All of Them, and I Cannot Name a Single One

I get asked who my favourite author is. I was asked it properly in an interview, and the answer everybody is waiting for is a name.

Whenever I am asked, I am tempted to answer with a line from Jab We Met, the Hindi romantic comedy in which Kareena Kapoor plays Geet. She says, main apni favourite hoon. I am my own favourite. Then I picture a donkey praising its own tail.

Except that an author who is not their own favourite cannot expect to be anybody else’s.

Somebody has to believe in a book before it exists, and for a long while that is one person. The same person is its first reader, and the first who has to tell it where it is wrong. You do both, and you cannot let either side have the last word. So the question is a slightly unfair one to put to a writer, and I have never answered it the way anybody wanted.

All of them

The answer I do give gets taken for politeness. Every author whose book I have read to the end is my favourite author. All of them.

I do not mean I enjoyed every book the same. I have preferences, and they go by genre, and I have said so elsewhere. I mean something an author means. Becoming one changed what the word is for.

I know now what a book costs, and compared with the research, the editing and the marketing, writing the manuscript was the easy part for me. The editing is a gentle name for sitting across from your own pages and telling them they are wrong, and then telling them again the following week, and removing what you were proudest of because it is standing in the way. Nobody sees that part, and it took longer than everything before it. Then the book exists and the hardest job begins, which is persuading a stranger to give it a couple of evenings, and more often a couple of weeks.

Every author who has been through all of that has earned my respect, and that is what favourite means here. There are many of them. Picking one name out would feel like an insult to the rest, so I do not rank them in public, and I doubt I ever will.

The one I can answer

The question I can answer is a different one. Which author made me want to put my own story on a page? Still not a name. Small moments did it, and each of them became somebody in the book. A bedtime book I was reading to my daughter, which helped shape Meera. Her three words came out of it. A road at half past four in the morning, full of people torturing themselves for a banana and a medal at the finish, and crossing the line anyway, which gave me Viyaan. And Goldie, who has a piece of his own on this Journal. Two people and a dog, and not one of them came from a novelist.

Becoming an author changed how I answer the question. I still have favourites on every shelf, but I no longer rank them. Every author whose book I have read to the end has earned my respect and a place on that list, because I understand now how much work lies behind a finished book. The characters I wrote, however, came from places that were not names at all.