheek.