I’m going to do it. As God is my witness, tomorrow on Valentine’s Day no less, I will put aside my pretensions for a literary career and begin what I have been threatening to do for years – write a full romance novel.

No proofreading, no editing, no twitching and tweaking for other people. This time its all me. I’m gonna do it. And what’s more, this time I’ll finish it. I won’t start laughing right when the tension builds up, I won’t hate my heroine and kill her off in the middle with the aid of a strategically placed rattlesnake or two, I won’t get bored and wander off – by God, I’ll do this.

And if the only way to do it is to believe in it, then fine – I believe the moon is made of Swiss cheese and last night a cow flew past it singing “Auld Lang Syne”. Neither of which have anything to do with romance novels but I’m just saying… that’s the level of my commitment.

In the coming months I shall write 200 pages – about 50,000 words, give or take a few thousand – of looooooooovveeee. There will be moonlight and roses and charming, dashing scoundrels who make off with a shy maiden’s heart.

Can it be any more evident that I haven’t the slightest idea for a story? Hehehe. Oh well, let this be an adventure.

***

Speaking of romances, I just saw the miniseries of the Far Pavilions… MM Kaye’s Indian epic that was my introduction to her work. I remember seeing and being less than impressed and then my cousin R pressing on me a copy of it and telling me it reads a lot better than it acts out. Be that as it may, I still found it a difficult slog – not the book per se but getting thru a lot of it. Well, I was only 11 or so and I didn’t really get the sweeping romance of it. But now I saw the miniseries again and it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. I mean, the English actors are still massacring the language all these years on but I didn’t remember Omar Sharief in it or all those guys from the Amitabh movies of the 70s – the good ones, remember? – who found a part in it. And there was Jennifer Kendall whom I love and again, didn’t remember as being part of it and the ubiquitous Saeed Jaffrey. Was there ever a foreign production on India that didn’t have him in it?

The only thing that really stuck in my mind and which I saw again in this was that the actress playing Anjulie has remarkable eyes especially heavily outlined in kohl. Oh, and I notice that the guy playing Ash in this has Abe Lincoln cheeks – you know what I mean… great big hollows that look like he was being starved in an attic somewhere until very recently.

More exciting than the Far Pavilions was the Shadow of the Moon. I remember R only had half a tattered copy with her. She didn’t know what had become of the last part and said, she’d read the rest of it in her cousin’s house but didn’t have one to give me. So I borrowed the half she had and it ended in the one big love scene in the book.

It wasn’t even a proper love scene. It was just two really weary, really scared people collapsing in each others arms and then sleeping for hours on the jungle floor. And I really liked it. I always have loved MM Kaye’s characters. They’re never perfect little angels constantly asking for your love. They can be quite difficult to understand or to relate to or even to like, and for that reason, they’re always more fun to read.

But I remember the years that went by before I finished reading the book. How I made R repeat all she knew, almost obsessively. And I wonder at her kindness for that geeky lil girl too. I know I was a pain. I knew it even as I was it. Once my obsession is kindled there is very little that can stop it. Even today it is an effort to stop it, to make myself realize that not everyone is apt to share my feelings on a certain topic and I have to stop piling it on them.

****

While I was ordering my copy of the Far Pavilions at Amazon, I came across this other book about the events of 1857. Well, two of them. One is called Zemindar and everyone who’d read it was aux anges over it. I mean, if book lovers could descend into hysteria online then this was it. It was insane. So I ordered it. I wonder if it will live upto its hype.

The second was this book by JG Farrell, which won the Booker Prize. Its called the Seige of Krishnapur and again its one of those least heard of book which seem to have everyone crazy. Pankaj Mishra wrote the intro for the edition I saw. That’s on my wishlist.

And I also heard about this book on the Cawnpore residency during 1857, which I think was the hardest hit. Its called Our Bones are Scattered and its written by Andrew Ward and its about the blood that was spilled by both sides in the run up to and in the aftermath of that war. Also on my wishlist.