Virtually every woman in her 40s has asked the question: who am I if not a mother, sister, daughter… making newly released mystery fiction novel The Portsmanbridge Riddle a compelling read. 
Written by Bahrain-based author Sonorita Chauhan Mehta, under pen name Sasha Wren, it follows Tarangini Ved, a retired foreign correspondent. When a respected figure is found dead and it is ruled an accident, Tara’s instincts, honed across two decades of watching official verdicts turn out to be wrong, tell her otherwise. 
The Indian expatriate from Um Al Hassam has been working on the book – the first instalment in the planned Tarangini Ved Mystery series – since her university days and decided to complete it. 
“I’ve been writing this book for a very, very long time since college,” said the communications and branding strategy consultant.
“I had around 15,000 words ready but I changed most of it because life, right? You pick up a lot more experience. You understand a lot more about the world, cultures, nuances and then the entire lived experience of being a journalist so a lot of that got translated into this as well,” she added. 
Elaborating on protagonist Tara and how her story might resonate with women in her generation, Sonorita noted that the book is about a woman who has spent her whole life being useful to other people and finally has to work out who she is once nobody is asking her to be useful anymore. 
“I think a lot of us reach that point eventually, whether it’s retiring, being made redundant or children leaving for college. But I didn’t want to write Tara’s retirement as rest. I wanted to write it as a second innings, a niche in a world that seldom gives women like her the liberty to carve,” she explained.
The engineer by qualification kickstarted her career as a radio journalist and then went on to work in newrooms across India. She revealed that her journey has partly influenced the protagonist and story. 
“I’ve seen the kind of disruption that she (Tara) has seen from behind the scenes. Those are not things that you leave behind very easily,” she added. 
The quadragenarian eventually transitioned from news to luxury and then communication. However, she has vivid memories of her life as a journalist, making her debut release semi-autobiographical. For instance, she owns a chipped coffee mug that makes an appearance in the story.
An excerpt from the novel reads:
‘The mug was red. Not the red of something new, but the particular faded red of an object that had been handled daily for a long time and had stopped caring about its appearance. A chip on the rim. A crack in the glaze that dated from Beirut. She had carried it through four cities and a move back to England and still used it every morning, not out of sentiment, but because a chipped mug on a good morning was a reminder that she had survived worse than whatever the day intended.
‘She filled it from the French press. Colombian single-origin, medium roast, ground twelve minutes ago. She had found the supplier in her first week in Portsmanbridge, a small roaster in Bristol who sent a new bag each fortnight, and the ritual of it, the grinding and the timing and the smell that filled the kitchen before anything else happened, had become the one fixed point in a life that was otherwise still deciding what it was going to be.
‘She took the mug to the window. The sea was doing its November thing. Grey into grey into grey. The horizon barely there, the sky and water arguing over which was which. She had hated this kind of morning once.’
An alumna of the Indian School Bahrain, Sonorita recounted growing up in the kingdom and how it influenced her career. “The BBC audio dramas that were aired on Radio Bahrain were my obsession for the longest time. And it still continues. Hearing them was one of the reasons I wanted to do radio. Bahrain as a place gave you the liberty to grow up carefree so you can choose any career you like,” she noted. 
She added that as her parents worked at the Indian School Bahrain, she spent a lot of time on campus especially in the library.
“I must have finished all the books in that library by the time I passed out. Bahrain has quite literally been with me from the first page I ever read to the first page I’ve ever published,” said the murder mystery fan. 
The Portsmanbridge Riddle is available on Amazon and will soon hit the shelves at select bookstores in Bahrain.