The fact that Anjana Appachana was a writer and a published one at that, came as a revelation recently to many Indians in Tempe, Ariz., where Appachana lives with her husband and daughter.

"Only when the local papers published some interviews after my novel, Listening Now, came out, did they come to know," says Appachana with a little laugh. " To be honest, I never told them, because I felt it was sort of pompous to introduce myself as a writer."

Her diffidence arose partly from the fact that because she was home full time while working on her novel, she had a sense that people might dismiss her as a housewife living in luxury and happily typing out stories. "They don’t know how hard it is," she says. "Because you know, writing isn’t given any kind of legitimacy. It is not seen as a job for which you leave the house every morning. In that sense, you cannot prioritize it."

Earning a living as a writer was not on Appachana’s priority list for a long time. Growing up in India as an only child, Appachana confined her love of literature to reading voraciously. After graduating from the Scindia Kanya Vidalaya in Gwalior, she went on to Lady Shriram College to pursue her bachelor’s in English, and later pursue her master’s in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Interestingly, Appachana was not drawn to join the crowd of ardent, rebellious intellectuals that formed part of JNU’s politically active campus.

"I was there between 1976-1978, a period of intense political debate and activity," remembers Appachana. "but I found it all very much a fraud and not rooted in anything. The whole atmosphere seemed to function in a vacuum as far as I was concerned."

After finishing her master’s, Appachana worked in Delhi at DCM Data Products for about four years as a personnel officer where she was responsible for the welfare of blue collar workers.

Though by this time she had begun writing fiction and even got few of her short stories published in well known magazines like the Illustrated Weekly, and Imprint, Appachana still did not consider taking her writing very seriously. That happened after when she came to the United States in 1985 with her husband, who had got an assistantship at the business school at Pennsylvania State University. A few months later she decided to enter the MFA program at Penn State mainly because she did not know what else to do.

"I know this sounds like a very uninspiring reason to join the MFA," Appachana says, "but that program was the catalyst to my writing. Once I began to study there, once I began writing, I couldn’t stop." At the end of the MFA program (which ran from 1985-1988) Anjana had a body of work which was to become her first book, Incantations and other stories.

The collection, which was originally published by Virago, England, in 1991, and later picked up by Rutgers University Press, and also brought out in India and Germany, was a stunning accomplishment for a new author. The passionately written stories told the varied tales of middle class Indian women caught in a torturous marriage, tussling with the issues of identity and self-worth, and trying to fulfill their desires and dreams within the complex social structures that enveloped them.

Though the book is now regularly taught in numerous women studies and creative writing programs in U.S. universities, in 1990 Appachana could not find a single publisher willing to publish her book. As a fledgling writer she had two strikes against her: she did not have an agent to promote her work (many publishing houses don’t even want to look at a book if you don’t have an agent), and her book was a collection of short fiction.

"Nobody wanted a new author whose first book was a collection of short stories," Appachana recollects. "Most agents and publishers want to see novels. And to top it all, the main body of my stories had to do with women and Indian women at that! So I gathered plenty of rejections." Undeterred by the discouraging responses to her work, Appachana never stopped sending her book out.

"I remember one rejection letter that stated that my work was not exotic enough," says Appachana. "I guess they wanted me to describe an India that people here want to hear about. My India — the country that I know and talk about in my fiction — is middle class India and middle class women."

And then one day she opened another rejection letter that had a positive suggestion. It advised Appachana to send her book to Virago in England because they had a reputation for publishing new writers, a proposal that Appachana was quick to act on. Though the book came out nearly a decade ago, Appachana says she still meets readers, particularly young Indian and American women, who walk up to her at readings to confess how deeply the stories resonate with them.

Appachana began work on her second book, Listening Now, after a hiatus of two years when she took time off to be a full-time mother. Returning to writing, Appachana admits, was very hard going. For two years, she struggled to find the voice that would unlock the heart of the book. "I wrote and wrote hundreds of pages and then trashed them all because it wasn’t what I wanted it to be," says Appachana. "And the problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. That is something that I discover in the process of writing. When I sit down to write I have nothing, I’m empty. For me, writing is the means of discovering my story."

