FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Story Statement
It's the summer of 1992. Popular and vibrant 20-year-old university student Rukmini Roy just had her heart broken. What she doesn't know yet, is that her best friend and all her other friends in her social circle are keeping a secret from her. The young man who broke her heart, Kash, has already started dating her best friend, Soloni. This coming-of-age story begins with how Rukmini overcomes betrayal by her friends. This tangled situation is only the beginning of her journey through young love, connection, and complicated friendships and eventually moving forward and understanding the hidden parts of people you don't expect.
SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Antagonist or Antagonistic force
Soloni is the first antagonist in Rukmini’s story. Soloni is her childhood best friend. She is not an obvious antagonist as she is introduced as a shy, insecure, awkward, and studious 11-year-old. Soloni idolizes Rukmini. For her part, Rukmini loves having a loyal protege in the form of a best friend, especially since she doesn’t get much attention at home from her immigrant parents and isn’t popular at school. As they grow up, Soloni begins to show flashes of an inner darkness brewing inside, due to a jealous spirit. Secretly, Soloni hates how perfect everyone thinks Rukmini is and even Solini’s mother is constantly speaking of her praises. Soloni quietly studies everything Rukmini does, says, and wears. Friends at university start to comment on how similar they are to each other. Then one day Soloni starts dating Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend right after he breaks her heart. Soloni then preys on the sympathies of their mutual friends, swearing them to secrecy about her new relationship. There will be other antagonists but this is the one that starts the story off during a painful and confusing chapter in Rukmini’s growth.
THIRD ASSIGNMENT: Create a breakout title
The Chronicles of Rukmini
Rukmini Roy
The Loves that Led Me to You
FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Two smart comparables
I found answering this question challenging as the authors below are widely admired. Reading these books were the direct inspirations for writing my book.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: The main character is Olive but this collection of short stories takes the stories of other characters in her town and different key points in Olive’s life and has a self-contained story in each chapter. This is a closer look at the human condition.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: Tells the story of three generations in the Whitshank family. This has a similar feel to Olive Kitteridge in that each chapter is a different point in time in the Whitshank legacy and the study of how each personality in the family came to be the way they are.
Others:
Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpha Lahiri: This is a collection of short stories about the Bengali immigrant experience in the United States that describes the emotional journeys of characters seeking love and overcoming barriers in settling in a newly adopted homeland.
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery: Adventures of our favourite red-head by the iconic Canadian author.
FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: Hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound
A young woman must contend with the betrayal of her childhood best friend who is now dating the man who broke her heart and she must also contend with all the friends who kept the secret of this betrayal.
SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: Conflict
Inner Conflict:
Rukmini is struggling with just getting dumped by a guy she finally decided to give a chance to whom she normally wouldn’t date. She is nursing her broken heart and relying on her friend Soloni as a shoulder to cry on for support. Soloni has hinted that she is staying in touch with Rukmini’s ex-boyfriend because Rukmini has remained friends with Kash. There is no reason to stop Soloni from not having a friendship with her ex if they are remaining in each other’s lives. After the breakup, her ex, Kash reaches out to Soloni for a “friendship” and Rukmini feels it is for support and that he must be having a hard time with the break up as well but something feels off after a certain conversation with Soloni. She is troubled by this and doesn’t know where to place this sinking feeling. Soloni has always been a good loyal devoted friend. Rukmini asks Soloni, “Does he ever talk about me?” Soloni responds with “I’m sorry he never brought you up.” Rukmini is surprised and feels worried and is a bit turmoiled by her perception that they are getting closer. Is it friendship or could it be more? She knows Kash enough to know he seems interested in Soloni and Soloni doesn’t seem to be putting up any boundaries. They keep making plans to see each other under the guise of friendship. Soloni informs Rukmini that she enjoys her friendship with Kash because she is usually uncomfortable around men, especially given how they grew up in a conservative household. She tells Rukmini that she feels comfortable around Kash. It’s the early 90s and both young women were raised in an immigrant family so neither of them grew up dating in their teens. Rukmini desperately wishes to appear cool with the whole thing. She decides she must handle this breakup with maturity since Kash has made it clear he does not have feelings for her anymore. She silently struggles with this conflict in how she appears to the rest of the world while she is devastated by this breakup and not knowing if Kash is moving on with her best friend. Rukmini would like to appear emotionally mature and not let her insecurities get the best of her. For years, Soloni has jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly teased Rukmini about always wanting to be the center of attention telling her she has a big ego and needs to be humbled at times. She feels that Kash thought the same of her during their relationship. She does not want to be that person anymore. Rukmini wants to be seen as humble and down to earth by the people around her but doesn’t know how to be that person when she is hurting. She wants to be a better person and being a better person means being humble, without ego, more like Soloni. For most of her life, it was Soloni who was trying to be like Rukmini but now she finds herself wanting to be more like Soloni, quiet, and unassuming, the type of girl that Kash wants to be with because she imagines them eventually falling in love and getting married and living happily ever after. She confides in another friend that she is worried they are getting closer. That friend finally breaks the news to Rukmini that they are indeed in a relationship now and everyone has known about this for a while but no one wanted to break the news to Rukmini. The two of them even came out to social gatherings with their friends when Rukmini wasn’t around. She quickly rationalizes that this is for the best but she is angry at her friends for hiding this big secret and feels doubly betrayed.
