Chapal Mehra is a publishing professional with over a decade in the Indian publishing industry. He began is career as a commissioning person at McGraw Hill and later worked at the Oxford University Press and Sage Publications. His last full-time assignment in publishing was as Acquisitions Manager at Penguin India. He has worked on consulting assignments with Harvard Business School Press, United Nations Development Program  and the Global business Coalition Against HIV/ AIDS. He is a graduate of New York University and is currently based in New Delhi and works as a full-time strategy and content consultant. Ask Chapal about the authors he has introduced to the market and the list is impressive. The three he always mentions are (a) We Are Like That Only by ex-McKinsey consultant and Marketing thought leader Rama Bijapurkar was the bestselling book in the non-fiction and business category for over 2 years(2007-9) and still continues to be hugely successful book in its revised avatar.  Chapal had chaperoned that book into the market. (b) Arun Maira’s Remaking India was considered a path breaking book in the application of consensus building and conflict resolution in business to national politics and development. (c) The Romance of Tata Steel by RM Lala has been critically hailed as a definitive biography of this great Indian organization.

I thought it would be great to have his perspective that first time authors could benefit from.

Abhijit: What were you looking for when you commissioned those authors?

Chapal Mehra: I think some of the better known writers that I have commissioned at various times include Arum Maira, Rama Bijapurkar, Kaushik Basu, Santosh Desai and  Jerry Rao. Not all these books came to fruition but those that did were quite successful.

I think the fundamental qualities  that one looks for in an author is a deep understanding and passion for the ideas that they want to write on, an innovative perspective on the subject and a reasonably good writing style along with a fair bit of flexibility. New ideas are very, very important  as is context which makes it relevant to the immediate market that you are addressing. A book as you know is a collaborative process. A writer entirely left on their own is often insular. Unless of course, s/he is an absolute genius. But how many of those exist?

Abhijit: As a writer how does one know which publishing house is the right one for me?

It works differently for different genres but a few simple rules apply.

A natural point is that the publisher should a considerable presence in the market you wish to address. Every brand, however big, has specializations or sub brands. Make sure you are with the right brand which has the infrastructure to bring you to your reader.  A big brand which is not player in the area you are writing on is useless for you . For eg. An academic book is well-regarded when it comes from a university press instead of say Penguin.  The next, of course, is that the publisher should have substantial content or similar books like yours, for eg. you cannot do an engineering book with a social science publisher . It would be lost. So having a companion list is important. Having a companion list ensures that the subject area gets enough attention by marketing and promotion and also your book rides along with other books. You also need to look at what the publishers strongest points are – editorial, marketing or sales? You have to understand your partners strengths and weaknesses and what they can provide you best.

Finally, your publishing house and editor have to believe in the idea that you wish to write on. It has to be a combined passion of sorts. You cannot start your first book with someone who doesn’t share your excitement. The sad thing is that in India this paddling pool is tiny.

Abhijit: Should the first time writers have agents?

Chapal Mehra: Sure. If you can find one you like and who delivers for you. Its tricky especially in India. You need to know the following : What is the role of the agent? What do you want them to do ? What do you see them providing are all things that need to be discussed before you embark on the agent relationship. It also depends on the agent you get.

Whenever I have acted as an agent I draft a strategy with the writer before we sign anything and make it clear to them what it is that I can deliver. And there is usually a follow up plan . As an agent the fun for me is to over deliver. I am also brutally frank with authors whose work I don’t think has international audience. Its better of they hate you now rather than later. We start with clear goals and work towards them instead of having some hazy idea of making you rich and famous.

Writers often overestimate the service that agents can provide. Every agent is not going to take you international with a  big fat advance. And really do you deserve that? Also you must learn from other examples worldwide. How many authors travel internationally across the world to you? Does everyone have that potential? Clearly not

Before you get an agent, you need to be sure and clear about what you want the agent to do for you. There are a lot of editorial inputs that agents can give. They can also open the right doors for you in the publishing companies and advise you on the appropriate marketing and publicity strategy. But there are agents and agents so please be sure what you want from them .

Abhijit: How should a writer choose an agent?

Chapal Mehra: Like I said earlier, before you choose anyone be objective and determine for yourself what you want for your book. If you are not Murkami, Ishiguro or Rushdie you need to be a little bit realistic in the goals you set for your work.

