Of daughters and dreams

Lakshmi Puri's debut novel is a multigenerational saga that doubles as India's coming-of-age story

- MANDIRA NAYAR

It was 1999. Aishwarya Rai had stepped into the world of acting. Akshaye Khanna was very much in his prime. Kevin Spacey had just won his second Academy Award. As a young diplomat, Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri was in Hungary, the year the country opened a new chapter to enter NATO. Hope was everywhere, as the world stepped into another millennium.

That was when Puri began writing a story that she had lived with—one that she had grown up listening to. But it took a lifetime to complete. “I started writing when I was ambassador in Budapest, from 1999 to 2002,” she says.

It is the dying days of December 2023 in Delhi. Puri is at her home, having taken a leap into fiction from the matter-of-fact world of diplomacy. “After about 43 years in what I call the pantomime of diplomacy, I really wanted to indulge in an act of creation,” she says.

Puri is at her desk, with an assortment of books in the background. All around her are gods— Guru Nanak on the desk, Shiva on the shelf and Krishna on the wall. “I wrote only 100 pages. After that, I got busy with work, and also had a block. I don’t know what happened. Over the years, I still kept reminding myself—that’s an unfinished project.”

It was only after 18 years—half of it in Geneva, and half in New York—that Puri resumed writing. Covid had the world on pause. “I worked 10 hours a day those days,” she smiles. “There was a kind of vacuum. That is what was needed. I think my external world was too busy.”