Sunday, 15 April 2007
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Sabzbagh
On the 1st of June, 20o6 my debut novel, The End of Innocence, was published. I had begun writing in 2000, when my daughter Laila was just a year old. What I had begun back then was not a novel but a short story. It was an intimate little story, recording many personal memories that I wished to pass on to Laila. But five years and at least as many rewrites later, the short story had grown not only in length, but also in breadth and consequently, scope. By the beginning of 2005, I had begun to hope, albeit tentatively, that it might one day be published as a novel.
On the 1st of June 2007 the paperback version of my novel comes out. It is, to be honest, a strange time. Although paperback sales are meant to be much greater, I cannot summon the same excitement for the paperback as I felt when I first held the hardback in my hands.
Much to my delight, my publishers have decided to keep the original cover. It depicts a little girl in a dress peering around a pillar at something that we, the viewers cannot see. We see only the back view of the girl: her pink dress with its puffed sleeves, her shoulder-length brown hair, her white ankle socks and sensible black shoes. It is a beguling cover, for it lures you into entering the little girl's world. But for me the cover is special for another, very personal reason. For that little girl is my daughter, Laila.
When my editor read my book, she immediately thought that a cover that somehow conveyed the time (I971) and place (rural Punjab) would be apt. And so the art department at Penguin got to work. They searched, I hear, for a long, long while and saw hundreds of images. But nothing seemed right. Either the pictures looked straight out of National Geographics or they were too self consciously folksy. Eventually, my editor called me in late November 2004 and told me that we didn't have cover. Did I have any ideas? I was leaving in a week for Pakistan where I try and spend every Christmas holidays. I could get some pictures taken there and courier them back. No, said, my editor, that would take too long. It would push back my publishing date. We had to do something within the next week. While I was talking to her on the phone, my six-year-old daughter put her head around my bedroom door.