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The story line of  Abha Nama was culled from a forgotten manuscript lying ignored in her old laptop. ...... a text of three thousand words about a teacher’s life    with a strange title ‘ Abha Madam’s attendance register. She began working on it  and painting on pillow covers some of the themes described in the book.  She loves painting on used material and so  pillow covers were a favourite medium to work on.  They  stand witness to dreams, frustrations, sorrows and tears hence  they are very portent territory.

Savia is not a trained painter.  Her  mother was a embroideress and an uncle gave her rudimentary lessons as a child how to work with china ink.  And that was it.  But when studying Ancient Indian History at Elphinstone and St Xavier’s College Mumbai one had to be constantly in touch with the art, architecture and archaeology of the past.  Her love for looking at art soon had her hand moving in different directions and that is when she  began to paint at a mature age of 40.  Many artists have taken to painting very late in life, one classic  example is Rabindranath Tagore who began to doodle in his 60s. ‘The advantage of being an untrained painter is this that your lines come purely from your own imagination, they are not like enforced by a rule, Savia admits.

Initially Savia wanted to major in English literature thinking that mastery over English would make her a writer but as her education progressed towards graduation she did  opt for English lit but soon realized much to her chagrin that teaching of English literature only encouraged a very Anglo-Saxon way of seeing and looking and even writing even in the early 80s.  This discouraged her  for her  real reason to be a writer was to discover  her Indian  roots.  Goa had been liberated and everything about India seemed so new at that time.So Savia opted for Ancient Indian Culture fired by the ideas of Romila Thapar and other Marxist historians of the 80s.  But outside of a few great universities the teaching of the past was very brahmanized and sanskritized, she soon discovered.  So she tumbled into a different world altogether.

In Abha Nama Savia has  tried to recreate through the experiences of an ordinary teacher , the processes of education  in a large number of institutions in India.  It is true that when the British left India , the power was inherited by the class elites of India and to a large extent they became the power barons wielding authority and ‘ruling.’  This simple story talks about such a minority institution and the book is important  because it talks about the inner world of teachers.  So little is written about it in fiction.  Teaching is always treated as a soft career option and there is a great deal of feminization in the work place.  This book probes such situations

On account of the illustrations it is easy to read and would help college students understand the hierarchies in teaching and the world that they inhabit.  The illustrations are not like those in the graphic novel which lead on to the story through blurbs.  But in this book if a chapter is talking about a principal then the chapter has illustrations that throw light on his character.  So in a way they draw you inward into the book.