coming home. It is a novel based in what I observed and learned in Delhi.

After living abroad for many years, I moved back to India at the end of 1995. I was finishing my first novel, Nani’s Book of Suicides, and felt that I needed to return to India. Even as I was finishing that first book, I felt that I didn’t really know India. Much of my experience of the country had been as a child, growing up in Varanasi. There were other cities and places of course. I still hold dear my memories of travelling for long days, by train and by road, to reach Arunachal. I cherish the long, languid summers of my childhood on the army cantonments in the Himalayas. Yet, each experience was circumscribed by family connections and social links. Somehow I felt I was writing from nostalgia and not real knowledge. After all, I didn’t really know India. I had never travelled on my own or lived in the country as a grown-up.

So in 1995, I came home! I spent part of that first year holed up in Lucknow to finish my first novel while consuming daily rations of chaat from Gol Market and writing away all night. The remaining part of that year, I travelled through India – Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Goa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh. Places I had never been to before. Armed with a Lonely Planet guidebook, a few names and addresses, and the same adventure spirit that had taken me backpacking in other parts of the world, I decided to learn about my own country.

Of course there were problems – I was constantly mistaken for a nutty foreigner, or worse still, a complete freak. Indian women apparently didn’t backpack! They didn’t talk to camel-drivers and tour guides. They didn’t travel with foreign friends. I was not only ignoring the social codes but also often shattering them completely.

I suppose if I had taken the up-market car-with-driver, posh hotel route, none of these would have been issues. But then the whole point of backpacking is to get to know a place thoroughly. I was not going to be denied the experience in my own country. Yet, not surprisingly, during that trip, strangers gently reminded me of traditions, manners, and customs. People from all over the country participated in my education – political, social, and cultural.

The novel ended around the same time as the backpacking (along with much of my savings). So like millions of other north Indians, I came to Delhi.

It was early 1996, globalization had kicked in and there was lots happening. That meant that there was a chance of getting a job and replenishing my savings. Initially, I tried going back to an office job, but I had been corrupted by the taste of freedom. Within weeks I decided that I would rather work as a freelancer instead. It was hard work, and I was making less money than I ever had. But I was happier. Best of all, I had loads of time to explore Delhi, travel around India (although my spinal column complained incessantly of the rough treatment by tourist buses).

Slowly I began to know Delhi. The faces, the links, the codes. The idiosyncrasies of a grand capital. Slowly, without ever realising, I got hooked. I endless observed the ostentatious, brash Punjabis, the gorgeous but often thick Jat mundas from Haryana, the hardworking but generally ill-starred Biharis, trying to make sense of their lives and dreams. I began to pick up Punjabi, and for the first time in my life, I learnt to curse fluently in Hindi.

As I settled in, I started to know the insider gossip and jokes. The political intrigues. Corruption that was refined over generations by leading families. The veneer of Westernized sophistication was used as adornment for dining at the Habitat, but discarded in favour of the orthodox feudal core at home. Oxbridge degrees and Harvard MBAs lived within the same minds as caste prejudices and religious bigotry. Somehow each of us seemed to veer madly between two polar extremes: modern and traditional, conservative and liberal, rural and urban, tolerant and bigoted. Somehow we managed to hold ourselves together despite the contradictions. With Krishna’s Eyes grew out of this experience of Delhi.

I wanted to write a book about returning home and making sense of India. I wanted to write a story of someone – like me – who would get to know India as a grown-up. I wanted to write about someone who would eventually understand that contradictions exist even if we can never make sense of them. My character would fall in love with India by learning about it as a grown-up. Krishna – my narrator and protagonist – is just such a character. In a sense, Krishna’s return to India is like an arranged marriage. She is born and brought up in India and so inextricably linked to it. But when she returns as a grown-up and begins to experience its complexities, she chooses to remain part of the country. Finally, she falls in love with it. Just like in an ideal arranged marriage!

I finally finished With Krishna’s Eyes in Barcelona. I reached mid-way through the book and suddenly found that I needed some distance from India, and Delhi. I found myself loading the book with endless bits of information – about history, politics, and social gossip – that fascinated me. I would go out every day and come back with more ideas I wanted to include in the novel, even when I knew it would detract from the story. Eventually, I had to accept, the only way around that incessant fascination was to move away from Delhi.

So the novel was finished in Europe, while I listened to Kishore Kumar for months on end. His voice somehow greases the way to my creativity. And sometimes, because I am a Hindi film fanatic, I would listen to newer stuff. Not surprisingly all sorts of references end up in the novel, from a trip to watch Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham to one of the characters humming “Tum aa gaye ho, noor aa gaya hai” from Aandhi.

My character Krishna is a film-maker in the novel. While researching her character, I began reading about cinema. Finally, I decided to study film more seriously and systematically. I also found that I was dissatisfied by the critiques of Hindi cinema, which are often from a Western intellectual perspective. My PhD tries to find a different critical starting point by using classical Sanskrit texts on performing arts as a basis for constructing a critical theory for Hindi cinema. The thesis will also serve as the basis of my next writing project – a nonfiction work on the Hindi film. I also hope to make it less academic and publish it in the general market.

Living in Europe has also given me an idea for a novel set in Europe, perhaps with primarily European characters. There is a good chance that eventually I will feel too close to my subject again. To get that objective distance, I may well have to move away. At least this time, I know that will mean returning to India. And to Delhi – which is still my addiction.

	SUNNY SINGH was born in Varanasi, India. She received her education in various parts of the world. She was graduated with honours from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, in 1990 with a degree in English and American Literature. In 2000, she returned to college to pursue a master's degree in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, which she completed with honours in May 2002. She is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the Universitat de Barcelona. In 2005, Sunny relocated to London, where she teaches creative writing at the London Metropolitan University
She has worked as a journalist, teacher, and as a management executive for multinationals in Mexico, Chile and South Africa. She gave up the corporate life for writing and after three books, and various writing projects in progress, still believes it was the best choice. She is also a playwright. Sunny is also involved with several not-for-profit organisations. She is actively involved in Club Masala, a Barcelona based organization that works on promoting South Asian culture. In addition, she is also the founder of the Jhalak Foundation, an organization that funds & organizes pediatric cardiac surgery for under privileged children in India. Courtesy: www.sunnysingh.net

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