Of Delhi, dreams and debut

T was a quiet day at Delhi's airport in March 1995, the kind where every sound - a crying toddler, the silence of a bored official, the tap of the rain - seems amplified.

- AASHNA REDDY

Amid the chaos, the narrator of The Scent of Fallen Stars finds himself caught in the peculiar energy of the city, an India both bewildering and intoxicating. This unsettling start to the journey foreshadows the complex web of identity and secrets that Aishwarya Jha, debut novelist and winner of this year's Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman (Best Debut Fiction) by The New Indian Express Group, so skillfully weaves in her first novel.

"Writing has always been my greatest dream," she says, recalling childhood visits to bookstores, inhaling the intoxicating scent of paper and wood. But much like her characters, the path wasn't straightforward. After countless rejections from literary magazines, she persisted, honing her craft through plays and short stories. "Writing plays taught me to craft dialogue and get to the heart of a scene quickly. You only have ten minutes in a one-act play, so every word has to count. It taught me to edit ruthlessly - if it doesn't serve the story, it goes," she says.