How I Turned My Family History Into a Novel

One Thanksgiving several years ago, my family was passing around photo albums like many families do. But instead of the Kodak shots of 90s birthday parties or Tweety Bird school clothes that would fill my own photo albums, these showed black-and-white vignettes of four boys in a hot, dusty environment, their hands carrying sturdy pith helmets or bows and arrows and the spoils of a bird hunt.

(3 Goals for Writing Great Historical Fiction.)

My novel, Sleeping in the Sun, is a distant cousin to these photo albums. But before its final novel form, the story of my Grandpa’s childhood in India became the thesis for my MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University, Oregon. He grew up at the end of the British Raj, the second of four sons to an American missionary couple. They lived just outside of Calcutta, Bengal, the former capital of the Raj. My grandpa was born in 1918 and grew up there all through his school years, heading to the foothills of the Himalayas for boarding school and coming back for mild winters at the mission.

My family has set down much of their history from that time. Several members wrote autobiographies, which, funnily enough, contradict each other in some places. And then there is my grandfather’s diary from when he was a schoolboy, in which he talks about tiring train rides, mundane errands, but also moments of beauty I didn’t expect from him especially at that age, like this passage:

Chamu (the cook), Lee & Gene (his brothers) cooked a nice dinner and we ate it on our steps under a full moon. A tree called the “Kameenee” tree was in full bloom and its flowers had a lovely smell. To smell that tree on a moonlit night! What a feeling! I was never so happy in all my life.

Mussoorie. February 16, 1935

At first, I tried to keep as close to the facts as possible. I was concerned with the idea that I might not be the right person to tell the story of life in India, having never been there before, and never lived in that time. So sticking as closely to the facts was my way of holding on to some credibility.

But there were so many facts, and I had the sinking feeling that they really only mattered to me because they were about my family. I used the facts to get my bearings, but then I started paying less attention to them and more attention to moments like the scent of that Kamini tree blooming in the moonlight. Details and anecdotes with emotion were what I thought about more and more.

The fear of walking alone through the jungles of Bengal, dangerous enough to make you carry a club as protection against man-eating tigers.

The everyday annoyance of your oldest brother’s pet monkey having free reign around the house.

The competitive spirit between athletic American brothers who must find ways to entertain themselves by creating a tennis court with chalk in the dirt.

And somewhere in all that were the interactions with Indian people themselves, which didn’t really fit the pattern of British-Indian relations that had been set forth by a long tradition of British-Indian colonial literature, such as Heat and Dust and A Passage to India.

The modest missionary house that my grandfather grew up in was a boarding house open to Indian people in need. A sign with Bengali script meaning “peace house” was posted on the door—the front door, not a servants’ entrance. The family was host to all manner of people, and I found the dynamic of four rowdy American boys sharing a house with Indian people who came and went as something unique. 

What’s more, accounts of their house servants were rich with human connection, as the family often did tasks right alongside their help, from going down to the bazaar for grocery shopping to scrounging for firewood together. But still, servants waited on them at meals and referred to them as sahib, and I saw this complex hierarchy of British/American/Indian status that I didn’t know existed.

Well, it turns out my grandfather’s family was extremely close friends with a high court British judge, who later went on to earn a knighthood, but who never married or had children of his own, and so, curiously, stayed close with my grandfather’s family, so close that the boys called him “Uncle.” There was something tragic about it, that beneath his wealth and status was a basic longing for family and companionship.

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If I wanted my novel to explore the dynamics between these three classes, there had to be a thread that tied them all together at the most basic level. Family was an easy one with all these brothers pulling in different directions, and the judge with his need for familial love. These two components to the story were based in fact, with the diaries and autobiographies and photographs as blueprints for their characters. But the servant class was not so fleshed out.

The character of Arthur was not based on a real person. Instead, I drew inspiration from several novels: The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro; A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry; and most helpfully, Staying On, by Paul Scott. All three of these novels examine the lives of single men who are in some sense alone in the world or have very few people to depend on. They have tenuous relationships with other characters, but they are not on equal footing as we would expect in a true friendship or familial relationship.

In the same way, Arthur, the family’s only servant, is involved in a similar relationship with his employers. He knows them intimately, knows their specific wants, waits on them at meals, and listens in on their conversations. But he is never invited to join the conversation, and there is no sense of concern from the family for his desires. 

The deep examination of his purpose and self-worth in a household—and also a country at large—that did not recognize him as an equal is where the real story is. Though I was initially drawn to my grandfather’s sensational diary entries about real events like finding snakes in the latrine or watching colorful funeral marches go past their house, the heart of the novel came out of Arthur, a character I made up.

Well, I didn’t just make him up, I built him out of other characters I found in literature. But that’s what story does that history can’t. My grandfather’s diaries are really just memories in history, the things that stuck out to him in any given day, events that were noteworthy, an excitement here, a disappointment there, but with not much continuity or growth. Based in history or not, a character in a novel must be made of more than just facts. Even someone as ordinary as Arthur, a servant to a family in a small town in 1930s India, must have something extraordinary in him.

So this holiday season, or whenever your next gathering is, tell stories. Pass photo albums around. Because every family has a story to tell.

Check out Joanne Howard’s Sleeping in the Sun here:

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