'If only hope existed for women today'

KOCHI: Fascinated though she is with Fort Kochi, author Jaishree Misra confesses that writing about it will have to, sadly, wait.
Denying that too much shouldn't be read into her recent books having only the odd Malayali character, she said, "Kerala shall make a comeback. There will always be pieces of my heritage in my writing. I made a vow that I would write about Fort Kochi from the day I first visited this place".
Misra was in the city on Tuesday for the launch of her book, 'A love story for my sister'. A few years ago, following the publication of 'Rani', based on the life of Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, Misra was intrigued by the stories of a few lesser known women of colonial India.
"I came across two women whose stories I thought need to be told. One was Begum Hazrath Mahal, wife of the Nawab of Oudh, and Margaret Wheeler, daughter of Hugh Wheeler, commander of the garrison at Cawnpore, who was kidnapped during the 1857 siege," she said. Misra began researching Margaret who married her captor, a mutineer, went on to convert to Islam and live happily with him. Queried on this by a British chaplain during her final years, Margaret was to retort: "He was kind to me". "If only such hope existed for women today," Misra muses. Margaret's story is also, Misra avers, the earliest recorded case of Stockholm Syndrome. Her new book blends incidents from colonial and contemporary India, simultaneously narrating the story of Margaret and that of Tara Fernandez, a young girl from Delhi kidnapped and raped in 2007.
"As I was working on Margaret, the Nirbhaya incident took place and I was taken aback by the brutality that still existed in so-called civilized society."