So for starters, your vision of the book and the agent’s vision of YOUR book have to match. You have to agree on who the primary audience is, where it should be published and how it should be marketed. Again its like a long-term relationship. You need to be sure you want the same things and agree on a  common set of goals and these can include things such as specific deliverables such as advances and marketing  .

And in case you don’t know what you want, then you have to be guided by your agent but also do your little bit of research. Agents are like all other consultants, some deliver exactly what you want, some deliver more, some just don’t deliver. Remember the list of deliverables that you draw up helps the agent and you. Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel by accident –he planned it.

Abhijit: What are the most common mistakes first time authors make? How should one avoid doing those?

Chapal Mehra: Oh they are endless:

1. Wrong agent
2. Wrong publisher
3. No idea of what they wanted for their book except that it  should get published
4. No idea of the terms of the agreement they signed
5. No idea of their intellectual property subclauses
6. Not enough discussion on how the book will be marketed and promoted

Most assume that the publisher is doing them a favor by publishing their book. Hence they refuse to ask any questions and later complain about how they were tricked. This is at heart a business transaction. So you need to be sure what you are getting into. No one is doing you a favor.  It is also an intellectual transaction so you need to be doubly sure that your ideas are cared for and promoted.

That having been said, first time authors can also be real nut cases. Some of them think that the Nobel Prize for literature is theirs and drive their agents and editors nuts with questions queries and endless heckling. There is a limit to everything . I always tell such authors if you think you are such a genius. Go elsewhere. And truthfully, when such a genius arrives every editor or publisher puts up with their tantrums. So if I am not putting up with yours. You should take the hint.

Abhijit: What are some of the watchouts for first time writers when they sign a contract with a publishing firm?

Chapal: Most professional publishing firms have standard contracts which they are not open to amending. It is the way they do business and these cannot be altered to every author’s requirement. In fact they are mostly standardized across organizations with a few changes here and there. As a first time author you need to know what you get into a contract with the publishing firm for :

Copyright: Understand the difference between copyright and  the right to publish.

What territory are you signing the book deal for? Do you want to keep US and UK or Europe rights for yourself?

Please check the royalty clause. Are you happy with what the standard royalty is ? Usually it’s the same across publishing firms

Please check the subsidiary rights.  Do you want to give up or keep –translation rights, film rights, tv series rights etc. In most cases I would advise its best to let the publishing company keep these unless you want to do something with them or you think it will have enormous potential which you have a strategy to exploit.

If its an advance contract what are your dates of delivery? What are the conditions associated with non- or late delivery?

Its always good to discuss the contract with your editor to also understand why the organization is offering the contract that it is . Most large professional publishing firms are not out to rob you. But its important for you to understand their thinking.

Abhijit: What are the typical amounts payable as advance to writers. How does one get these million dollar advances that one hears of?

Chapal: Before we discuss an advance lets understand the nature of it. An advance is a monetary commitment to a writers work. This work is a product that the publisher hopes to sell. The advance is built on the foundation that the book will sell in certain numbers. Some authors labour under the impression that large advances are always doled out . Its only a fraction of writers that get such advances. It depends on what genre, the potential and the ability of a publisher to pay. Some advances from international publishers seem big because you multiplied them by 50 really! Its not too high in India unless you are a well-established writer or the book has huge potential. It can range from Rs40,000 to a few lakhs . In any case, these huge advances are only possible if the mathematics are done properly.  Most standard advances in fact are adjustable against future royaltyThere isn’t a standard strategy to getting that multimillion dollar advance. It depends on the potential of your work and the capacity of your agent. I know of people who have written to a big publishing firm directly and been offered reasonable advances because their work is good. others usually get it through agents.  So there isnt a single strategy. And what are multi-million dollar advances? I million dollars is the equal of 5 crores in India .Which Indian writer has received these recently? Only a handful …

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My favorite website in this respect would be http://www.advicetowriters.com/ They have loads of stuff you will read and learn from. Must read.

