Female Pain Painted in Words by a Woman Writer

Lost Callahan is a Novel by Aaksa Karuna Shah, a graduate from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. The novel is a story of psychological trauma faced by the protagonist Emma. The novel is inspired by real life people and the life of the author herself. Most of the characters in the novel are somewhere or the other related to the author in real life. The novel is a good piece of fiction which gives a reader deep insight into in and around of a psychological disorder patient. The author is a resident of Delhi and completed the novel in four years. she took such a long time to complete a book of about 150 pages because she wrote the whole book on the used tissue papers that she collected from a nearby restaurant.

The author grew up in a middle-class family where parents do not encourage their children to take up writing as a profession but Karuna dreamt of writing and she did it. She took four long years but finally, she completed the novel and she says that when she held her book in hand for the first time, it was the "best moment in her life". During the writing period, it was her routine to take up the new tissue papers and write tens of the tissue papers from top to bottom with a ballpoint pen. She numbered the papers so that she can store them in order. She collected them and stored them all at one place. 

She had to face the tragedy of losing her work twice. Once she lost a large chunk of her papers, she had to write the missing part all over again. And the other tragedy happened after the novel was put into digitised form, it was somehow deleted by somebody and nobody was able to retrieve the work. A certain part of the work was retrieved but she again had to write a big deal of the story.

Her novel was published by Partridge India in 2015 and she said that the moment came to her as if a huge milestone of her life has been achieved. She can be reached at www.aaksakarunashah.com

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