Q: Two American literary agents are representing your work. How did you find them?
A: A writer from England happened to visit India to research her novel. She got in touch with me and I helped give her suggestions for research--a mutual friend on an online writer's group knew I was researching Indian myth and history extensively. She was impressed by my plan to retell Indian myths and told her agent. Her agent contacted me and asked to see some chapters. She signed me up immediately, becoming my American rights (primary) agent, and the other agent signed me up at the same time to represent my international rights. It was reading the chapters that made them decide, nothing else. (The writer friend I mentioned was not even published at the time, so she had no influence at all!) Even I couldn't believe it when it happened,because between the two of them, these agents represent a huge roster of very successful and eminent authors and they take on only one or two new authors every year or so.
Q: You started with literary fiction, but later branched into different genre, and even non-fiction and journalism. Is it all for money? How do you view writing as a means of livelihood?
A. Most people don't know it, but I've been writing since childhood. My first publications were short stories and poems in local literary journals (Jayanta Mahapatra, Randhir Khare, the late Nissim Ezekiel, and other senior literati would remember)and in foreign literary journals. I wrote my first novels in my teens (yes, related to Indian mythology too) but didn't have the confidence to submit them to publishers then. I had no family to support me financially and my mother was an alcoholic abandoned by her family, so I had to quit college (I was paying my own fees) and get a job to support both of us. I was offered a job as an advertising copywriter and I took it, it paid Rs 700 a month. At the same time, an editor at Times of India named Khalid Mohamed (the same) learned that I was interested in writing and asked me to try my hand at columns. So my twin careers in advertising and journalism started at around the same time. I was 19 years old. Most people assume I started writing columns recently, for money. But at that time, I was paid Rs 200/- a column and was never sure if a column would even be published. When I stopped writing two years ago, I had over 1800 columns published, many under pseudonyms because I often had more than there articles in the same issue. I also broke front-page news for Times and other publications, under my own name, as editors like Darryl D'Monte will probably recall. It was only after my mother died that I could think of writing novels again, but her long illness had left me with crushing debts (which I only recently finished paying off) and I had a wife
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