How I met him? A scuffle had broken out between beggars over alms at the temple gate. The police retorted with a baton charge. Those fighting scattered like chickens. I heard shouts behind my back, people running, cries of pain. I turned and caught a pair of bright eyes looking out from behind a rose bush. A young lad came forward and sat down by my side. He pointed at the pack of cigarettes in my pocket. I gave him one. How he smelled. I turned my face away.

‘My name’s Tablet,’ he said. I half expected him to tell me he had a twin brother ‘capsule’. I ignored him. Tablet kept talking, words that drifted away in the wind and never reached my ears. He was always around whenever I came. Sometimes he asked for a cigarette, sometimes a green coconut, a couple of times, money. And he could talk, words in a rapid staccato between vigorous pulls at a straw or cigarette.

One afternoon, he turned up as I was about to leave. He had this look on his face, happy one moment, confused the next. His hair was cut, nails clipped and he was wearing new clothes. When I offered him a cigarette, he declined. ‘No tablets, either,’ he said. He followed me to my bike. ‘I got job,’ he said.

I ran into him several times in the city: in the bazaar at Machkhowa; once in a dark street, when his hand flew out of a door and touched my shoulder and gave me a fright. Several times, I saw him near his old haunt at the Sukreswar Temple, helping old people across the road. He was always smiling, always with a minute to spare. And his eyes, how they lit up when he saw me. How welcome I felt.

His story came out in bits and pieces over cups of tea and spells of dolphin-watching. His mother had deserted him at birth. He was brought up by an old beggar, who came under a lorry one night while sleeping by the road. Beaten, hounded from one place to another, he found refuge at Sukreswar. My initial reluctance gave way to a desire to know him better. I took him to lunch one day on the ferry. On Puja, I gave him a shirt, my brother shoes. My mother knitted him a sweater. I invited him home. Sometimes he stayed the night. He became a part of our family, trusted, heard and loved.

And then one day, he wasn’t there anymore. Like he never existed. He was supposed to come for dinner, but never showed up. I went to his lodgings the next day. His room was locked. The landlord told me hadn’t come home for a week now. When they broke inside, it was empty. We filed a report with the police, but it was a waste of time. Tablet was gone.

It is six years now. This is a troubled land. What if Tablet is dead? A victim of a hit-and-run somewhere? Shot? Knifed? Drugged and dumped in the river? I like to think he is well, somewhere nearby. I wish I took his photograph, but I have this picture in my mind of this kid with a smile on his face, bright eyes looking out with trust at a world that gave him nothing but pain. It feels like yesterday when I saw him last. My mother expects him to walk through the gate any minute. He is around somewhere in the city, in the park, by the riverside, lost in thought, wandering.

He is around for sure.

Wars also produce the most extraordinary of stories. Who can forget the Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda’s itch for war when he continued fighting on the Philippine island of Lubang until 9 March, 1974 – nearly 29 years after the end of the Second World War. Another strange tale I heard was from my grandmother. This from the Sino-Indian War of 1962. She told me how they were ordered to evacuate from Tezpur, a frontier town on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. In fact, grandpa had broached the topic a week before should the Chinese advance, but grandma declined to leave. ‘Let these little men come,’ she said. ‘Let me see how they take my house. I will show them.’ No amount of argument or cajoling moved her. No, she will not leave even if she was the last person in town. Her neighbours had left, one family after the other, but grandma wouldn’t budge. ‘Let this little men come,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll show them for disturbing the peace.’ She cleaned grandpa’s hunting rifle, and sharpened her khukri, a present from a devoted Nepali servant. The evening before they finally left, grandpa saw government officials burning the currency reserves in the banks on orders from New Delhi. Rumours floated about the Chinese being less than twenty kilometres away following the path, everyone said, of the Dalai Lama fleeing from Tibet. Stories flew about how a few government officials had fled with most of the money, gold, whatever riches the town had. There were inspiring stories too. One Sikh soldier holding out against a Chinese battalion and killing forty three Chinese soldiers before he was himself killed. This only made grandma more determined to stay back.

