The book that saved me: A writer reflects on ten years of his novel

by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

The book that saved me was the one that I wrote. Ten years ago, today, The Last Song of Dusk was published in Bombay. I wore an ill-fitting bandh-gala made by a tailor in Parle market. I had never read in public before – now I was to read before a house full of Bombay’s august, at the British Council. My family was in the audience but if I caught their eye I knew I’d be found out. My sisters had always called me ‘the boy with the mismatched socks’. But on that evening, a decade ago, my socks matched for the first time (black Anchor). My hair didn’t fail me entirely. The awful thing about putting on a public face is how your private one suffers; I worried I would no longer be the boy with the mismatched socks. Going forward, everything would match; then, I would die, or worse, flourish as a fraud. It was a risk I took without knowing then it was such an awful risk.

The book sold out its first printing in a week. An auspicious start.

People recognized me, including in the public lavatory. ‘Are you that writer?’ This was fame’s hazard: it would not let you piss in peace. Because of the book, I was invited to dinners, to talks, to literary festivals in far-flung places; invariably, they were more boring than ever imagined. Because of the book, I gained friends, and fell into gilded society – for a boy who had spent his formative years without any friends, holed up alone in a makeshift tree-house in the backyard this was a mighty improvement (or was it?).

Because of the book I was asked my mind on things I knew precious little: I was 26 then, with no right to a real opinion having not yet endured the breadth of hard experience. Because of the book I traveled to 64 cities in one year (the jet lag was so awful, ten years on, I still got the red eye).

Because of the book I came into intimacies – lovers read the book, then they cut into the quick of my night, leopards on spoor. Because of the book I came to learn that the world I’d known, as one that might be contained in a tree house, and was therefore small, tender and personal was, in fact, its diametrical opposite. The book was my passport into formalized adulthood, a visa into a society whose membership I ought have reviewed more carefully before accepting. Yet, this book saved me, many times over; what’d I have done otherwise with heft of memory or crackle of language?

Here’s the upside of living a book for ten years – I found, in the breadth of hard experience, that it was always better out in the tree-house. That’s where I still was the boy with the mismatched socks, the boy without the public face, the boy who lived entirely in imagination. Now it’s time to return up there, to reclaim that secret self, revealed only in magic hours, authentic and solitary. The good fortune of being published, and of being the custodian of a book as loved (and, often, as loathed) as The Last Song of Dusk are the readers it drew. They are the best readers in the world. They forgave the book’s many flaws, its youthful extravagance, and chased after its sadness; it was the kind of wild thing that could light up a dark room. The book’s readers, its friends, were bolder than its critics, visionary and ardent, they saw it as it was: an old thing rinsed with a young man’s tears. Having seen its sorrow, they had met it with their own. They had known all along that a book was a thing to weep to, to weep with; it offered no justice but, by Lord, it’s listening was magnificent.

This is why I love this book – for the readers it allowed me to meet, who entered my solitude to enter their own. This is why I am so crushingly grateful for having written this book, and for having loved its characters – they kept me able company. This is why ten years later, I feel I should never have left that old tree-house - but also that it’s never too late to head back there. Because the book that will save me is the book that I am yet to write. In the meantime, this book has all been an auspicious start. Thank you, dear reader, for everything, but chiefly for the love.

Penguin publishes a 10th anniversary special edition of The Last Song of Dusk in June. Shanghvi is a Goa based writer - @sdshanghvi & facebook.com/shanghvi.