‘so what is the book all about?’

“So what is the book all about?” is the question about the book I dread the most. (The second being, “Is this the story of your life?” The answer to that is: NO!) I feel incapable of putting the novel into one or two sentences. But if it’s something that has to be done for publicity’s sake, maybe a line from the book’s back cover will do: ‘Spanning five years, and alternating between northeast India and New Delhi, this is a story of love and loss, of lives adrift in a mega city, and of the lesser-known side of urban India.’

I would prefer to talk about how this novel came into being. Sometime in 2001, when I was working as a sub-editor at a news website based in Delhi, I was sent by the chief editor to cover an art exhibition at a hotel. Mine was a desk job, but there was a shortage of reporters, so I was asked to go for the exhibition: a lightweight story basically. At around the same time an Afghan was arrested in the city for supplying cocaine: it was quite a big story for a while.

The exhibition and the drug dealer came together in my mind in the form of a short story, which I wrote in three days and sent off to the literary section of tehelka.com. It was called Jet City Woman—no deep thought behind the title, just the name of an old song I happened to hear on FM radio. The short story had three main characters who went on to form the basis for my novel: the unnamed ‘reluctant journalist’ from Shillong, the mysterious female TV reporter Naina, and the Afghan cocaine dealer Karim. The story was put up on the tehelka homepage, I received quite a few mails from people telling me how good the story was, and I thought that I had, overnight, turned into a ‘writer’ who could now write a novel. I was wrong of course. It took me five more years. In that time there were three more jobs, and three attempts at writing a novel that had to be abandoned halfway.

Getting the book accepted, edited, and then published took me another year-and-a-half. But that is another story. The strongest feeling when I held the first copy of the book was one of relief: relief that it was finally out in the market, and that I could start working on another book.

P.S. Question about the book I dread the most no.3: “Who is Naina based on?”!