Made in Delhi
Aatish Taseer’s fiction debut, The Temple-goers, will hit the stands only in March next year, but Dilliwallahs were treated to a preview last week in an event billed as ‘A Reading in A Room with a View’ in the tenth floor lounge of Park Hotel. No sooner did Taseer begin reading an extract from the forthcoming novel set in Delhi, his audience began a guessing game to identify the characters. Despite Taseer strenuously denying that his book is a roman a clef, the characters were recognisable: Chamundi Devi, a princess politician from a desert state, a socialite famed for her salon who wears a chopstick in her bun and her reticent, “diminutive sardar” spouse.
Steamed Love
Random House, with its overwhelming literary reputation—they have published 31 Nobel laureates and 15 Booker prize winners, 22 of the Top 50 essential reads etc—is now going to give Mills and Boon a run for their money in India. Publisher Chiki Sarkar’s latest brainwave is to launch a series of steamy historical romances, Kama Kahani, featuring brooding desert princes and cruelly handsome zamindars.
Family In The Way
They may have shied away from contributing to The Tranquebar Book of Erotica, but that didn’t stop them from attending the launch party which featured belly dancers after the readings. When Bibliofile asked one established writer if he was in the anthology, he backed away as if he were about to be shot, saying: “No, I’m a family man!”
