Nervous Throat-Clearing

Much to my own surprise, I have finished writing a book. Perhaps some people’s surprise is greater than mine, and that would be the very patient editors at HarperCollins India who suggested some five years ago that I should make a collection of my book columns.

I started to collect my book columns and got side-tracked when hard disks (and floppy disks — remember them?) from eons past yielded other things that had been forgotten. Columns on the Internet back when we treated it as a strange new toy and thought Usenet groups and Lycos were so advanced; columns on random subjects that were blatantly written for the cheque back in the days when the partner and I had just started freelancing; columns on food (mostly on eating) from the time our food columnist disappeared and I was pressganged into doing this on the grounds that a) someone in my family had written a cookbook b) I read encylopaedias on food for fun c) I was the most efficient tiffin-raider in the office.

So instead of taking six months to riffle through the files, what was then called The Collected Columns or Adventures in Reading or some such anodyne title took about two years to compile. My editor had stopped asking for a date of delivery and was instead anxiously asking whether I was still doing something — anything! — on the book.

Then I read the columns and realised they couldn’t go into print after all. Newspaper writing is supposed to be for the moment, and is supposed to contain some news, which means they don’t usually read very well six months or two or four years after they were printed. Discouraged, I abandoned How To Read In Indian — it had been retitled, after this essay in Caravan —  and went off and wrote a couple of cat sagas instead. That was a lot of fun. My editor came to the book launch and manfully, through gritted teeth, congratulated me on finishing a book, any book. Even if it wasn’t his. I like to think The Wildings gave him hope, and he was really very patient.

Once in a while, I’d run into Alok Rai, whom I’d discussed the book with back in 200– never mind when. I’d said exuberantly that I thought I’d finish in maybe a year, since the columns were already done. He laughed, wolfishly, and said, “You wait. Just you wait. It’ll take two years if you’re lucky.” Meanwhile, we were discovering that no one could pronounce How To Read in Indian. It was the “in Indian” bit that was tricky. Someone asked me how my reading nuns book was getting along, and that was the end of that title. My editor found himself a new cardiologist.

Then last December, a friend gave me excellent advice. I couldn’t decide whether the book with no title was a collection of vaguely literary journalism, or whether it should be a literary history of Indian authors and their relationship with English in the 18th and 19th century. Which was a) another terrible title and b) would have taken another four years to research and write. She said, “What do you think it’s about right now?”

I said, “It’s about how much fun it is reading books. And writing books. And eating books.” (That last bit is explained in the book, though I have to admit that the title’s a bit of a giveaway.)

She said, “Well then. Leave it be what it is.”

So I wrote a few more love letters to reading, trying to explain why anyone would spend most of their adult life doing this, and sent The Girl Who Ate Books off to my editors. This came as something of a shock to them, but they’re out of the emergency ward now and the doctors say they’re doing fine. As for the book, it is a hodgepodge, a mishmash, a salmagundi, and it should be out around December 2015.