them out was among Tarannum’s
daily chores.
Believe it or not, we continued this
way for five or six years, but in this
time I had barely added a couple of
chapters to the earlier draft. My habit
of reworking chapters meant that I
could not progress with the narrative.
Unbelievable though it may sound, I
wrote more than 200 drafts of the pro-
logue and the first chapter.
Meanwhile, I moved to Ludhiana
with another bank. Our home was
close to the office and work pressure
was minimal, so Tarannum insisted
this was a good time to seriously start
work on my novel. She bought me a
new laptop, and using her powers of
persuasion, extracted a promise that I’d
finish my novel first and then edit
or rework the chapters. If I tried to
achieve perfection I’d never completeI began to drift away from my
writing. After returning from office,
I spent my time cooking and
watching mindless TV soaps, and
abandoned reading.F
our years passed, and I was
transferred to Basti, a small town
in Uttar Pradesh. This is when I
also got married. Tarannum and I
had never met before the nikah and
did not know much about each other
either. When she came to live with me,
she discovered newspaper clippings of
my published articles and the partially
written manuscript of my novel. I
confessed that I had stopped after a
writer’s block, but she insisted that I
start over. She even offered to type out
whatever I wrote. Thus, it became a
sort of ritual for me to scribble at least
100 words every morning and typingreadersdigest.co.in 95My Story(Left) The author with his wife, Tarannum; (Right) at The Hindu Lit for Life festivalal
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