It is usually mid-afternoon when the courier arrives with that hefty brown box. You half-guess what’s in it, you smile insanely at the courier guy until he sprints down the stairs muttering that what the neighbours say about you is indeed true. Then you tear at the sellotape eagerly, somewhat like a youthful eager lover. Inside, beneath the straggly strips of coloured paper and a cloud of bubblewrap, nestle six of the most beautiful things you have ever set your eyes upon: your books.
No, no, it’s not the stuff you ordered online – that’s a great glee, undoubtedly, but it does not hold a candle to this. These are your books. I mean, like really. They have your name on the cover page. Six (or ten, in the case of the older publishers) copies of a perfect slice of your unconscious, delicately carved and bound and served, a scrap of you that will survive all wars and catastrophes and tell the future generations – the humans who have built a floating city to escape the ant people – exactly what your life and times entailed. I mean, whatever those musicians and filmmakers and artists might say, you know there is no greater contribution than the written word. This book will make you immortal.
You sigh dramatically and would have called out to your family but for some strange reason, your throat is scratchy and hoarse. Just as well, you tell yourself silently, perhaps this is one of those moments you keep for yourself. (Good decision, you realise later, for the family, squabbling over the acknowledgements and dedications pages, would have marred the day forever.) You treasure it.
And now, if you have any ounce of sense, you will listen to me carefully and treasure this moment with great deliberation. This is the closest you shall get to happiness with regard to your literary career, this moment when the sky is the limit and immortality just shy of dusk. Enjoy it. Then, unpack that helmet from the attic that you’d acquired in your motorbike fixated days, keep it by the bed, get into your pyjamas and climb under the duvet. Enjoy a good night’s sleep. Things are about to get wild. The shit will soon hit the fan. Life will never ever be pre-book again.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen over the next few days.
Day 1
With great fanfare, you strut into a famous bookstore. You look at the Bestsellers Section. You spot the usual – CB, AT, RS1, DD, AC, RS2, HotGirl etc. etc. You scowl at them and search high and low. No sign of your book. You go to ‘New Arrivals’. You spot Sonam Kapoor’s dietician’s memoirs, Deepika Padukone’s PR consultant’s self-help guide, Dhoni’s dentist’s autobiography, Dhoni’s autobiography, the new Wodehouse, the new Agatha Christie, the new Byomkesh Bakshi, five novels that will be nominated for the Booker next year and one cookbook. No sign of your book.
You have a minor scuffle with the rude shop assistant. Next shop, ditto (though here you don’t pick a fight but maintain injured silence). Shop after, ditto (by now you are so desperate, you tell the shop assistant your life story and he promises to call IF the book arrives. After you leave, he throws away your phone number. Do you know on an average day how many buggers waste his time pretending to be authors?)
You don’t sleep at night.
Day 2
The next morning, you dial all the numbers you have for your publishers – from managing editor to sales clerk. No response.
Day 7
You finally hear from an editorial assistant at your publishers. They had gone on their annual sales conference trip to the Maldives. By now you have scoured 87 shops that stock books in your city and been prescribed Alprax by your GP. The editorial assistant tells you that no sweat, no sweat, the six that were sent to you are author copies. Almost as early as advance copies. They will trickle down into the market eventually. You would have slept tonight but you find yourself going over the exact meaning of the word ‘eventually’ until the spouse hurls that dictionary at you. I told you the helmet would be essential.
Day 27
Today is the eventual day. Nineteen out of the 87 shops have displayed your book in New Arrivals. You have accepted by now that none of the other shops you identified as ‘bookstores’ though they were heavier on stationery and teddy bears will ever stock your book. Unless you beat – or at least match – CB, AT, RS1, DD, AC, RS2, HotGirl etc. etc. You can live with that. You would have been able to sleep tonight but for the fact that you are travelling for your first book launch tomorrow. Butterflies caterwauling in your stomach.
Day 28
On the matter of the book launches, you consulted one of your friends in the know. (Well, you don’t exactly know what she does but you assume she’s in the know because she is Bengali married to a Mallu, wears power sarees, and has a membership to the IIC.) Your friend said a launch in the capital was extremely necessary if you wanted to be taken seriously.
The editorial assistant – pretty much the only person in the publishing house you ever got through to – told you delicately that it might be better to do the launch in your city where your friends and family would attend it – but you trusted the judgment of the friend in the know. She spoke eloquently about contacts in the media who would cover the event, contacts in the hospitality industry who would sponsor the wine, contacts in the corporate world who could afford to buy the book, contacts among students who could not afford to buy the book but would help make the book viral, contacts in the posh clubs who would put you onto the reviewers.
You spent a bomb on flight tickets for yourself and the spouse. Your parents and in-laws wanted to come too but you put your foot down on it. It would look too unprofessional. (If you were up for an award or something then that would be different.) You also spent a bomb on shopping for appropriate clothes. Between the tickets and the clothes, your advance has been effectively spent. You have to spend out of your pocket for the hotel room, but that’s fine, really it is.
