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Abha Dawesar's Miniplanner does not skirt the issue

When writer Abha Dawesar began to work on her first novel Miniplanner, she had an image in her mind - a strip club in New York City. In the opening chapter of Miniplanner (Cleis Press, 2000), Dawesar's 24-year old protagonist, André Bernard visits Skirts -- a strip club, with his boss, Nathan Williams, where women in G-strings perform lap dances for male customers.

Although they are visiting a heterosexual establishment, André and Nathan will soon start a torrid gay relationship. And by the time you are into the first 50 pages, getting through the steamy sexual sequences between the two, André has also started an affair with Nathan's wife Sybil. His after-work social life will get so complicated that he will need a miniplanner to keep track of his evening/night schedules.

"I had the initial scene in my mind -- the strip club scene -- and once I started writing, I really got into it," Dawesar says, sipping a cappuccino at a coffee shop in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The strip club image is familiar to Dawesar, since her day-job is in the financial services industry.

"I thought it was interesting that all these people from Wall Street, accountants and consultants go to strip clubs and behave this way," Dawesar says, adding that she has visited a strip club with office mates. "Many people I work with do this kind of thing. Often, the whole group will go out to entertain a business client visiting from outside. This is corporate entertainment."

How does a 26-year-old raised in New Delhi (she attended Army Public School and her parents, both doctors, still live in India), with an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard University, get into the mind and under the skin of a white, male, bisexual investment banker - André Bernard?

"Living in New York you have exposure to a lot of different communities and different types of people," Dawesar says. "I hadn't really intended to write a book about André. It was really my imagination taking over. The imagination is limitless. You can be anything you want, whenever you want."

"The way the world is, there are so many different types of identities you have and so many different compartments, but there is also so much crossover. In some ways, André is nothing of what I am, but on the other hand I can write in his voice. Because in some ways, I can be him in my mind."

She wrote the book two years ago, over a five-week stretch. It was an easy write, she says. Once she finished it, she showed the manuscript to friends, who were more familiar with André's lifestyle.

"No even one commented on things I expected to be problematic, whether André's representation was accurate. And that was fantastic," she says.

She pitched the book to a couple of agents, and when things were not working out, she decided to send manuscript to Cleis Press -- a small publishing house in San Francisco.

"One thing I like about Cleis is that they do a lot of gender bending stuff and so hopefully the book won't get slotted as a gay book," she says. "It was heartening that they thought the primary readership will be heterosexual women in big cities."

Since November 2000, when the book was published, Dawesar has been on a limited promotion tour to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York, reading at independent and specialized bookstores. Her audience, she says, has been young city dwellers, though varied in race (including South Asian men and women) and gender.

She has read at Manhattan's Joseph Papp Public Theater and at an Asian studies conference at Columbia University. She has also been interviewed at the Asia Pacific Forum on the WBAI radio station in New York City.

Slowly, the book it finding its way in gay and lesbian publications and web sites.

Writing on planetout.com, Richard Labonte said: Dawesar has crafted an intricate, often hilarious story...(with) steamy sex scenes, tender family moments and passages of reflective introspection."

And a reviewer on LesbianNation.com said: "Dawesar exhibits talent when it comes to hot sex scenes, and she's a keen and witty observer of corporate life."

Although she dedicated Miniplanner to her parents, Dawesar was quite clear that she did not want them to read the book.

"I love my parents. This my first book. I dedicated the book to them, but that doesn't mean I wanted them to read it."

Miniplanner has not been released in India, but her parents managed to acquire a copy through friends in Vermont.

"I was aghast," she says. "And so I called them up and said please don't read it, but my mother said she was definitely going to read it. So I said fine, but please don't let anyone else at home read it."

The next time she called home her father was 50 pages into the book. "He said it was quite remarkable," she says with a nervous giggle. "So I was kind of shell-shocked."

She thinks her father liked the book more than her mother. In fact, her mother has pointed out that Miniplanner could have accomplished the things it did, without being so explicit.

"But if you are living in 1999 in New York as a gay man, I don't think you are going to be coy," she says. "You are going to speak the way gay men do and not talk about sex as a young Indian woman, who is 26 or for that matter a middle aged Indian woman in New Delhi. This book has to be authentic to that. I certainly think I made the right choice."

EXTERNAL LINKS
Miniplanner: A Book Review

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