It could have been a Manhattan dinner party of the media elite. The women wore cocktail dresses and high heels. The men, in business suits, had downed a few too many scotches. The banter was bawdy, gossipy, sometimes cruel. And beneath it all, business was being done.
Shobha De, this country’s biggest selling novelist writing in English, made her entrance in a chic silk sari of muted taupe and black, with her trademark mane of wavy waist-length hair gleaming in the darkened ballroom. She was immediately surrounded by press barons, television personalities, socialites and newspaper editors.
At 50, De has just come out with her memoirs, “Selective Memories: Stories From My Life.” She is once again titillating her readers with tidbits about movie stars and writers, and at the same time stretching the bounds of what women can talk about here in public. She describes, for example, her decision to leave her husband and two young children because her marriage had fallen flat.
She has built a devoted following of middle-class readers who consistently make her books bestsellers here. In Bombay, she is a phenomenon. At tony bookstores where shoppers sip cappuccinos and lattes, her strikingly beautiful face gazes out from rows of book covers.
But De’s fame has not yet crossed over to the United States. While a raft of Indian writers of literary fiction have won critical acclaim in America — Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth, for example — none of De’s racy, commercially successful novels, all of which begin with the letter S, has been published there.
Her publisher, David Davidar, chief executive of Penguin Books India, pitches her every year to agents and editors in New York City. He tells them that her novels, set in Bombay’s high society world of film stars and business moguls, would have a ready-made market among America’s growing population of Indian immigrants, many of them the middle-class women who are De’s most faithful readers in India.
“I tell them: `She’s hot. She is the biggest writer in India.’ They say, `Sure, send me all her books.’ “
So far none has bitten.
In India, De is the Indian novelist writing in English who has cumulatively sold more books than any other author. “Socialite Evenings,” “Starry Nights” and “Strange Obsession” are among her 13 titles.
Still, by U.S. standards, the Indian market for her books and those of other novelists writing in English is puny. Davidar says that at most 2 percent of India’s population of almost 1 billion read fluently in English. That’s about 20 million people. And he estimates that at most 1 million of them have the education, income and interest to buy books in English.
De’s books consistently sell about 30,000 copies, and that puts her in a league all her own, he says. But she earns peanuts by U.S. standards. Davidar estimates that she will make a little over $5,000 on her memoirs. De herself says, “I definitely need my husband to subsidize me.”
Her second husband, Dilip De, is a wealthy, widowed Bombay businessman. She has remained close to her children by her first marriage, who were raised in her ex-husband’s extended family. She and De have raised two children of his and two more they had together. Through the years, she has sat at the dining room table, in the midst of family chaos, furiously scribbling her books and newspaper columns in longhand.
De’s memoirs are a kind of hip Bildungsroman: young woman breaks out of her sheltered, middle-class Brahmin upbringing to become a fashion model, editor of cheeky magazines about the rich and famous, a writer of popular fiction and a mother of six.
Far from being ostracized for her choices, De has recently been lionized in splashy newspaper features. Her own experience is a sign, she said, of how much life has changed for middle-class women in India’s big cities.
“It’s one thing to have a mind of your own,” she said. “It’s another if you have an income to match.”
The West’s appetite for Indian writing, she says, is limited to categories she defines as Raj nostalgia, the exoticized India that she says she finds in Roy’s work, and the visions of “honorary Indians,” like Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, who “remember an India that no longer exists.”
“That’s not my India,” she says.
Her India is the thriving, individualistic metropolis of Bombay, a place any New Yorker would recognize.
“I like the ugly underbelly of the city, too — the cops and the underworld, the loan sharks, the corrupt officials and inflated real-estate prices, show biz without glitz, people with indecent amounts of money and naked urchins on the street cleaning your windshield,” she says. “All of that makes Bombay, not just a human city, but a city that pushes you to the edge.”