A night later, she was woken up from sleep. It was grandpa. He whispered that all the inmates from the district jail and the lunatic asylum were to be released at dawn. They had to leave immediately. At first, grandma thought it was a story made up to convince her. But when she saw he was serious, she needed no further convincing. While grandpa locked the doors and windows, grandma bundled what she could into two suitcases. At the door, she sprinkled Bandar kekua or Mucuna prurita, the velvet or mad bean, which is known to cause a terrible itch. ‘A welcome for our Chinese friends,’ she had whispered. Outside their house, the streets were filled with people. A blackout was in force. Like silent sentinels of the night, they made for the river bank in the darkness where huddled shadows of ferries waited to transport them to Silghat, three hours across the Brahmaputra.

The Chinese reached the outskirts of town three days later, but never entered Tezpur. They withdrew soon after across the border. Everyone was allowed back into town. Grandma returned home after a week. Her house was as she had left it. Across the porch, a single word written with a broken piece of brick: ‘Nepai.’ You shouldn’t have.

Of those released from jail and the lunatic asylum, only a few were caught and returned.

Those were dark and terrible days, the nineties. For the soldiers of the Indian army, every local was an insurgent. To have a gun thrust at your face was commonplace. But the rebels had a vice-like grip on life. Not a leaf stirred in Assam without their knowledge. Refusing a donation was akin to becoming a traitor. For months after that, I expected a car or a bike to screech to a halt in front of my office, when I walked home or drove. Nothing happened.

My friend in the loose shirt burst into prominence a few years later. That village boy with a stammer and a gun too big for his fingers walked up to an army Major and shot him dead. Revenge, the rebels claimed, for a girl raped by soldiers on a raid. Newspapers carried his aliases and a photograph. He had seven names. Does he get up in the morning, look at a mirror and decide “who am I going to be today?” He became the most wanted man after the leader. The soldiers went after his family. They took away his elder brother and his wife. Nobody saw them again.

For some time, he laid low. There was the odd snippet he was in Peshawar. Some said he was in Dacca, then in Myitkyina. Stories about crossing the border into Yunnan and travelling through Tibet, then through Nathu La into Sikkim and back to Assam. Regular jaunts to Bangkok, and to Phuket, where he was the proud owner of a beachfront property. The short guy with a loose shirt and a gun behind his back was going places.

He surrendered under an amnesty. He said he was “joining the mainstream” whatever that meant. He went on television, regretting the error of his ways. “There were days when I couldn’t go without killing,” he confessed. Months passed. I heard he was doing well. Tea, coal, handloom, construction. He was into everything. Then the shootings began. Relatives of rebels were called out of homes at night and shot. Dead bodies left on the roadside, hacked limbs on the sands of the Brahmaputra. My friend’s name was touted as the prime suspect. The rebels threatened him with dire consequences. He laughed in riposte.

He opened his office near where I worked. I, in a rundown thirty-year old building peeling paint and chipping off brick by brick. He, in a glitzy glass and steel affair, two buildings away. He had come a long way from the hesitant village boy with a gun.

Time passed. One afternoon, I saw him again. A blurry, dark- glassed figure in a black suit inside a bullet-proof Japanese SUV. Our eyes met for a second. Lingered. His were still the same. Cold. Lost. Eyes that have seen. What must he think? Does he remember me? That he came my way once. Walked up the stairs, sullen in the dim light. Knocked at the door. Waited an hour for me to finish. Bowed and stammered his threat. Showed me his gun, then quietly left, as if sorry for the intrusion, sorry he didn’t understand my situation, how hard life already was for me, sorry he came to make it harder. What must he have thought when I asked him to shoot me? What must he had thought?

The next evening, I found the road jammed with traffic and people. Cars honking. Sirens wailing. Everybody talking. There has been a shooting. Later that night, I saw it on TV. In the morning, the newspapers carried his photograph on the front page. What was left of him, that is. Two rebels on a motorbike walked past security and shot him on the face while he was getting out of his car. Not once, but many times. They made certain of his death. They were fulfilling an age old adage.

