Many Festivals, One Celebration

Kiran Manral grew up in a Bombay that has since morphed into Mumbai, and in unrecognizable ways as well. Her mother was a teacher and her father worked at a bank. Living inside the bank’s derelict quarters, amidst folks who spoke a medley of tongues, Manral recalls a cosmopolitanism that wasn’t performative or self-conscious: “We had Bengali, Tamilian, Gujarati and Malayali neighbors.” Though her father was Muslim and her mother Catholic, at the community’s Diwali celebrations, she helped draw rangolis at other homes, and was part of the gaggle of kids making the huge star that would be strung up in the society.

Savoring Bookish Escapes

On other days, she chose not to be as social. As an only child, she was rather introverted. Rather than hanging with friends, she befriended fictional characters, Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, or Archie and his Riverdale chums or the fantastical creatures from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Even at family functions, she sank into her pages, while her mother proffered flustered apologies. Borrowing books from her school library or the scantier neighborhood one, or buying second-hand books from raddi stores outside the railway station, she always had a stack to chomp through. She was only nine when her father died unexpectedly. Earlier, she recalls accompanying him to the Happy Book Store in Bandra every Sunday, where despite a constrained wallet, her choices were always indulged.

Plumbing Stacks of One’s Own

At one time, she had so many books and comics, including two quivering piles of Amar Chitra Kathas, she started a lending library. Sparking off a home-based business well before entrepreneurship was in vogue, she tracked dates and fines in a ledger. She laughs, in retrospect, at how those early business instincts had withered away in later years.

All along, her reading was never policed. “I read like a maniac.” She started soaking up adult books earlier than peers, devouring Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace and Sydney Sheldon with the thrills of an adolescent’s covert transgressions. She reveled in horror and humor, flipping easily between Stephen King and P.G. Wodehouse. This wide reading has bled into her writing, into books that wrestle with dark themes while also exuding bursts of unforeseen lightness.

Majoring in Literature

During her college years, the binge reading persisted. After her 10^th grade, despite her strong academic performance in the board exams and pressures to pursue science, she chose to join arts. This was perhaps her first willful rebellion against mores she did not subscribe to.

Mom-blog Draws Followers

Pursuing a journalistic career after college required late stints at offices. Fortunately, her then-boyfriend (and now husband) encouraged her choices, even picking her up at unsafe hours. She began her career in advertising, which was an easy hop for someone so dexterous with words, and then shifted to journalism. She chose a stay-at-home break when she had her son. But parenting was a new and uncharted terrain, filled with startling roughs and rewards. Heeding her instincts – as she’d often done so far – she started blogging about her life as a Mom.  At first, her impetus was to document the moments, which would otherwise fray into a blurry past. Her pieces resonated with many mothers and she gathered what most writers yearn for: a community of readers.

Prolific Across Categories

Her supportive flock urged her to write a book: “They had more faith in me than I had.” The readerly trust was well-founded, since after her first book, which involved a school-gate Mom turning into a detective, she has penned 17 books across genres. Her works include psychological thrillers, horror, fantasy, romance, chick lit and sci-fi. She’s also spun out non-fiction books on topics that feel both intensely personal and relevant to wider audiences. Three books revolve around parenting, one co-authored with the famed Ashwin Sanghi. Her Rising series on “Women Who Have Changed India” capture boundary breakers in all their diversity.

From Sparks to Stories

For someone so prolific, Manral says the originating flicker varies for each project. Her first book, The Reluctant Detective and its sequel, The Kitty Party Murder, stemmed from her own experience of living in a gated community. It was also an organic extension of her Mom-blogger persona. All Aboard was penned in response to a Penguin editor’s request for their ‘Metro Reads’ imprint that portrayed the current zeitgeist on relationships. Braiding romance with Indian family dynamics, the book, along with Once Upon A Crush and Saving Maya, the three chicklit-romances she has written, are witty, fresh takes on familiar situations.

Her darker books emerged from childhood memories or hearsay. Her mother had told her about a fellow teacher at her boarding school, an Anglo-Indian woman who lived completely alone. The image stayed with Kiran, and turned into The Face At The Window. When she was still a child living in the bank colony, one of the mothers had suddenly vanished, leaving her husband and two kids. Manral had felt deeply stirred by the plight of the abandoned children. Missing, Presumed Dead was fueled by that long-ago discomfort. For More Things in Heaven and Earth, the character just alighted on her and she felt propelled into writing her story, throwing rare light on a bereavement, grief and the sudden loss of a spouse. While she acknowledges that it’s not easy to pick a favorite among her works, she says The Moon in the Lining of Her Skin is “very precious to me.” She’s certain the book can resonate with a wide swathe of readers, and she hopes more will discover it.

Later this year, she will be releasing a non-fiction account of women entrepreneurs, a category of entrepreneurs who need to be celebrated more, to encourage more women to get into entrepreneurship.

The Writing Process

As for her writing process, since she works simultaneously on more than one project, it varies by genre. For lighter reads, she just bangs them out on her computer, and dashes them off after one or two rewrites. With non-fiction, since meticulous research precedes the writing, she pieces it all together at the end. With the darker, noir books, the characters often completely take her over. The possession is often so overwhelming, she notices changes in her own body. For instance, with The Face at the Window, since her character was a 78-year-old woman, Kiran started experiencing geriatric knee aches and pains. These books, while generated in a pantser style (sans outlines), take longer to finish. Sometimes, she has manuscripts “marinating” untouched, for six months to a year. From start to finish, she might rework the material 25 times or more, so that the first draft is starkly dissimilar to the final version.