The launch is supposed to begin at 7. By the time it is 8 and only four people from your publisher’s office have arrived, you begin to feel a bit sweaty and faint. You wish you had brought your parents and in laws as that way at least the shop would have begun to look fuller. The spouse is trying to lure unsuspecting book buyers who have entered the bookstore to the launch but it seems to have backfired. The store is now completely empty. Since your friend’s wine contact failed at the last minute, the publishers have served tea with mini-cookies. You have not eaten any of that and now you feel murderous. You should have remembered that hunger induces anger.
You snap continually at your spouse while smiling widely at your publisher, hoping she will tell you, any moment, how your book is being hailed as the next best thing. But the bookstore owner has waylaid her and is reading aloud to her his debut novel about the torrid affair between characters of two books who come alive at night when the bookstore is shut.
Finally, at 8 30, the spouse calls your friend in the know. She is, unfortunately, in Taj Mansingh, where, as it happens, Shashi Tharoor has a book event today. Did you know? What an unfortunate coincidence. Her media contacts, student contacts and corporate contacts all, apparently, chose the Tharoor event over yours.
At 8.45, just before you are about to slump in the author’s chair, your childhood friend Happy arrives with family, a band of 11 merry sardars whom your mother tracked down after 23 years and invited, and since it is their first book launch ever, you decide to be the poster child of authorhood anywhere in the world. You don’t mind when they get you to sign the math textbooks they buy for the kids from the bookstore and the Nita Mehta Lebanese cookbook. After all, it is their first book launch – they may not know it is customary to buy a copy of your book and get it signed.
It is only at night that you sob into the pillow until the humiliations leak out of your soul. Then you watch a stupid cricket match.
Day 43
Forget the launch, it was nothing – at least only the spouse and your publisher got to witness it. There will be no recovering from this.
This is the very pits, an absolute utter unmitigated disaster.
A national daily has apparently reviewed your book. Except, the article has been accompanied by a book jacket that is not yours. The reviewer spent ten paragraphs saying what your book was not. In the last paragraph she concluded that while what your book was not could have been pathbreaking, exciting, radical, pioneering, funny, eccentric, hoot-ish, and hilarious, what your book ends up being, is just bleh. (The only thing good about the book, the reviewer hammered the final nail with precision, was that the book was dedicated to no one. And that isn’t even true. You had just snuck the dedication in the last line of the acknowledgements.)
It is a disaster so mega that the owner of the publishing house – a man as elusive as jackal himself – calls you to explain that it is not the book at all that warranted this review but a result of a complicated ménage de trois featuring the reviewer, your former friend-in-the-know and your publisher’s daughter’s school-teacher. It would be a terrible tragedy if you killed yourself over something that was not even remotely related to you. Plus, they were even proposing your name to a few literary festivals. It would be a pity to die now.
Day 57
You survived the launch and the review ultimately because you got three emails from readers who loved your book (well, one loved your book, one wanted to know if you could help him get published and one was a bit creepy – said the book felt so true to her life that it was as though you had actually followed her around with a camera.) Anyway, there were one or two other reviews in minor publications that got your book. They helped too.
So today – today you are finally having a good day. You have ironed out your issues with the spouse. You have managed to spend seven minutes at a stretch without getting depressed about your book. Your father-in-law called to say his second cousin’s America-returned son-in-law actually bought your book – and enjoyed it.
You go for a walk. You enter your favourite bookstore and though your book is not in Bestsellers or New Arrivals (or, for that matter, in the shelves) you don’t flip out but saunter to other sections. Isn’t this a bookstore? Isn’t it that sacred place where ever since Class Two when you came last in the ankle race you have found peace? Why should you let any book – even your own – decrease your pleasure in this space?
You relax and browse for an hour. You pick two books for yourself and one for the spouse as a peace offering. When you are the cash counter, you notice there are at least 200 college students raising cacophonous bedlam in the Bestsellers section.
‘What is happening?’ You ask the store clerk.
‘You don’t know?’ she says, looking at you in shock. ‘This evening is the launch of Tell Me Naa Jaanu Is It Or Is It Not, Quickly. It has already sold 50,000 copies. The fans are here though it’s only # PM now. See. That girl - ’ I look at the direction of his finger and see a sickly looking creature, barely 13 or so, holding a plate of sweets aloft reverentially, ‘she has brought special sweets for him.’
You surprise yourself.
On the way out, you grab a copy of the book. Maybe it’ll teach you something about success after all?
