Manju Kapur's GALLERY OF LIFE

In the contemporary publishing scene, author Manju Kapur cuts an unusual figure. Having published her first book at 50, she takes her time over each one that follows and consistently defies all markers of literary success

- Somak Ghoshal

It’s a murky Saturday morning on the eve of Diwali, and I’m sitting with writer Manju Kapur in the drawing room of her home on Man Singh Road in Delhi. I’m here to talk to her about her new novel, The Gallery, recently published by Penguin Random House India. But having followed her work over the years, I have questions that span beyond this one book.

In the literary world, the appearance of a Manju Kapur novel is like sighting a comet. Each of her books has an intense, often painstaking, gestation period. When it comes out, there’s a certain amount of attention from a loyal readership (“largely female and older,” as one of her editors put it). But once the hubbub dies down, Kapur retreats into her cocoon, only to re-emerge with a new novel a few years later. This cycle has repeated since 1998, when she published her first novel, Difficult Daughters.

In the contemporary publishing scene, where youth and saleability are touted as the magic ingredients to success, Kapur, 75, cuts an unusual figure. She came to writing fiction in her 40s, after teaching English literature at Delhi’s Miranda House College for 30 odd years. And that, too, after many false starts.

“I always thought literature was so exalted—I could never do it,” Kapur says. “But after the rush of the 1980s and 1990s, Salman Rusdhie and Amitav Ghosh and others, I thought, chalo mein bhi try kar leti hoon (okay, let me try as well).”

So, she gave herself two years to finish her first book. In the end, it took eight. “That’s such a dreadful introduction to my writing process,” Kapur laughs. “I have never managed to write a book in two years.” It took her all her 40s to write Difficult Daughters. “I was a teacher, I had three children, and I ran a house very badly,” she says.