For a woman who didn’t hear of the word sexy till she was 16 or 17, Delhi-born and schooled Abha Dawesar has come a long way. The 28-year-old’s first novel, The Three of Us (Penguin), begins in a strip club, goes on to a gay bar and moves with generous dollops of explicit sex scenes, blurring the distinctions between a Manhattan bedroom and a Manhattan office desk. No wonder when she first read from her book to a hall full of IIT graduates (80 young males), words forsook them for nearly five minutes. What induced a nice young woman with writerly ambitions to plunge into a theme even seasoned Indian writers fight shy of? "My protagonist was a young white male in Manhattan and I couldn’t be coy about his sex life," she points out.
The scale and grandeur of book launches has made us almost forget that they are literary events. It was V.S. Naipaul, brought expressly to launch Nalini Gera’s "authorised biography" of Ram Jethmalani, who reminded the glitterati of what book launches are about. "I did not expect such a glittering crowd," he confessed at the five-star book launch/cocktail party. "I was expecting to see," he groped a little for the right words, "more writers."