(This article owes much to my friend the humour writer Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, who had, among other things, alerted me to the massive success of the novel Tell Me Naa Jaanu Is It Or Is It Not, Quickly, which incidentally also finds mention in his new play Dear Anita: A tale of Passion, Revenge and Sales Returns, starring Krishna Shastri Devulapalli as Struggling Writer and renowned author Anita Nair as renowned author Anita Nair.)
Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
No, no, it’s not the stuff you ordered online – that’s a great glee, undoubtedly, but it does not hold a candle to this. These are your books. I mean, like really. They have your name on the cover page. Six (or ten, in the case of the older publishers) copies of a perfect slice of your unconscious, delicately carved and bound and served, a scrap of you that will survive all wars and catastrophes and tell the future generations – the humans who have built a floating city to escape the ant people – exactly what your life and times entailed. I mean, whatever those musicians and filmmakers and artists might say, you know there is no greater contribution than the written word. This book will make you immortal.
You sigh dramatically and would have called out to your family but for some strange reason, your throat is scratchy and hoarse. Just as well, you tell yourself silently, perhaps this is one of those moments you keep for yourself. (Good decision, you realise later, for the family, squabbling over the acknowledgements and dedications pages, would have marred the day forever.) You treasure it.
And now, if you have any ounce of sense, you will listen to me carefully and treasure this moment with great deliberation. This is the closest you shall get to happiness with regard to your literary career, this moment when the sky is the limit and immortality just shy of dusk. Enjoy it. Then, unpack that helmet from the attic that you’d acquired in your motorbike fixated days, keep it by the bed, get into your pyjamas and climb under the duvet. Enjoy a good night’s sleep. Things are about to get wild. The shit will soon hit the fan. Life will never ever be pre-book again.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen over the next few days.
Day 1
With great fanfare, you strut into a famous bookstore. You look at the Bestsellers Section. You spot the usual – CB, AT, RS1, DD, AC, RS2, HotGirl etc. etc. You scowl at them and search high and low. No sign of your book. You go to ‘New Arrivals’. You spot Sonam Kapoor’s dietician’s memoirs, Deepika Padukone’s PR consultant’s self-help guide, Dhoni’s dentist’s autobiography, Dhoni’s autobiography, the new Wodehouse, the new Agatha Christie, the new Byomkesh Bakshi, five novels that will be nominated for the Booker next year and one cookbook. No sign of your book.
You have a minor scuffle with the rude shop assistant. Next shop, ditto (though here you don’t pick a fight but maintain injured silence). Shop after, ditto (by now you are so desperate, you tell the shop assistant your life story and he promises to call IF the book arrives. After you leave, he throws away your phone number. Do you know on an average day how many buggers waste his time pretending to be authors?)
You don’t sleep at night.
Day 2
The next morning, you dial all the numbers you have for your publishers – from managing editor to sales clerk. No response.
Day 7
You finally hear from an editorial assistant at your publishers. They had gone on their annual sales conference trip to the Maldives. By now you have scoured 87 shops that stock books in your city and been prescribed Alprax by your GP. The editorial assistant tells you that no sweat, no sweat, the six that were sent to you are author copies. Almost as early as advance copies. They will trickle down into the market eventually. You would have slept tonight but you find yourself going over the exact meaning of the word ‘eventually’ until the spouse hurls that dictionary at you. I told you the helmet would be essential.
Day 27
Today is the eventual day. Nineteen out of the 87 shops have displayed your book in New Arrivals. You have accepted by now that none of the other shops you identified as ‘bookstores’ though they were heavier on stationery and teddy bears will ever stock your book. Unless you beat – or at least match – CB, AT, RS1, DD, AC, RS2, HotGirl etc. etc. You can live with that. You would have been able to sleep tonight but for the fact that you are travelling for your first book launch tomorrow. Butterflies caterwauling in your stomach.
Day 28
On the matter of the book launches, you consulted one of your friends in the know. (Well, you don’t exactly know what she does but you assume she’s in the know because she is Bengali married to a Mallu, wears power sarees, and has a membership to the IIC.) Your friend said a launch in the capital was extremely necessary if you wanted to be taken seriously.
The editorial assistant – pretty much the only person in the publishing house you ever got through to – told you delicately that it might be better to do the launch in your city where your friends and family would attend it – but you trusted the judgment of the friend in the know. She spoke eloquently about contacts in the media who would cover the event, contacts in the hospitality industry who would sponsor the wine, contacts in the corporate world who could afford to buy the book, contacts among students who could not afford to buy the book but would help make the book viral, contacts in the posh clubs who would put you onto the reviewers.
You spent a bomb on flight tickets for yourself and the spouse. Your parents and in-laws wanted to come too but you put your foot down on it. It would look too unprofessional. (If you were up for an award or something then that would be different.) You also spent a bomb on shopping for appropriate clothes. Between the tickets and the clothes, your advance has been effectively spent. You have to spend out of your pocket for the hotel room, but that’s fine, really it is.
