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No amount of research can get you to know a completely different central character from the inside out. I researched quite a bit of Viraf’s story the hard way, by having lived it. A relevant term is ‘felt knowledge,’ and that was an invaluable ingredient in the making of Go Home,” says US based author Sohrab Homi Fracis (pictured). Like his protagonist, Viraf, the author studied abroad during the American backlash against the Iran hostage crisis. "That was the crucible in which some of my maturity was forged, just as his was. There’s a line in the narrative that goes, ‘And the felt weight of even small violence had left him intolerant of all violence, except in defence or for justice.’ That precisely defines my own stance,” reveals Fracis.
A novel in the school of realism and about tricky times "demands a high level of authenticity if it is to work at a high literary level, delivering depth of both story and characterization. So to some necessary degree, the old dictum of ‘Write what you know’ holds true… In a novel, a story is paramount, and can best be delivered by employing artistic/poetic license, (unlike) a memoir that must adhere to fact and its inherent restrictions,” believes Fracis.
Go Home (reviewed in Parsiana, August 21, 2018) has earned considerable acclaim for Fracis. Earlier this year, Stanford University shortlisted his book for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Last year the book was a finalist for the 2017 International Book Awards, in the multicultural fiction category and had won him the South Asian Literary Association Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Writing. He was also featured on the cover of Northeast Florida’s arts and entertainment magazine Folio Weekly after the release of his novel.
Recalling his journey through various professions before he decided to pursue writing, Fracis states, "I started off as a third-generation civil engineer, destined to follow in my father (Homi)’s and maternal grandfather (Hormusji Engineer)’s footsteps and join them in their flourishing construction company, Levka. I had the credentials but not the true interest, so I trained as a business software consultant with Tata Burroughs, and was on contract to a couple of Fortune 100 companies, including Ford, before I burned out entirely on the technological work front.
"My next step, I felt, had to be in a direction of true interest… So I tried my hand at writing, and when it seemed like I had potential, returned to college for my second masters, in creative writing (his first masters was in civil engineering). Those two years, during which I was hired part-time on the University of North Florida campus as an English peer tutor, were among the best years of my life. By the end, I was publishing stories in literary magazines, but it would be a long haul before my first book was published. In the meantime, I taught literature and composition and eventually creative writing at the University. I still teach/lead the occasional fiction workshop at venues such as the Florida Heritage Book Festival held at Flagler College.”
 In 2001 his first book, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, brought him US’s prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award, won for the first time by an author of Asian origin. The German edition released in 2006 was selected among the year’s ‘Most Beautiful Books’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Gaining in popularity, he was invited to be Visiting Writer in Residence at Augsburg College, as Artist in Residence at Escape to Create, and as Artist in Residence at Yaddo, one of the two oldest art colonies in the US. Some of the other honors to come his way were the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction. "It has been a good millennium,” he notes.

 

 

 

The transition from penning short stories to writing a novel was indeed difficult, admits Fracis: "During the conceptual/planning stage, I found it helpful to wrap my head around much of a short story before beginning to draft it. But the far greater scope and depth required of a novel prohibited that luxury, so I had to step out in faith, not really knowing where the draft was going nor how best to proceed. The potential for a misstep somewhere along the long and uncertain process was proportionately higher and the penalty greater, possibly fatal, as I’d learned with an early attempt at a novel that, aside from published excerpts, had remained unpublished as a whole for some good reasons.”
He has conducted a workshop on recognizing and navigating the difference between the two forms of writing at the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival where the participants compared ‘Hood,’ a twice-published short excerpt from Go Home, with the novel itself, "both of which share opening pages that are close to identical except for appropriate modifications that allow for the difference in scope and depth.”

 

 

 

 

For Fracis, home, during his formative years, was in Bombay where his parents and elder sister resided with his maternal grandparents in the Marine Lines area on Queen’s Road. "My grandfather had played cricket for Maharaja’s Eleven against the visiting British teams and captained the Parsi Gymkhana team. His nephew, my mother’s cousin, was India’s ‘dashing’ wicketkeeper/batsman, Farokh Engineer. My grandfather outlived my grandmother, Shirin Engineer, and even my mother Dinsi by many years, eventually falling in his ‘nervous 90s,’ good cricketer that he was.
"My father, Hormusji’s partner at Levka, prided himself on never bribing anyone in order to get the company work done and also on its reputation for building excellent pharmaceutical factories. He taught me the value of honesty and quality. My mother, a fine pianist and avid reader, was one of the gentlest people I’ve known as is my older sister Nilu Shapurji. Encouraged by our parents, Nilu and I had been addicted to the pleasures of reading.” Sohrab studied at Campion School and Elphinstone College before graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. "A good family is a blessing one appreciates and misses all the more when one lives halfway around the world from them,” says Sohrab who is single and resides in Jacksonville, Florida.
Recounting his decision to leave India, Sohrab relates, "All my wing mates at IIT, Kharagpur were preparing to apply abroad by sitting for the worldwide GRE (Graduate Record Examinations). So in spite of being more of a sportsman than a good student, I thought it was the thing to do and wrote the exam at Bombay’s US Information Service. To my surprise, I did very well, and eventually was offered a research assistantship at the University of Delaware. It wasn’t much of a leap of faith. At that age (I was 22), like Viraf, I just thought of going abroad as ‘the next great adventure.’ And yes, I experienced a wide range of culture shock/clash.”
Viewing Parsis as "an amazing story and a remarkable community,” 60-year-old Sohrab mentions, "I really admire our ancient-Iranian ancestors’ courage in braving the unknown in order to hold on to their beliefs, and also the community’s fortitude in surviving for so long as a minuscule minority in India as well as its ability to put its stamp on such a huge country and, eventually, even the world. Here’s a passage that encapsulates this communal journey in my novel, Go Home: 
‘Go home to Iran. To a place he’d never seen.
‘Go back a thousand years.
‘Reverse his ancestors’ voyage into the unknown, after the Arab invasion put Zoroastrianism to the sword. In wooden dhows, half a millennium before Columbus embarked for India, they’d sailed the Arabian Sea. Iran to India, Pars to Gujarat, migration in his blood.
   ‘There would be no going home, no going back ever for the Parsis. Centuries of settling and moving and starting up again. Sanjan to Navsari, Navsari to Udvada, Udvada to Bombay. And now, after hundreds of years, India to America. Old World to New.’”
 Uncertain of where the community is heading, Sohrab feels "it depends somewhat on how the battle between the orthodox and progressive factions plays out. What once helped it survive as an exiled community, its ability to circle its wagons around its religious beliefs, has now endangered it as an inbred and dwindling religious community that bars the children of its women who marry men from other religions and also (discourages) interested people from converting into it. I’m not religious myself, but I would think religious people would want their religion to spread and be available to anyone. So this religious form of protectionism is counter-productive and unbecoming of an otherwise generous community. I’m glad to see that the current generation, in India and abroad, is increasingly marrying whomever it pleases.”
About his future writing plans, he says, "I’ve begun to work on short stories again. A new Florida story ‘We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida’ was released by Burrow Press of Orlando in the critically acclaimed 2017 book anthology. Another new story was published this year in the literary magazine Flock. And a third new story will appear next month in the book anthology, 15 Views of Jacksonville. Eventually I may have the makings of a second story collection. And I also have the beginnings of another novel.”