There is providence, it is said, in the fall of a sparrow. A chance meeting sometime in the year 1991, with Dr Rao, the Editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi, proved not only fortuitous but had consequences far beyond any that anyone could have foreseen.
Dr Rao was looking for someone to translate a particular story by Premchand, Mandir Masjid; he suggested, quite without preamble, that I should do it and he would publish it in his journal. He overruled my qualms about no previous experience at translating, let alone writing. I was then working as Assistant Editor at the India International Centre and was perfectly content editing other people’s (bad) writing.
Soon enough, I had pecked away industriously at my father’s battered old typewriter and presented Dr Rao with a translation which he duly published in Indian Literature. Little was I to know then that the sequence of events that would unspool—almost in slow motion over the next two decades—from that chance meeting and that generous, almost avuncular, suggestion would give birth to an undreamt-of literary career.
For someone with no literary ambitions at that point and no academic interests either, that single act of translation would prove to be the foundation stone for a life-long vocation. Almost 25 years later, I am still building on that single serendipitous meeting.