*My friend in the loose shirt formed the basis of the character Manav in Where the Rain Falls.

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife wrote the ending first and the beginning last. She says, ‘The book was written in no order at all, just me working on whatever I had some idea about. By the time I wrote the beginning, I’d already written most of the book.’ Was it helped by the fact that she is a visual artist, her book broken down into chunks, curdled thoughts picked at leisure and written? I did similarly with Where the Rain Falls, beginning with the ending, but perhaps it was helped by the fact that it was based on a true incident, one that claimed many lives. If you are the perfect writer and outline your novel, you already have a sense of the ending. By the time you reach the last chapter, the words are already there in your mind waiting to be set in the right order. Writing the ending earlier is a good way of moving forward if your book is stuck, and the plot is getting all muddled up. What if it turns out well, what if it is so good you can’t wait to finish the rest of the book?

At book stores I have seen people reading the back cover blurb, and then a few lines from the last page. I know people who insists on buying books with happy endings. The meticulous reader, those who read books from cover to cover will take an occasional guilty peek at the ending, and happy that things are going their way, motor along. Unlike films, where a good ending makes the difference between a film you enjoyed and a film you remember, endings, however, doesn’t make a book. Memorable endings, however, stay with you, their words, the stories they embellished, how it all brought everything together. Great endings make you mull over the book long after it is finished, a friend you just said goodbye, but can’t wait to meet again.

All great last lines need to be understood in the context of the entire book, like the final breath before you sigh and close the book and think about what you just read, and how it affected those in the book, the characters, you. Sometimes, it’s just a word. Tomorrow, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; sometimes, it’s a query – Are there any questions? in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; sometimes, it’s a pronouncement as in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore – You are part of a brand new world.

Last lines leave you with hope and feelings poignant as in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table: From the distance, before she disappeared into the world, Emily waved. It can touch you with feelings tender and passionate as in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera – Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said. Sometimes they mesmerize, saying much more than the words, even the book – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past – in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or as in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, leave you spellbound – It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. Then this, which when I read for the first time, when I was ten or eleven, made me think of a friend I lost a year before in an accident – He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). And finally, an ending’s ending in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. It is concise and perfect – So that, in the end, there was no end.

The tree in front my window has a story of its own. The person who planted it died last year. He fought with his son to have it planted. It was getting in the way of a badminton court. He used to water it with his granddaughter in his arms. It has grown tall, so tall it keeps the sun away. The girl reads in its shade. She is not more than five. The son has put a seat around it. The family gathers around most afternoons.

Outside, it is cold. The sun, it hides. In front is a road. It is wide. At all times of the day it is filled with cars and pedestrians. It is noisy and full of smoke. There are people everywhere. Hundreds of them. Some cling to buses creaking under their weight. Others watch. They chew tobacco or smoke. Some are shrouded in smoke from their tea from the roadside vendor. They clasp the tea-glasses in the winter chill to warm their palms. They are all watching, silent, chatting or in the company of their thoughts. They are writing their stories. Or they will become one if fate has it in them to become incidents.

The roads itself is silent. It carries no thoughts but travellers travelling. Past hills green, over rivers wide, through forests so thick it is dark during the day. Elephants cross its asphalt to the other side every day. They are not alone. Deer, rhinos, tigers follow in their wake. Even poachers. Sometimes forest guards. At night there are gunshots. There is death beyond the road. Lingering in the shroud of a winter mist, the road reminds me of a snake. It winds its way past the jungle, past tea gardens lush with fresh leaves and tea-pickers picking them with deft fingers and throwing them behind into their wicker baskets. They work like machines, but they have a song about them. Sometimes they laugh. What sorrow must they hide? What stories?

