She started reading Mills & Boon romances from the age of 11 — so when Harlequin, its publisher ran a contest two years ago in India, for a romantic short story of about 2,000 words, Shoma Narayanan churned out one. A vice-president with HSBC Mumbai, she was then posted in Hong Kong for a few months and “had a lot of free time”. Her story was shortlisted and the prize was editorial mentorship with the UK team. Earlier too, when DNA was launched in Mumbai, and ran a short story contest, she emerged a winner. “The prize was a Cartier pen, but I didn’t have the courage to use it,” she chuckles. Now with three Mills & Boon books under her belt, a fourth in the offing and a contract for another three, Shoma is a veteran at giving birth to Mills & Boon’s Indian characters wearing Indian clothes, living Indian fantasies, and falling in love with Indian men or women.

After completing an engineering course in her hometown Jabalpur, Shoma graduated in management from XLRI and worked with ICICI Bank for a year before joining HSBC. From her schooldays she was interested in writing and keenly participated in short story contests.

Shoma’s first book, published under the Indian Author Collection, was Monsoon Wedding Fever . In this book she expanded on the plot of her short story, which is about a couple of sweethearts in college — but the man walks away; the girl doesn’t quite know why. She is now working in Mumbai, sharing a flat with a man, and comes home one day to find her ex-boyfriend sleeping in the living room. He is the cousin of her flatmate, so the two meet again. It took Shoma nine months to write the book — the authors are asked to keep the word length at 45,000–50,000 — and a year to get it published. Then her editor decided to take it global, which hadn’t been done with an Indian author until then. Two other books followed, and her fourth will hit the stands this November. It’s about a woman who is jilted at the altar and tries to start afresh, but is in danger of tumbling into another relationship, which can cause a huge scandal.

So, does it pay to be a writer?

The money is “decent, and depends on the sales. But I’ve had 14 years in a banking career and have just started this, so obviously there is no comparison. But if I was just a homemaker, I might have felt differently,” she says.

With a full-time banking job, a 10-year-old son and six-year-old daughter, not to mention the husband, is it difficult to find time for writing?

“Not really, I do the big chunks during the weekends. But sometimes when a good idea hits me during the week, I grab my laptop and start writing,” she says. And discipline is required too, to keep to schedules. She did try to write something every day, “but with the kids and my full-time job, it didn’t work. I found that I was stressing myself out, and the quality of the output when you force yourself is not that great.” While some of the ideas for her central plot come from real life, most of her work is fiction, she says.

Now that she has got into the groove, it takes her three to four months to finish a book. Her books have done well, with the first published in the UK, the US, Germany, Japan and France, and now getting translated into Italian.

Her son, while happy with his now famous mother, feels “I should choose one career or the other, because it means I get to spend less time with him!”

A large chunk of Shoma’s readers are young, urban women, “except for male friends who know me and some random guys who post comments on my Facebook page”.

She says feedback is very important to her because she writes for “a genre where people have some expectations before they pick up the book”. But more than the readers, she takes the feedback of her editor and a few friends, who she trusts will give honest feedback, very seriously.

Her own reading is very eclectic. “I read all kinds of stuff.” The latest book she liked was The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Two of her all-time favourites are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights . “I used to like Gone With the Wind when I was younger,” Shoma adds. And then of course she picks up romance books written by other writers. But she hasn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey ; “some friends, whose verdict I trust, weren’t happy with it, so I didn’t read it!”

Does she think she’ll ever make the transition from a bank job to full-time writing? “It’s difficult to say. I don’t think I would give up a corporate job completely... it’s not only about security, but I really enjoy what I do.”

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