Story Done

Finished revising the story, and now doing some edits before posting it for the workshop. Also emailed it to a couple of "out" friends. So hopefully will have some feedback to revise it again. My own feeling is, it's definitely better now. But will also need more work.As I gave it a read this afternoon, I realized that the story is brushing up against an issue of which I don't have an immediate solution.This is the first story where I have taken up the issue of class in very direct terms. The protagonist of the story is very very different from me. He is an eleven year old working class boy whose mother works as a domestic maid in Kolkata. Therefore, the kind of childhood I am writing about is starkly different from my own. Not only that, one of the things I try to do in this story is to contrast this kid's childhood with the kind of childhood which I have had. Now, I can write authoritatively about growing up middle-class, female and Bengali in Kolkata. But I do not have the same authority in writing about the childhood of a boy who works in a tea-shop. It's not that I have never come across such kids, or have had conversations with them. But my interactions with them have always been colored by my own perceptions and social locations. Even if I plan to interview hundreds of such kids now, just for the sake of this story, that issue of my own location is never really going to go away. There is no way I will ever have un-mediated access to such voices and experiences. Therefore, in order to create this particular character in a convincing kind of a way, I have bumped against my own class-position. I don't want my protagonist to be a child-Velutha. But then, that doesn't necessarily lead me to figure our automatically what I want.

So for now, I will take the easier route. I can rest with the draft I have for now, and I will just bank on the critical faculties of my readers to help me improve the piece.