I have come a long way. I am at journeys’ end. The road, it peters out into a wide field. I am here to meet an old lady. She was eighty one when I met her for the first time. Old and frail, she could barely walk. But her eyes, how they sparkled. And I had thought: what stories must they hide? What had they seen? Her husband protesting against British rule? Allied warplanes overflying her village to the Burmese front? How the Brahmaputra changed its course during the Great Earthquake of 1950 and missed her village by a whisker? Her only son became an assassin for the rebels waging their war of independence. She hasn’t seen him for years now. Perhaps never will. But she keeps on hearing stories about him. The men he killed. Soldiers mostly. That he has died, shot in the jungle. She has no way of knowing. A soldier shot a villager dead on suspicion last week in her village. She was the only one who protested. Now, hers is the voice the village listens to. She is writing her story again. She has grown into a character. She is Ai. She is still looking out at the road. She has hope.

(Ai is the main protagonist in Where the Rain Falls)

I started querying. In batches of five or six I sent out queries and to only those agents accepting electronic submissions. Can you imagine the cost of couriering a letter to London or New York? And the normal post? I was better off throwing my query in a bottle into the Brahmaputra. The first agency I queried requested a partial, and a week later, the full manuscript. There were more requests for partials and fulls. In the meantime, I kept working on the manuscript, so that every time a partial or full was requested, I had something better to send. And every time I finished editing, it felt like it was the best I could do. Then the rejections started coming in. Brief letters dropping subtle hints. They were pointing out deficiencies in the story, problems with the plot, dialogue, where I could improve. ‘The story takes too long to take off’, ‘Over repetition of some words’, ‘Can you please cut down on the prose?’ They said I could write. They liked the idea of an old widowed illiterate woman as the protagonist, someone who rose above her inadequacies to lead the protests against the atrocities of the soldiers. They liked the idea of a rebel assassin whose father was a pacifist and a Gandhian. They said it would not sell. They wished me luck. I wrote back thanking them for their time. Their inputs were invaluable. Every little pointer was like a mini-critique for free. These were people who have been in the trade for years. I took heart from the fact that the book was improving. I was learning. I had hope.

I left India for a few years in 2007. England was cold and dreary. I had little time to spare. I was working from eight in the morning. Patients, papers, presentations. Not to speak of the cold. And the infernal rain. Does it ever stop? But I still found time to write and revise. And the rejections, they kept pouring in, much like the rain. My writing was all right. The time, not at all. The publishing industry, I was told, was going through its worst period. One day, an agent wrote back. Yes, we like it, she said. We are not saying we would like to represent you, but we would like to work on it. It was one of the few agencies in London with their own editor. The editor sent her own letter. She wrote: ‘Many thanks for sending us your full typescript, which we have read with interest. We think this story is an astonishing undertaking. It is written with terrific commitment and fervour and we like the fact that the main character is an elderly widow. However, we do feel it needs some polishing. Firstly, the story takes too long to get going and the narrative voice takes a while to get into its stride. You can, occasionally, be too wordy with your prose – especially at the start – and this over-writing needs to be toned down. Do you think you could have a go at making the writing leaner and, perhaps, by doing this cut about 10,000 words from the story?’

I was elated. I set to work. A month later, I resubmitted. She wrote back within the week saying: ‘I do think your writing is of the right quality to merit publication. Your writing is sparse, evocative, and has a strong sense of place.’ There were a few more editorial suggestions. I set to work with gusto and couriered her the manuscript again after a month. She wrote back a week later. She always took a week. She said she was leaving to join as an editor in a well-known publishing house. She was leaving the manuscript behind for whoever comes to take her place. I waited. Six months passed. I sent a reminder to the new editor. She replied that the agency was no longer interested. I wasn’t angry. Disappointed, yes, but wasn’t the book in better shape? I was drifting in an endless sea in a storm that showed no signs of abetting. Hope was all I had. That very evening I started querying again.

A pile of rejections built up. It seems better was finding lesser acceptance. Three months later, an agent in New York wrote: ‘I have now finished re-reading WTRF, and I must tell you that I am even more enamored of the book now than I was upon first experiencing it. What a marvelous story.’ He offered representation. I accepted. He began to submit. I crossed my fingers, touched wood and declined to walk under ladders.

More months passed in waiting. It extended into a year. I wrote to the agent. He replied back. The recession in the publishing industry was bad and getting worse. A small press had accepted, then closed. Signing on my book was like inviting doom. The replies from my agent became vaguer with every passing month, and then stopped all together. Another year had passed. And still no shore in sight.