Should you have an agent and such vexing questions answered here http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article611600.ece

I found this article useful Ten rules for writing fiction

We have all grown up in a world that clearly values rationality and rational behavior. Being emotional was frowned upon. Whenever someone displays emotions in public view it makes news (Think of Maradona’s expressions as the team played and lost) and the world turns its cameras to look at the person who just “lost it”. When I studied Science in school, I was told by my teacher that if there was something that cannot be explained by Science it was not worth knowing and that it was obviously irrational. Such was the vehemence with which I was nudged towards being rational. As I grew to develop my own view of the world, I got fascinated by the limitations of rationality. Rational stuff had a logical sequence and clearly activated that part of my brain that I had difficulty accessing. You try this one and you got to do this real quick: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Write down your answer. If you said that the ball costs 10c, then you are part of the majority. That is the good news. The bad news is that the correct answer is 5c. Shane Frederick, Prof at MIT Sloan posed this question to more than 3,000 students at eight different universities. Fewer than half gave the correct answer. The trick is to not go by your instinct which gives the wrong answer, but to take a second more and reflect on it. Shane has developed a 3 question test – that question is one of the three – that can be almost as accurate in predicting characteristics that other tests like the SAT, ACT, or the Wonderlic Personnel Test. He also found that those who do well on the cognitive reflection test tend to be more patient in decisions between smaller sooner rewards and larger later rewards.  Before you pat yourself on the back (your own or anybody else’s for that matter) remember, they are also more willing to gamble in financial domains.

Now let us check the other half of your ability. Try saying the words in the visual. The top line would read red, blue, orange purple. That is easy. . The task is to quickly name not the word itself, but the color of the word. As an example, for the word “green” printed in red ink, the correct verbal answer is “red.” Because of a phenomenon called directed attention, this is hilariously difficult to do. You must actively inhibit the automatic response—reading the word—in order to do something else. This is not the only way in which we can understand the power of the irrational. There are many examples that have been done to show how we all do dumb and irrational things despite taking pride in our rational selves.

Take for instance Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory? What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labeled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”? How far would you go? The majority, at least 63% of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent. These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for a psychology study.

Magic tricks work in the same way. Rationally speaking you would of course agree that there is no such thing as a color changing card. If you picked one card from a deck of cards, how could a magician change the color of the card while you are watching the trick on camera. The camera never lies, right? Wrong.

My hypothesis is that you need to learn to develop the irrational – also known as the “creative” aspects of you. Writing a story is a good way to develop your irrational self. Stories are boring when they are straightforward and predictable. For instance try this for a rational (aka BORING as hell) opening lines of a short story.

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class. The Professor was teaching (what else) Physics. The boy and the girl were trying to think of what the possible question paper would be like…

Now try this one on

A boy and a girl sat on the same bench in the Physics class.While the Professor was teaching Physics, the girl’s mind wandered. She was thinking of options. What protection should she use when the boy would meet her that evening. Would it be better to carry a small revolver or should she just use the sharp kitchen knife, she wondered. The boy was telling himself, “If only I had known that she was vegetarian, I would not have poisoned the fish…

The best storytellers are magicians who use the same principles of psychology to lead the reader to a path that is perfectly rational and logical, but wrong. The purpose of every story is to coax the reader into suspending their disbelief. Good cinema does the same. See how much more interesting a life you would lead if you stopped resisting the irrational aspects of human beings. For instance, if you knew that groups fail to share information with each other that is known only to themselves and simply repeated what others already knew, you would put less faith in decisions made by the group. People are seen as more capable when they talk about shared rather than unshared information. To be on the safe side people prefer to stick to repeating things that everyone knows and, bizarrely, others like them better for it. Heck!! I am not suggesting that you drop all opportunities to be rational. Merely suggesting that the next time you do something irrational, maybe there is an opportunity for you to learn about stuff most people have learnt to ignore. For instance, by knowing about the 7 Psychological Principles of Scams you can protect yourself from scams that makes 3.2 million people each year in the UK into handing over £3.5 billion to scamsters.

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If you like to try more tests that check for cognitive skills, try a logic and reasoning skill test here

Or this interesting piece on Ten Social Psychology Studies

It is truly a magical moment when you read the manuscript and suddenly feel that there is nothing more left to add or to take away. If you add stuff you will feel the need to trim the fat and you cannot take away a single word without leaving gaps in the mind of the reader. It is that moment when you feel the most self-confident. You are ready to take the book to a publisher.

