Why I write

Being a writer should have made writing this personal piece easy for me. But there is so much I want to share that I don’t know which thought should go first. So I am going to start by talking about the enchanting world of books.
I was lucky to have grown up surrounded by books. My father believed that a child’s mind needed to be fed nutritious food as much as his or her body did. So he would bring home books appropriate to each age my sisters and I were passing through. There were fairy tales, kiddy books, adventure stories, illustrated classics, abridged tales from Shakespeare and finally, the Classics themselves. Our lives were rich in literary stimuli. We ate, slept, talked and even breathed books all our growing years.
Books were an incentive to complete schoolwork, they were a reward for doing domestic duties, they were the pot at the end of the rainbow when exam time seemed interminable. We even mended clothes and ran errands for money to buy more books.
Only book lovers will understand the joy of holding a book in the hand and feeling its smooth cover or crisp pages that along with the faint scent of printer’s glue creates an unique identity of its own. Every book became a friend, with its own special feel and smell!
It was the humourist  Groucho Marx who said, ‘Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read!’

The transition from being an avid reader to a writer was natural, because I wanted to write what I love to read. Stories of human interest, of relationships, of unexplored emotions. Set against periods of India’s journey that I could  re-imagine and recreate, based on the actual facts and events. They say a writer’s first novel is  autobiographical. Well, my  first The Wheel Turned was born of my childhood impressions  of what war can do to a soldier’s loved ones. As I settled down to penning more books, I moved away from the intensely personal to the richness of India’s history and culture. And I found my forte in historical fiction. Weaving stories with the warp of history and the weft of my imagination. I do hope these stories will bring alive another period and add a third dimension to dry history.