House Of Solitude

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi on the house where he wrote his bestselling novel, The Last Song of Dusk. In an exclusive to GoodHomes, he narrates three pieces on the subject of our cover story: his family house.

In 2002, I returned from California to Bombay. A love affair had bombed. I was to start on a master’s degree in San Francisco the following year — a scholarship had been secured. Interim, I had a year to kill. My father, the practical Gujurati, insisted I get a job – perhaps as a reporter. My mother said, ‘You don’t need to leave the house. Why don’t you start a pizza parlour in the garage?’

Around that time Hrithik Roshan, who grew up in the same neighbourhood, went from totally awkward badminton playing teenager I’d seen at Juhu Gymkhana, and transformed into a world-class, nipple-flashing film star. One of my school contemporaries, whose kindergarten achievement had been target urinating in Limca bottles, distinguished himself not only by marrying but also begetting a child the same year.

Folks in my neighbourhood were flashing the absence of chest hairs, and the presence of heirs.

Meanwhile, I was nursing a broken heart and quarrelling with my mother – no, I did not want her mami’s recipe for pizza sauce; and yes, this made me a bloody ingratiate. I retreated to my room in the house, the photographs of which grace this magazine. I sat before a manuscript I’d finished two years prior. My novel was a love story of sorts, a marriage under threat, a young woman whipping into her sexual and artistic own, the shadow of music on their lives — these were key strands. I wrote all day, then deep into night; I edited like the demon was in me; I revised everything. I had charts. There were diary entries I revisited. In four months, I brought into being the story that later brought me into writerly existence: The Last Song of Dusk was completed in this house. From the fate of the house, from its invisible veins and ventricles, its secret cloacal, a book came to be.