Peacocks Dancing,Sharon's second novel, is set in Guyana and India.

Like Of Marriageable Age it is in part a coming-of-age story, in part a story about finding one's roots and one's mission in life. Also, like Of Marriageable Age it is laced with pain and tragedy — and a little bit more than laced. Peacocks Dancing, in spite of the image of light and colour the title conjures up, takes the reader into one of the darkest stains on the landscape of humanity: the black pit that is Kamathipura.

Sharon on Peacocks Dancing:

"When I started writing this story I did not plan to enter Bombay's notorious Red Light District. I certainly did not plan to write a book ‘about’ child prostitution. I intensely dislike political manifestos disguised as novels; fiction, for me, is character driven, and the moment a novel becomes a platform for the author to rant about this or that social issue it loses its life. And yet this darkness exists, and that's where my cast of characters found themselves, and that's where I, their creator, had to follow them. But I refuse to wallow in sorrow and darkness forever, and I'll never to let my characters do so. I believe intensely in the transformation of pain into its opposite through spiritual growth, and for this reason, and this reason alone, I allowed my Peacocks Dancing characters to walk through that dark valley."

The story:

(Excerpted from the review of The Literary Moose: website)

"On wild girls with a golden heart.

In the suburbs of Georgetown, a small willful girl is growing up; a daughter of an easygoing man of Indian descent, and a mother she barely remembers. While she is still small, she must face the motherless world, into which a new entrant comes, an alien being, a horror of a new mother, and to tell the truth, nothing is as it used to have been, for the stepmother is one great catastrofee, as Rita notes in her first diary. In time the small girl learns how to avoid the meddling substitute for a mother; that is not so easy, but neither is it too hard, given that the latter is not mean, but merely has a weird set of whimsical demands that are not a bother to comply with, merely a nuisance, or are easily worked around. As years pass, the situation stabilizes, and the abandoned girl grows into a wild child who is soon to become an equally wild woman. A permanent misfit, she — but despite that fact she is growing and developing as any other child with a normal family. More, Rita is charismatic, always has been. Initially, it is the queue of children who look up to her, knowing that no day is wasted when wild Rita Maraj is going to lead them to one adventure or another, devise a prank or two, or tell them stories.

When the days of first blushes come, you will be deeply entrenched in the storyline, bouncing between amusement and fascination with Guyana, the land where all races are mixed, though not blended, in a hot, steaming environment whose degree of complication is only exceeded by the degree of its complexity. Wild, wild goose she is, our Rita. Ah, what hell she must have gone through those days. To begin, now she has a small sister, impossible to get rid of, in the vein of a shadow, always lurking where she is least needed or wanted. One day — and this is the day I don't believe I will ever forget, Rita goes on for a man hunt, though that she would never admit — even should her feet soles been burnt and her hair pulled. What the girls don't hesitate to do when they want to attract attention! Devil had it, in the celestial form of her sister, that in the least appropriate moment, the green sponges come into view… Green sponges? if you don't see it already, poor Rita didn't have any… attributes to speak of, and thus the sponges, green as they were. No end to embarrassment! Sitting in the darkness of the cinema afterwards, the miserable creature saw the world twirling in tears, the silver screen filled with green sponges, shame the only feeling, nothing but death ahead. Didn't you have a moment like this, when you wanted to fall under the ground, when without any mathematical training with insane certainty you grasped, absorbed the full meaning of infinity? Oh, 'tis true that shames we do have different when we are older, but the nature of the phenomenon is identical. I didn't much care for Rita before the day of doom, but since then, I have befriended her. I think you will, too, for she is a very admirable girl — wildness, green sponges and all.

So the girls grow slowly into women, stumbling a little here and there, and everything returns to the equilibrium. More or less, for it is a crime to speak of this revered state of nature when the girl is as wild, and the times as turbulent. A disaster comes when Rita loses track of her the bratty, self-centered little clump of a sister, loses sight of her and thus control of the situation, for a reason simplest of all, for such as you and I, the readers. Lost in a book, sitting in a bookstore, Rita forgets about the world around. In the space of minutes, the world is transformed. The street accident takes the sister to the hospital, for fortunately she lives through, and it also takes everything from Rita, the ground from beneath her feet, for it can't be denied that it is all her fault. In addition to the finite, but sufficiently long sequence of failures, we may now add the biggest failure of all. In midst of a slowly, but amusingly rolling storyline, we experience a bifurcation, a volcano of events, and the novel suddenly undergoes transformation from a sleeper of a diary to a fast-paced oriental fable reminiscent of Edward Morgan Forster; that is: with powerful imagery achieved via very modest means (Grand Moose knows that writers of the orient can be painfully verbose). What strikes the reader throughout the novel is its originality, no doubt due to the uniqueness of the heroine, and by extension, the narrator behind. But then you might have known that from the very start, for Rita is a peg that neither is square, nor does it fit into any known hole, round or otherwise.

The storyline stumbles on its feet in one moment though, as I found it hard to believe the improbability of the coincidences imposed on the efforts of Rita et consortes during the search for the lost child. Probably, once you get over this improbable improbability of the probabilities, you will enjoy the rest of the story quite much; and that includes the writing style, which despite the length of the novel is quite reserved (albeit not minimalist), the imagery — which combined with the ascetic means of expression is what I think puts Maas apart from other authors who pursue the Indian dream of one sort or another), the careful avoidance of stereotypes that are the usual stone roped to the neck of any Oriental novel, and finally, to repeat for the umpteenth time — the uniqueness of the protagonist."

HarperCollins interview on Peacocks Dancing.

Review by Lalitha Nataraj at Sawnet

Interview with Dr Ishwarprasad Gilada on child prostitution in Bombay.

Have you read Peacocks Dancing? Tell Sharon what you thought.

Of Marriageable Age was Sharon's first novel. When she wrote it she was living in an ancient farmhouse: very pretty to look at but lacking central heating. Her computer stood in a corner of the bedroom, which was unheated and freezing cold in winter. But... writing kept her warm. [read more][buy the book ] After the devastating death of Jyothi’s mother a charitable Western couple whisks her away from Bombay’s chaos, danger, and filth. She is given a comfortable home, a first-class education - and a precious half-violin. [read more] [buy the book]