You write to the publisher and give them a taste of the good stuff. They do not seem to share your enthusiasm. Hmmm… maybe it is time to take your manuscript to another publisher. Some of them tell you that your work is not good enough, some find it “interesting” but they have their hands full, some say that it would be a couple of years before they can think of publishing your book.

Publishers really look for a commercial proposition in every manuscript. They want to understand how many people will buy the book you have written. It is always worthwhile to do that Math before you go to a publisher. The easiest way to do that is to go to a bookstore and see if there are other writers who have published books somewhat like the one you wrote. Ask the store, how many copies of the book they sell in a month or in a year. Now repeat that exercise for a few more stores. Maybe you can ask a friend in another city to do a similar exercise on your behalf. That will tell you if your book will have a market or not. If you have written a text book, ask a few schools if they would recommend your book as a required reading. Be prepared to explain why they should do that.

Finally, look into you list of friends, relatives, colleagues etc and ask how many of them will buy your book. Most of them will want you to “gift them a copy of your book.” Majority of the planet does not know that authors need to buy their own book if they have to gift it. You will occasionally find some people who will say, “Don’t expect me to BUY your book.” At this time resist any urge to kick their shin. They speaketh out of ignorance and not malice. Here is where self-publishing kicks in. For a small fee you could see your own book in at least your own bookshelf. NY Times had talked about self publishing thriving as the publishing industry undergoes some huge shifts with many publishers dropping advances paid to writers.

Vanity Publishing is used to describe books where the cost of writing, printing, production, distribution and even publicity is funded by the author. If you are a rich dude, this is your chance to be an author. The critics are less than kind to such books. A better version of this is called Subsidy Publishing where the publisher will bear part of the costs. Self Publishing is a good way of doing limited copies of your own book and testing the market. This is a good option if you want a 100% control over the contents – esp if what you are publishing may be controversial or off beat. Publishers do not take any of the proceeds and if the author distributes it too then there are no distribution fees as well. The result is a larger payoff because it is a much larger percentage of the sale price. Don’t feel apologetic about self publishing. The Celestine Prophecy, Chicken Soup for the Soul, What Color is Your Parachute are all books which were self published.

Some popular sites are Lulu, FastPencil, Create Space and Xlibris. Check out the website of Xlibris for their FAQs on why self publish.

Advantages of self publishing

1. Time
   Traditional publishing takes too long; most traditional publishers work on an 18-month production cycle. Choose to self-publish and your book could be ready for the market within three months. (AB: I highly recommend that you work with an editor who will trim the manuscript and make it more readable. Imagine if you could edit and clip your home videos and give it some crispness)
2. Your book-the way you want it
   A book is a reflection of the author. Self-publishing gives you complete control on the direction of your book. The decisions are exclusively yours and not limited by third parties with intentions and interests different from your own. (AB: You can choose the font, the cover design and paper quality of the book, even if you know nothing about it. Each choice will impact your cost. So keep an eye on the tab as you keep ckecking those fancy options. It is like assembling your own computer. Each accessory has a cost and it all adds up. )
3. Retain all rights
   As a self-publisher, you own all rights to your book. If you use a traditional publishing house, they will own all rights. If they lose interest in your book, you will not be able to print additional copies unless you purchase those rights back. (AB: This is one big advantage you have. If some regular publishing house thinks that your book has potential, they will be happy to offer you a deal if they get you to the negotiating table.)
4. Testing the market
   Because your book may fill a niche that has not been met, you can test the market by self-publishing. Find out how well your book will sell, and how successful it will be. (AB: This is a polite way of saying that if your book self only three copies then you know that it was not born to be a mass market product. It is what we will politely call a ‘niche product’. You will also realize why publishers did not find it a commercially viable proposition. You can print limited copies that you know for sure you could personally sell and then decide if you want to print more copies to hawk. That is the advantage of print-on-demand technology. If you want to make only three cups of coffee, no point buying a truckload of coffee beans.)
5. A limited market
   Your book may appeal to a limited market and, therefore, may not be of interest to a large publishing house. (AB: See commentary with point 4 above. Think of a school’s yearbook. How many times have you rushed out to buy someone else’s yearbook? The same would hold true for say most people’s family history unless you have a recognizable surname.)

Writing a book is tough. Finding the right publisher is tougher. Self publishing solves the second problem. But distributing the books and selling it through a bookstore is a helluva task – esp if you self publish. But that story is for another time.