To compound her troubles, Appachana had to deal with moving out to Tempe, (where her husband teaches at the state university) and the constant ailments that wrecked the health of her infant daughter. "I was writing in total isolation. I was new in Arizona, had no friends, did not drive and there was no public transport and my baby being unwell kept me confined at home anyway," says Appachana. "There were months when I couldn’t write at all. Then I would find an hour in a day, or sometimes an hour in a week, to sit down and write. When you’re up all night with a baby, it’s hard to find the stamina to sit and work at a novel."

Grappling with all these issues, finally in 1994, five years after she began writing it, Appachana finished the novel. Though Random House accepted it in 1995, because they kept postponing the publication date, Listening Now did not appear in bookstands until 1998. The book has garnered impressively good reviews, although Appachana is scathingly doubtful about the veracity of a few of them.

"For instance, the review in The New York Times Book Review may sound good, " she says, "but I don’t think the person even read it. I don’t want to sound cynical but that review made me feel that it was clearly something that had to be done and so it was written." She praises the review in the Boston Globe for its insight into her novel, "That reviewer seemed to understand all the nuances of the characters and what I was trying to say in the novel."

Listening Now takes the reader into the world of six ordinary women and slowly unfolds each life, layer by layer, to reveal the secret that defines their existence. In many ways, it is a harsh world that these woman inhabit, where the burden of their indifferent husbands, and domineering in-laws are tempered by the strength of the bond between the women.

"I wrote the novel because I wanted to give legitimacy to the lives of ordinary women. Women like my mother and her friends, the way they live and the landscape of their minds," explains Appachana. "These women may seem ordinary but I don’t think their stories are ordinary. Though I put a love story in the novel it ultimately falls apart, and what endures in the book is the love and support the women share."

Though she is aware that some readers may feel that the bleak lives led by the main women characters could have been relieved by the presence of one understanding husband or a kind hearted mother-in-law, Appachana points out that that was not the book’s focus.

"I did not want to look other areas of their lives because I was not interested in creating a balance in my story. I just wanted to highlight the issues that concern me deeply," she emphasizes.

"I didn’t want to say this is how the men behave but they are also very good. Take the character of Narayana in the novel — he is a good brother-in-law to Padma and he is a gentle, kind man full of integrity but he doesn’t understand his wife. And I think a lot of men, in very fundamental ways, don’t understand their wives however much they love them. It doesn’t have very much to do with love."

She goes on to relate an incident that illustrate this blinkers on attitude. An issue of the feminist journal Manushi had a photograph of a mother with her twin children, a son and a daughter, where the daughter looked much thinner because less food was given to the girl. A male friend who happened to see that story immediately dismissed it off as nonsense, saying what mother would deprive her own child of food?

"I said yes, they do and they do that even in families like ours," exclaims Appachana indignantly, "where the question is not one of starving the daughter but the preferential treatment given to sons in terms of that last piece of chicken, that extra spoon of sugar, the larger helping of biryani — it’s always the son who gets it. And the daughters themselves, when it’s their turn to become mothers, do the same thing. These are things that happen every day. They are not large issues of life and death but these are the small details of a woman’s life with huge implications because it all adds up to the way she perceives herself and the world around her and I wanted to bring all that out in my book. "

One of the most challenging tasks an immigrant writer can face is recreating a world with its sounds and scents, its voices and images, while living in a totally different environment. But Appachana insists that writing about India while living in the United States has never hindered her creativity. "When I write, I’m there, I’m back. In a way, I think I miss India so deeply, that writing is a means of inhabiting my home. Probably that’s why I’m happier when I’m writing, because I’m there, not here!" she says.

Another factor that probably aids Appachana’s evocative descriptions of the daily intimate lives of Indian women is the fact that she makes it a point to visit India for three months every year. Her regular trips to India have also helped to keep her daughter in touch with her roots, and the reality of life in India. "Since my husband is from North India and I’m from the South, we communicate to each other in English, which means that my daughter too speaks only that language. But because we go back every year, my daughter has a strong sense of her heritage. She’s not one of those kids who regard India as dirty and smelly. She’s very much at home there," Appachana says proudly.

With her daughter now in school, Appachana has accepted a post teaching creative writing at Arizona State University. She finds the return to academia exhilarating despite the tremendous demands the reading and grading work makes on the time she needs to spend on writing her second novel. But one of the positive aspects about working in a university setting, says Appachana, is that it has given her a world where she feels at home.

"Now I can actually say I’m a writer without looking embarrassed!" she confesses.