For a person who was woken up by a phone call early in the morning, Milan Vohra sounds very cheerful. She talks about nothing in particular and goes as far as making idle talk with this reporter, before settling down to business, again just as cheerfully. The first Mills and Boons author from India, Vohra started her writing career on the evening of her wedding anniversary. And the rest, as the cliche goes, is history. Now in the city for the launch of her second book, Tick-Tock We’re 30, the bubbly author says it is of a completely different genre from Love Asana.
Tick-Tock We’re 30 is about 12 young men and women who make a pact to meet up when they all turn 30. Told from the viewpoint of Lara, the main female protagonist, the book is all about revisiting old friendships.
Your first full length book was a Mills and Boon. How different is Tick Tock from Love Asana?
It is a story with 12 major characters! It would have never been possible to write a book like this within the M&B framework where secondary characters barely have a role to play. Plus, I like to use humour when I write my characters and to feel free to use the kind of lingo or Indianisms that make it so exciting to be writing today for our times, in my own voice. Writing an independent book like Tick Tock We’re 30 gave me the liberty to do that.
There are six women in your second book. What were the challenges you faced in trying to portray six different characters without them ending up to be Mary-Sues?
There’s no shortcut. You’ve got to work out each character in a lot of detail before you start writing. It helps a lot to work out their backgrounds, their physicality obviously, their take on things, the way they react to situations. But why just the women characters? There are six men in the book too and each person needs to be distinct, just as people are in life. For instance, I had fun developing a minor character like Favio, the stylist who always speaks of himself in the third person and has a lisp.
Where did you draw inspiration from for Tick Tock?
The plot stems from the fact that I had a large group of friends I grew up with in Delhi who kept talking about having a reunion ever since the millennium. One day I just decided, enough. These folks are never going to get their act together. I’m going to write myself a new set of friends and make this reunion happen. But the little little things that we notice, from every day life is what makes writing so much fun! Things that I had no idea I’d stored away come back in some form or other.
In your previous interviews you said that you distinctly tried to avoid the Sex and City style of women in Tick Tock, and that all your characters knew the worth of a work-life balance. Is that how modern Indian women are these days? What is your take on it?
I can’t for the life of me force fit a scenario that I am not convinced exists, if I’m setting the book in India. If I read of a woman who can wake up, Samantha style, with a complete stranger in her bed, kick him out and be more worried about a zit on her face than the fact that she has no idea what the guy’s name is – I don’t get it.
Maybe this happens and maybe there are readers out there in India who are relating with it but I can’t. I have to write from what I know. And the women I know and see around me seem pretty smart. More and more, they want to work at getting a good work-life balance, as do I.
Did you have any struggles with being taken seriously in respect to your writing? Have you ever been dismissed as a ‘Mills and Boons’ author or a ‘chick-lit’ author?
I went with the flow and enjoyed what the M&B experience gave me…a lot of fun, giggles, a lot of discipline and learning that writing even a genre book is far from easy-peasy, the reward of getting huge affection from M&B die-hards, confidence in my being able to develop a plot and of course my 15 seconds of fame. Then I took my time to catch my breath and think through what I wanted to write next. It helped also that I wrote a few short stories between these two books, some that were reflective, slightly dark; and a couple of fun stories for the older teen readers. It has definitely helped me be received with more openness from readers.
What are your plans for your future books?
I’ve just about weaned myself off the characters in Tick-Tock we’re 30. Yes, the next baby is on its way. The problem is it’s a book that’s turning out to be so much fun to research — I hope I get down to writing it soon!
