Maya, mystery in Mumbai
Shabnam Minwalla, 52, spent 10 years working as a newspaper reporter in Mumbai. She married, started a family, quit her job to raise her three children. Struggling, for one reason or another, to return to the workplace full-time, Minwalla decided nine years ago that it was time to write her book.
“I love murder mysteries. They’re my go-to. My plan was to do a murder mystery set in Mumbai. I started writing and it was atrocious. It sounded like a long newspaper report,” Minwalla says.
She wanted to get the journalist out of herself and the novelist in, so she read a lot. “I was also reading a lot of children’s books with my own children (then aged six and eight) and wrote my first book, The Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street
(Hachette India), in 2013.” It was a mystery aimed at children aged 11 to 14. The book Minwalla is best known for came later, the YA fantasy work What Maya Saw: A
Tale of Shadows, Secrets, Clues (Harpercollins, 2017).
It is set in an old Mumbai college. The protagonist is there for summer school workshops. Only she can see the Shadows for what they really are, a bunch of gorgeous students who will do anything to keep their youth and beauty. Even kill. Maya must now unravel a trail of clues left behind by a long-dead priest.
On how the genre has changed
What Maya Saw really resonated with her readers, Minwalla says. She believes she has Harry Potter to thank for that. “The Potter series did us a huge favour and made publishers realise that YA protagonists could sell books here too,” Minwalla says. “Even series like Twilight, however bad they are, did sell and got the teenagers reading.”
The genre has since gone beyond cauldrons, witches and unfamiliar languages, to mirror reality more closely. “In my books I use real locations in Mumbai – bakeries, the seaside, Colaba Causeway,” Minwalla says.
On her favourite recent work
Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (Wendy Lamb, 2009) is a fabulous timetravel novel set in 1978-79 New York, Minwalla says. It follows a young woman who receives a strange note asking her to record future events and decipher clues to reveal the identity of a time traveller. “It’s a great combination of fantasy and mystery.”