Pia's close encounters with death

Hyderabad: In the summer of 2001, Pia Padukone was working in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. She left four days before 9/11. Then in 2004, when tsunami hit the eastern coast of India, she was on the beach with her family just a few hundred miles north of the tragedy.

And then in 2013, when Boston Marathon Bombing shook the world, she was celebrating with pints of beer in a bar with her husband, who had just crossed the finishing line with Pia cheering him on. A single close shave with death can make one question fate; three of them can surely make one write a book about fate. In Pia’s debut novel Where Earth Meets Water, protagonist Karom comes to India in search for answers after repeatedly having close encounters with tragedy, and barely missing them.

“While I approached these situations as arbitrary life coincidences, the conglomeration of each of these near-brushes with disaster made me consider how someone, who is plagued by the idea of fate, might approach life after having lost friends and family in multiple disasters. It made me think about how one person’s grief could affect the people near and dear to him, and how their lives could then be irrevocably changed,” says Pia.

Having faced the aftermath of 9/11 and the tsunami first-hand, she didn’t have to do a lot of research to bring the details of those tragedies, and the emotional upheavals that ensued, alive in the book. “I didn’t really do any research other than tap into my personal feelings and memories. I relied on my first-hand senses to write the characters’ stories,” says the author.

Whenever disaster strikes, there are those who are hit, and those who barely escape. But even those who escape the tragedy, find their lives changed forever. The book also deals with survivor’s guilt. Pia explains, “Right after 9/11, survivors who had missed trains, or overslept, or had meetings canceled, were grateful for their lives. But then the next wave of understanding and acceptance hit, and many people experienced a sense of guilt that so many people had perished while others had been saved, a complex and intriguing response to disaster.”

Pia is already working on her second novel but she reveals that it might actually be her third if you count the one that she wrote when she was 12 years old. “My family tells me that I have been concocting stories since I was a little girl. When I turned twelve, my grandfather gifted me his old typewriter and I wrote my first ‘novel’ on it,” she says.

Now, Pia writes a reading and cooking/eating blog with her husband Rohit called Two Admirable Pleasures where they publish what they call “part book review, and part recipe”. “As a voracious reader and eater, I found myself craving certain foods when I read a book, or feeling emotions that could be managed with the right meal. And Rohit will create it. Or if a book takes place in a certain part of the world, he will create a meal that echoes that culture’s cuisine. It’s a lot of fun to work on this project together,” she says