Anuja Chauhan’s bestselling debut novel, The Zoya Factor, a romance set against the background of a fictitious 2010 Cricket World Cup, was number five on India’s Top Ten Fiction List 2008. Her second novel, ‘Battle for Bittora’, anticipated common citizens’ interest in politics. The book ‘exceeded the expectations set by ‘The Zoya Factor’ and was declared the most Entertaining Read of the year 2010 by People Magazine’s. Her third novel, ‘Those Pricey Thakur Girls’, set in the pre-liberalization India of the late nineteen eighties, was an out and out commercial hit. Her latest Novel, ‘The House that BJ Built’, its sequel, was released last month.
The book is a romance involving BJ’s Rs 200 crore house on New Delhi’s posh Hailey Road. “It’s about families, and houses, and family skeletons and sister-dynamics and girls ‘doing their own garments-ki-business’ and the travails of an indie filmmaker who’s making his first mainstream, commercial film,” says Anuja.
About the idea
One has lots of ideas, but some are stickier than others. Anuja writes on subjects that refuse to leave her head till they are put down. “I wanted to write about how Delhi changing - going from a city of laid back living and sprawling bungalows to one of high rise condominiums with security and patrolling. I realized that all of us have some ‘nani-dadi ka ghar’, that we love and have fond memories of, and that will inevitably be divvied up like a cake and everybody will fight over the slices. I thought that would make for a great setting for a love story,” she says.
Motivation
A lot of sentimental stuff gets said about ‘preserving ancestral home and not selling out to builders. “I wanted to make the point that, eventually, a house is just bricks and mortar. The ‘house’ that BJ built, is not really the house, it’s the people in the house,” says the author, who moved on from Harper Collins Publishers India, to Westland.
From an idea to a full-length novel
The authors who didn’t know about genres when she started to write, says, “I just knew I wanted to write romances - with lots of humour and satire.” So at what point in the development of an idea did she knew that it will become a full-length novel, she says, “When it won’t go away. When it keeps coming back, and refuses to leave. That sually happens when you’ve hammered out about 20,000 words.”
Life experiences
Anuja, who is a believer in write what you know, says, “When stuff is just researched or googled, it just doesn’t have the same texture or knowledge.”
Journey as a writer
Talking about her journey to becoming a writer she says, “I’ve been writing since I was a child - plays, poems, limericks.
In boarding school I used to make up personalised love stories for all my girlfreinds - like if one of my girlfreinds was an athlete, I’d spin a tale about how she went for a basketball tournament to Dehradoon and the team bus broke down on the way and these boys stopped to help - who were also basketballers from a boy’s school. If my friend was a studious type, I’d make up a story about how she met this guy in the library. And so on.
Then I started writing advertsing copy - which kept me happy for a long time - but then eventually, I wanted to stretch myself a little and so I started writing my first book.”
