I am a lousy cook. Perhaps a more honest admission would be: I am no cook at all.
 
My parents were decent, loving people. But they were also creatures of their society and time. They lived in a society where middle class people hired cooks who did the cooking. My mother cooked, but she also worked; as her responsibilities grew, her time for cooking became scarce. She became a periodic dabbler in the kitchen.
 
It was also a time when food was prepared from scratch. There was no processed or semi-processed food. Nor was there home delivery from restaurants. If you wanted food from restaurants, you went and ate there or sent a servant to buy something and bring it home. For a while we lived in a large building that had a restaurant on the ground floor, run by an owner who was a close friend of my father. If we had several guests and mother wanted help, father talked to his friend and some special curry turned up in the evening.
 
Father had little to do with the kitchen. He had a fish vendor among his large circle of friends and occasionally tried to impress mother with the gift of a special seasonal catch. I remember him also turning up with some unusual vegetable that he liked and had found in some remote market mother was unlikely to patronize.
 
I mention all this to explain that I had no notion of what transpired in a kitchen except that I consumed what it produced. My parents never thought cooking was something I should learn or even try. 

Things did not improve when I left my parents’ home. I left, after completing my time in the university, only to join a large company that generously provided me with a furnished home, along with an experienced cook. The cook was very competent and placed good food on the table. Occasionally he asked me what I liked; I replied briefly, based on what I had tasted elsewhere. I took little interest in what he did in the kitchen.
 
The sheer vulgarity of what I was doing did not occur to me, as no doubt it did not occur to many like me. My friends had no idea what happened in a kitchen, ate only what tasted good, based on their limited range of experience in the family or some restaurant. They had no notion of how what they placed in their mouth affected the rest of their corpus. 

​It astounds me that I went through a process of formal education, right up to the doctoral level, in well-known institutions, without learning the rudiments of one of the key elements of civilized life, food. I knew nothing about food groups, their nutritional value, their contribution to the body’s functions, their relative importance for health, the ways they can be prepared to enhance their value or destroy their quality, and the havoc bad food can and does cause. All I knew was their taste, prepared in the few ways I had so far experienced.
 
Nor did I have the slightest idea of the incalculable wealth and variety of cuisine around the world: the superb spongy flatbread the Ethiopians produce that westerners would not touch, and the extraordinary mushroom-enhanced black rice Haitians concoct that Indians would shun before tasting. The consequences of such culinary insularity are disastrous. I have a first-rate Russian chef as a neighbor; she jettisons all oriental food as spicy. I have too a talented Colombian cook as a friend; she rejects out of hand any Mexican food as ‘picante.’ One of my abhorred Biblical dictums is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. About food, my dictum would be: the fear of alien food is the beginning of gastronomic folly.
 
It took me many years and the exposure to many lands to learn the simple truths:

• Taste is just one aspect of food
• What I put inside my body determines its fate
• Food can cure what medicines often pretend to do
• Making food can make it toxic or salubrious
• Like race and color, discrimination in food is stupid.

 
For a long time, I saw Feuerbach’s aphorism ‘man is what he eats’ as an economic doctrine, for it is true that the way we earn our bread often determines what we mostly are. Now I know better. It is also a social doctrine. The way we make our bread, taste it, respect it, and exalt the process of making, eating and honoring it, determines the kind of society we have and the kind of social beings we are.
 
I was lucky to have wonderful, sensible parents. They however made the ghastly mistake of never sending me into the kitchen to observe and learn. I should have learned how to cook, both to know the vital clue to my health and well-being and to have the incomparable pleasure of discovering the rich, unlimited world of varied cuisine. You really know little about food, if you don’t cook, and you know precious little about its taste if your range is confined six or sixteen things your mother served you. As in many things, love is not enough. Broadening our horizon demands insight and imagination.

I have occasionally thought of writing a novel. Then I have shelved the idea, saying to myself, it would take a lot of time I could not readily spare. Or – a variation of the same rationale really – I had too many things on my hands, and it would be burdensome. I thought airily of a future day when I would be so unburdened that I could happily undertake a long piece of writing. That day, of course, never came.
 
What was happening became clear to me when a friend mentioned a curious phenomenon. Apparently somebody had declared November as a novel writing month and created a software that mapped your progress through the month. It brought home to me that there really was no ideal time to write a novel, and November was as good a month as any other. I had been giving myself a pretext to defer the enterprise, and now I could cling to the pretext or drop it. With some discomfort, I chose the latter.

Not that I was quite unprepared for the business. I had been writing other things assiduously the last several months. For years I had been writing reports and memoranda. Lately I had reduced those, and started writing fanciful things, personal essays and short stories. But these were short pieces and rarely extended beyond a thousand words. A novel was a very different proposition. I had decided on a short novel of 50,000 words.

​I am told some writers plan their novel like a general plans a military campaign. They develop a detailed blueprint: how the story will unfold chapter by chapter, the characters who will play a role in it, the main protagonists and the peripheral figures, some major events that will occur in their lives and even some key scenes that will push forward or turn sideways the current of events. I had no such plans, like a pathetic commander with no soldiers or armaments to command.
 
I took my cue from DH Lawrence who said he let his ‘daimon,’ an inner spirit, write his novels. Let alone planning the plot, he did not even care to edit his work. If dissatisfied with the result, he simply wrote it all over again, in order to give the daimon another chance to express itself more fully. He would have been horrified at the idea of a story plan.
 
I simply had the basic idea of exploring the interrelationship between two men and a woman, by moving them together through time and place. The conventional notion is that such a triangle cannot persist, and the relation between the two men have to be of hate and jealousy. I wanted to question that simple assumption, for I believed it could be a more complex affair. I had twice in my life found myself in a triangle of some kind, and, while I felt very adversarial and venomous in one case, I developed great affection and admiration for the other male in the second case. I felt I should place my three protagonists together and see how they work out their relationships, without trying too hard to force them in a certain direction.
 
I also didn’t want a hero or a villain in my story, people who act in a decidedly heroic or villainous way. I wanted them to be like me or like people I have met, people I could expect to meet in a party or in a restaurant, people whose behavior I could understand or guess. Perhaps I am a writer of limited imagination, so I chose the kind of people I know and I also chose cities, and places in those cities, that I am familiar with.
 
As I proceeded, I discovered something that was a genuine surprise. Once I had created the three protagonists of the story, they started acting on their own, and I felt I could not fully control them. They would not do things that did not go well with their nature, though I might have wanted them to act in a way that would help my narrative. I suspect some readers may not like a couple of things they did, but those were things they did and I had to concede them the freedom to act in their own way. I suppose I should be relieved that they did not do anything dastardly.
 
Like everybody else, I have met some toxic people, in offices and hotels, planes and trains, law courts and tennis courts, but I haven’t really met truly odious people like hitmen and gangsters. They don’t appear in my novel. Nor do huge events like wars and revolutions occur in the book. Few things really happen in my story, and much of the time things that happen are pathetically small. Yet the truth is that those small things seem to make a great difference to the people whose life they affect. I dare say this is not unlike what occurs in many of our lives. Small events that few notice and others think trivial seem to create troubling waves in our existence.
 
I had planned to write my novel over the entire month of November. I was astonished that I wrote at an unexpected clip and the book of 50,000 words was done by mid-month. Doubtless I will go back to the manuscript some day and edit a few words. But I am glad that the story is told.
 
My three protagonists will shortly be ready to take a bow on the stage.