To shake off the gloom and intensity that these works engender, she uses her other works – the lighter reads or the non-fiction – as “palate cleansers.” But with all her writing, she’s careful about not slackening with details, summoning her journalistic eye to ensure accuracy.

Her Typical Day

She starts working at 7:30 am each morning, after returning from the gym at 7 am. Thereafter the computer is on the whole day, though she also has to fit in domestic mundanities that frequently fall on women. She recently read about a male writer who locked himself in a room, working for 18 hours each day, with his wife carrying in his meals. “I need a wife,” laughs Manral. At the same time, she acknowledges that not needing an income from writing is a privilege she’s grateful for. She warns new writers that “there’s no income in writing unless you’re a bestseller like Chetan Bhagat.”

She has been on just one writing retreat, in Kumaon near Nainital, but she says while the time away did help clear her head, she did not get much writing done. In general, she doesn’t hanker for retreats since she’s already prolific while working from home amidst sundry distractions. But she does admit that a retreat can recharge your brain in other ways through interacting with other writers, which can expose you to themes and processes you may not encounter otherwise.

Overcoming Writer’s Block

She says there are phases – like right now – when she feels like her mind is not as fertile as it needs to be. She intends to let it remain fallow for a while, as she repopulates it by reading books, watching shows and traveling. Nonetheless, as a professional writer, she ensures that she churns out a certain number of words per day. Even if she’s blocked, she works her writing muscles. She cites the examples of Stephen King – who produces 2,000 words every day – or Terry Pratchett who whipped up at least 500. As Manral puts it: “You can always edit what you’ve written. You cannot edit a blank page.”

Undeterred by AI

Manral sees AI as a tool that can be leveraged to handle the grunge work. She doesn’t recommend using it for creative work since it obliterates singular voices and viewpoints. But she suggests using it for PowerPoint Presentations or Insta and LinkedIn posts, where writers are less invested in originality or self-expression. She’s personally not threatened by it: “If we’re going to be scared of AI, we’re stupid. If we’re going to be overly reliant on AI, we’re stupid. We need to be aware that AI is a just tool.”

Losing Readers to Screens

Manral observes that reading level declines are inevitable amidst a deluge of more seductive forms of content. She has observed that she retains material better when she reads a paper book rather than something on Kindle: “Maybe this has to do with the generation I belong to or the way my brain functions.” Though there are many compelling shows on channels like Netflix and Amazon Prime, she observes that viewers do not exercise their imagination as readers do. And that as a collective, we are losing memory, ingenuity and attention.

She hopes that future generations will tire of the digital overload, and opt for offline alternatives, akin to the manner in which the sober curious movement has shunned the excessive drinking of earlier generations. To shield her own attention, she turns notifications off on her phone and checks messages every few hours.

Her Current Bedside Reads

She’s currently reading Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins, a book that she describes as “very funny.” She’s also reading Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors and If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. She usually picks up books based on friend recommendations, or endorsements from discerning readers. She rarely heeds reviews in mainstream publications.

Creating Behind the Mic

She not only writes across genres, she creates across mediums. She’s run a podcast titled, “Chasing Creativity with Kiran Manral.” Talking to different creators – ranging from a chef to a hair transplant surgeon – has fed her own creativity: “I used to cannibalize their tips.”

She and Shunali Khullar Shroff, also an author, have been hosting the “Not Your Aunty” podcast for three seasons now. She describes it as “two very opinionated ladies airing our opinions on everything under the sun,” while also just having fun. They also invite guests to keep it engaging. They’ve had Priyanka Chaturvedi, Lisa Ray, Sonali Bendre, Anuvab Pal, Dr Savio Furtado, Dr Cuterus aka Dr Tanya Narendra amongst their recent guests.

Rather than jumping on trends, she’s always stayed ahead of the curve when it comes to leveraging technology and platforms. She started blogging well before social media influencers were a thing. She kicked off her video interviews on creativity before podcasting was widespread. She was an early Tweeter and considered a twitter influencer before Twitter imploded under Musk.

Writing Rather than Marketing

Currently, she’s not enthused about aggressively promoting her books. She notes that authors can be tempted to pour immense resources into marketing, because publishers can never flog it sufficiently in today’s content-saturated age. “Such investments can pay off, and your book might turn into a bestseller, but 20 years later, it’s going to lie among a heap of forgottens.” On the other hand, she treasures a few readers engaging deeply with her works, rather than a fleeting rank on Amazon or on a bestsellers’ list. She prefers to channelize her efforts into writing the best book possible.

Pleading for a Kinder World Order

In terms of changing the world, she suggests we all look at Gaza. “It’s genocide happening right here, we are all complicit and no one’s stopping it.” As a global citizen, she’s disturbed by the polarization and widespread othering. Evoking Carl Sagan’s image of the planet as a “pale, blue dot,” she hopes we can bring back kindness, civility and just old-fashioned courtesy.

References

https://kiranmanral.wordpress.com/