The launch is supposed to begin at 7. By the time it is 8 and only four people from your publisher’s office have arrived, you begin to feel a bit sweaty and faint. You wish you had brought your parents and in laws as that way at least the shop would have begun to look fuller. The spouse is trying to lure unsuspecting book buyers who have entered the bookstore to the launch but it seems to have backfired. The store is now completely empty. Since your friend’s wine contact failed at the last minute, the publishers have served tea with mini-cookies. You have not eaten any of that and now you feel murderous. You should have remembered that hunger induces anger.
You snap continually at your spouse while smiling widely at your publisher, hoping she will tell you, any moment, how your book is being hailed as the next best thing. But the bookstore owner has waylaid her and is reading aloud to her his debut novel about the torrid affair between characters of two books who come alive at night when the bookstore is shut.
Finally, at 8 30, the spouse calls your friend in the know. She is, unfortunately, in Taj Mansingh, where, as it happens, Shashi Tharoor has a book event today. Did you know? What an unfortunate coincidence. Her media contacts, student contacts and corporate contacts all, apparently, chose the Tharoor event over yours.
At 8.45, just before you are about to slump in the author’s chair, your childhood friend Happy arrives with family, a band of 11 merry sardars whom your mother tracked down after 23 years and invited, and since it is their first book launch ever, you decide to be the poster child of authorhood anywhere in the world. You don’t mind when they get you to sign the math textbooks they buy for the kids from the bookstore and the Nita Mehta Lebanese cookbook. After all, it is their first book launch – they may not know it is customary to buy a copy of your book and get it signed.
It is only at night that you sob into the pillow until the humiliations leak out of your soul. Then you watch a stupid cricket match.
Day 43
Forget the launch, it was nothing – at least only the spouse and your publisher got to witness it. There will be no recovering from this.
This is the very pits, an absolute utter unmitigated disaster.
A national daily has apparently reviewed your book. Except, the article has been accompanied by a book jacket that is not yours. The reviewer spent ten paragraphs saying what your book was not. In the last paragraph she concluded that while what your book was not could have been pathbreaking, exciting, radical, pioneering, funny, eccentric, hoot-ish, and hilarious, what your book ends up being, is just bleh. (The only thing good about the book, the reviewer hammered the final nail with precision, was that the book was dedicated to no one. And that isn’t even true. You had just snuck the dedication in the last line of the acknowledgements.)
It is a disaster so mega that the owner of the publishing house – a man as elusive as jackal himself – calls you to explain that it is not the book at all that warranted this review but a result of a complicated ménage de trois featuring the reviewer, your former friend-in-the-know and your publisher’s daughter’s school-teacher. It would be a terrible tragedy if you killed yourself over something that was not even remotely related to you. Plus, they were even proposing your name to a few literary festivals. It would be a pity to die now.
Day 57
You survived the launch and the review ultimately because you got three emails from readers who loved your book (well, one loved your book, one wanted to know if you could help him get published and one was a bit creepy – said the book felt so true to her life that it was as though you had actually followed her around with a camera.) Anyway, there were one or two other reviews in minor publications that got your book. They helped too.
So today – today you are finally having a good day. You have ironed out your issues with the spouse. You have managed to spend seven minutes at a stretch without getting depressed about your book. Your father-in-law called to say his second cousin’s America-returned son-in-law actually bought your book – and enjoyed it.
You go for a walk. You enter your favourite bookstore and though your book is not in Bestsellers or New Arrivals (or, for that matter, in the shelves) you don’t flip out but saunter to other sections. Isn’t this a bookstore? Isn’t it that sacred place where ever since Class Two when you came last in the ankle race you have found peace? Why should you let any book – even your own – decrease your pleasure in this space?
You relax and browse for an hour. You pick two books for yourself and one for the spouse as a peace offering. When you are the cash counter, you notice there are at least 200 college students raising cacophonous bedlam in the Bestsellers section.
‘What is happening?’ You ask the store clerk.
‘You don’t know?’ she says, looking at you in shock. ‘This evening is the launch of Tell Me Naa Jaanu Is It Or Is It Not, Quickly. It has already sold 50,000 copies. The fans are here though it’s only # PM now. See. That girl - ’ I look at the direction of his finger and see a sickly looking creature, barely 13 or so, holding a plate of sweets aloft reverentially, ‘she has brought special sweets for him.’
You surprise yourself.
On the way out, you grab a copy of the book. Maybe it’ll teach you something about success after all?
(This article owes much to my friend the humour writer Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, who had, among other things, alerted me to the massive success of the novel Tell Me Naa Jaanu Is It Or Is It Not, Quickly, which incidentally also finds mention in his new play Dear Anita: A tale of Passion, Revenge and Sales Returns, starring Krishna Shastri Devulapalli as Struggling Writer and renowned author Anita Nair as renowned author Anita Nair.)
Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club.