Here are details of the Mumbai launch for A Pack of Lies !
Ad guru Prahlad Kakar will be in conversation with the author – this promises to be fun because Prahlad and Umi have known each other for many years!
Date: Friday, 16th October 2009
Time: 7pm-10pm
Venue: Olive Bar and Kitchen
As before, if you feel you absolutely deserve to attend, get in touch with us through the Contact page.
The Westland office is above Evergreen Sweet Shop and Madonna Beauty Parlor. Diwali orders, presumably, had the sweet shop in a frenzy of cellophane and sugar that spilled out onto the street. The doorman of the beauty parlor opened the door as soon as the three of us approached, sending my self-esteem to a new low, but we all did laugh at that moment. It was a moment of triumph too, that it was the office of my publisher I was going to and not the beauty parlor.
Meeting Prita, my editor, was not like a first meeting at all. It seemed as if we had met before during the writing and finishing of POL. But I did get my promised hug in person which is not possible in email.
Our driver’s cell phone does not work, but he says “Radio, bluetooth, hookup, receive”, words that make me look at him in awe and delight and tell him that we are not so hi-tech in America.
I tell him we didn’t see any elephants that day, and he says “Maybe you will see a camel tomorrow.”
An elephant with a painted head walked slowly along the road out of the airport. The next morning another elephant walked by us at a traffic light along with bicycles and assorted vehicles.
It is odd to connect the writing of this book to where I am now – with my sisters, about to meet all the people who brought this book from a Word document on my hard drive to a real book I can hold in my hand with pages that smell slightly of ink. The smell brings back the days when I was seven or eight, and I would go to work with my mother at the Times of India building, imposing enough to a child, but when a peon took me to the press floor, the smell of newsprint and the sounds of the machines were thrilling to me.
It is strange and wonderful that other people will read my words, however they react, and, however nervous and anxious and unprepared I am to do those other things that come with being a writer. I calm my nerves by listening to the fragile sound of peacocks meowing in the night and remembering elephants walking, unperturbed in the disastrous traffic of the capital city.
The invite-only launch for A Pack of Lies is in New Delhi on October 14th, 2009!
If you feel like you have been greatly wronged by not being invited, send us a message through the contact page.
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.