Not Only the Things That Have Happened

Here's a bit about the new book that ran in Platform Magazine a month or two back. Since the interview, the release date of the book has changed from September to October/Novemeber.

As you can see, Blogger makes the text of the interview difficult to read, so the original is below. Here is a link to it at the Siyahi website, which displays it more clearly. I have to show you this picture which was taken a couple years back by my son Akshay. He was ten then. The picture of me with the bicycle in the post below this one is also one he took, but more recently. Lately when people ask for an author picture I send them Akshay's work. It's nice to have an in house portraitist. 

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1. Give us a little background about yourself and when did your romance with writing begin?

I’ve never had a romance with writing and certainly it has never romanced me. I wish, I wish, but wishes don’t transform magically into romantic suitors and they never get down on bended knees and there never is a sparkling novel inside the satin lined box they never hold open. It is another matter that I have had many such romances with reading.

2. If you had to write a blurb on Not Only the Things That Have Happened, how would you write it?

A woman relinquishes her four year old son to tourists passing through town; losing him, she loses the story of her future. A world away from her the boy becomes a man without the story of his past. Some forty years on the mother struggles on her deathbed to find the story that will release her from life, the son’s struggle is for the story that will allow him to live. Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a novel about the stories that break us and make us and then remake us.

3. What inspired the novel and what made you structure it in two parts?

The novel takes place over a thirty six hour period and does what I like to do with time in my writing, which is to make the point that the present is always given to us, but the past and the future is of our making. This makes for a complex structure as characters travel back and forth from the present to the past and into the future. However I am not a complete masochist and not at all inclined to inflict pain so I keep it simple, locating the stories as far apart as the lives of the two main characters. The mother lives in Kerala and her story takes up Part One of the novel; the son lives in the United States and his story is Part Two of the novel. No, they never meet, neither in life nor in my novel. There is however space in the novel for the reader to decide if there is somewhere else where lost souls meet.

4. When is it out and what next?

Not Only the Things That Have Happened is forthcoming from Harper Collins India in September of this year. My next book is a young adult novel, the story of twelve year old Noor who learns to ride a bicycle, learns what is lost and gained when dreams become real, and learns her kabbadiwallh father merits the pride she has always felt for him. I am also working on another collection of short stories.