I returned to India still adrift. As if in welcome, three car bombs exploded one after the other during morning rush hour. I escaped one by about three minutes. There were many who were not that lucky. I started querying again. One agent in New Delhi replied within five minutes and asked for the full. Ten minutes later, he suggested a critique and quoted a price. I had enough. I started submitting to publishers on my own. In India, you can still do that. Even the big ones accept submissions from writers. Time passed. I forgot about the book. Gave it up. I started working on book no.2. On Christmas Eve 2010, I received an offer of publication. A few emails and phone calls later, I signed the contract in the New Year. And it has been a journey too long.

On hindsight, did I time my submission right? Was the manuscript polished enough? I thought I was well read. Only, the agents were better read. Their advice was invaluable. They gave shape to a book that was just a story told talked and written offhand. That they were kind enough to reply to my thought-perfect book was a blessing. I still cringe when I think of those days, how I dared to inflict my work on them. I never gave them a book they couldn’t refuse. My writing wasn’t perfect and I was foolish enough to believe it was. They were right. They read for a living. They know the inside outs.

Rejection? What I learned? Rejection is just a passing phase. I have seen enough of rejection and life to know nothing is certain in this world. It feels great to see the book listed with various online retailers. It is finally coming out. Or is it?

I took to writing. What I wrote was influenced one way or the other by what I was reading. Books gave me knowledge. Life experience. I had my opinions. It all showed in my writing. I had stories to tell. Because I was reading, I was learning how to tell them. I was no longer racing through the pages. I was also studying the writer’s craft, learning, critiquing. Every book was a lesson in creative writing. I was learning to create characters, how to carry forward the narrative, how to write dialogue. I was learning in a sense how it was done. I was no longer reading for reading’s sake. Sometimes I stopped reading and wondered: ‘Gosh, what a wonderful way of saying it.’ This phase of reading showed in my writing. I was becoming better as a writer.But I was no longer myself. I was trying to be someone else. I was doing what novelist Michael Moorcock called copying the masters. He said:

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

I was trying too hard to be a Rushdie or Marquez. Reading no longer was an enjoyable pursuit. I was getting too analytical, too ensnared in the whirlpool of technique. But I grew out of this phase too. Slowly, I learned to separate the reading from the writing. I was still reading and reading to learn, but the learning was becoming easier. The writing sorted itself out. The writing became intuitive. Years passed; too many beyond the count of my fingers. Now I am a discerning reader and a careful writer. Time is precious. What I read has purpose.

How books helped in writing? Books taught me to think. Not linearly. Laterally. Books taught me to innovate. Books taught me the finesse you could achieve with language, how words can be used to create visual impact, how words told with the finesse of a writer’s pen can create a world so unique it is almost believable. Books also made me draw from my own experiences. I delved deeper. I tried that much harder. I always found something I thought I never had. I was inspired. Great stories are always inspiring.

Portuguese Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago explains his daily writing routine thus:

I write two pages. And then I read and read and read.

Twenty eleven was a landmark year in so many ways. Things changed. The Apple is no longer the same. It’s a year since J D Salinger died. For the first time on Amazon, more e-books were sold than paper books. Now we have kindle millionaires. The year gave us the oldest and the youngest published authors separated by seventy years. Playwright and Czech leader Václav Havel died as did writer and commentator Christopher Hitchens.

Elsewhere, another pop icon died at 27. People occupied. People defied. People faced tanks and guns and bravely fought. The Arab Spring heralded the first pangs of freedom for hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East from oppressive regimes. It demonstrated the power of social media. Facebook played a pivotal role in harnessing the masses in Libya and elsewhere. A new nation was born in Africa. Tiger Woods did not win a single tournament. Osama Bin Laden was killed. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died. Dr Death Dr. Jack Kevorkian, whose assisted suicides caused outrage, died of natural causes.

I had no promises to keep this year. I read and wrote every day. In January, I signed the publishing contract. By September end, I turned in the manuscript. In November, I had the first glimpse of the cover. It is happening. I have reason to be optimistic.