Check out this neat piece on self publishing from NY Times or this one from HowStuffWorks

Career stories are in, and a new set of part-time authors is cashing in on the trend. Bankers, admen, scientists , hoteliers, HR professionals, are all drawing on their experiences to produce ‘corporate novels’ where the careers of the protagonists take up just as much space as their love affairs. And a new generation of readers is lapping it up, says Dibeyendu Ganguly in Corporate Dossier section of Economic Times dated 27 February 2009

Ravi Subramanian is the author of If God Was A Banker, which has sold over one lakh copies. With royalty payments at Rs 40 a copy, the book has netted the head of consumer assets and credit cards at HSBC a cool Rs 40 lakh since its publication in 2007. “I want to be the John Grisham of banking,” he says. “I’m the only one writing on this and there’s a big market out there. After all, banks employ more people than any other industry in India. Young people want to join banking and naturally, they are interested in reading about it too.”

Youngsters who read Subramanian’s book for insights into the banking world might be in for a bit of a shock. Following the rise of two IIM graduates to the top hierarchy of an American bank, the steamy novel is full of organisational politics, sexual harassment, fraud and a slimy direct selling agent who doubles as a pimp for the bank’s bosses and wields more power than the CEO.

The creative side of advertising has always tended to produce novelists, script writers and lyricists. Some hold on to their jobs, like Chauhan, while others move out. “People who join the profession are those who want to express themselves in some way,” says Jaideep Varma, who quit advertising after 12 years to become a full-time writer. “But then they realise that advertising is not going to lead to any kind of self expression. That’s why you find so many ad professionals moving into other creative areas.”

In Local, Varma’s debut novel, the hero is a fresher in a Mumbai ad agency who sleeps in local trains after work — an interesting idea which, alas, doesn’t actually work. The parts set in the ad agency, however , work quite well, which proves that it helps to have some experience of what you’re writing about.

Abhijit Bhaduri, Human Resources (HR) director of Microsoft India, has chosen to spin his novels around the HR profession rather than any particular industry. A graduate of XLRI, Bhaduri set his first novel, Mediocre But Arrogant, in the ‘Management Institute of Jamshedpur’ , from where his hero graduates to land his first job in HR.

His second book, Married But Available is about the protagonist’s early years in Balwanpur Industries, an Indian company that’s been taken over by a multinational. The book is sprinkled with HR gyan and Bhaduri, who has worked with Tata Steel, Colgate and Pepsico, says it gives his characters credibility: “The professional and personal lives of my characters aren’t separate, they’re wholly meshed.”

One of the biggest selling Indian novels of all time is Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans, written at the fag end of the license raj, when the middle class Indian dream was to immigrate to the USA. Utkarsh Rai, managing director of Infinera India, published a collection of Hindi short stories titled Reteela Safar after returning to the country ten years ago. “It was a theme people could relate to in those days,” he says. “Now the focus has shifted to Indians in India rather than Indians abroad.”

The big fans of the corporate novel today are Indians who are not into serious literature. They once had to look to writers like Arthur Hailey for industry-dramas but now have the option of picking up an Indian novel they can relate to. “Middle class Indians define themselves through their careers,” says Amitabha Bagchi, IIT professor and author of the novel Above Average. “They would naturally enjoy reading stories about the pitfalls of professional life.”

With liberal doses of romance, action and intrigue , some might say corporate novelists depict their work life to be far more exciting than it actually is. But one industry that always lends itself to juicy fiction is hotels. Four decades ago, Mani Sankar Mukherji wrote the best-selling Bengali novel Chowringhee, about the goings-on in a five star Kolkata hotel as told by a maudlin clerk.

Now Advaita Kala’s written the delightful Almost Single, in which her sassy heroine, a guest relations manager in a Delhi hotel, ‘tolerates her job, hates her boss and bonds big-time with her friends.’ The book is replete with hilarious vignettes from hotel work-life and Kala admits she’s drawn heavily on her seven years of experience with the Oberoi group hotels and the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. “My experiences were even more outrageous than what’s in the book. I’ve actually had to tone it down slightly,” she says

Almost Single has since sold over 50,000 copies and along with The Zoya Factor, it’s set the ‘chick lit’ genre rolling in India. “Men will never admit to reading it,” laughs Kala. “At the Jaipur Literary Festival last month, there were lots of girls who came upto me to get their copy of the book signed, but there was only one guy. And he said it was for his girl friend.”

