jet city woman in khan market

I was in Khan Market the other day and did a bit of investigating. My book is in the three big bookshops there: Bahrisons, Faqirchand, and Full Circle. They’ve all sold a couple of copies, and there have been enquiries from people, which is not bad for a first-time novel from a relatively unknown writer. The north-eastern angle to the thing must be creating some curiosity.

At Full Circle one the salesgirls turned out to be an Assamese. She got up from her seat to talk to me when I mentioned I was the author of Jet City Woman. “For your next book,” she advised me, “try and write about north-east India, about Assam, like Indira Goswami for example. A lot of people, especially foreigners, ask about the north-east.” I’ll keep that in mind. Though of course I think I should write on anything I please. The last thing I want is to be typecast as a “north-eastern writer” or, even worse, a “north-east expert”!

I left my Dorling Kindersley visiting card (Ankush Saikia, Editor, it says) at Bahrisons, and later got a mail and a call from Anuj Bahri. Mr Bahri is a man who wears many hats: bookseller, publisher, and literary agent. Indian publishing is growing, and here’s a man who’s on the move. There’s a Delhi International Arts Festival happening during the middle of December, and Mr Bahri’s invited me to take part in a discussion on contemporary Indian writing. I might even have to do a reading from my book. The programme details haven’t been finalised yet; will put them up here when they are. The photos you see of the poster and the book are at Bahrisons.

I read somewhere recently that rents in Khan Market have gone up by 100% from one year to the next, and that it’s now India’s costliest (and the world’s 24th costliest) retail location. That reminded me of something Khushwant Singh (who stays across the road in Sujan Singh Park) mentioned, about Khan Market in the old days having book-lending shops and cycle-repair shops. That seems to belong to a slower and more graceful era, a time when black & white photographs of Connaught Place would show maybe five people and a solitary car. On that note, I’m waiting to watch Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand, a story set in Mumbai’s film industry of the 1950s, a time when our nation was very young. One of Mishra’s earlier films was the interesting Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi with the even more interesting Chitrangada Singh. Khoya Khoya Chand releases this Friday, the 7th.

I received an invite today in my e-mail from Jeet Thayil for a book launch-cum-discussion on the 7th of December. It’s a first novel titled Lunatic in my Head by Anjum Hasan, someone from my part of the world. She’ll be having a discussion with Siddhartha Deb, who’s written two novels set in north-east India, The Point of Return and Surface. I’ve never been to this sort of an event before, but I might for this one. Will put up a post about it if I do go. Khoya Khoya Chand will in that case have to wait a day.