Sonia Faleiro

Meet Sonia Faleiro, the globe trotting writer, award winning journalist and storyteller. She is the author of The Girl (Viking 2005), and a contributor to AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India (Random House, Vintage UK, Anchor Books US). Her nonfiction book on Bombay’s bar dancers will be published by Penguin in 2010. She has her website at www.soniafaleiro.com which has some interesting podcasts.

She blogs at http://soniafaleiro.blogspot.com/ and has a Jack Russel Terrier dog named  Zoey Faleiro-McKnight (See inset photo). “Faleiro from my mum, McKnight from my dad”, says Zoey on his blog. Sonia is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/soniafaleiro if you want to follow her.

Her non-fiction work includes a six part series on India’s domestic workers. Read this piece about a domestic worker who is clearly underage.

“Some people love the company of children, but in the Indian housekeeping industry, where human beings fulfill the role of washing machines, vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, the reasons for this are Machiavellian.” says Sonia.

Sonia profiled the world of eunuchs. She has also written about the farmer’s suicides in Vidarbha, and about malnutrition in Mumbai. Her writing appears in Tehelka, Time Out, Travel + Leisure, Third World Resurgence, The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, Himal South Asia, and Maxim. She is currently working on her second book – a non fiction account of bar girls. What I like about Sonia’s writing is how much empathy she can show for the subject without being patronizing. Sonia is a trigger happy digital photographer who documents the world around her when she stops to take a look. Check these photos by Sonia. She is also a Contributing Editor at Vogue.

I caught up on mail with the peripatetic Sonia Faleiro who is currently in San Francisco, US.

Abhijit: You were born in Goa and have lived in New Delhi, Edinburgh and Bombay. You currently divide your time between Bombay and San Francisco. Which of these cities takes up maximum mindshare in your writings?

Sonia: Oh, definitely Bombay. I started my career as a journalist with India Today in Delhi, but it was in Bombay, a city divided, complex and extreme, in which I discovered I really wanted to write about people on the margins, struggling for a foothold, sometimes succeeding and at others times, despite their best efforts, giving in to their worst impulses—something else the city incites. My forthcoming book, which Penguin will publish in India in 2010, is about the lives of Bombay’s bar dancers, and researching this book over a period of five years introduced me to layer of the city even more gritty, and yet fascinating, than I had thought imaginable.

Abhijit: Do you associate a city as the birthplace of any piece of work? For instance would you say Goa is the place of birthplace forThe Girl (2006, Penguin Viking).

Sonia: In a way yes, since I was born in Goa and the book is set there. But The Girl was started in Edinburgh where I was reading literature at the time. It’s an intense story, full of melancholy and drama, something I could only have written at that particular time in my life. Bombay of course, has been the birthplace of my new book. No other city, for better or worse, could have inspired or provided the material for it.

Abhijit: A lot of your writings are about the marginalized. You have written about Mumbai’s bar girls and about India’s domestic workers. About farmers and hijdas (eunuchs). Where does that belief come from?

Sonia: Do you mean the belief that these people deserve to be written about? From a journalistic integrity, I suppose.

To be able to write and to have access to forums that will publish one’s writing widely is a privilege. As a journalist and a reader I’m left in no doubt that there will always be people to write about the rich, the powerful, the glamorous; sometimes when they have nothing to say. But writing about such people, doesn’t impact them in the way writing about the marginalised and the alienated does. To write about those who have no voice, or whose voice has been silenced, is to empower them. Writing about the farmers of Vidarbha, who have been committing suicide since the 1990s, at one time at a rate of one every 12 hours, for example, has had a tangible impact on the political attention and economic stimulus offered to their community and their families. Having another profile written about Shah Rukh Khan, however, makes no difference to him, and frankly to readers—what more is there to learn about him?

I admit also to enjoying greatly what I do for a living. To spend time with people whose lives would otherwise never intersect with mine, is an incredible learning experience. It has enriched me professionally, but also personally—I see a different world, a world more tragic but also greater, more interesting, and more courageous because of them.

Abhijit: What prompted you to write the non-fiction book you are currently writing about the bar girls in Mumbai? What has been your greatest insight as you have gone about watching their lives from such close quarters?

Sonia: I decided to write about bar dancers following my friendship with a young woman I had come to know closely before the government of Maharashtra banned dancing in bars in 2005. The ban hit her so hard; it changed her from an optimistic and ambitious woman with a life’s plan, into someone unemployed, hungry, and virtually on the street. The disintegration of her life horrified me greatly primarily because I considered her a friend, and was worried for her, and also because the Government’s claims that banning bar dancing would end crime, protect women and rekindle public morality was clearly a ridiculous one. To start with, the government has no business attempting to regulate public morality. Especially since its own is in doubt!

I started to research the book to rebut these claims, and to prove that the government’s political avarice had destroyed an entire community of women.

I continue to be overwhelmed by the strength and resilience almost all the women I met showed during this time. There are so many lessons to be learned from their lives, and I hope some of these come across in the book.

Abhijit: You are a contributing editor for Vogue. Do you look at that forum as an antithesis to the rest of your writing especially as a journalist? What is the largest part of your identity (in your mind, at least)? Is it being a journalist, a writer of non-fiction, fiction or writing about lifestyle at Vogue magazine?

Sonia: Although I write on diverse subjects, all of them reflect interests in my personal life. For example, I write for Vogue on art and film, because I love to view and even buy art, and I enjoy a variety of film genres—India, foreign, independent. What gives me the greatest pleasure though, and I hope will become a hallmark of my work, is long form narrative nonfiction about people on the margins.

Abhijit: Do you continue to visit the world of people (eg. domestic workers, eunuchs, bar girls etc) after the article has appeared in print? If yes, how do they view you?

Sonia:Yes, I do actually, quite often. Sometimes I translate the article for them, or someone reads it aloud to them, and so they hear a playback of their words and my view of their lives, and inevitably they have an opinion on it. These follow up conversations can be hugely interesting. One bar dancer I interviewed after the ban, for example, was upset I had mentioned she had been frying fish while we chatted. ‘Why would people believe I had no money if I’m eating fish?’ she wondered.

Abhijit: Finally, your dog Zoey has a blog and is even on Twitter. Why should a dog twitter?

Sonia: Let’s be honest here, Zoey doesn’t personally blog. Or twitter. She tells me what to write and I do it for her. I don’t have an answer to why dogs, or animals in general, should get online—that’s a personal choice and you know I’m all for freedom of expression! Zoey’s online because she’s a big part of my life, and a part I feel safe, and am happy to share her life with my readers.

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