One man the new-gen corporate novelists owe much to is Chetan Bhagat, the author one who opened up the market for this genre. Bhagat’s debut book, Five Point Someone, was set in IIT-Delhi , his own alma mater, but since then, he’s moved to writing novels that are based on research rather than personal experience. “I enjoy the research,” he says. “I learnt so much about call centres while writing One Night and I used google heavily for cricket history in The 3 Mistakes Of My Life.”

Does the Deutsche Banker ever plan to write a novel set in the banking world? “Not while I’m still in the profession,” says Bhagat, categorically. Which leaves the field more or less open to HSBC’s Ravi Subramanian, who is currently working on another novel called Devil In Pinstripes, which features bank collection agents who drive customers to suicide. “It’s important that I stick to writing about banking,” he says. “I want to establish my corporate novelist pedigree before I get into other kinds of writing.”

And finally, how are the corporates who are the subjects of these novels reacting to the trend? Kala, who now works with Time magazine, says the hotel industry has been hugely supportive of Almost Single, laying out the red carpet wherever she’s had a launch: “The ITC Kakatiya in Hyderabad, ISTA in Bangalore, all hosted my launch events free. The staff there made me feel I’m one of their own.”

At HSBC, Malini Thadani, head of public affairs, was the one entrusted with onerous responsibility of going through the manuscript of If God Was A Banker prior to its publication. She wielded the censor’s scissors in six places, cutting out all but one reference to HSBC. “My job was to ensure the book didn’t damage the institution. In the end, we accepted it as an imaginative and entertaining work of fiction,” she says.

Once it was published, however, HSBC sportingly backed the novel, with country head Naina Lal Kidwai launching the book at Crossword. After all the coflict and tension, an altogether happy ending.

Read this article on Economic Times website 

 I just finished reading Next Door a collection of short stories by Jahnavi Barua. This petite medico was my neighbor many moons ago. She would keenly listen to the ongoing conversation and then jump in, speaking rapidly (with more words per second than anyone else I know!!) to put across a point of view. 

She is a full time writer, reader, mom and wife but “not necessarily in that order”, Jahnavi adds briskly. While this the first book by her that I have read, but Jahnavi is no stranger to writing having won the Short Fiction contest hosted by British Council in ‘05 and then the second prize in the Children’s Fiction category of the same prize. In 2006 Jahnavi was awarded a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to study Creative Writing in the UK.

Next Door has stories set in Assam (Asom to the locals and pronounced as Ahom). The backdrop gives it a unique flavor and the use of Asomiya English builds the recipe. The stories are on themes that are universal. I loved The Patriot a story featuring the relationship between an old man and an underground militant who meet in strange circumstances. The two stories which are about the militant groups (which since the ’80s have been pursuing armed struggle to establish a sovereign state in Assam) bring out the best in Jahnavi. The stories around relationships between parents and children also have hues that reach out to the reader.

My overall take: I enjoyed the her debut collection of short stories. The liberal sprinkling of Asomiya words and phrases make up the unique flavor of her collection. You understand the many moods of the river Brahmaputra (known as Tsangpo river in Tibet) and how it is integral to the inhabitants of the state. The flowers that grow there. The emotions that guide the rural and urban folks.  Sometimes the local phrases make you stop and re-read the sentence to get the import of it and acts as a speed breaker but at the end the pace also lets you absorb the nuances that speed reading would not. It is like getting used to eating a new cuisine that you know you will eat again.

Next Door – a collection of stories, is your debut work. Did you choose between writing a novel or a collection of short stories?

Yes, this is my debut collection – I have had a couple of stories published in anthologies earlier and have also written a children’s illustrated book called, The Boy Who Lost His Voice, but this is my first collection.
From the point I began writing seriously, in 2004, I found I was writing only short fiction so the choice between writing a novel or a short story collection was, in a sense, already made.

Which of the stories happened first? Where there more stories you had written before that did not make it to this collection?

