When a child leaves a parent’s home, the parent feels heartbroken and happy at the same time.
That was how I felt when I accidentally stumbled upon my novel in Crossword last week. Dhruvadevi had begun her own journey now to find her readers, her own place in the world of books.
The most moving thing in the weeks leading to launch was the deluge of unexpected support that came my way on WhatsApp.
I have never really warmed up to WA groups, but I took a leap of faith and exposed my DPS Class XII-I group to the book cover options. The group quickly metamorphosed into a fierce focus group. The inputs were diverse, detailed and animated. One cover option won hands down, but a classmate who speaks entirely in riddles suggested marrying the mood/atmosphere of a rejected option with the design of the winner. A deadly martial arts expert attacked my preference for a specific Devanagari font, pointing out that it wasn’t readable. A very polite one roasted me by asking whether the book cover was for me or the readers.
Then the tech-genius delivered a knockout punch. He felt that as a rookie writer, I should have my name shunted down to the very bottom (thankfully not removed from the cover altogether). The title & “The Queen Who Made Chandragupta”, he felt, should be front and centre.
Another discussion about my name opened a Pandora’s box. Friends debated my long, difficult-to-pronounce name. The tech-wizard suggested that I shorten it to something small & easy to remember. I have a nickname “Servo”(that apparently “adds life”), so in the heat of the moment, I did toy with the idea of a pseudonym like Manto.
Meanwhile, a classmate who had read the manuscript suggested adding a family tree, which was incorporated at the very last minute.
Then the pre-order link went live and the groups went berserk. One wisecrack claimed to have developed a 56-inch chest. A US Masters league cricket player’s heart went ‘garden-garden’. A high-profile CEO wanted a personalised signed hardcover copy for himself & his wife (also a classmate). It was an honour, even though the book had, at the time, been released only in humble paperback.
With the pre-orders available at Amazon in India, friends abroad began pre-ordering physical copies to addresses in India. Then, inevitably, Jugaad got to work. An operations wizard classmate found a way to ship his personal copy abroad, to the UK using a strange website.
The process also uncovered pieces from my writing past that I had forgotten. One friend had held onto my handwritten novella about “school prefect elections” for years, until it got misplaced during one of his many relocations.
The preorder response was so vociferous that the book occasionally ranked second in the Ancient World best-seller list, sitting next to the legendary Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles.
It occurred to me that just as history had forgotten my protagonist Dhruvadevi, I too had forgotten these wellsprings of support in my own backyard, filling my barren land with hope for a new spring.
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