Vee Kumari
Writer, Actor, Producer
"A journey from the left side of my brain to the right."
About Vee
Vee Kumari grew up in the south of India. A lover of books from a young age, her favorite authors were Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. She would hide to read, to avoid her mother, who might want her to do a chore or two. It was her mother who directed her to use the dictionary to learn the meanings of new words and construct sentences with them. Vee wanted to become an English professor but went to medical school, where she excelled.
After arriving in the US, Vee earned a doctorate in Anatomy and became a faculty member at the UC Davis Medical Center, where she worked for over 35 years, and later at the Keck School of Medicine for five years. Teaching neuroanatomy to medical students became another passion for her. She published numerous scientific papers and won several teaching awards. During this time, she continued to read contemporary mysteries and other fiction.
When she retired in 2012, she took classes at The Gotham Writers’ Workshop and the UCLA Writers Program and had the privilege of being mentored by authors Lynn Hightower, Caroline Leavitt, and Karen Bender.
“Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery” is her debut novel, which incorporates her observations of Indian immigrants and Indian American lives in the US. It is now a feature script that Vee is pitching for production.
Her second novel, “ANKANAM, An Inner Courtyard,” was published by Nu Voices Press in India and is available on Kindle Direct Publishing. It will soon be available on Amazon.com.
She is also an actor who has appeared in over fifty films and TV shows, including Criminal Minds, Glow, and Scrambled. She has also produced five short films, including Halwa, which garnered first prize in HBO’s 2019 Asia Pacific American Visionaries contest.
Vee lives in Los Angeles near her daughters and their families.
To learn more about Vee and her work, explore here:
Books
Dharma
A Rekha Rao Mystery
Meet my protagonist, Rekha Rao, a thirty-something Indian American professor of art history. Disillusioned by academia and haunted by the murder of her father, for which she believes police convicted the wrong person, she moves away from her match-making family. She’s focusing on managing her PTSD and healing her heart broken by an abusive boyfriend.
She gets entangled in a second murder that of her mentor and father figure. An idol of the Hindu Goddess Durga is the murder weapon left on the body. Rekha is asked to help Detective Al Newton understand the relationship, if any, between the meaning of the statue and the motive for the murder. She’s attracted to Al but steers clear of him because of her distaste for cops and fear of a new relationship, sticking to what she was asked to do. The two constantly clash, starting a love-hate relationship. Meanwhile, she’s set up to meet a suitor, an Indian attorney who turns out to be a very likeable man.
When police arrest one of her students, and accuse her mentor of idol theft, Rekha’s ‘dharma’, her duty, rears its head, and propels her into looking for the killer on her own. Despite admonitions from Al and bodily harm caused by an intruder who broke into her home, Rekha finds the killer, and in the process, emerges from the cocoon of a protected upbringing, to taste the prospect of a romance, and discover her true identity.