If S.A.R. Geelani is now very much in the public eye, it may not be long before he's overtaken by another Geelani. Iftikar Geelani's story of his arrest by the Delhi police on trumped-up charges of passing on secret information on troops deployment in Kashmir to Pakistan's ISI will soon hit bookstores. Geelani began writing My Days in Prison during his six months behind bars, using his journalistic skills to document the hair-raising tales of abuse he saw around him. Two-and-a-half years after his release, the book's finally in the press and will be released in April by Penguin.
We may have heard nothing of Bapsi Sidhwa since the film Earth which was based on her novel Ice Candy Man. At the best of times, the mother of Pakinglish fiction is a slow writer, having produced only four novels so far—The Crow Eaters, Ice Candy Man, The Bride and her last, An American Brat, that came out in 1993. But she is hard at work on her next project and it's not another novel. For the last two years she has been busy putting together an anthology of poems and prose on the city she grew up in—Lahore. Stopping in Delhi on her way back from Lahore to her home in Houston, Texas, Sidhwa spent a week discussing her project with her publishers, Penguin. Curious that neither her publishers nor the bookshops forever hungry to entertain a visiting literati cashed in on her first visit here in three years.
There is no such thing as bad publicity. And the latest to prove this is Shobhaa De's new book on marriage, Spouse: The Truth About Marriage. Living up to her image as the 'Shahrukh Khan of Indian Publishing', De's Spouse rocketed up the bestseller list and how. It crossed 10,000 sales in a record three days; re-orders are pouring in. If booksellers here are to be believed, she's selling better than that other mysterious publishing phenomenon, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. "India is finally seeing mass market publishing coming into its own," her publisher Penguin's crowing.