In this collection, the first story I had written was Tiger. It took me the longest time to write, nearly five months, and is also one of the more elaborate and detailed stories in the collection. I have a few other stories lying around, written before and after the collection. But it is not as if they did not make it to the collection; I have not finished them yet to my satisfaction, so have not sent them out anywhere.

All your stories are set in Assam. The language of your characters is also “Asomiya English”. Does the language used come in the way of appealing to a larger section of the audience?

Yes, all the stories are based in Assam. Although now I have lived more than half my life outside Assam, I found when I began to write I returned to the landscape of my childhood, of my origin, as if it were the most natural thing to do. Place, for me, is a powerful influence; it shapes and moulds a person in a way at once subtle yet all pervading. The landscape of Assam is for me the landscape of affection, of memories; against its wide sweep of misty blue hills and majestic river most of my family’s lives (and mine) have played out and that is where I wanted to set my stories.

The characters in my stories being based in Assam naturally speak Asomiya English. I found, after the book was published, that it did not seem to, in any way, detract from the book’s universal appeal. In fact, people outside Assam who have read the book have told me that they relished the strong Assamese flavour of the dialogue in the book. A fellow author, also from the North-East, from Shillong, has stated in an interview that after reading Next Door, she almost felt as if she had read it in Assamese. And she does not speak or read Assamese! Others have told me that even though there were Assamese words, here and there, they did not understand, it did not get in the way of their flow of reading at all.

I have to say here that I have used Assamese words only when there were no equivalent words in English; there has been no attempt made to exoticize the stories.

How many of these stories are about characters you have met or known of? You are a trained doctor. I would have expected more stories that capture your experiences as a doc.

There are only two characters in the rather diverse cast of characters in the book that I seem to recognise from real life. Even then, I only recognise certain traits; a physical characteristic, a particular attitude. There is no one who is taken wholly from real life experiences.

My experiences as a doctor have crept in obliquely into many of the stories… in The Magic Spell for instance, the entire episode of poisoning was dictated by my knowledge of Forensic Medicine. Several of the stories – Holiday Homework, Honeybees and Awakening, for example – have been marked by death and disease. This is, I think, a consequence of my years spent as a doctor.

What next are you working on? A novel or a collection of short stories?

I always seem to tinkering around with a couple of short stories – I don’t know, though, if any collection will come out of this! But I know , with certain conviction, that I will always be writing a short story.

At the same time I am considering a novel. It is a new challenge and one that I look forward to taking on.

The biggest challenge here, I find, is finding that large chunk of time needed . A novel demands that uninterrupted long stretch of quiet time ; be it for that stewing stage, when an idea has to ferment in your head, or for that time when you need to put it all down. I work from home and there can be no one more harried than the person- and I gingerly add here – especially a woman – there I said it !- attempting serious work from home, for no one takes you seriously; there are constant interruptions and often resentment from the interrupting end when you resent that interruption. I am now resigned to being thought unfriendly but that label is an occupational hazard of all writers desiring seclusion.

Alternatively , I am considering working at night , at a time when the world sleeps. The quality of silence at night also helps in focusing my thoughts. The only drawback here is I will have to sleep when the world awakens , but we can all get used to that! I really am interested in how other writers manage this problem…

Who have been your literary influences? Do you read Asomiya literature as well? Did you ever think of writing in Asomiya?

Literary influences – there have been so many it is hard to name just a few. The darkness and the attention to flavour of the Russian writers – Chekov, Dostoevsky, Sholokov; the preciseness of American writing, past and contemporary. A deep and encouraging influence was the Indian woman writer writing in English ( although such classifications may be frowned upon now). I still remember Anita Desai’s Fire on The Mountain , for its lean, spare yet lyrical prose. Another influence has been Shashi Deshpande with her strong sense of place – she showed me it was okay to write about what one knows best. There are too many such writers to name here! I must add here that my mother , a student and teacher of English Literature , studied in particular Indian women writing in English. Her doctoral thesis was based on that topic and growing up in a family where this was much discussed did have a strong impact on me.
And of course, my favourites are the writers of short fiction : Chekov again, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, George Saunders, Julie Orringer… the list goes on and on!

I read Assamese literature too, but I am ashamed to say mostly in translation, for although I read Assamese well enough, I am slow, slower than I would like. But I intend to attempt to read only in the original now. There is exciting writing coming from Assam that I want to savour fully.