64 THE WEEK • JULY 21, 2019
BOOKS
@LEISURE
D
ressed in a checked grey
shirt and black trousers,
Amish Tripathi looks
radiant as he steps into the
library of his plush apart-
ment in a swanky 60-sto-
rey residential tower, the
newest address of affluence in suburban
Mumbai. The reading room resembles a
luxurious five-star lounge, with transpar-
ent curtains falling from a high oakwood
ceiling and round sofas with colourful
cushions. It offers an enviable view of
the city’s skyline, which is gloriously
coloured in shades of orange and grey
on a wet Saturday evening. “Please order
something. You have to have something,”
he insists.
Soon after, he double checks my
recorder to confirm that it is on, narrat-
ing an anecdote from a past interview
in a Delhi hotel which went unrecord-
ed and led to chaos. This is how our
conversation begins—naturally, over a
cup of green tea and his favourite cream
biscuits.
It was the cream in the cracker that
came to his rescue when the going got
tough and “extremely complicated” with
the writing of his recently launched,
Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta, the third
instalment in the five-book Ramchandra
series.
“I am glad it is over,” says Amish. “It
was too complicated and I am never
attempting something like this again. My
books always have twists and turns. It is
the way stories come to me. But in the
overwhelming desire to write a twist in a
way that the reader doesn’t realise it until
she discovers it in the next book, things
became horribly complex. I went crazy
trying to make sense of all the timelines,
datelines and twists and turns that I had
to keep a track of.” The author refers to
the multilinear narrative style in which
multiple stories with multiple characters
are told at the same time. He deftly uses
it to cut back and forth between story
lines and timelines and connects all
three books to a singular theme. Raavan
is a racy combination of mythology and
fiction that delves into the life and timesWEAVING A TALE
Stills from a promotional
video for the book