he's so soft-spoken you have to...

Here’s the article from today’s edition of the Indian Express: it appeared in the Delhi Newsline section.

City Blues

Anushree Majumdar

He’s so soft-spoken that you have to strain to hear him. But Ankush Saikia is worth listening to, for the 31-year-old has come out with his first novel Jet City Woman (Rupa, Rs 195), a pacy narrative that weaves splendidly through Delhi and the Northeast (of India), a relatively virgin territory in Indian English.

Jet City Woman, named after a Queensryche song, is about a reluctant journalist from Shillong, a mystery woman called Naina and an Afghan drug dealer. It is also about people who are, in one way or the other, lost in Delhi. “I was trying to write a contemporary book on people who were likely to fall through the cracks in most mainstream narratives,” says Saikia.

Much like the protagonist, Saikia had left the languorous green of Shillong for the urban oddities of Delhi, jangled the keyboard as a journalist at India Today, indiaabroad.com and expressindia.com before becoming an editor at Dorling Kindersley. Along the way, sometime in 2001, Jet City Woman began as a short story but, over five years, turned into a novel spread over 190-odd pages. But Saikia denies autobiographical overtones, saying only the places are real, not the people. Some of the characters, he says, sprang from books and newspaper articles that he had read. “I read about this Afghan coke dealer called Naqibullah who was caught in Delhi last year and that was how the character Karim emerged. Naina, on the other hand, is vaguely like Lara in Dr Zhivago,” he says.

Now Saikia, who was short-listed for the Outlook/Picador-India Non-fiction Writing Award in 2005, is gearing up to put together a collection of short stories and a travel book. But it isn’t easy, he says, with a regular job. “The hardest thing is the simplest: to sit at your desk everyday and write. You need time, to experience life, especially its knocks, which become commoner as you grow older, and most importantly to develop a coherent view of the world and its ways,” says Saikia, too solemn for a thirty-something.

I don't like the first line and the last line. They make me seem like a quiet humourless bore. And two minor quibbles: the Afghan in question was first arrested in 2001, i remember mentioning this (he died under suspicious circumstances in Delhi's Tihar jail earlier this year), and they didn't mention my blog (i've asked for it to be inserted in the article on the Express site, but that doesn't seem to have happened as yet). But overall a nice story. I can only hope that a lot of people went out looking for Jet City Woman today. The photo of me along with the article was taken by Tashi, who appeared in my last post.

Addendum: This post wasn't meant in any way to be a criticism of the Indian Express or the people who worked on this story. The Express gave my book it's first two press mentions and i'm grateful for that. I should have explained that what a reporter writes and what appears under his or her byline can be very different things, courtesy the copy desk. I should know, I was a sub-editor before moving on to publishing.