This morning I got news from my editor in Delhi that Shakti Bhatt had passed away. Shakti was a young editor, and full of plans. I had met her just the other day, for the first time, in New Delhi. She was also my friend Jeet Thayil’s wife. Read Shakti’s interview with Jabberwock here; Kitabkhana shares a poem in her memory; and SAJAforum provides an obit. What a terrible loss. My thoughts are with dear Jeet.

Don’t ask the astrologer. Don’t keep a journal when you’re unable to write. And step out of the hotel to try and divine who it is among the people you meet who will take your story forward. All this and more from V.S. Naipaul’s account of the writing of India: A Million Mutinies Now:

I had four blank, frightening days in the glamorous hotel, during which I did the dispiriting thing of keeping a self-conscious journal with nothing to say. I didn’t like the journal form; it blurred vision. I preferred distance, and the sifting of memory. The comparison that comes to mind now is that of Ibsen, still more poet than playwright, struggling to keep a journal on his trip to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Momentous days, fabulous sights: made for a journal, one would have thought; but it must have fatigued Ibsen to be on the outside, dealing only with the externals of things, and he simply stopped. In some such way in Bombay I broke down and gave my dour journal up; and looked around to make another kind of start.

A big board in the hotel lobby advertised a resident or “in-house” fortune-teller; I was often tempted in those four days to go for a reading, to find out whether I would do the book. I didn’t have to do that. One does more in anxiety than one suspects. The book did get started — “Bombay is a crowd” is the opening line I alighted on, and then it moved fast.

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative. The reader, once he has entered this book and goes beyond the opening pages, finds himself in a double narrative. There is the immediate narrative of the person to whom we are being introduced; there is the larger outer narrative in which all the varied pieces of the book are going to fit together. Nothing is done at random. Serious travel is an art, even if no writing is contemplated; and the special art in this book lay in divining who of the many people I met would best and most logically take my story forward, where nothing had to be forced.

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