and alternating between northeast India and New Delhi, this is a story of love and loss, of lives adrift in a mega city, and of the lesser-known side of urban India.’ Does that make you curious as to what the book is really about?

It might interest you to know that Jet City Woman the novel started out as Jet City Woman the short story on www.tehelka.com way back in October 2001. Sometime earlier that year, when I was working as a sub-editor for a news website based in New Delhi, I had been sent by the chief editor to cover an art exhibition at a hotel. Mine was a desk job, but it seemed there was a shortage of correspondents. So I was asked to go for the exhibition: a lightweight story basically, something to drum up some PR. At around the same time an Afghan national was arrested in the city for supplying cocaine: it was quite a big story for a while.

The art exhibition and the drug dealer came together in my mind in the form of a short story, and I wrote it in three days and sent it off to the literary section of www.tehelka.com, which was promoting new writers those days. The title - Jet City Woman - came from the name of an old song by Queensryche I happened to hear on FM radio while I was trying to think of a title. There was no deep thought behind choosing the title beyond the fact that the ‘city’ and ‘woman’ in the song title echoed my story’s central theme. But years later, going through the lyrics while I was writing the novel, I found they sort of connected to the story I was trying to tell.

The short story had three main characters who went on to form the basis of my novel: the unnamed ‘reluctant journalist’ from Shillong, the mysterious female TV reporter Naina, and the Afghan cocaine dealer Karim. The story was put up on the www.tehelka.com homepage and I received quite a few mails from people telling me how good the story was. I thought that I had, overnight, turned into a ‘writer’ who could now write a novel. I was wrong of course. It took me five more years. In that time there were three more jobs, and three attempts at writing a novel that had to be abandoned halfway. The hardest thing while writing the novel (and I actually ‘taught’ myself to write a novel with this book) was getting the correct ‘tone’ for the story I wanted to tell.

Getting the book accepted, edited, and then published took me another year-and-a-half. But that is another tale. From a short story on a website to a published novel six years later - my Jet City Woman has come a long way!

Apart from the basic plot of the book, my aim was to write about places and people I knew well from my own life: in that sense the book is autobiographical. Places like the Laitumkhrah meat market in Shillong, the Tibetan refugee colony at Delhi’s Majnu ka Tila, the students’ colonies around Delhi University; people like my friends and acquaintances and colleagues from Shillong and Delhi. But most first novels are autobiographical I guess, in that the writer looks within for the story; after that the writer tends to look outside of himself for his material.

Sixty years on from India’s independence, along with our growing economy (and because of it) there has been a steady increase in the different types of voices in our books and movies and music (and other art forms). People have the opportunity to take chances with the kinds of stories they have to tell. In such an environment, I would like to think that Jet City Woman looks at places and people that haven’t been written about before in an honest and direct manner. And of course, I would like to believe that it has an interesting story to tell.

I’ve had feedback about the novel from my readers, and the people who seem to enjoy it the most are those who are familiar with the book’s terrain, people who know Shillong, Delhi, Delhi University and the journalism circuit in Delhi. Most of them are young, around my age, and have never come across a book or movie that shows them their lives. This book is especially meant for people like them. However, people anywhere and of any age will enjoy this book I feel, as long as they give it a chance to speak for itself. It offers a window onto a different sort of world, and that is what literature and writing is about at the end of the day.

To know more about Ankush Sakia's book, visit:
http://jetcitywomanbook.blogspot.com

Ankush Saikia is a senior editor working at a publishing firm in New Delhi, India. Jet City Woman, his first novel was published in November 2007 by Rupa & Co.

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