When the real and imaginary meet, a book is born. And for Abha Dawesar, that’s precisely the most absorbing part of being a novelist. It’s a way of understanding the world and feeling it, “my novels are as much part of life, as they are of this imaginary world, for fiction is very much real for me,’’ the 34-year-old author of The Three Of Us, Babyji, And That Summer In Paris, is in a reflective mode. Here for an interaction on her novels with students at PU, the 34-year-old who studied political philosophy at Harvard, has been writing for as long as she can remember, penning a 130-page novel at the age of 14. “It was terrible, done on a typewriter, but at that point of time, I knew that all I wanted to do was write and that too novels,’’ Abha’s debut was with a novel, Three of Us, which was about a white male protagonist, wherin she has given a matter-of-fact treatment to sex. Shifting to New York from Delhi at the age of 17 and now also living in Paris for many months in a year, the decision to be a full-time writer and giving up a lucrative career as an investment banker was a conscious one. “What meant to me most was writing and I was ready to take a risk. I was prepared for the rejections, willing to persist and stick it out and I wasn’t a feeble-hearted writer. Your best book could be the most unsuccessful one, for after you finish writing it, nothing else is in your hands,’’ Abha agrees the process of publishing is hard one and recalls how Babyji (bought by Random House) was refused by many literary agents and finally got the best one. No purpose or message, Abha says each book that she writes is different, sometimes she wants to recreate a time or environment and at times just explore a character. “For instance Summer of Paris is about writing, all characters in the book are writers, with one writing for many years and I am trying to understand what drives him,’’ Abha’s fourth novel, yet untitled, is set in India, in a family and the protagonist is a young character. Abha’s writing, she affirms is driven by characters and her first two novels began with or as short stories, and then the characters unfolded, the plot grew and she had a big story to tell. “A short story is a reaction to a particular impulse and now I don’t even attempt to write a short story,’’ the writer’s happy that works by Indian writers is no longer going to be called Indian writing, but simply writing. “That’s because there is a universal appeal in their work. And the travel, work, exposure gives a real picture of India,’’ Abha travels often to India for she has a certain way of being here, that is nowhere else...
