A Pack of Lies will be launched on October 14th.

My mother will not be there at the launch, nor will she ever read the book. She died on March 1st, 2003. I read all her books, or, to be perfectly honest, I had most of them read to me, by the author herself. My mother didn’t think much of my writing, she read my school essays, shook her head, did not deign to read any more. The one book I started as a computer programmer’s wife with no work permit in California she said needed so much work that I gave up. I didn’t write any more till she was gone.

I quote Leoben here, though I am sure this has been said more eloquently by others who carry more weight than he does, but none more pretty than him: Children are born to replace their parents. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die.

Though I miss my mother, and never wished her dead (I don’t count the time the congealing egg in my plate made me wish the repressive monster before me would drop down dead, or the time I was forced to return a Superman comic I stole and apologize to the owner of the store and I wished the moral policewoman would be run over by a bus on the way there). But, if she had been alive, would I have written the way I have now, would I have written a whole book, would I have written a whole book and dared to send it to a publisher, would I have written A Pack of Lies, had it published, and be packing to go to India for the launch?

I wish my mother was here to read my book. But, I do know, there would be no book had she been here to read it.