My book has a strong Indian flavour

When Mumbai-based banking professional Shoma Narayanan submitted her short story to the Harlequin Mills & Boon’s Passions — aspiring authors auditions, little did she know that she would emerge the second runner-up. She also managed to become the first Indian to author an Mills and Boon’s novel that saw global release. Shoma’s Monsoon Wedding Fever recently hit the stands at book stores.

“I have always assumed that people who are in the writing business tend to do better, so I never thought I had a chance of winning the contest,” recalls an excited Shoma, who admits that she never took up writing seriously until her winning short story began taking shape. “Writing was always more of an outlet for me. I would write regressive, serious stuff,” she says.

But if you’ve read even one Mills and Boon’s book, you’ll know that they’re about anything but regressive, serious stuff. They’re filled to the brim with hardcore romance, betrayals and even a fair share of erotica. Shoma says that though she stuck to the basic plot structure of an M&B book, she added her own Indian twist to it. “Before I wrote the book, I was asked to read a fair amount of M&Bs. So I figured out what is expected of an M&B novel,” she says. “It is meant for the younger and urban audience. There is a feel-good factor about the book. It’s more of a chick-lit than a traditional M&B novel,” she adds.

Explaining that there is a strong Indian flavour in her book, “Indianisms”, she says, Shoma opens up about her debut novel, “The heroine is a typical working woman – young and ambitious. She takes her independence to extreme levels.” Unlike your usual run-of-the-mill romance novel, the boy-meets-girl plot extends into a boy-runs-into-girl-again, and rather awkwardly at that. “They both run into each other at a monsoon wedding and the story takes off from there and is about what happens then,” Shoma cuts short.

Shoma admits that when she was still writing the book, she had no idea that it was up for a global release. “Until then, I was only writing for myself,” she says, explaining that it was in a way a blessing in disguise because she never felt the pressure of being the first Indian author to get an M&B out there.

But not being aware about writing for a global audience might have called for some of Shoma’s initial few drafts to be modified quite a bit. But Shoma refutes it, “At that point, I didn’t want to make too many drastic changes, so I just went back and changed some of the Indianisims by weaving it into the storyline and modified some of the Hindi phrases that I’d used,” she says.