I hope 2011 was kind to you. I hope you did well in whatever you were doing. Above all, I hope you were happy. I wish the same for you in the coming year. Happiness, success, prosperity. What else could you possibly want?

Many authors claim making their work available online increases book sales. A case in the point is Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep with Ricardo Cortes. Advance PDF copies to publishers were leaked and forwarded in their thousands by email. The book reached No. 1 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list a month before its release. Canadian science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has put his entire collection online. Doctorow believes copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho is a vocal champion of putting entire books online for free. Coelho has been a willing conspirator in pirating his own work. When he first came across a pirated Russian edition of The Alchemist on the internet in 1999, he put the link on his site. The impact was immediate. Sales in Russia which was only about a 1,000 books, rocketed to 1,00,000 in 2001. His fans have downloaded complete editions of his books more than 20 million times. Piratecoelho, a WordPress site now linked to his blog, culls pirated versions of his books on sites like BitTorrent and eMule. He pays fans scattered across France, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Turkey to find new torrents of his books to link to the site. He explains his action thus:

It was not me who put it there, but being adept at free contents, I put this URL here. I am just facilitating. At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it. They wait for the hard copy anyway. Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.

Author Neil Gaiman has similar views. He isn’t worried about piracy and doesn’t think of illegal downloading as a lost sale but advertising for his books.

So are Coelho and Gaiman on the right side of the argument? Or is Lucía Etxebarria justifiably peeved? Does it not matter to both Coelho and Gaiman if their books are illegally downloaded because they are among the most successful authors around with sales in millions. What of the one-book author making his foray into a writing career. Would it help his cause to make his book available online? Will his hard work be wasted because of illegal downloads? This is a touchy topic. But piracy is an infringement of an author’s rights and unless such downloads has the author’s tacit approval, it remains so.

Last year, I set myself a target to read a book every week. Correction – I said I’d finish a book every week. I failed. Badly. I ended up reading about half of that. I bought twice as much, about ten books a month. I am asking myself now, so late in the year, with the sun about to set and the world to dim: did I set myself too high a target?

I read every day without fail. It’s a habit since childhood. A book is a must before I close my eyes to the day. Even if it was for a few minutes, I must read a book. Not a magazine or newspaper. A book. Even if I came home at two in the morning, I must have my quota of words. I read in my worst of days and in the best of days. Sometimes, I read for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour. At school, we finished a hundred fifty page paperback in an hour and a half. We devoured words like food. We read in class, paperbacks hidden in the clasp of history textbooks or geography lessons. Not a library in the city was safe from us. In university, reading took a backseat. How much can you read when classes start at seven and I am free only by eight or nine. But I still read at night. And I always read for pleasure. I never set targets. Reading was a primal pursuit, and nothing came close to the feeling of hands holding a book, the smell of paper in your nose, eyes feasting on one word after another like one magic spell after another. Honestly, what was I thinking when I said last year I would read a n number of books.

Setting targets took away the pleasure from reading. I was now reading to keep a promise I made to myself. Or was it a falsehood of a promise? I can’t remember what I read this year. Was it that nothing of note was written this year, or was I skimming the pages to keep pace, instead of reading for reading’s sake? I suspect the latter. Time was at a premium now. I had work, patients to attend to, a manuscript to edit, stuff. Twenty four hours wasn’t enough. But I still read without fail. But it was no longer a pleasure. Reading was no longer a pursuit, but a compulsion. Reading became tedious. Along the way I learnt that if you set yourself a target, you turn something you like into a task. Would you gulp down a glass of wine or sip it?

Honestly, what have I done, wasting the little bundles of time when I could have enjoyed myself. I am not setting targets anymore. I will read for pleasure from now on. Even if I had to read one book a month, I intend to enjoy it, enjoy the churn of words in my mind, enjoy the moments when they conjure up images in my mind, pictures that are real, characters that have voice, feelings that are poignant.

Honestly, books. I love them. Like they say, reading is for pleasure. And I aim to thoroughly enjoy myself from now on.