For my latest novel Bombay Fever , I had to invent a terrifying new epidemic. This was the entire point of the book. A mysterious new infectious disease called — ta-da — Bombay Fever rips through the city of Mumbai, killing hundreds. Meanwhile, a scattered group of civil servants, politicians, health workers and scientists try to make sense of the insanity that ensues all over Mumbai and then, inevitably, elsewhere. Oh, and there is a mysterious subplot about a secretive security agency within the Indian government that not even the Prime Minister is aware of.

It is all rollicking good fun. So please buy the book.

Inventing a killer disease might sound like the easiest aspect of writing a thriller set in modern-day India. Everything else — public health, politics, city administration, health protocols — seems infinitely more complex. But, in fact, it took me the better part of a year and a half to finally ‘create’, so to speak, a microbe that not only seemed scientifically plausible but also matched the scope of the book I was trying to write.

This book was always meant to be about an epidemic in Mumbai. It was not going to be another World War Z, in which almost everybody dies. Nor was it going to be about a disease that smoulders along, killing a few hundred every few months. I wanted the entire plot in my novel to take place over a span of no more than two weeks. Bombay Fever had to kill, kill fast, but not too fast.

So how do you invent a disease like that? Now that I’ve done the hard work, let me distil the process down to six easy steps.

Step One: Understand how diseases work. How do you actually catch a cold? Or the flu? It is amazing how we can know plenty about lots of diseases without entirely understanding how they operate inside the human body. My first step was to read three instalments from the excellent Very Short Introductions (VSI) series of books by Oxford University Press. The entire VSI series is tremendously useful for quick explainers on rather complex things. I read the ones on Bacteria , Viruses and Epidemiology . The great thing about these books are the reading lists and bibliography at the end. A wealth of information there.

Step Two: Now that you know how diseases and microbes work in general, it is time to zero in on specific diseases or epidemics. Because I wanted to look at outbreaks that functioned within the geographical scope of a city, or at most a country, I generally ignored famous outbreaks such as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Instead I looked at both Ebola and Legionnaire’s Disease. I looked at Ebola and related viruses because of the extensive recent writings on them. And I looked at Legionnaire’s because I have always been fascinated by it. I read Richard Preston’s excellent The Hot Zone to understand the former, and several research papers and library books on Legionnaire’s. By this point you should be beginning to get a fairly detailed sense of the history, science and geography of outbreaks. Odds are that you are going to be simultaneously thrilled and horrified. Thrilled because reality can often be stranger than fiction. And horrified because some diseases are truly... Evil.

Step Three: Take a break. Take a few days off to let your brain absorb all that information. But keep a notebook close at hand. You never know when you’ll get a smart idea for your fictional killer. More importantly, you could suddenly think of great questions to ask. You’ll be sweating through a spin class when, suddenly, you wonder: ‘I wonder if people who exercise are more susceptible to certain diseases...’ Never ever think you can record these ideas and questions later in the day. That never happens. You will forget. Write it down. Or save it on your phone. I use an app called WorkFlowy.

Step Four: Great. So now you have a rough sense of how outbreaks work. Now time for some fun. Time to consume a bunch of great books and movies that you think are closest to the work you are trying to write. I chose the film Contagion , and the books World War Z and The Andromeda Strain . One word of caution though: beware of plagiarism. Especially the unintentional kind. This can happen. So I make sure to finish this step many months before I place fingertips on keyboard.

Step Five: After reading several I came to realise that all good thriller novels are about somebody solving a problem somewhere. This might seem basic, but it highlights the need for a protagonist, an antagonist and a theatre for the drama to play out in. In my case the place was Mumbai. So I next wondered: how would Mumbai react to an outbreak? This meant researching two types of things. First, how do cities, especially those in India, react to outbreaks? Second, what are the protocols involved. So I spent a couple of weeks reading stories of historical outbreaks all over the world, but especially in India. I looked at the Surat plague outbreak, and the Spanish flu outbreak in India between 1918 and 1920. I particularly kept an eye out for granular detail. How do people behave? Doctors? Nurses? For instance, one source I read said that one of the first signs of a problem in Surat during the plague was that doctors started vanishing from hospitals. Along with boxes of antibiotics. I found that fascinating. Finally, I read up on the systems countries and the World Health Organisation use to manage epidemics.

Step Six: So here we are. We know how diseases work, we’ve looked at two or three in great detail, we’ve looked at some great fictional diseases, we’ve looked at the politics and sociology of outbreaks and we know the protocols. Time to invent your own cold-hearted microbe murderer. I invented Bombay Fever. What will you invent?

Sidin Vadukut is a columnist and editor with Mint. Bombay Fever is his fourth novel

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW