COVER STORYJULY 2019 STORIZEN MAGAZINE | 11You have written across
genres. Your first book was
on the life of a girl in
corporate. Then you moved
on to writing thrillers, The Taj
Conspiracy and Hunt For The
Kohinoor. What inspires you
as a writer in this genre? Any
real life influence that led you
to write on this genre?
The writing of what became my
second published book, The
Long Walk Home, took me
seven long years. That was
partly due to the research
involved but also because I was
teaching myself to write. I stalled
frequently and threatened to quit
occasionally. At some point, I
heeded my husband’s advice —
Why not try something simpler?
— and the idea of a tongue-in-
cheek look at a woman
executive in an all-male
corporate world came to me. It
arose from my own experience
as the first woman sales
manager with Unilever India
(Hindustan Lever Limited, at that
time).
I intended it as mainstream
women’s fiction and had a lot of fun
writing it. Perhaps because I wrote
it as a relief from Long Walk and the
voice of my protagonist Noor came
naturally to me since I gifted her
many of my own adventures in
sales. I wrote it in a year, it was an
easier sell, and it became my first
published novel, Earning the
Laundry Stripes.Thereafter, when I was searching for
my next subject to write, in the winter of
2008, we visited the Taj Mahal. Our
guide came highly recommended with
his roster of foreign corporate
clients. He proved a downer, rattling off
dimensions of domes and minarets
amidst a steady dribble of urban
legends. As we perambulated the
monument, he pointed to the pinnacle
atop the central dome. The finial is too
far for the naked eye to discern much.
But a replica exists on the red
sandstone platform and he walked us
to it. See, he triumphantly pointed to a
carving — a coconut resting on mango
leaves atop a pot of water — a popular
Hindu design! Then he began his spiel
about how the Taj Mahal was actually
an ancient Hindu temple called Tejo
Mahalya which the Mughals had
repurposed.