Secondary Conflict:
While Rukmini is popular at her university and within her social circle, she didn’t grow up like this. Growing up she was never a stand-out at school and her parents didn’t pay much attention to her. Her mother was always more concerned with status and appearances and what their social standing was in the city’s thriving and growing Bengali community. Her mother was constantly comparing Rukmini to other girls in the community. Many of them were getting excellent grades but Rukmini was a solid C + student and this caused Rukmini much shame. She just assumed all her friends were smarter than her. Not only that, she had to deal with being one of the few brown kids at her school. At cultural gatherings when the Bengali community came together, her friends, discussed such things as who was on their way to receiving scholarships, who was lighter skinned, and who amongst them planned on a career in engineering or medicine. Rukmini struggled with the feeling that she disappointed her parents in all these categories. She was not light-skinned and she didn’t have a head for math or science, and the prospect of a future in engineering gave her a feeling of paralyzing boredom. She wanted romance and a life full of travel and adventure. Her father was an engineer and didn’t seem at all interested in anything Rukmini did but was mostly focused on her little brother who didn’t have a care in the world being the long-wanted son born to an Indian family. Her little brother was born when she was 10, Rukmini couldn’t help but feel that her parents finally welcomed the child they had been waiting for all their lives. He was doted upon by her parents and nobody mentioned anything about the shade of his skin. She felt constantly overlooked at home and school. She never really felt like she received any of her father’s attention or her mother's love so lived her life into her 20s constantly seeking what she saw as the ultimate validation in the form of the male gaze. She just wanted someone to notice her and tell her she was pretty. The only person who thought she was special was her friend Soloni who admired everything about Rukmini. As Rukmini experimented with makeup and styles, she likened herself as a mentor to a very eager Soloni, teaching her how to dress and display more confidence. While Rukmini struggled with her confidence at home, she felt self-assured around her Bengali community misfit of friends.
While she never had a boyfriend in high school, because no one showed any interest in her, by the time she started university in her hometown of Calgary it was a new beginning. It was the dawn of the 1990s and a whole new world had opened up for her. She started dressing better and had more friends in university, including her childhood family friends from the community that she had grown up with. Then finally she had a boyfriend. Kash was not the type of guy she normally dated because he was a bit of a loser, truth be told. It all began when he desperately wanted to cross the line of friendship and be her boyfriend, so she let him. Unfortunately for Rukmini, upon winning the prize of making her his girlfriend, he broke up with her after a few months saying he didn’t feel the way he thought he initially did. She was right all along; they were better off as friends. So what could Rukmini do but accept this after introducing him to all her closest friends?
He seemed to take an interest in Soloni right away and that made Rukmini uneasy. Rukmini always had everything over Soloni. If she didn’t feel pretty enough, confident enough, she always secretly knew she was “better than” Soloni at least. She wasn’t insecure like Soloni. She was the pretty one, even though Soloni was the smart one. Now here is a guy who chose Soloni, over her and this is a hard pill to swallow.
FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Setting
The setting is in the early 1990s in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. There is a small-town feel to this mid-sized Canadian city. Some scenes take place in mostly suburban homes, community halls where South Asian cultural festivals are held, and then, when the characters are older, in nightclubs in the city’s downtown core. The city is not known for its diversity so many of the young people from different immigrant groups come together in social settings at the university, favorite local haunts, and their homes. The many young immigrant twenty-somethings who hadn’t gone away for university still lived at home and answered to their parents as most of the characters in this story are children of immigrants, twenty years after the mass immigration from South Asia in the 1970s took place in Canada. Given this era of Generation X, these children of immigrants had a more conservative upbringing than the current-day second and third-generation offspring of immigrants in North America. These characters often must deal with their parents' traumatic decisions rooted in survival mode and scarcity issues. For these characters, it often shows up as over-protective parenting all while having few financial resources and wanting to preserve one’s culture while settling in a new country.
One of the first scenes is set on a blistering cold winter’s night after the two friends, Soloni and Rukmini have come back from a night out of dancing. The winter cold is piercing but Rukmini is reassured by the comfort and warmth of her friendship with one of her oldest and dearest friends as they attempt to warm their limbs in the refuge of Soloni’s car. The heat from the car’s radiator provides some respite to her icy hands and feet in the blistering prairie winter. She has been left out in the cold (by way of getting dumped by Kash) but here is her friend making her feel better by taking her on a night out to let off some steam and bond like they did when they were younger. Rukmini, after getting tipsy at their favorite majestic nightclub, in a moment of vulnerability, confessed how much she was still hurting from her breakup with Kash and how much she still missed him. Soloni appears to be comforting her but she is also masking her deceit as a relationship (unbeknownst to Rukmini) has already begun between her and Kash.
They return to Soloni’s parent’s home and settle in on the pull-out couch in her homey suburban basement for an impromptu slumber party, much like they did years before as teenagers. Soloni now in the safety of her home dwelling is less guarded. She lets a few things slip. Here is where Rukmini picks up on a few clues that Soloni may be hiding something from her regarding the nature of her relationship with Kash.
There are flashbacks to warmer Calgary summer days when life was full of promise and when Rukmini’s romance with Kash was just blossoming. The sky is crisp, endless, and blue, as Alberta is known as “Big Sky Country” so the possibilities were endless and hopeful as to where this new romance was to lead Rukmini. It began at the Calgary Stampede, an annual country exhibition and fair that has been enthusiastically celebrated in the city for generations. Kash wins a huge stuffed animal on the fairgrounds for Rukmini and she is charmed by him. This begins their romance.
Cultural events at community centers, halls, and old churches play a big part in the setting of this story. When there is a cultural festival, immigrant groups rent out these halls decorate them with their cultural ornaments, and gather together for food and prayer. While many cultural groups now in 2024 have dedicated temples and cultural clubhouses, at the time in the 90s many of these buildings and gathering locations were still being built after years of fundraising. Here families and participants dress up in their best cultural garb, bring potluck, feast, pray, and rejoice, and hold shows showcasing local talent in the community to entertain all who are invited. It’s something that’s looked forward to by all the Bengalis around the city from different neighborhoods eager to come together a few times a year for Navrathri Holi or Durga Puja.