“Where is the next generation of artists?”

"I was expected to be the third generation engineer to join my grandfather’s company,” ruefully smiles the author of Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America. The award winning collection of 12 short stories, recently republished in India by Indialog Publications, provides glimpses and reflections of Sohrab Homi Fracis’ metamorphosis from engineer to author as parental expectations gave way — slowly, very slowly — to the innate desire for self-expression. "You write about what you know: the complexity of life is so subtle, there are nuances you cannot imagine,” he admits.

The first Indian author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, described by the New York Times Book Review as "among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers,” Fracis’ fiction has been published in journals spanning the North American continent from Toronto to San Jose. "When you are learning to write, short fiction is easier. The scope of the novel lends to your dropping the ball without realizing it…though novels are (more) marketable,” he told the audience of assorted journalists, littérateurs and screen playwrights who had gathered at the audiovisual room of the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) to listen to him read excerpts from his stories on November 1, 2006.

Sohrab Fracis: a matter of fine tuning

In answer to a question Fracis noted that it took him a long time to conceptualize a story — maybe, years. "When it’s bursting in my mind I start to draft and the drafting process goes more smoothly after that point.” After the first draft "you see things you never saw before. Sometimes it needs more than fine tuning,” he added candidly.

The Minto stories relate his experiences in India where he studied in Bombay’s noted Jesuit institution, Campion School and dutifully acquired his masters in technology (MTech) from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, also captaining its badminton team. Named after a college hostel in Patna, a former barracks for British troops named after Viceroy Minto, the artful pieces provide tantalizing glimpses of youthful ragging, the incipient development of student unrest, indiscipline and growing politicization in the Indian heartland as much as sidelights on the aging Parsi community of Bombay, its increasing alienation from the changing spirit of India. Interleaved with these reminiscences of the India of the 1970s are stories based on the American experience: "the wave of xenophobia on the heels of the Iranian hostage crisis,” the occasional unsavory characters with whom he got into fights on the Delaware University campus where he pursued his masters in computer engineering.

"We do go through phases when we imagine more than is actually happening. Parsis are touchy, reactive. Sometimes over reactive. There are many nice, open minded Americans. No particular phase is typical of the whole. There is a time horizon. The longer you are there, the better you know the country,” he explained in a subsequent interview with Parsiana, maintaining that universities are a microcosm of the larger society, the larger world.

Sohrab is now working full-time on two books, a non-fiction work, The Game Against Death, and a novel, A Man Of the World, as notes a report in Inside UNF, a journal of the University of North Florida where he had taught literature and creative writing from 1993 to 2003. The novel, Fracis says, is "at least two years away from publication.” As for the book of philosophy, a work in progress bearing the subtitle "Continuity versus mortality,” he says it has grown out of the literature theme courses he taught at UNF "on the mortality of characters, finding ways to live on after we die,” as illustrated in literature. It was triggered, he added, by John Gardiner’s phrase, "Game against death.”

As posted on his website (Fracis.com), the Inside UNF report mentions Sohrab’s recent and future activities: "He still occasionally employs his skills as a professor of creative writing and literature: in 2004 he was invited to be visiting writer in residence at Augsburg College, Minneapolis; in 2006 he was an artist in residence at the Seaside Institute, Florida and in the summer of 2007 he will be an artist in residence at the prestigious artists’ community of Yaddo in upstate New York. Also, since 2004 he has been the final judge and presenter of the Page Edwards Short Fiction Award at the annual Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival. He is living his dream, enjoying a full and interesting life as a writer.”

According to Fracis, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award are among the first rank of literary awards in the US. The Iowa Short Fiction Award which Ticket to Minto won in 2001 is "top of the heap” in the second tier of awards, he notes. Though glorying in the prize which changed his status in the publishing world, Fracis maintains, "I do believe I got lucky.”

The children of Dinsi and Homi Fracis, an engineer with frequent out of town assignments, Sohrab and his sister Niloufer Shapurji, now based in Nagpur, grew up with their maternal grandparents Hormusji and Shirin Engineer at Bombay’s Marine Lines. The venerable Hormusji was later joined by Homi in the closely held construction company, Levka, which then had an enviable reputation for quality construction of the consciously limited, sterling projects it undertook. In school Sohrab had registered his superiority in arts subjects. "I wanted to be a journalist but my father couldn’t envision it,” he notes with regret. "If you have basic intelligence, you can do anything,” he adds. He tried to live up to family expectations, pursuing his science and engineering education in India and the US, landing an engineering job contract initially in Iowa, then working for two years with the Ford Motors in Detroit, acquiring his green card, going southeast when he got a contract as a software consultant to the city hall of Jacksonville.

With too many friends "who are techies, who can’t stop talking technology,” Fracis realized he couldn’t take it anymore. After the Jacksonville contract ended, he enrolled in the University of North Florida to do his third masters — in arts. Was it a crazy decision? Was it gutsy? He says he only knows that life was "not a drudgery any more.” Because it was a different stream, it took him two years to complete his masters, simultaneously working as a "peer tutor” at the university which he describes as one of the "best value” universities in the US, with tuition fees that are not prohibitive.

Though he says that writers benefit from networking, personally he has not been "one to network…Lots of writers/publishers/editors in New York are in the same circle, in the loop. In Florida, we are outside the loop.” There was a time, he says, when he subscribed "to the archaic concept that all I had to do was write a really good book and the rest would take care of itself!” He got the notion, he indicated with a trace of self-mockery, from how "Yeats came to admire Tagore or Graham Greene admired R. K. Narayan!”

But Fracis’ admiration for Rohinton Mistry is real. He describes the Toronto based novelist who was twice short listed for the Booker Prize as "reclusive, one who likes his privacy…until he appeared on Oprah (Winfrey)’s show. She made his book (A Fine Balance). After that his visibility exploded. It was the first time mainstream America was reading about Parsis — a milestone in Parsi literature!”

The cost of living in North Florida is not high, maintains Fracis and even the impact of the notorious Florida hurricanes is comparatively lower, though the state has entered a 20-year period of active hurricane cycle, he tells us. "Global warming is affecting the air currents which fuel hurricanes, though Jacksonville hasn’t had a direct hit since the 1960s.”

Fracis has the opportunity to mingle with Parsi/Iranian Zoroastrians in Florida. "About 60 plus people show up for Zoroastrian functions. But they don’t impact life on an ongoing basis,” he notes. He had attended the North American Congresses in Chicago — when he had appeared for a panel discussion with novelists Bapsi Sidhwa and Boman Desai — and San Jose. He feels the commu­nity’s numbers are diminishing because it is more dispersed today than ever before. "The community is spreading out… the diaspora is getting scattered… the links are weakening. In some ways it is a healthy process,” he muses, "because it will quicken the process of others being allowed in. The rate of intermarriage in North America is much higher when compared to Bombay’s Parsi-Parsi emphasis.”

What disturbs the author who has remained "single out of circumstance, not choice,” is the community’s new-found preference for security: "We used to be a community taking chances with our lives, pushing boundaries. Now we have become too comfortable as professionals. I feel we have lost our adventurous spirit, our willingness to take risks. We are generating promising professionals instead of great individuals. We are losing Parsis in the arts: where is the next generation of artists? In some ways it is discouraged by parents and grandparents who channel children into conventional paths. It may be more rewarding at the family level. But at the community level? I’m not too sure…”